Confessions of a wandering mindLuke BennettDepartment of the Built EnvironmentSheffield Hallam University

l.e.bennett@shu.ac.ukhttp://lukebennett13.wordpress.com#lukebennett13

Confessions of a wandering mindLuke BennettDepartment of the Built EnvironmentSheffield Hallam University

#lukebennett13

Confessions of a wandering mindLuke Bennett wondering

About?

What?

Why?

Why am I here?

Why am I here?Im not an artist...

...Im an environmental lawyer with an MRes in sociology

...working training surveyors and building managers

...but

Its all about reading the cityI study ways of reading the built environment

Lawyers read the citySurveyors read the cityInhabitants read the city

...and they all read concrete and ghosts

Reading concreteMaterialities are undeniable in the city: the environment is built

Metal and concrete carries the road over the river

Yet much passes unnoticed, by most

The bridge is only noticed if it fails

What processes trigger the valorisation of mundane elements of the built environment?

Reading ghostsGhosts of the pastMaterialities of the pastConventions of the past

Ghosts of the present Fear of usage / non-usageLiabilities / compliance

Ghosts of the futureForward gazing (contingencies; planning; designing)

Laws x-ray specs

Crown owns sea bedCrown probably owns foreshoreCrown ownscoal and oil rights Beach car park: 4 hour licence to parkHoliday cottage: weekly letAncient Cockling RightsWoodland owned by Trust as tax investment;

Nature reserve management agreementCommon Land (grazing rights)99 year lease of hotel; ground rent; chancel repair duesRestrictive covenant prohibiting launching of boatsTree Preservation Notice

Right of Way over private roadPublic HighwayDevelopment Agreement (option to purchase)

What brings me to here?At one level my work is an investigation into the legal/user aesthetics of the built environment

Why does the law notice (or ignore) what it does?

How do lay people use (or ignore) the built environments legal encoding on a day to day level? How does the law bit reside within a wider material and symbolic realm of meaning-making and normative control?

Studies of owners anxieties about visitor safety cemeteries trees quarriesCultures of risk perception and object-readingStudies of metal theftobject-reading and circulating cultures of commodificationStudies of deep topography urban exploration, bunkerology,psychogeography, ruin porn etcobject reading and cultures of enthusiasm Studies of mundane physical lawobject reading and circulatingnorms of event and place framingLUKES RESEARCH THEMES

What am I trying to stitch together?The weirdness of laws role in constituting the mundane physical world

The prevalence of myth, ghosts and embodied practices within everyday space

Plus something applied. Im studying these processes because they ARE pragmatic

How?

Models of disciplinary workLegal scholarship deductive, hermetic: study the law as a code-system, ignore the non-law realm.

Social science inductive, empirical: study the social world and derive valid generalisations.

The arts phenomenological, experiential: reflective and depictive of affect and subjectivity.

Towards a psychogeography of the dropped curbDrawing across domains:Adding mundane law; adding concrete; adding ghosts

Henri Lefebvre multiply the readings of the cityWalter Benjamin botanizing on asphalt

Valorisation

enchantment

Valorisation / enchantment

Mining the interzone

lukebennett13Jean-Paul Sartre:

I was carried away: nothing appeared to me more important that the promotion of street lamps to the dignity of philosophical object [for] truth drags through the street, in the factories

Struggling to recognize the over-familiar world of the everydayBen Highmore on Henri Lefebvre in (2002) Everyday Life and Cultural Theory

Surrealism as montage; montage as methodSurrealism is about an effort, an energy, to find the marvellous in the everyday, to recognize the everyday as a dynamic montage of elements, to make it strange so that its strangeness can be recognized. The classic Surrealist can be seen as Sherlock Holmes-like: faced with the deadly boredom of the everyday, the Surrealist takes to the street, working to find and create the marvellousness of the everyday.

(Ben Highmore 2002: 47)

On methodTake a dog for a walk

Notice everything

Look from all angles

Hold the thought: and do something with it

Thoughts on the songs that railings could sing

Is this research? Is it scientific?

Is it poetic?

On straddling

Studying Abandoned QuarriesAfter Bunkerology...

British Mountaineering Council project on owner anxieties about climbing in abandoned quarries

But also how are these non-places valorised and used by climbers, poets and other enthusiasts?

Riding the fenceThe perils or productivity of straddling.

Riding the fenceThe perils or productivity of straddling.Officials are highly educated, but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him by the hour, he may nod politely, but he wont understand a word of it.

Franz Kafka, The Castle

Kafka on the fenceOfficials are highly educated, but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him by the hour, he may nod politely, but he wont understand a word of it.

Franz Kafka, The Castle

Kafka on the fenceFranz Kafka, recipient of the American Safety Societys gold medal for inventing the industrial safety helmet circa 1912 whilst working as a lawyer at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute

Graham Harman (2008) On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and HusserlPhilosophy must be realist because its mandate is to unlock the structure of the world itself; it must be weird because reality is weird

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