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Comment by Place Link on July 18, 2024 at 6:05am

Poems of place are not simply poems about places, rather they are a species of place with a special relationship to what it is to be in (external) place. Included in this is a recognition that poems (as places) have a material existence as a gathering of words (literally ink) on the page which takes a particular spatial form.

Topopoetics means closing the gap between the material form of the poem (topos in the sense of rhetorics) and the earthly world of place (topos as place). It means attending to the presence of place within the poem. To do this the rest of the essay considers the role of blank space, the tension between shape/form and movement and the relationship between the inside and outside of the poem. 2

Blank Space/Full Space Before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn’t much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso (Perec 1997, 10). My interest here is in the combined impact of two meanings of topos – as correct form and as place – on understanding poetic approaches to and renditions of place. The act of building and dwelling that is a poem starts with a blank white space. By writing poems we gather that space and give it form.

True – it already has edges and texture (it is, in Perec’s terms “almost nothing”) but words (as place) bring space into existence. The space becomes margins and gaps between words – even holes within letters. This relationship between poem and place and the space that takes shape around it is one of the defining elements of poetry. Glyn Maxwell, in On Poetry, ruminates on blank space and silence in poetry. Regard the space, the ice plain, the dizzying light. That past, that future.

Already it isn’t nothing. At the very least it’s your enemy, and that’s an awful lot. Poets work with two materials, one’s black and one’s white. Call them sound and silence, life and death, hot and cold, love and loss…. … Call it this and that, whatever it is this time, just don’t make the mistake of thinking the white sheet is nothing. It’s nothing for your novelist, your journalist, your blogger. For those folk it’s a tabular rasa, a giving surface. For the poet it is half of everything. If you don’t know how to use it you are writing prose. If you write poems that you might call free and I might call unpatterned then skillful, intelligent use of the whiteness is all that you’ve got (Maxwell 2012, 11). Poems are patterns made from space and which make space. Even before a word is read you can see a poem’s shape – the black against the white in Maxwell’s terms.

This is one of the most pleasing things about poetry and it serves no function at all in a novel or most other forms of writing. Writing a poem is a little form of place creation that configures blankness. This resonates with Wallace Stevens’ ‘Anecdote of the Jar’: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion every where. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Here the roundness of the jar (roundness is repeated throughout the poem in ‘round’, ‘around’ and ‘surround’) orders the “slovenly wilderness” around it – it orders and regulates a kind of blankness (the ‘almost-nothing’ of wilderness) in a contrived and designed way.

Comment by Place Link on July 16, 2024 at 4:45pm

Culture brings nature into perspective and makes it make sense in much the way the marks of the poem make the blank space make sense. Stevens’ jar performs similar functions to Heidegger’s bridge. The poem does the same thing – bringing space into being.

Silence is the acoustic space in which the poem makes its large echoes. If you want to test this write a single word on a blank sheet of paper and stare at it: note the superior attendance to the word the silence insists upon, and how it soon starts to draw out the word’s ramifying sense-

potential, its etymological story, its strange acoustic signature, its calligraphic mark; you are reading a word as poetry (Paterson 2007, 63). Here, British poet Don Paterson suggests that the self-aware special-ness of the poem is created by its being surrounded by blankness, which he equates with silence. There is a merging of sight and sound – pure blankness and silence. The sense of sound is the only sense which has a unique word for absence.

While silence is the absence of sound there is no word for the absence of smell or taste for instance (we have to resort to terms like ‘tasteless’). Perhaps it is for this reason that blank space is compared to silence. It also reminds us of the origins of poetry in spoken forms. The blankness is not just something to be filled but an active component in

the creation of the poem. The blank page is the friend of the poet allowing an infinite variety of form in the simple sense of shape. When the single word appears on the blank sheet the word-as-poem and the space around it are simultaneously brought into being. In this sense, one does not precede the other.

Paterson describes the act of poetry as an emergence out of silence and space. This is not quite right. This assumes the pre-existence of a blankness and silence within which the words emerge.

Perhaps, instead, the blankness is produced by the creative act. The blankness emerges with the noise. There are similarities between the poet’s relationship to blank space and the painter’s relationship to the canvas. They are clearly not the same thing.

In most painting the canvas is covered. The first thing many traditional painters do is cover a canvas with paint and then start to work on the detail. The canvas is obliterated. The poet, on the other hand, cannot fill up the space he or she is confronted with. The poem needs to play with the space and allow the blankness to be part of the process. Don Paterson puts it this way: Our formal patterning most often supplies a powerful typographical advertisement.

What it advertises most conspicuously is that the poem has not taken up the whole page, and con siders itself somewhat important. The white space around the poem then becomes a potent symbol of the poem’s significant intent (Paterson 2007, 62). The space around the poem once written advertises the poem’s importance as special words. (Con't Below)

Comment by Place Link on July 14, 2024 at 6:57am

The painter may paint blankness, applying white paint perhaps but rarely leaves the canvas untouched. But there are also similarities between the blank space of the painter and the poet. One similarity is suggested by Gilles Deleuze in his meditation on Francis Bacon. Here he suggests that the blank canvas that con fronts the painter is not blank at all but invested with every painting ever done before. In fact, it would be a mistake to think that the painter works on a white and virgin surface. The entire surface is already invested virtually with all kinds of clichés, which the painter will have to break with (Deleuze 2005, 11). The image Deleuze gives us is of a painter confronted with the whole tradition of painting right there on the blank space which is no longer blank. This is the same for a poet who has to face the page/screen with the knowledge of all the poems that have gone before. There are all the ballads and sonnets, the free verse and the sesti nas, Caedmon’s Hymn, the long lines of Whitman, the dashes of Dickenson, iambic pentameter, half rhyme, sprung rhythm, spondees, syllabic experiments, language poetry and limericks – all of these pre-figure the first letter written or typed. The space is not blank but dizzyingly full. Returning to Deleuze: It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief fol lows from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he – or she – could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. (Deleuze 2005, 87).

The space of the poet, like that of the artist’s is a space to fill with what gets defined by the words or a seething endless presence of everything that has been written before. Once there is a poem on the page then an act of dwelling has occurred that brings space and place into being. If we move beyond the blankness of the empty page/ screen then we begin to see all the other ways in which space works for the poem. Take any poem, copy it, and apply a thick black marker to the lines of text. You end up with a black shape and a white shape. Space works as margins, as gaps, as signi f iers of intent when the poet does anything other than left align the lines. Naturally this use of space is most pronounced in forms of experimental poetry in the modern ist tradition: concrete poetry, Mallarme’s radical departures from the left margin, the projective verse of the Black Mountain School or the contemporary experimen tation with ‘erasure’. But space and place do their work too in traditional forms. The popularity of the sonnet is partly attributable to the perfect way it sits on the page, announcing itself as a poem. 3 Stasis and Flux The topos of the poem results from its play of ink and the absence of ink.

Comment by Place Link on July 12, 2024 at 8:45am

Something has to appear for space to emerge. Georges Perec makes this clear: This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text (Perec 1997, 13).

Perec’s book, Species of Spaces is a catalogue of spaces and places with chapters devoted to “The Apartment”, “The Street” and “The Town” for instance. The first chapter, though, is “The Page”. The page is immediately equivalent to spaces we may more easily think of as the world beyond the page.

The page and its markings are not removed from, and about, the world – they are of the world. In this chapter Perec outlines the nature of a topopoetics in simple terms. Writing, particularly writing poems, is the production of space and place.

It is a cartographic act that combines senses of home and journey. The process of writing creates coordinates – a top and a bottom, left and right, beginning and end. In amongst the words are pauses and hesitations. There is a poetic topological correspondence between the poem and the place it is about. In Peter Stockwell’s account of ‘cognitive poetics’ a key idea is the notion of f igure/ground – the notion that some things appear to be more important, more fluid, more foregrounded while others remain as background and setting (and thus seem ingly less important) (Stockwell 2002).

The first is figure and the second is ground. The figure is prominent and the ground is not. This occurs most obviously in the way characters are more important than the places they are in in novels. Description is often about ground and action involves figures. Figures often move across a

We make our places by doing them –by beating the bounds rather than drawing a line in the sand. Beyond that place of movement is the white of silence. But even that space is being shaped, if only as the negative image of the poem. 4 Inside and Outside One way of thinking about place is to think of it as a singular thing – specific, par ticular, bounded and separate.

The very idea of place is bound up with uniqueness and a sense of division from what lies beyond it. But places are actually connected into networks and flows – they have an extrovert side (Massey 1997). This paradoxi cal sense of separation and connectedness is noted by Malpas.

One of the features of place is the way in which it establishes relations of inside and out side – relations that are directly tied to the essential connection between place and boundary or limit. To be located is to be within, to be somehow enclosed, but in a way that at the same time opens up, that makes possible.

Already this indicates some of the directions in which any thinking of place must move – toward ideas of opening and closing, of concealing and revealing, or focus and horizon, of finitude and “transcendence,” of limit and possibility, of mutual relationality and coconstitution (Malpas 2012b, 2). This feature of place is one that translates into the topos of the poem. Poems too open and close, conceal and reveal. (Con't  below)

Comment by Place Link on July 11, 2024 at 7:08am

Poems speak to things which lie outside the poem. Clearly the poem has a referential function – like all language. It is about something. But even if we include the things the poem directly names on the inside of the poem, there is yet another set of things that are not directly named but instead gestured towards. In this way the poem opens up to the world. We have seen how one of the features of place is the way in which it gathers things.

A place is a unique assemblage. The things that constitute a place often appear to us as specific to that place even if they have, in fact, travelled from else where. Things form a particular topography of place at the same time as their jour neys link the inside of a place to elsewhere. Poetry is one way in which we stop and wonder at the specificity of the way things appear to us in place.

Poetry involves being attentive to things and the way I which they are gathered. Poetry is an ‘encounter with the world’. No matter the changes in Heidegger’s philosophical vocabulary, a key point around which his thinking constantly turns is the idea that thinking arises, and can only arise, out of our original encounter with the world – an encounter that is always singular and situated, in which we encounter ourselves as well as the world, and in which what first appears is not something abstract or fragmented, but rather the things themselves, as things, in their con crete unity (Malpas 2012b, 14).

This insistence on the specificity of ‘things themselves’ is one way we can think about poetic attention. A poetic concern ground that appears relatively static. This movement, in a poem, is expressed with direction words such as “over” or “in” or “towards”. Topopoetics challenges some of the assumptions of the figure/ground equation. As place is most often equated with ground it tends to have a degree of deadness associated with it. It seems less important.

Topopoetics draws our attention to the opposite – the active presence of place in the poem. Another key term in cognitive poetics is “image schema” which refers to “loca tive expressions of place” (Stockwell 2002, 16). Stockwell gives the examples of “JOURNEY, CONTAINER, CONDUIT, UP/DOWN, FRONT/BACK, OVER/ UNDER, INTO/OUT OF”. Terms of mobility catch our attention and urge us to continue reading – static elements are frankly boring and we quickly forget them. The difference between the moving elements and static elements produces literary and cognitive effects. But even before any particular word is written or read we have the poem – the lines that form a shape in space. As we read left to right and top to bottom against the white space a figure forms over ground. A passage is enacted. Stuff happens.

Poems are made out of arrangements of type and blank space – figure and ground in a physical, pre-verbal sense. I am not sure what the cognitive content of this patterning is but it is surely important to poetry – even before the specifics of actual words and their meanings. This is the start of the geography of the poem. There are two spatial metaphors at work in the basic language of poetry that point towards the way a poem is an act of dwelling: these are the words ‘stanza’ and ‘verse’.

Comment by Place Link on July 9, 2024 at 7:50pm

(Con't) Stanza means ‘room’, ‘station’ or ‘stopping place’ and refers to blocks of black separated by white on the page. These are rooms we pass between surrounded by outside. Stanzas found their way into written poetry through the act of memoriz ing verse. Rooms, or stopping places, are memorized and filled with words that would be activated by an imagined walk through the rooms. While stanzas are clearly places to stop – they are also clearly linked by movement. Movement also occurs within the stanzas as we follow the lines of text.

The word ‘verse’ comes from the practice of tilling the soil – agriculture – the root of ‘culture’. It is rooted in the Latin versus, meaning a ‘furrow’ or a ‘turning of the plow’. As the farmer (or farm worker) tills the soil they come to an edge, turn around, then make their way back, pacing out the day. Verse can thus be found in ‘reverse’. These two ideas – stanza – as a block of bounded space and verse as an action – a form of practice that brings those blocks alive and reminds us that they are only there because of move ment – these two ideas describe something of the geography of the poem as the interplay of fixity and flux of being and becoming.

Poetry is often referred to as freezing time. In fact, many kinds of representation are said to freeze time (and thus, in some circles, representation has become deeply suspect) (Anderson and Harrison 2010). In poetry’s case, this could not be further from the truth. Poetry, to me, is a mobile form related to walking and, indeed, ploughing and reversing. This sense of mobile journeying in the poem is part of the topological understanding of the poem on the page.

Perec knew this: I write: I inhabit my sheet of paper, I invest it, I travel across it, I incite blanks, spaces (jumps in the meaning, discontinuities, transitions, changes of key) (Perec 1997, 3) with place starts from a recognition of an original encounter which is “singular and situated”. The more the poem can reflect this situated singularity the more faithful it will be to the place that lies beyond it. But it would be wrong to think of the ‘concrete unity’ of place as a pure, bounded entity with no relation to a world (even an abstract world) beyond it. Places always point to a world beyond them, and so do poems.

One way in which the place of the poem opens up to its outside is through metaphor. Metaphor is another component of poetics that has a spatial root in travel. Metaphor comes from the Greek metaphorá (μεταφορά ) for ‘transfer’ or ‘carryover’.

In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor” – a bus or a train. Stories could also take this noble name: every day, they traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories (de Certeau 1984, 115).

Metaphors perform two operations simultaneously – they say a equals band, at the same time, a does not equal b. Just saying a is the same as b is not metaphorical.

For a metaphor to be a metaphor a has to also be different from b. The more different they are the more powerful the metaphor. This is true as long a and b are not so different that they are not, in fact, similar in any way.

Comment by Place Link on July 8, 2024 at 8:57pm

（con't from above）Metaphors have a spatial logic, they connect a thing which is present in the poem to something which is absent outside of it. In doing this the absent thing becomes present. The inside is connected to the outside. Using metaphor means seeing one thing as another – a form of understanding that is “fundamentally spatial in organization” (Zwicky 2003, § 3). This spatiality is one which is not bounded and singular but, instead, one which makes a connection, or, as Jan Zwicky puts it. “a linguistic
short-circuit.”

Non-metaphorical ways of speaking conduct meaning, in insulated carriers, to certain ends and purposes. Metaphors shave off the insulation and meaning arcs across the gap (Zwicky 2003, § 68).
The place which is a poem has both the meanings which lie within the boundaries marked by the presence of type, and the meanings that this type connects to. The text of the poem is both a neat, closed entity and a set of links to what lies beyond.

It is in this sense that the metaphor formulas a=b and a≠b simultaneously recognizes the inherent qualities of what lies within the poem and the connections to what lies without.

A metaphor can appear to be a gesture of healing – it pulls a stitch through the rift that our  capacity for language opens between us and the world. A metaphor is an explicit refusal of the idea that the distinctness of things is their fundamental ontological characteristic.

But their distinctness is one of their most fundamental ontological characteristics (the other being their interpenetration and connectedness). In this sense, a metaphor heals nothing – there is nothing to be healed (Zwicky 2003, § 59).

Metaphor works on the dual capacity to recognize the concrete unity of the assemblage of things that lies before us and to insist on their connectedness to a world beyond. Things (and the assemblages of things which are places) are both distinct (in that there is no other assemblage exactly like this one) and connected (things are always interconnected). Metaphor allows us to be near to things, in the way both a poet and a phenomenologist insist on, and to recognize a constitutive outside. This outside is also a world of things, practices and meanings that can be drawn upon to recognize the specificity of ‘here’.

5 Conclusion

In this essay I have developed a basis for topopoetics – a way of reading poetry that uses spatial thinking to interpret the work a poem does. This is distinct from an analysis of poems about place – or the poetics of sense of place. While it is clear than many poets evoke place in their poetry and that geography may be one of the few constants in the history of English language poetry, it is also the case that poems are kinds of places and they enact a form of dwelling. Indeed, it was poetry that
inspired much of Heidegger’s thinking about place and dwelling. Topopoetics insists on the active nature of spatial thinking in the process of interpretation. Place and space are not just setting or subject but are, rather, woven into the fabric of poetic making itself. I have made a start to outlining topopoetics through reference to the role of blank space, stasis and flux and inside and outside in order to show how spatiality is implicated in the process of meaning making. This, in turn, becomes a tool in relating the poem to the places the poem is about.

（Towards Topopoetics: Space, Place and the Poem，Tim Cresswell，© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 B.B. Janz (ed.), Place, Space and Hermeneutics, Contributions to Hermeneutics 5, Pg.319-331，See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net）

Comment by Place Link on June 25, 2024 at 11:47am

周學榮·多維推動城鄉融合發展

新中國成立以來，中國城鄉關係經歷了早期以鄉村農業為主體支撐城市發展、中期以工業推動城市發展反哺鄉村發展和近期以城鄉一體化統籌城鄉融合發展三個主要階段。城鄉融合發展是發揮城鄉比較優勢，在經濟、社會、制度、空間和生態等多維度的融合。中國城鄉融合發展目前面臨要素雙向流動空間不足、制度保障不完善、公共服務水平不均衡、基礎設施差距較大、空間生態融合機制不健全等問題，要解決這些問題，需要采取高質量的城鄉融合發展措施。

經濟融合：城鄉融合發展的關鍵

農村經濟發展是城鄉融合發展的關鍵，而城市經濟發展是促進農村經濟發展的引擎。經濟融合關鍵在於城鄉要素的雙向流動。城鄉要素主要包括人口、土地、資金、技術、信息等。要提高要素流動效率：一是建立城鄉統一市場體系，利用網絡信息技術推動農業農村現代化、信息化建設以降低人口、土地、資金等要素精准匹配和流動的成本；充分利用大數據、區塊鏈、物聯網技術，為經濟發展打通城鄉乃至國際市場空間。二是產業是要素流動的載體，要大力推動城鄉產業協同發展。在信息技術革命、新工業革命、數字經濟革命背景下，可充分利用現代信息技術構建以新產業、新業態、新模式、新結構為內核並相互融合的新型經濟形態，促進制造業與服務業、文化與旅游業、健康業與養生業的協同發展，加速提質推動城鄉一二三產業的協同融合。因地制宜發展區域特色產業，根據產業類型，延伸產業鏈，加強農業生產、經營、貿易、服務、線上線下等全產業鏈建設，用品牌帶產業，鼓勵賣產品的同時賣服務，打造城鄉聯動的產業集群，實現城鄉產業鏈和供應鏈的協同發展。三是構建城鄉融合金融服務體系。為此，需要實現銀行網點全覆蓋，加強數字金融建設，建立現代數字金融體系，推進互聯網金融和移動金融服務，打通城鄉金融網絡通道；健全城鄉金融監管體系，防范和化解金融風險，保障金融市場穩健有效運行，為實現城鄉經濟融合提供資金服務支持。

社會融合：城鄉融合發展的基礎

社會融合主要體現在文化、教育、醫療、社保、優撫與救助等方面。其中，文化融合是城鄉文化互嵌的過程。城市文化是城市區域的人們在改造自然、社會和自我的活動中，共同創造的行為方式、道德規范、觀念形態、典章制度、知識體系、風俗習慣、技術和藝術成果等。其所形成的物質文化和精神文化認知可為鄉村文化建設提供經驗和借鑑。而鄉村文化同樣是先進文化有機組成部分。比如鄉賢文化、手工藝等非物質文化、田園文化、農耕文化等，這些是根的文化、是創作思想的來源、是放鬆身心的樂土。公共圖書館、文化站、農村書屋、智慧廣電、非遺和藝術工作室等基礎設施建設作為城鄉文化融合的載體，可推動城鄉文化資源的共享和交流。加快城鄉教育設施建設，通過信息技術賦能鄉村教育，推動城鄉教育資源的共享和優化配置，促進城鄉人口素質的共同提升；提高偏遠貧困地區教師的福利保障水平，吸引和穩定鄉村教師隊伍。建立城鄉醫療服務網絡體系。通過醫聯體、醫共體、互利互惠醫療等，推進城鄉醫療協同發展，實現醫療資源共享和優化；推進電子化醫療服務，實現醫療服務的遠程就診、遠程診斷、遠程咨詢、遠程醫療監護等服務，開展「互聯網+醫療」的新模式，提升醫療服務的效率和覆蓋率。建立以最低生活保障為核心的社會救助體系，實現城鄉社會救助的無縫對接，建立城鄉優撫及救助一體化體系。

制度融合：城鄉融合發展的保障

雖然中國已經取消了農業和非農業戶籍管理制度，但各種社會保障制度仍需繼續完善。為此，一是要加快完善城鄉社會保障制度，擴大城鄉居民基本醫療保險和養老保險等保障范圍，實現城鄉居民社會保障水平的均衡；統籌推進城鄉社會保障和福利保障，提高相關信息傳遞、接收、處理效率和服務質量。二是建立進城落戶服務機構，加強服務保障和後續管理，包括居住安置、就業創業、社區融入、子女教育等方面的服務制度，切實解決遷入人口的實際困難。三是健全城鄉融合發展體制機制，完善政府財政補貼和稅收優惠制度。總的來說，只有讓城鄉融合制度真正落到實處，才能打通城鄉融合發展的制度瓶頸。

空間融合：城鄉融合發展的橋梁

空間融合為城鄉各種資源自由流動提供了橋梁，因此要優化城鄉空間結構，建立城鄉統一規劃體系。一是根據城鄉空間格局和特點，注重農村空間產業發展和新型農村建設，加強農村區域景觀規劃、鄉村規劃、產業布局規劃等；扶持現代農業、農村旅游、特色小鎮等元素在農村空間中的培育和發展。二是推進城鄉交通、水利、電網、通信網絡、燃氣等基礎設施互聯互通；建立便捷的交通運輸系統、信息通信網絡和生態環境保護系統，是實現城鄉空間互動和協調發展的關鍵所在。三是加強城鄉土地利用規劃和管理，優化城鄉用地布局；推動人口空間融合，農民群體是農村空間發展的關鍵參與人，盡可能實現農民群體和農村區域空間發展的良性互動和相互促進；構建城鄉勞動力流動的產業空間和市場空間，實現城鄉人口的互動與融合。通過政策引導和市場機制的作用，重點是提高農村地區發展水平和生活質量，在城鄉區域間建立互聯互通的農村公共服務體系和產業鏈，在空間上打破距離感和建立融合的橋梁。

生態融合：城鄉融合發展的依托

從行政區劃上來看，城市和鄉村有區域上的差別。但從空間上來看，大氣、水、土地等是連成一體的。在城鄉融合發展中實現生態融合的關鍵在於尊重並發揮生態系統的自我調節、自我修復和自我再生能力。為此，一是注重生態環境的修復和保護。制定政策和法規，建立環境監測和管控體系，加強對污染源的管治，加大對環境保護的投入；推進山水林田湖草沙等生態系統的恢復和修復，提高生態系統的功能和可持續性，科學規劃城市綠地、公園和旅游景區等生態資源。二是建立農業生態保護區和生態農業園區。支持和鼓勵農業生態化和有機農業的發展，促進精准施肥、科技覆蓋和生物多樣性保護，推廣農業循環利用、綠色有機農業等新型農業模式。三是設立生態保護優先區、紅線區等特殊保護區。鼓勵建立低碳生態示范區，發展可持續的生態旅游和休閒業，利用生態產業促進城鄉融合發展。

綜上，高質量的城鄉融合發展需要多維推動，其中經濟融合是關鍵，健全城鄉要素平等交換、雙向流動政策體系是重要任務；制度設計是保障，打通城鄉融合發展的各項制度瓶頸是前提；以縣域為基本單元，推進城鎮基礎設施、公共服務、社會事業向鄉村延伸和覆蓋是重點；合理規劃空間和生態布局是城鄉融合生命共同體的橋梁和依托。總之，多維推動高質量城鄉融合發展以縮小城鄉差距，是實現共同富裕的重要任務。

（原題：多維推動城鄉融合發展；2024-06-18；來源:光明日報；作者: 周學榮；單位：湖北大學公共管理學院教授；本文系中國社科基金重大項目「十八大以來推進社會主義基層民主政治建設的實踐和經驗研究」（22ZDA064）階段性成果。）

Comment by Place Link on May 16, 2024 at 8:48am

地方性：生態符號學的一個基礎概念

[摘要]本文立足於小型文化體系，提出了微觀生態符號學的一個基本概念—— 地方性，將其作為考察地方文化和生態系統的一個基礎單位。由於符號活動的語境性和生命與環境之間密不可分的意義關係，地方性作為生態符號學研究的一個可能起點，具有足夠的理論支撐和高度的可操作性。 並且，這種強調符號主體的地方性、語境性的概念，為解構自然與文化的二元對立將起到重要作用。

[關鍵詞]地方性；語境性；生態符號學；環境；符號主體

 [作者簡介] 蒂莫·馬倫（Timo Maran），愛沙尼亞塔爾圖大學符號學系高級研究員，主要從事生態符號學研究和自然文學研究。

[譯者簡介] 湯 黎（1982—），女，四川內江人，西南民族大學外國語學院講師，主要從事西方文論研究。（四川成都 610041）

一、引言

要研究自然與文化之間的關係，就需要在不同的科學領域內進行討論，因為，沒有一門所謂的純學科可以處理這樣一個豐富的主題。自上世紀60年代始，幾門不同的學科，如生態批評、文化生態學、環境美學、環境哲學等，就開始了對這一問題的探討。這些由文學批評的理論基礎以及藝術哲學理論產生的學科試圖解釋人與自然之間的關係。

此種研究情形可以概括為四個相互交織的方面：理論框架、研究對象、文化語境和自然語境。 我們可以認為，其中的第一項，即理論框架承載了學術認同和科學的歷史遺產，而後三項則有賴於特別的研究對象和地方性的條件。

上述邊界學科的理論背景大多（盡管並非絕對地、獨一地）源於英美學術傳統，由此產生了一個問題：源自一個科學傳統的理論和方法，如何對另一個傳統中的、地方性的材料進行分析呢？

①本文較早的一個版本發表於由弗維·薩拉皮克（Virve Sarapik）、卡迪裡·圖烏爾（Kadri Tuur）和馬里·拉恩裡梅茲（Mari Laanemets）主編的《地方與場所》（Place and Location）的第二卷，題名為《地方性的生態符號學舉出》(Ecosemiotic Basis of Locality)，第 68-80 頁。

例如，在思考愛沙尼亞這個芬蘭-烏戈爾語系的小型文化體時，這就會成為一個問題——我正好來自那裡。 在研究愛沙尼亞的文化與自然關係時，我們很快會發現，許多生態批評的重要概念，如「荒野」、「環境書寫」、甚至「文化」與「自然」，它們本身的對立都不具有操作性。 較之於英國和美國，我們的文化環境、歷史遺產和自然經驗都有所不同。 或許在較大的文化體與較小的文化體之間，以及由這些文化產生的范式之間的最大不同在於它們的普遍程度有所差異。

大型的文化以及由其衍生的大的科學傳統可以自然而然地宣稱自己代表了普遍的經驗和知識，而對於小型文化，學術界總持有這樣的懷疑：它們所取得的知識是否只代表地方性的實踐，或者是否與普遍性相關。此外，對小型文化體而言，自我身份的問題也要重要得多。

（原題：地方性：生態符號學的一個基礎概念① [愛沙尼亞]蒂莫·馬倫文 湯 黎譯，見：鄱陽湖學刊，2014年第三期，37頁—43頁；註①①Kalevi Kull,「Semiotic ecology: Different natures in the semiosphere,」Sign Systems Studies, vol.26, 1998, pp.347-348.）

Comment by Place Link on May 14, 2024 at 7:44am

因此，與尋求共性的「大」的文化相反，源於這樣一個文化的學術傳統的優勢在於，它是以差異為主題的。而且，就小型文化而言，在對象層面和元語言層面描述和驗證其不同與特性的科學概念都尤為寶貴。由於缺乏對地方之軸進行描述和評估的方法，在融合地方文化和全球科學的道路上，全球性就成為最顯而易見的、令人憂心的障礙。 而我們的理論語言對於表現地方的獨特性是否足夠靈敏，這也可能成為阻礙發展對文化與自然之研究的一個問題。 填補這一罅隙的一個方法可能就是，創造出綜合性的理論概念，它可以為描述地方文化指明一些方向， 同時又使這種描述的確切本質保持開放性。

在元層次上，作為描述人與自然環境之間的關係，描述人類在生物系統中的位置以及人類文化中的自然的學科，符號學的興起可算姍姍來遲。 盡管自20世紀90年代起，生態學的符號學研究就在不同的語境中以不同的形式被提出，但作為范式的生態符號學是直到諾特 （Winfred NO ǖth）1996 年的論文發表後才有跡可循的。①在該文中，諾特將生態符號學定義為：研究生命體及其環境之間的關係之符號學方面的科學。 ②

兩年後，庫爾縮小了這個詞的范疇，認為它包含了發生在人類及其所在的環境之間的符號過程， 即「生態符號學可以被定義為自然與文化之間關係的符號學」，③由此將生態符號學與生物符號學區別開來。2000年，在伊馬特拉國際暑期研究所進行的符號學與結構研究，以及幾家符號學期刊的專刊④也見證了這一新范式的產生。 生態符號學最近的發展則包括了在系統生態學⑤、 風景生態學⑥和生態批評⑦之間建立聯系的努力。

①Kalevi Kull,「Semiotic ecology: Different natures in the semiosphere,」Sign Systems Studies, vol.26, 1998, pp.347-348.

 ①Winfred NO ǖth,「Oǖkosemiotik,」Zeitschrift für Semiotik,1996,vol.18, no.1, pp.7-18. 轉引自 Winfred NO ǖth, 「Ecosemiotics,」 Sign Systems Studies, vol.26, 1998, p.333.

 ③Kalevi Kull,「Semiotic ecology: Different natures in the semiosphere.」

 ④Semiotica，127-1/4，1999；Tartu Semiotic Library，vol.3, 2002；Sign System Studies，vol.3, 2002；Zeitschrift für Semiotik，8-3,1986.

 ⑤Soeren Nors Nielsen,「Towards an ecosystem semiotics: Some basic aspects for a new research programme,」Ecological Complexity, vol.4, no.3, 2007: 93-101.

 ⑥Almo Farina, Andrea Belgrano,「The eco-field hypothesis: toward a cognitive landscape,」Landscape Ecology, vol.21, no.1,

 2006, pp.5-17; Almo Farina, 「The landscape as a semiotic interface between organisms and resources,」Biosemiotics, vol.1,  no.1, 2006, pp.75-83.

 ⑦Timo Maran，「Towards an integrated methodology of ecosemiotics: The concept of nature-text,」Sign Systems Studies, 35(1/ 2), 2007, 269-294; Alfred K. Siewers, Strange Beauty，Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape，New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

接下來，我們將要探問：生態符號學方法的何種知識可以運用於研究人與自然之關係的話語，運用於融合了生態批評、文化生態學、環境美學、科學生態學、環境哲學和其他學科的討論。 本文旨在嘗試一種謹慎的可能：將地方性視為主體及其環境之關係的、一以貫之的特性，並對這一以符號學為基礎的概念提出一個定義。 這裡，我把地方性作為符號結構的一個特征來進行分析，這些符號結構以如此的方式和環境一起出現，以致如果不大大改變結構或是結構所包含的信息， 它們就無法脫離環境。

這一概念源於如下理解：一個符號過程總是包含著特別的、獨有的現象。 在皮爾斯（和西比奧克）的符號學傳統中，文化和自然的絕大部分可以被視為符號過程的結果或者模式，這些符號過程不可避免地將重點放在文化與自然的地方性身份之上。另一方面，地方性的概念強調了環境關係的質性特點。

後文將會提到，主體及其所在的環境之間互為條件性是生命體與人類起源的符號系統的典型特征，並且，我們是從理論生物學和理論符號學——即產生生態符號學的兩門主要學科——的角度來討論這一問題。因此，在這裡提出的方法認為，對生態符號學而言，自然是特征性的，而且，這種方法能夠運用於更廣意義上的，對文化與自然之關係的研究。 在本文的最後部分，我們將會討論在文化認同的塑造中，作為安置的地方性在一個特定的自然環境中所起到的作用。

二、作為生命體特征的地方性

每個生命體都在或多或少的程度上適應於它所在的環境，這一理念是達爾文主義的進化論生物學的主要觀點，屬於生態學的核心部分。但是，在現代進化論生物學中，生命體及其環境仍然是相當抽象的，它是在某種間接的、抽象的指標，比如適應性、適應價值之上被定義的。 如果我們對某一物種的個體行為進行觀察，那麼，作為圍繞真實的生命體、具有特征的媒介，環境可以成為行為研究、自然史研究或是生物學領域其他形式研究的對象。

動物及其環境的適應關係， 可以分為兩個方面：生理上的相應性，如動物的身體構造、生理及其環境之間的一致性； 交流與符號學上的一致性，作為個體的動物在其間對特有的環境進行感知、作出反應。這兩個方面是必然相關的，比如說，像哺乳動物的眼睛構造這樣的生理適應，使得人類能夠以我們的方式來感知風景。 同時，這兩個方面內容也有著明顯的不同： 交流和符號學上的一致性是質性的，並且和個體的解釋與發展相關。 只要我們將生命體作為主體來進行檢視，允許它有某種解釋和選擇的自由，生命體及其環境之間的關係就會是特別的、獨一無二的。 生物符號學的主要締造者烏克斯庫爾（Jakob von UexKüll）對這一主體性的現象學觀點進行了很好的闡述：

動物的身體可以被比作一所房子， 以此來進行研究， 解剖學家一直詳細地研究它是如何被建造的； 生理學家則研究房子裡的機械應用；而生態學家描述和研究的，是這個房子所在的花園。

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