The Unhinged Hinge: Pegged Out, Pinned Down, and Folded Away

Authors

Keywords:

hinge, unhinge, spatial hinge, unhinged hinge, dissemination

Abstract

The concept of spatial hinge has been strung out before us in two particularly striking ways, once with quotation marks clipped to the word hinge (spatial ‘hinge’), and again with quotation marks pegged to both the words spatial and hinge (‘spatial hinge’). The concept hangs on a difference in spacing. It hinges on how it is spaced out with pins and pegs (‘ ’). Suspended from inverted commas, mounted mise en abyme, and unhinged from its intra-textual, inter-textual, and extra-textual scaffolding, the concept of spatial hinge – if indeed it is a concept – eludes being pinned, pegged, or penned down, and in so doing opens itself up to the folding away of space and spacing. For what is truly unnerving about the spatial hinge is not so much that it is a joint that disjoins, but that it bends itself around two warped off-cuts: space, spacing.

Author Biography

Marcus Doel, Swansea University, UK

Professor of Human Geography, Swansea University.

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Published

2023-08-28

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2023)

Section

Thinking Space

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