index
Global marginality?
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A traditional unified place -- a street in Venice -- but isn't Venice too a collection of discontinuous sub-places connected by transport links?
It could also be objected that what I am calling a dispersed place is really only a marginal parasite on real places. The network stretches between places but is not a place itself. I would reply, first, that its place unity depends on the specifics of norms and expectations and trajectories of action. Not all networks can become places, but some can. Second, dispersed network places are "marginal" only if you think of places as incurably centered. Being marginal to a settled and centered grammar can be itself a grammatical position. The travel-business-telecom assemblage offers its own conventional expectations for actions that happen within and across it. Truly marginal activities would be out experimenting with modes of life that are less well-defined than the international consultant or journalist. The margins are more temporary and fluctuating, and, like the creation of new metaphors hardening into dictionary entries, they can become routinized and lose their marginality, as has the travel-telecom network.