A woeful neglect of space and place has occurred since the time of ancient Greece.

Dr Glock will present a post-modern creatively inspired exploration of how the shadows

in Nature as seen in places and in critical cultural events contain the future as

preliminary discourse.

Analysis of critical places produces a prologue that actively identifies the teleological

cry within Nature by examining that which has been exiled, orphaned, denied, or

marginalized.

Various theoretical models will be used in order to demonstrate how places contain

the way forward. Victor Turner’s ritual process of liminality where almost anything can happen in the edge created by plight or calamity produces gaps in the ordered world. Liminal personae, or threshold people, are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony.

Place in this sense is also understood as nonsensible—a no-place. Gaston Bachelard understands this no-place as an imaginary space that is far from being arbitrary or chaotic, it is consistent, specific, and finely wrought, not unlike the unconscious as investigated by Freud or Jung.

The repressed contents for Freud and a numinous dream for Jung are comparable to Glock and Bachelard’s thinking about poetic imagery and psyche, which requires its own psychoanalytical name. Bachelard suggested a name to explore place—topoanalysis. Topoanalysis is a descriptive psychology, depth psychology, psychoanalysis and phenomenology, which have all come together in a common enterprise, one that can be defined as the systematic psychological study of the localities of our intimate lives.

Dr Glock’s presentation extends Bachelard’s topoanalysis, because it works with significant places and cultural events – what may be called cultural topoanalysis. Because it is fluidly subjective and is the study of the localities of our intimate cultural lives, it is functionally trans subjective. Cultural topoanalysis is less a method than an attitude. Its focus is on the palatial properties of certain images. On whatever horizon one examines it, the place image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being. This is the appropriate attitude for conducting cultural futuristics for the sake of identifying the reified material which acts as a sign post for the way forward. The place/event as a singularity becomes logically the topography of psyche of intimate being.

Cultural topoanalysis is also person, house and world. It is a person, place-world, a world of places that can be explored “room by room, . . . place by place. . . . It is a matter of places dreamed, imagined, remembered—and psychoanalytically read.

Dr Glock’s presentation explores certain critical-cultural events room-by-room, place-by-place, and image-by-image, through the lens of the dream and the creative expression of poetic imagination.

Hence, one is led toward singular, striking images within places that reveal psyche at work in the world and thus the way forward.

Way Forward Places – Way Forward Engineering

Michael Glock, Ph.D.