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100 _aKingsbury, Paul
_929766
245 _aGo figural: crop circle research and the extraordinary rifts of landscape
260 _bSage,
_c2019.
300 _aVolume: 26 issue: 1,(3-22 p.)
520 _aIn recent years, cultural geographers have begun to scrutinize the relationships between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’. These studies assert that the ordinary and extraordinary are not fixed and discrete, but rather, mutable and connected. The main goal of this article is to explore how landscape can combine the ordinary and the extraordinary by reflecting on my participation in the 2017 Summer Lectures Crop Circle Conference in Devizes, England, and drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s work, Discourse, Figure (1971). My argument is that crop circles and the conference participants’ research practices landscape the ordinary and extraordinary by magnifying disruptive yet alluring rifts (écarts) between textual acts of reading and visual acts of seeing. I illustrate how such rifts, which Lyotard aligns with ‘figural space’ (l’espace figurai), occur on and off the conference site as follows: first, through an awkward slowness demanded by drawing crop circles in a sacred geometry workshop; second, as a result of the opaque thickness of the local countryside wherein researchers struggled to locate crop circles in fields and navigate country lanes; and third, in the operations of desire in group consciousness workshops that propelled disagreements over how to access the sacred. The article concludes by acknowledging some of the limitations of my reading of figural space, as well as some reasons why we should ‘go figural’ in cultural geography.
650 _aconferences,
_929767
650 _acrop circles,
_929768
650 _a extraordinary,
_929769
650 _afigural space,
_929770
650 _aJean-François Lyotard,
_929771
650 _a landscape,
_929772
650 _a ordinary,
_929773
650 _a paranormal,
_929774
650 _athe everyday
_929775
773 0 _010528
_915377
_dSage publisher 2019
_tCultural geographies
856 _uhttps://doi.org/10.1177/1474474018814991
942 _2ddc
_cART