5. GROSSRAUM AND GEOPOLITICS: RESITUATING SCHMITT IN AN ATLANTIC CONTEXT

Contemporary theorists of international relations and historians of empire have found utility in the spatial theory of “Grossraum,” or “great space,” that Carl Schmitt developed in the 1930s and 40s. This article asks whether Schmitt's concept of Grossraum can be fully disentangled from its German history—from the Nazi pursuit of Lebensraum in which it eventually culminated, but with which it is not identical either. I argue that Schmitt's Grossraum theory is neither merely a symptomatic reflection of the Third Reich's objectives, nor a free‐floating theory with strong potential for critiquing imperialism, but is best approached as an important moment in the transatlantic conversation among empires that unfolded between 1890 and 1945 about the sources, methods, and prerogatives of global power. It compares Schmitt with other figures in German geopolitics such as Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer in order to establish a genealogy of the distinction between land and sea powers, arguing that Schmitt's writings on Grossraum modernize and transmit to the twentieth century the most influential theories of political geography and geopolitics developed in the Atlantic world between 1890 and 1930.     

ON THE ELUSIVENESS OF CONTEXT

How can we decide the pertinent context in which a given object of historical study should be examined? This question has long puzzled historians. In the field of intellectual history, the Cambridge contextual school represented by Quentin Skinner triggered a series of methodological debates, in part relating to its opaque notion of context; critics have argued that a satisfactory answer to the question—how to recover a relevant context—has yet to be given. This article tackles why the question has continued to elude us. The article demonstrates that it is simply impossible to propose a practical set of guidelines on how to reconstruct a correct context because the identification of the relevant context is presupposed in the logical structure of inference in historical inquiries; identifying a relevant context is logically antecedent to the inquiry. In order to show this, the article deploys Charles Sanders Peirce's theory of inference. Thus the article submits that Skinner conceptualized his method as what Peirce called “abduction,” which specifically seeks authorial intention as an explanatory hypothesis. This observation entails two ramifications in relation to the notion of context. One is that context in Skinner's methodology operates on two levels: heuristic and verificatory. Confusing the two functions of context has resulted in a futile debate over the difficulty of reconstructing context. The other ramification is that abduction always requires some sort of context in order to commence an inquiry, and that context is already known to the inquirer. Any attempt to reconstruct a context also requires yet another context to invoke, thus regressing into the search for relevant contexts ad infinitum. The elusiveness of context is thus inherent in the structure of our logical inference, which, according to Peirce, always begins with abduction.     

THE CONTEST OVER CONTEXT IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Recent articles critical of the use of context in contextual intellectual history have identified contextual method with the post‐1960s work of the “Cambridge School,” which is regarded as being grounded in a flawed theory of textual interpretation. Focusing on German cultural and political history, this article shows that a contextual historiography was already fully developed in seventeenth‐century ecclesiastical history, and a parallel version of this approach had developed in the field of constitutional history. The modern critique of context emerged only with the appearance of dialectical philosophical history in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The article argues that rather than representing a scholarly engagement with contextual historiography, the central plank of the dialectical critique of contextualism—the notion that contextual explication of thought is insufficient because context itself has transcendental conditions—is actually a cultural‐political attack on it launched on behalf of a hostile and incommensurable academic culture.     

北方的雪——金建国黑白摄影

<正>欣赏这组名为《北方的雪》的作品,不由自主地被一幅幅质朴无华但却又饱含着对"北方的雪"的深情厚意的影像所吸引。金建国镜头里恢弘的林海雪原,神奇的不冻河,童话世界般的雪乡村里……构成了一个优美的黑白雪世界,向观众展示着黑白摄影的魅力。金建国习惯使用标准镜头,要求相机按照他的旨意"平和"客观"地看世界,尽量避免刻意去制造影像的夸张和变形。他善于透过作品"平淡"的表面,向读者呈现出大自然和社会生活的美感和内涵,他     

论区域旅游规划中的景观文脉整合

景观文脉是目的地景观的文化内涵及其相互联系,在区域旅游规划中通过文脉整合可以体现区域特色,增强各个景观的内聚力而促进旅游业的持续发展。本文运用文化地理学的观点,从对区域景观文脉的认知入手,论述了区域旅游规划中景观文脉整合的重要性,最后阐述了区域旅游规划中景观文脉整合的方法。     

消费社会下商业地理研究的新取向

二十世纪二、三十年代以来,在实证主义和行为主义的影响下,商业地理学研究多聚焦于空间结构与边界、商业活动的区位与业态、商业活动中人的行为等经典领域。九十年代之后,网络经济的快速发展和大数据的应用,使实体商业与电子购物的关系、消费者行为的空间分析等主题,成为新的研究焦点,并积极推动商业地理在研究内容和研究方法上的革新。伴随着消费力量在现代社会的崛起,商业地理所关注的商业空间和活动,不仅被消费地理从社会文化的视角进行诠释,而且在主题上扩展至更为多元的消费实践和社会关系网络。人本主义、新马克思主义、结构主义等流派的思想,也被广泛用于消费空间的解读。在一个更为广阔的社会背景和更贴近日常生活的框架下,商业地理将不局限于对物质层面的关注,而是处于一个更加开放的知识体系之中。