[I]n Heidegger's vocabulary, a hammer, for example, in its very design, affords a particular readiness-to-hand, or way to be used. The behaviors and emotions that particular settings afford are central to our experience of place, and to our consequent ways of imagining, behaving in, maintaining, and reproducing places -- both material and fictional, as I have argued in my effort to show the similarities between constructing characters and constructing settings.

The radical exploration of urban affordances of the Situationist dérive can be perceived in tension with phenomenological traditions of engagement with places that sought to create in the landscape character of a different sort -- often national, or white, related to homeland and security. Rhetoric inheres powerfully in setting, partly because it is so often perceived in a taken-for-granted way as a given. So while coin-toss or ripped up and re-taped together map guided rambles may seem silly from some perspectives, from others - and particularly, perhaps, from the sympathetic view of fiction writers who have considered the task of setting the scene - such disruptions of assumptions about place can be seen as powerful tools of invention.

¶ 8:21 AM