Wise, J Macgregor

Bio Sketch

J Macgregor Wise is an American cultural-studies scholar of media, technology and social space, Professor of Communication Studies at Arizona State University (bio web-verified via publisher and bookseller author pages: the Portobello Bookshop author note; Waterstones). He is the author of Exploring Technology and Social Space (Sage, 1997) — the book his own Intimus essay cites in note 14 as the source of the culture-assemblage formulation — and Cultural Globalization: A User's Guide (Blackwell, 2008), co-author of MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture (2nd ed., 2006, with Grossberg, Wartella and Daddin), and co-editor of New Visualities, New Technologies: The New Ecstasy of Communication (Ashgate, 2013, with Jussi Parikka). His essay "Home: Territory and Identity" first appeared in Cultural Studies (vol. 14, no. 2, 2000, pp. 295–310) and was reprinted as a selection in Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston's Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader (2006). He works in the Deleuze-and-Guattari tradition of cultural studies: territory, territorialization, milieu and the refrain applied to media, technology, and the spaces of everyday life.

Key Works

• *Home: Territory and Identity* (2000/2006) — the essay: home and identity as products of territorializing forces; the child in the dark, the milieu, the expressive territory, and the home/house/domus separation (originally Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2000, pp. 295–310; Intimus excerpt pp. 297–301).
• Exploring Technology and Social Space (1997) — technology and the social as territorializing processes; cited in the essay's note 14 (Sage, p. 79).
• Cultural Globalization: A User's Guide (2008) — globalization through cultural studies concepts (Blackwell).
• MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture (2nd ed., 2006) — co-authored media-studies textbook.
• New Visualities, New Technologies: The New Ecstasy of Communication (2013) — co-edited collection on visual technologies (Ashgate).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• home — his essay's central concept, now paged on this source: home as territorialization, "a place we are" not "a place we come from"; the home/house/domus separation; home as coping-resistance.
• milieu — "a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component" (Deleuze & Guattari, quoted p. 391); the milieu created by the sung refrain, the car's rhythm, and every lived marker.
• territory — territory as act: "an accretion of milieu effects… expressive rather than functional"; "A territory is an act, territorialization, the expression of a territory."
• habit — the headnote's formula: home "established by the act of territorialisation, the accumulation of habitual acts that are shown to be permeable, changeable and socially reinforced."
• deterritorialisation — the reterritorialization register: possessions discarded each move, home recreated "with a similar feel" from new markers.
• everyday-life — home-making as the everyday's territorial operation; culture "judged by its operations, not by the possession of products" (de Certeau & Giard quoted p. 394).
• haecceity — the car-with-its-rhythm as moving individuation; the home-territory's "living of the territory (a temporalization of the space)."

Relevance to the Core Research

Wise supplies the wiki's Deleuzian account of home — the counter-theory to both the self-expression essays (Taylor's roam, Turpin's expression-theory) and the Heideggerian dwelling cluster (dwelling): home is not the originary place identity comes from but "a place we are," made by the accumulation of habitual acts into a permeable, changeable, socially reinforced territory. His marker-theory (the wall that "when lived… radiates a milieu"; the coat that saves the seat) links the wiki's boundaries, trace and practiced-place clusters into one mechanism, and his effect-of-the-object thesis triangulates the domestic-object economy against system-of-objects and sign-value. The home/house/domus separation — with its gender-political programme via Massey (the female-coding of stasis, nostalgia, privacy, authenticity) and Illich's body-space co-shaping — extends the gender-and-the-interior cluster into the concept of home itself.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the wiki's only source by Wise: the Intimus selection (pp. 391–396, excerpting Cultural Studies 14.2, 2000, pp. 297–301) with the editors' headnote; the source of home and milieu as paged concepts.