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whereas geographical, so-called physical location relies on the
natural environment
.
In the former case, it is areas and localities such as agglomerations, habitats,
administrative territories, zones and regions with cultural, economic, military value,
etc. which serve as “locators”. In the latter case, it is the lie of the land and natural
formations which serve to locate a knowledge object.
As regards so-called geopolitical location, we can see that this constitutes a
particular case
of location which relies on social space, or on space which has a
meaning
for a human actor (a person, a group, a society, a state, etc.)
2
. Alongside
this form of location, there exists (of course) a very diverse range of other forms of
location which rely on social space. It is the specificity of the corpus of analysis and
the
universe of discourse*
which decides the possibility of explicitizing a particular
form of locating a knowledge object.
Let us simply note in passing that a form of location is
always
equipped with a
double specification:
1. a
thematic specification
: this specifies the type of social space required in
order to locate a knowledge object - the space of daily life, the space organizing the
world of work, etc.;
2. and a
functional specification
: this specifies the role played and the value held
by a particular place for the knowledge object being located (this is space in its
narrative function, to quote Greimas [GRE 76]: places of qualification, places of
reconnaissance, places of testing, but also euphoric or dysphoric places, places with
an epistemic or deontic function and so on).
6.3.Locationandcontextualizationbycountry
One of the most widespread forms of so-called
geopolitical
location of the
knowledge object thematized in an audiovisual text is
location by country
.
Figure 3.4 (Chapter 3) offers us a simple example of this. It shows us that this form
of location is carried out as three successive activities. The realization of each of
these activities is entrusted to a thematically and functionally specialized sub-
sequence (see also Figure 6.1).
2 These are forms of location which rely on
human geography
, which ultimately constitutes
only a specific type of location relying on a space of meaning (a general
semiotic
space),
along with forms and procedures of location using anthromorphological spaces (that is,
imaginary, fictitious spaces) or indeed using spaces such as those which regiment the lives of
natural species.
