Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues : Exploring Critical Issues [1 ed.] 9781848882362

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Space and Place

Critical Issues Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board James Arvanitakis Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter S Ram Vemuri

Simon Bacon Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Kenneth Wilson

A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ The Ethos Hub ‘Space and Place’

2013

Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues

Edited by

Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria and Carl Haddrell

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-236-2 First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2013. First Edition.

Table of Contents Introduction Didem Kılıçkıran

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Mobility, Fluid Spaces and Fluid Subjects Harris Breslow

1

The Haunting Absence of Presence in Michael Eastman’s Havana Series Christina Alegria

13

Creating Empty Spaces through Disoccupation: The Aesthetics Proposal of Jorge Oteiza Jon Echeverria-Plazaola

25

Reconstructing the Theatre Space through Cinematographic Presence: The Film Entr’acte on Stage Karine Bouchard

43

The Construction of Space and Place in the Hollywood Teen Film Patrick O’Neill

55

Narrating the City: Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction Berit Michel

65

Harlem: Black Manhattan and the Practices of the City Joe Varghese Yeldho

75

Conceptualising the Phenomenon of Distance Learning in Saudi Arabia: A Foucauldian Panoptic Approach Omar Basalamah and Tariq Elyas

81

Movement and Involvement: Phenomenological Adventures in Cyberspace Thomas Arnold

91

Visualising ‘Outer Space,’ Defining Place on Earth Adrianne Santina

99

Looking Again: Emerging Practice in Domestic Space Ian Madeley

111

Contesting the Modernity of Domestic Space: Design Reform and the Middle-Class Home, 1890-1914 Patricia Lara-Betancourt

119

Landscapes of Belonging: Female Ex-Combatants Remembering the Liberation Struggle in Urban Maputo Jonna Katto

129

Rural Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals: Living in Finnish Lapland Hanna Peltomaa

141

Contention on the Meanings and Uses of Urban Space in Turku as the European Capital of Culture 2011 Tuuli Lähdesmäki

153

An Analysis of the Nexus between Popular Culture Consumption and East Asian Regionalisation Kadir Ayhan

165

Gaze and Writing: Space of Lack Xymena Synak-Pskit The Problem of Place: A Foucauldian and Discursive Analysis on Place Veronica Ng

175

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Introduction Didem Kılıçkıran This volume is a collection of the presentations contributed by the participants in the 3rd Global Conference entitled Space and Place (Exploring Critical Issues) held in Oxford, England, in September 2012. Like the two earlier conferences that were held in Oxford and Prague in 2011, the third conference provided a unique opportunity for discussion for the participants interested in the complex and dynamic issues concerning ‘space’ and ‘place.’ As the call for presentations suggested, the conference was committed to a discussion of a variety of aspects of space and place, ranging from philosophies and semiotics of space and place, to issues of gender, surveillance, identity, transnationalism, migration, home, non-places, places of imagination, borders and boundaries, embodiment and disembodiment, techniques of spatial representation, and new media technologies, and drew together scholars and practitioners from a similarly wide spectrum of disciplines, including archaeology, architecture, urban geography, the visual and creative arts, philosophy and politics, gender studies and literary studies. This diversity was also reflected in the diversity of approaches to space and place, which eliminated overlaps and repetitions in terms of both theory and content. And it should also be added that diversity was on display also on a geographic level as the participants of the conference came from the US, Germany, Poland, India, Afghanistan, Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, New Zealand and Finland. Scholars and practitioners from such different backgrounds contributed an amazing range of case studies that stretched the globe, while the concerns they shared helped the building of bridges linking particular geographies, histories and cultural specificities to others. When we consider that space and place are significant concepts for the meetings of peoples and cultures, such diversity was particularly meaningful for the purposes of the conference. The richness and variety of the themes and approaches that the participants presented in the conference was the main catalyst underlying the completion of this volume. The chapters here reflect the truly inter-disciplinary nature of the conference. Hence the ideas, theories, methodologies, along with the registers of language, might be said to belong to specific disciplines. The chapters also reflect the complexity of dealing with the concepts of space and place, which both have long histories and carry with them a multiplicity of meanings and associations with some other key concepts and various aspects of life. As Doreen Massey suggests, ‘space’ may imply ‘the realm of the dead’ or ‘the chaos of simultaneity and multiplicity,’ and ‘place’ can raise an image of the home - ‘one’s place in the world,’ - or, with allusions of mobility, can be used to discuss issues of identity and positionality. 1 Both concepts are also incredibly mobile in that they resist any one single way of thinking. The chapters in this volume pull out a few threads from this

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__________________________________________________________________ complexity to explore the nature of the diverse ways in which we conceive, construct, interpret, practice, perceive and represent spaces and places. Notwithstanding this diversity, however, the chapters reflect a certain sense of unity in terms of the exploration of critical issues pertaining to the concepts of space and place. A quick summary of such issues which come forth in the volume would include the following: a) shortcomings of theoretical conceptions of space and place in explaining contemporary spatial phenomena; b) relationships between representation, experience and practice; c) politics, power relations and ideologies underlying the production and representation of spaces and places; d) dialectics of presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion; e) relationships between boundary constructions and the construction of identities and belongings in both real and imagined landscapes. It might also be useful to bear in mind for the reader that an overarching theoretical framework that encompasses the various aspects and conceptions of space and place discussed in the volume would be Henri Lefebvre’s ‘triadic’ understanding of space as spatial practices (or perceived space), i.e. the spaces produced by individuals and social groups through embodied practices in daily life; representational spaces (or lived spaces), i.e. the symbolic values and associations produced by users and inhabitants; and representations of space (or conceived space) i.e. spaces conceived by planners, architects, and artists and manifested through maps, drawings, plans and images. 2 I should also add that I have placed the chapters in an order that represents this framework (although somewhat vaguely), that is, by taking into account the broader conceptions of space and place manifested by the authors. The volume starts with a theoretical chapter that deals with one of the most debated upon issues in contemporary social sciences: the issue of the ever-growing mobility of peoples, things, capital and images, and the problem of how to conceptualise mobile phenomena in terms of space and place. Harris Breslow addresses mobility with reference to the challenges it poses to established conceptions of space and subjectivity. Following geographers and anthropologists like John Urry and Arjun Appadurai, and building specifically on Manuel Castells’ work on the network society, Breslow argues that the replacement of a ‘regime of stability’ (or ‘spatial fixity’), together with the web of political, social and cultural apparatuses (particularly the nation-state) that has sustained it, by a ‘regime of mobility’ and an ‘apparatus of flow’ since the late 1990s, no longer allows us to conceive of space and subjectivity in terms of concepts based upon stasis. He discusses whether flow as a spatial apparatus of mobility could be used to articulate notions of space and subjectivity in terms of fluidity. Drawing on this discussion, in which he refers to a large body of work on mobility along with both modern and postmodern conceptions of space and subjectivity, Breslow’s ‘Mobility, Fluid Spaces and Fluid Subjects,’ also articulates a general theory of fluid cultural phenomena, and examines English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) as an evidence of fluid phenomena within an apparatus of flow. He concludes that as

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__________________________________________________________________ ELF and other linguas franca grow, language will cease to function as a stable structure for the production and reproduction of subjectivities. Breslow’s chapter is followed by Christina Alegria’s chapter entitled ‘The Haunting Absence of Presence in Michael Eastman’s Havana Series,’ which deals with issues of representation and the conflicts between representation of spaces and material spatial experience. Alegria focuses on photographer Michael Eastman’s famous work that exposes the colourful yet crumbling architectural spaces of Cuba’s capital. According to her, Eastman’s images create an ‘oppositional space’ by constructing a cultural past of prosperity that is in stark contrast with the present postcolonial situation of Cuba and the lifestyles of Cuban citizens, which is characterised by political repression, as well as lack of capital and adequate infrastructure and basic necessities. Alegria questions the absence of the Cuban citizen in these images, and sets out to discover the philosophical meanings of the dialectic between absence and presence and chase important art historical influences and the techniques used by the artist by analysing some of the key photographs from the series. She then suggests that this absence delegates absence to the ‘subliminal role of substantiation of presence,’ 3 rendering Eastman’s images, in turn, the embodiment of the contemporary Cuban citizen. She argues, with reference to the postcolonial ‘borderline’ proposed by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, that by their very absence, the political survivors of Cuba’s revolution become a construct of the postcolonial fallout where ‘The “past-present” becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living,’ 4 and concludes that the ‘haunting world of absence’ in Eastman’s photographs is one whose presence both conceals and delicately reveals a sorrowful, agonising present. With Jon Echeverria-Plazaola’s ‘Creating Empty Spaces through Disoccupation: The Aesthetics Proposal of Jorge Oteiza,’ we move from photographic representation of architectural spaces to the construction of a new conception of space in modern sculpture. Echeverria-Plazaola describes this process as a ‘process of dematerialisation’ in which the well-established idea of sculptures as solid monolithic masses that replace or project the volumetric space around them has been replaced by an understanding of sculptures as ‘absolute elements’ constituted by the very space in which they are placed, thereby turning what has been imagined as negative space into positive space. The author focuses on the Spanish artist Jorge Oteiza’s ‘Empty Boxes’ and ‘Metaphysical Boxes’ which exemplify this process of dematerialisation, and argues that Oteiza constructs the void instead of the mass by breaking the indifference of space. He relates this to ‘Negative Theology’ and related concepts of ‘disoccupation’ and ‘Negative Aesthetics’ through which the artist creates an ‘active empty space,’ best exemplified by ‘The Monument to José Batlle y Ordoñez,’ an architectural proposal for Montevideo. Echeverria-Plazaola suggests that the monument, where the sculpture as object is replaced by a ‘purely spatial organism’ through the creation of an empty enclosure, serves, in reality, as an open and receptive place, to

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__________________________________________________________________ be fulfilled, as in Oteiza’s words, ‘with the final integration of man and community.’ 5 As such, both Oteiza’s work and Echeverria-Plazaola’s chapter are important reminders of the need to go beyond the assumption that art is only about visual contemplation and to understand it terms of the production of spaces and places. Karine Bouchard, in ‘Reconstructing the Theatre Space through Cinematographic Presence: The Film Entr’acte on Stage,’ presents another take on the dialectic of absence and presence in visual arts, focusing on the presentation of René Clair’s film Entr’acte during the transmission of Francis Picabia’s Dadaist ballet Relâche, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1924. The author takes this as a case showing that the origins of the hybridity and deconstructive nature of recent forms embraced by cinematic representation lie, in essence, in the early 20th century historical avant-garde experiments which attempted to change the space in which the artwork is situated and to create site-specific works that could construct a dialogue with spaces and turn them into meaningful places. Bouchard describes how the juxtaposition of the two artworks presented an unconventional artistic event for the time: while the dancers in Picabia’s ballet performed everyday movements in a free manner without the limitations of a structured choreography and the codes of dance, the dance appeared on the screen, in the virtual space of Entr’acte. This reconfiguration and reversal of the codes of the two art forms led to the creation of an ambiguous space, which was also supported by projectors placed behind the dancers, aimed at producing shadow and light effects that prevented the spectators from distinguishing the movements on the stage from those on the screen. Bouchard elaborates on such dazzling experiences of presence and absence along with the technology used to produce them, and concludes that the transformation of the theatrical place into a movie theatre in the case of Relâche presents an instance of institutional violence and provides us with an example for the creation of a new social space through artistic practice, in which the audience is confronted by its own habitus. Bouchard’s discussion on this avant-garde theatrical performance in early 20th century Paris is followed by Patrick O’Neill’s chapter on the representation of the shopping mall and the parental home in the Hollywood teen movies of the 1980s. Drawing on Michael Bakhtin’s concepts of the ‘chronotope’ and the ‘carnivalesque,’ as well as the structuralist notion of ‘binary oppositions,’ O’Neill discusses the contradictory roles the shopping mall plays in teenagers’ lives as depicted in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982) and Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge, 1983), and the different meanings invested by teenagers into the parental home in Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983). In ‘The Construction of Space and Place in the Hollywood Teen Film,’ the author examines some key scenes from the movies, and this examination reveals that these teen movies work beyond their contexts and the expectations of their spectators by commenting on broader cultural and socio-political concerns of

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__________________________________________________________________ 1980’s America such as Reagonomics, capitalism, consumerism and adolescent sexuality. Berit Michel, in ‘Narrating the City: Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction,’ problematises the distinction between the embodied experience of urban space which, according to contemporary urban theory, is a complex and ever-changing spatial structure that defy any description in its totality, and narrative representation of the city in fiction writing. She rightfully asks how urban narratives can escape their inherently linear structure to depict the city, while the city keeps on being written by its participants and represents a reality that could only be anticipated by the subjective, fragmentary and plural perspectives of its inhabitants, as discussed particularly by urban theorists like Michel de Certeau, Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre. Michel, then, focuses on Norman Klein’s Bleeding Through and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, to unveil the narrative strategies employed in these novels to depict the contemporary urban experience. After an analysis of the novels which include pictures, typographical ploys, and an interactive DVD in the case of Bleeding Through, along with adhering to common narrative conventions, Michel discovers that the novels, instead of attempting to depict the city in its wholeness, try to make the reader feel and experience that the city can never be sufficiently mapped, and concludes that the creative narrative strategies employed in these novels to translate spatial structures into narrative terms present us with an even closer insight into the ways in which urban spaces are perceived and experienced, and position the novels in parallel with contemporary urban theories. Joe Varghese Yeldho’s ‘Harlem: Black Manhattan and the Practices of the City’ is the second chapter in the collection that discusses the role of narrative representation in understanding urban spaces. While Michel discusses contemporary urban fiction writing, Yeldho focuses on the depiction of Harlem in James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan published in 1930. The author sets out by arguing that the occupation of the space of embodied practice and of the position of the insider who actively experiences urban space by the space of the narrative routine still to this day remains unproblematised and undertheorised. To him, Black Manhattan is a counter example that makes no pretentions to become an ethnography although it captures the sense of a place that is typified as the urban ghetto, and as ‘the other’ in the early 20th century New York. Yeldho discusses how Johnson does this, drawing attention particularly to the metaphors of transit that he uses to represent Harlem as a place ‘you went through,’ rather than as a place ‘you went out to,’ which, according to him, belie the conventional understanding of an urban ghetto that one had to steer clear of. 6 He suggests that the strong element of performance and practice in the text, especially walking and strolling, also supports the understanding of the position of the insider without occupying that position, and concludes that Harlem, in Johnson’s text, remains as an ‘innocuous set of practices, primarily the practice of life.’ 7

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__________________________________________________________________ The issues of surveillance and the disciplinary control of subjects through spatial organisation have long been popular in research dealing with space and place. In ‘Conceptualising the Phenomenon of Distance Learning in Saudi Arabia: A Foucauldian Perspective,’ Omar Basalamah and Tariq Elyas present an interesting take on these issues by focusing on distance learning conducted through virtual classrooms in Saudi Arabia, a country in which institutional spaces still inscribe national identity and social order. The authors argue that the move from a conventional, teacher-centered educational system to a what is imagined to be a more progressive educational system structured around the virtual classroom, has resulted in the redefinition of power relations. Drawing on their in-depth interviews with Saudi teachers, they show that the panoptic authority of the teacher, granted to him by the circular spatial structure of the physical milieu of the conventional Saudi classroom (the Halaga), and the well-established disciplinary techniques of the modern classroom have been transmuted by the invisibility of the students in the virtual setting of distance learning. This invisibility, they argue, produces a ‘reverse panoptic gaze’ that shifts the power in favor of the students, and poses serious challenges not only to the authority, but also to the teaching styles and methods of the teachers. Considering that the teachers are also placed in a vulnerable position to be monitored by the administration, they conclude that the virtual space in distance learning should be more teacher-friendly, and that it should be reorganised to create a more democratic teaching environment, leaving us with questions regarding the boundaries of freedom in virtual spaces. Thomas Arnold, in ‘Movement and Involvement: Phenomenological Adventures in Cyberspace,’ provides us with another thought-provoking argument about the experience of the virtual landscapes that have become part of our daily lives, which many, following William Gibson, 8 have called ‘cyberspace.’ Arnold sets out to establish the phenomenological structure of this ‘virtual spatiality’ by drawing on a combination of Husserl’s theories of ‘pictoriality’ and of ‘kinaesthetical constitution of space.’ 9 ‘Pictoriality’ leads him to argue that cyberspace has an ‘unreal actuality’ in that although we experience it as spatial, we do not confuse it with real space. ‘Kinaesthetical constitution of space,’ on the other hand, provides him with a framework to discuss this unreal actuality as one in which we can move around at will, and thereby as a space that is much more ‘space-y’ than the solely passively perceived space of paintings and movies. Then he goes on to discuss that this virtually embodied space could be interpreted as a ‘realm of places that we can navigate’ if we adopt the Heideggerean idea of involvement and interpret navigation as an ‘existential involvement with places.’ 10 Arnold argues that we can then see how cyberspace can become home to many virtual worlds, since, for Heidegger, every place we experience in the world derives its meaning from involvement. The chapter concludes by suggesting that our conception of movement as constituting space and involvement as constituting place holds true for cyberspace as much as for actual space.

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__________________________________________________________________ Adrianne Santina, in ‘Visualising “Outer Space,” Defining Place on Earth,’ examines the representations of outer space half a century ago by painters like Chesley Bonestell and David A. Hardy. She suggests that, by using a photorealistic style to depict various locations like the Moon, the planets and the stars, these painters attempted to visualise places in the boundless, infinite realm of the outer space. More interestingly, however, she argues that the images produced by these painters operate in two other ways than merely satisfying the never-ending desire for visually consuming outer space. First, they work as ‘expressions of the sublime,’ which, however, suggest ‘death’ or ‘the absence of life.’ Secondly, they imply colonialism by representing outer space as a new frontier to discover and conquer. Yet, according to Santina, the photorealistic and scientifically-oriented style of these works conceals such deeper issues and emphasises instead transcendent, ‘God-like’ images of the cosmos and astronomical phenomena. She concludes that, while visually captivating, these images construct a specific understanding of outer space which is quite different than the conception of outer space presented by contemporary photographic representations that rely on advanced technologies, and that they raise important questions about the human constructions of space and place by serving as reminders of ‘our Earthbound, finite existence,’ i.e. as ‘memento-mori - a reminder that humans eventually die.’ 11 The next two chapters offer important insights into our understanding of domesticity and domestic space, a site the importance of which has been increasingly emphasised by researchers from various fields of social sciences. Ian Madeley, in ‘Looking Again: Emerging Practice in Domestic Space,’ opens to us the doors of his private space to tell us his journey of rediscovering his relationships with the familiar objects and routines of his home after what he calls an ‘increasing perception’ of the spaces of domesticity following the loss of his wife with whom he had shared those spaces. The chapter draws on the stages of his work ‘Spaces Actions’ - a video installation that use series of looped recordings examining the routine function and interior spaces of a domestic drawer unit. By ‘looking and listening again’ 12 through this ‘emerging practice,’ Madeley shows that it is possible to initiate ‘re-viewings of the home environment,’ 13 and that there are everyday opportunities for challenging the auto response basis upon which we take part in the requirements of routine and to re-examine the ways in which we appropriate the mundane spaces of the home, along with all that we take for granted as ‘the familiar.’ 14 ‘Contesting the Modernity of Domestic Space: Design Reform and the MiddleClass Home, 1890-1914’ by Patricia Lara-Betancourt is the second chapter in the volume which delves into the territory of the home to unveil the myriad of social and cultural meanings that underlie the spatialities of the everyday and familiar. The chapter provides us with a rich historical account of how different conceptions of modernity and domesticity in Victorian London rendered the British middleclass home a contested space in terms of taste, class, and gender. It builds on a

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__________________________________________________________________ comparison between the understanding of modernity as reflected by the largest and most popular department stores selling domestic furniture and furnishings and the taste culture advocated by a group of artists and designers who promoted a design reform movement. Here, Lara-Betancourt refers particularly to William Whiteley, who, after the great Exhibition, reproduced a similar sense of spectacle by arranging goods that would attract a massive audience by their ‘ingenuity, novelty, variety, technology and art,’ 15 and to William Morris as the protagonist of the reformers who consistently attacked the products and displays of retailers as vulgar and ugly, and played an important role in the formation of a genre of domestic advice literature comprised of books, journals and magazines targeting women in particular, and advising them on how to furnish and embellish their homes. The chapter continues to tells us how the genre assumed a position of authority, and turned out to reflect, in time, an ambivalent discourse based also on the everexpanding variety of consumer goods that its protagonists had set out to criticise, with reference to the writings of authors who did not shy away from recommending particular brands and shops. Lara-Betancourt also illustrates the portrayal of the middle-class housewife as copying the external indicators of a more refined social demeanour, which the authors of the genre saw as the main factor underlying the wrong kind of consumption, and concludes that ‘in snubbing feminine and popular taste,’ 16 they missed the opportunity to understand and relate to the consumer needs, which, as she suggests, may reflect important values and aspirations besides aesthetics. These two chapters on the domestic home are followed by three ethnographic accounts on other sites of belonging and identity. The first one is Jonna Katto’s ‘Landspaces of Belonging: Female Ex-Combatants Remembering the Liberation Struggle in Urban Maputo,’ in which Katto introduces to us the stories of female war veterans in Maputo who took part in Mozambique’s liberation struggle from 1964 to 1974. Drawing on life history interviews that she conducted with these women, she examines their conceptions of national space and belonging, and the ways in which they construct gendered meanings of the nation and their own role in its liberation against the official, male-narrated history of the liberation struggle. Moreover, Katto also tries to unveil how national belonging is juxtaposed with the women’s present experiences of the city. She shows that although their narratives do not significantly contest the official history, the construction of the narrative per se becomes meaningful for these women as it helps them make sense of their life trajectories and their present places in the cityscape. ‘Transformed into a tale of female defiance and persistence,’ these female narratives, according to Katto, maintain that women were not ‘puppets of male history,’ 17 but that they, together with male soldiers, were active agents in the making of history. This engaging account on national belonging is followed by ‘Rural Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals. Living in Finnish Lapland,’ a thought-provoking ethnography by Hanna Peltomaa on the lives of sexual minority (LGB) people in

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__________________________________________________________________ Finnish Lapland, a rural area comprised of sparsely populated villages. Peltomaa states that the situation for these people is prevalently painted as ‘terrible,’ as queer culture in Finland is most usually associated with urban life as in other parts of the world. She argues, however, that although urban areas offer a wider selection of spaces aimed at sexual minorities, some LGB persons prefer living in rural settings. Peltomaa discusses the reasons behind this by highlighting the prospects concerning the freedoms and restrictions that LGB persons encounter in rural settings. Drawing on her interviews with some number of LGB people, she shows that while the face-to-face community culture in which everybody knows each other, and matters like ‘coming out’ never remain as private and personal, poses serious disadvantages in terms of the expression of queer identities, the ski resorts in the Lapland, as spaces where traditional moralities of rural life are contested, serve also as spaces of freedom where LGB people can meet friends and even find their life partners. The third ethnographic chapter in the collection also stands out from the rest as the only chapter that deals with urban activism which has of late become one of the most popular topics in urban studies. In this chapter, entitled ‘Contention on the Meanings and Uses of Urban Space in Turku as the European Capital of Culture 2011,’ Tuuli Lähdesmäki focuses on the ‘tensions and contentions’ related with the designation of Turku as the ‘European Capital of Culture 2011’ and the mobilisation of a local group of activists against the designation through a project called ‘Turku - European Capital of Subculture 2011’ which aimed to create a counter-discourse to produce alternative meanings and representations of city spaces. Drawing on the data of her research based on the methods of traditional and virtual ethnography, Lähdesmäki discusses the reasons behind the creation of the counter-discourse, along with the ways the activists represented the city and urban spaces, and the practices, ideologies, and power relations that related to their aims of creating a more democratic urban space and culture. She concludes that although the official discourse of Turku2011 and the counter-discourse relied, in fact, on similar ideas concerning the importance of active participation to local cultural production, taking care of and enlivening urban public space, offering cultural experiences for all citizens, and making the city a more inspiring place, factors such as the modes of implementation, discursive frames and institutional power rendered them as opposites of each other. Kadir Ayhan’s chapter entitled ‘An Analysis of the Nexus between Popular Culture Consumption and East Asian Regionalisation’ is another chapter that stands out from the rest of this collection by its focus on the scale of the region. The author looks at the emerging connectedness in East Asia driven mainly by informal regionalisation processes in the absence of interstate communication and transaction due to the historical animosities and territorial problems, and tries to understand the role of pop culture in this emerging connectedness with a particular focus on the flow of Korean pop culture products within the region. He argues that

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__________________________________________________________________ pop culture products have brought to light commonalities between the societies in the region, which have always shared cultural similarities especially due to their similar experiences of modernisation. He adds that these products have also provided East Asian peoples with opportunities to meet and learn about each other, and, in turn, construct new images of the ‘others,’ who are, in his case, Koreans. This socio-cultural connectedness, Ayhan argues, is also complemented by an economic rapprochement that is represented by the emergence of a regional market for East Asian stars and pop culture products. The volume, which began with a theoretical chapter, ends with one other theoretical discussion on space and place. In ‘Gaze and Writing: Space of Lack,’ Xymena Synak-Pskit presents us with a very interesting account on the Lacanian idea of the ‘gaze’ in relation to writing, which can be read as another take on the dialectics of absence and presence, this time from a linguistic and philosophical perspective. We turn back to Foucault with Veronica Ng’s ‘The Problem of Place: A Foucauldian and Discursive Analysis on Place’ to examine conceptions of place from a historical perspective. Adopting the framework of the ‘history of ideas’ and discursive analysis, Ng discusses a large number of material, from various fields like literature and film from the 17th to the 20th century, to show the multiplicity and discontinuity in the ways place was conceived, drawing attention to the discursive nature of these conceptions and their manifestations in architectural practice in particular. Her conclusion is that the problematic nature of the concept of place today is a result of the historical transition of an idealised conception of place as opposed to a taken-for-granted conception of ‘placelessness,’ which rely on the negation that both are discursive constructs that draw on a web of relations between different fields in different historical contexts, and that both have always had a problematic relation with practice. On behalf of myself and the two other editors, I wish that the reader enjoys and learns from this volume. And I would like to extend my gratitude to all the authors for their thought-provoking and challenging contributions. Notes 1

Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991). 3 See Christina Alegria, ‘Presence in Michael Eastman’s Havana Series’, in this volume, 13. 4 Homi Bhabha, ‘On “Hybridity” and “Moving Beyond””, in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1114. 2

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See Jon Echeverria-Plazaola’s ‘Creating Empty Spaces through Disoccupation: The Aesthetics Proposal of Jorge Oteiza’, in this volume, 32. 6 Joe Varghese Yeldho, ‘Harlem: Black Manhattan and the Practices of the City’, in this volume, 75. 7 Ibid., 79. 8 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984). 9 Thomas Arnold, ‘Movement and Involvement: Phenomenological Adventures in Cyberspace’, in this volume, 91. 10 Ibid., 95. 11 Adrianne Santina, ‘Visualising “Outer Space,” Defining Place on Earth’, in this volume, 101. 12 Ian Madeley, ‘Looking Again: Emerging Practice in Domestic Space’, in this volume, 111. 13 Ibid., 115. 14 The readers may find Madeley’s work at http://vimeo.com/user8240514. 15 Patricia Lara-Betancourt, ‘Contesting the Modernity of Domestic Space: Design Reform and the Middle-Class Home, 1890-1914’, in this volume, 120. 16 Ibid., 125. 17 Jonna Katto, ‘Landscapes of Belonging: Female Ex-Combatants Remembering the Liberation Struggle in Urban Maputo’, in this volume, 136.

Bibliography Alegria, Christina. ‘Presence in Michael Eastman’s Havana Series’. In Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria, and Carl Haddrell, 13–24. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. Arnold, Thomas. ‘Movement and Involvement: Phenomenological Adventures in Cyberspace’. In Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria, and Carl Haddrell, 91–98. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. Bhabha, Homi. ‘On “Hybridity” and “Moving Beyond’”. In Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison, and Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

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__________________________________________________________________ Echeverria-Plazaola, Jon. ‘Creating Empty Spaces through Disoccupation: The Aesthetics Proposal of Jorge Oteiza’. In Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria, and Carl Haddrell, 25–41. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace, 1984. Katto, Jonna. ‘Landscapes of Belonging: Female Ex-Combatants Remembering the Liberation Struggle in Urban Maputo’. In Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria, and Carl Haddrell, 129–140. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. Lara-Betancourt, Patricia. ‘Contesting the Modernity of Domestic Space: Design Reform and the Middle-Class Home, 1890-1914’. In Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria, and Carl Haddrell, 119–128. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Madeley, Ian. ‘Looking Again: Emerging Practice in Domestic Space’. In Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria, and Carl Haddrell, 111–117. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Santina, Adrianne. ‘Visualising “Outer Space,” Defining Place on Earth’. In Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria, and Carl Haddrell, 99–110. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013. Yeldho, Joe Varghese. ‘Harlem: Black Manhattan and the Practices of the City’. In Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, edited by Didem Kılıçkıran, Christina Alegria, and Carl Haddrell, 75–80. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013.

Mobility, Fluid Spaces and Fluid Subjects Harris Breslow Abstract This chapter offers a theory and description of the effects of what Castells has characterised as an apparatus of ‘flow’ upon the articulation of both space and the subjectivity. Castells’ work on the network society has had a continuing impact on any number of disciplines. It has had a lesser impact, however, upon theories that discuss the relationship between apparatuses of flow, space and subjectivity. In theorising flow, space and subjectivity, I shall discuss the following: 1: Space as mobility: I will read the body of contemporary writing on the phenomena of mobility and motion as discussions of flow and challenges to both modern and postmodern conceptions of space. These are based on an ideal type of space that is static in nature. This space can be understood as an environment that grounds subjects, articulates communities, and delimits the nation-state. I argue that we are in an era where a political economic apparatus of flow, made manifest through its articulation of a regime of mobility, no longer permits us to conceive of or critique theories of space in terms of concepts based upon stasis. 2: Fluid Subjectivity: Modern conceptions of subjectivity and the postmodern critiques of these conceptions are founded upon notions of a stationary subject - one who is unmoving, and who perceives the world from what is literally a fixed subject position. I will argue that these conceptions must be replaced with a notion of subjectivity that takes into account the vast degree of mobility found in contemporary life. From this, I will articulate, following Mol and Law, a theory of fluid subjectivity. 3: Fluid Phenomena: In addition to discussing subjectivity as a fluid, and its relationship to flow, I will also describe a general theory of fluid cultural phenomena. In particular, I will examine language, and English as a lingua franca, as evidence of fluid phenomena within an apparatus of flow. Key Words: Space, flow, Castells, Mol and Low, mobility, motion, fluids, subjectivity, supermodernity. ***** 1. The Static Space of the Subject We have, for the longest time, lived in a world where our sense of subjectivity, our sense of self, and our understanding of the world around us have been described by a variety of models that imply a subject who exists in static space - a subject who does not move, a subject for whom the world exists in a series of fixed and frozen relationships. These models are found across the gamut of the social sciences and the humanities, and they have a long heritage. Descartes’s subject was positioned at a fixed location in Cartesian space, and from this location able to

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__________________________________________________________________ perceive, to think and to know oneself. The widespread European adoption of linear perspective during the Renaissance articulated a perceiving subject located in a fixed relationship to the external world that enables the subject to fully perceive, measure and understand the world around her as it unfolds and circulates in the space around the position - dare I say the subject position - that she occupies. 1 The unspoken precept of the various models concerned with language and meaning is the presupposition of this fixity, which enables the subject’s immediate and full perception of the object qua text across a space rendered transparent. This model informs literary criticism, which has seen many productive and profound arguments over the nature of the production of meaning, but which has left the act of perception alone. 2 This model also informs Freud’s ‘talking cure,’ where an entire psychoanalytic history unfolds around the talking subject’s position on the couch, always already to be eventually relocated to the home - the site of the unyielding Oedipal triad. In linguistics, the relationship between the sujet d’énoncé and the sujet d’énonciation must remain stationary in order to enable the completion of the circuit that produces the discursive enactment of language across a transparent space that is surrounded by context. 3 The history of structuralism, in general, is that of the articulation of a series of relationships within which are articulated semiotic, social, ideological, or other values that are the function of fixed positions within a static, structured space. 4 This is no less true of poststructuralism where, for example, semiotic slippage is a function of differences amongst multiple subject positions that are fixed within a structure, and not an absence of the structure, itself. 5 I do not want to give the impression that this is a purely cultural or intellectual bias characteristic of Western cultures. Indeed, if anything, we must see this fixity in terms of the articulation of a complex and multivariate apparatus of political, economic, social, cultural and material fixity that always already presupposes static or transparent space. One aspect of this apparatus is the modern nation-state, and I want to read the nation-state as a static phenomenon. The nation-state is based upon and promotes a regime of fixity: It is located within a particular physical space, and is both created and maintained by juridical, social, economic and communications technologies that have, in the past, served to preserve this fixity and permanence. The nation-state functions within fixed borders that determine, define and convey an identity to the population that comprises the nation. An army maintains these fixed borders, defends the nation, and protects the state. A juridical state apparatus, whose jurisdiction extends to the very edges of these borders and within which it is sovereign, governs the nation and preserves and maintains - i.e. fixes - the relationships therein. A national market regulated by the state creates and distributes wealth for and among those within its borders, thereby funding the state, enriching the nation, and enlisting its members as stakeholders in the state’s ongoing existence. A national mass media apparatus produces and distributes both

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__________________________________________________________________ fictional and nonfictional cultural content within the national marketplace. This content naturalises, legitimates and substantiates the existence of both nation and state and the subjects therein, by contriving a sense of autochthony, narrating a history, and ascribing a particular relationship and an enduring set of characteristics to these entities. 2. Flow: The Spatial Apparatus of Mobility This regime of stability, the spatial fixity that has characterised the modern world, and in particular the modern west, for so long is coming to an end. We are entering a period that Urry and others have come to characterise as an era of mobility. 6 But first a word of warning: I do not want this argument to be construed as some form of linear historical narrative. Historical processes unfold both discontinuously and discontiguously across time and space. This is no less true of the historical processes that have resulted in the contemporary articulation of mobility, which has existed as a partial field of struggle 7 at least since the Third Estate’s demand for freedom of movement during the early modern period. Nonetheless, although mobility was enumerated as a political right during the late eighteenth century, it did not fully emerge as a field of struggle until the articulation on a global scale of an apparatus of flow during the late 1990s. This apparatus may be characterised as a physical infrastructure. Urry and Castells both describe this apparatus as an immobile infrastructure that enables the unprecedented movement of people, materiel, digital information, financial instruments and culture. 8 Although the most visible evidence of this apparatus can be found in the immense roadways, airports, railway stations and container terminals that dot the modern landscape, it should be noted that there also exists a literally subterranean network of conduits and cables that enable the efficacious movement of digital information, financial instruments and culture products on a global scale. 9 We tend to think of the Internet in terms of almost ephemeral notions such as Cyberspace, digital communities and online cultures, which describe entities that we can experience, but that we cannot hold in our hands. Castells argues, however, that it is this physical infrastructure of conduits and cables, hubs and nodes, which enables this ephemerality. Moreover it is the instantaneous movement of digital information that enables the complex coordination of the timely physical mobility of materiel and people across the globe. 10 Digital information moves instantaneously across the Internet, and is used to inform the computational algorithms through which the complex coordination of movement is made possible. I want to follow Castells and Appadurai, and think of this apparatus as one of flow. Flow is the preeminent structural development of the postwar era; it is that which is disarticulating the regime of fixity that may be said to characterise the world prior to 1995. 11 I want to think of flow in three ways. First, I want to understand flow in terms of the processes that spatially disarticulate heretofore

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__________________________________________________________________ traditional nation-state borders and the functions that heretofore have been inherently located therein. 12 Amongst these functions are the political establishment of the state; the articulation of the relationship between the state and the nation; the formation of national communities; the concomitant processes of identity formation that these communities undergo as a result of the relationship between the nation and the state; the articulation of national civil societies; and the creation of subjects within and of the nation-state. 13 Subjects are the literal embodiment of the political and cultural identities articulated within the state. Their behaviour - material, social, political, economic, and cultural - is fostered by and reproductive of the various relationships within the nation-state and its attendant institutions. Insofar as these subjects are engaged by an apparatus of flow and become highly mobile, they no longer may be said to be the ideal reproductive subjects of the bounded, static nation-state and the relationships found therein. The very same may be said for materiel as it too begins to flow, thus becoming increasingly mobile: The national political economy qua bounded and the spatial apparatus of the nation-state comes under severe pressure and can no longer be said to exist solely within the borders enunciated by the nation-state apparatus. Indeed, Castells argues that the nation-state has become the network state as a result of the pressures exerted by flow - a state that can be spatially characterised in terms of permeability. 14 In other words, flow has not only enabled mobility, it has also disarticulated the political economic and sociocultural apparatus that had prevented mobility. Second, I want to think of flow as a space of networked mobility. In this respect, the apparatus of flow - the limited access high-speed roads, airways, shipping lanes and ports, the railways and train stations and the conduits, hubs and nodes of the various digital information networks that we now colloquially refer to as the Internet - form a circulatory system that we may understand as a space of almost pure mobility, and within which there is little to no respite from mobility’s requirements to move. While I am tempted to follow Augé and describe this as a non-place, 15 I want to resist this temptation, because although I agree with Augé regarding his periodisation of things - that is, I believe that we are in a supermodern world and not a postmodern world - I do not believe that what we are witnessing is the creation of a system of non-places. There are two reasons behind my thoughts. First, Augé’s use of the term non-places is in reference to de Certeau’s distinction between place and space, where ‘place’ is the structural articulation of the spatial expression of power, history and identity that can be delimited on its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats … can be managed. … It is also the typical attitude of modern science, politics and military strategy. 16

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__________________________________________________________________ Movement, in de Certeau’s scheme, represents the articulation of struggle and resistance, which is productive of ‘space.’ Movement is disruptive; it destabilises the apparatus of relationships that are productive of place as an expression, apparatus, and site of power. Movement both produces and is produced by the localised and momentary tactics that are productive of ‘space.’ This space is one that is ahistorical, disempowered and without identity. 17 In other words, it is a non-place. 18 Urry also critiques Augé’s use of the term ‘non-place,’ but his critique is fundamentally different from my argument. For Urry the non-places that Augé describes have over time become places as a function of the services they now offer to those who move through them. 19 In this respect, Urry ignores the role that movement itself plays in the articulation of non-places, which is a key aspect of Augé’s argument. Additionally, I believe that, within a network space, movement no longer functions as a force of destabilisation. In a network space, movement is a function of an apparatus, and an expression of power. We can think of movement as an expression of power in two ways. First, think back to Foucault’s profound insight in The Order of Things: The establishment of man as both the subject and object of knowledge permits, in the biological sciences, a description of man as a being who not only circulates, but within whom are circulatory systems - blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rates, heart rates - for which statistical norms, based upon a multitude of observations, were established. 20 The same is true of networks of flow: People, materiel, finances, information and cultural objects circulate amongst hubs within a network of delimited routes whose smooth functioning requires the continuous surveillance of everything that is moving therein. The surveillance of these circulatory networks enables the establishment of norms based upon protocols of movement across the network and behaviour within any of the hubs found within the network. This is precisely Virilio’s point: The way to overcome potential resistance to power is not by slowing people and things down, but by speeding them up, keeping them in perpetual motion and establishing systems of surveillance and norms from which people cannot hide while they are moving. 21 Second, we must understand that, although everyone is subject, to some degree, to the apparatus of flow and to the exhortation to be mobile, mobility itself is a relatively scarce resource, and, as Urry describes, has become a field of contestation - one that generates its own form of capital (in this case, mobility capital), and which itself is acquired with a surplus of other forms of capital. Thus, financial capital, cultural capital, educational capital and technological expertise qua capital may all function to enable one to access mobility capital. Those with low amounts of mobility capital are still required to be mobile and must still move through the apparatus of flow, but they move more slowly, less comfortably, and across far shorter distances. 22

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. Fluid Subjectivity: Towards a Theory of the Subject of Flow The third and final way that I would like to discuss flow is in terms of the production of subjectivity. The apparatus of flow that has destabilised the regime of fixity, and which has led to the articulation of the network state, has, in so doing, disrupted the relationships within which subjectivity was both experienced and understood as a stable phenomenon in a static space, regardless of how contingent this phenomenon has always been. Networks are spaces that are relational in nature and it would be a mistake to see elements within a network, such as subjectivity, in absolute or static terms. The value to, and identity of, any single element within a network is a function of the relationships enabled within that network and the relative position of that element with respect to other elements within the network. 23 In a network space characterised by flow, these relationships are a function of the movement amongst and between the various locations that any element may move towards and temporarily occupy within the network according to its protocols, the variety of elements flowing through the network, the positions that may be found within the network, and the differential values assigned to elements, movement and positions therein. Subjects moving through a network move through at least two types of nodes: Nodes of surveillance and control, where they are observed and disciplined, and ideological nodes, where subjectivity is informed. 24 The relationships found within these nodes, and which come to bear upon the subject, are not produced ex nihilo, but are themselves the product of the nodes’ relative position and relationship to all the other nodes in the network. 25 As a subject flows through a network, the likelihood that stable subjectivity will be maintained is a function of the speed by which, and the nodes through which, the subject flows. I want to argue that networks of flow are, ultimately, fluid spaces, and that many of the elements within them, subjectivity in particular, tend to be fluid as well. In a fluid space, elements, such as subjectivity, can transform without fracturing. There can be ‘variation without boundaries and transformation without discontinuity. We’re looking at flows. The space within which we’re dealing is fluid.’ 26 Even in a network characterised by flow, subjectivity can maintain a semblance of relative stability, although the key term here is ‘relative.’ As the subject flows from one ideological node to the next, the network relationships that articulate themselves to the node, and the inter-nodal relationships that inform one’s subjectivity shift, as does the self. This shift need not be dramatic; it need not be profoundly enacted; transformation does occur, even without discontinuity. One phenomenon that I believe can be seen as a bellwether of fluid subjectivity is the nature of the use and status of language by subjects who are flowing. Here I want to very briefly discuss English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). ELF has become an increasingly popular pedagogical theory in the teaching of English as a foreign language, particularly in the cosmopolitan, multicultural cities that function as either regional or global hubs within the global network of flow. ELF’s focus is not

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__________________________________________________________________ on the teaching of ‘proper’ English - that fixed and stable edifice that has never really existed -, but rather on concentrating on teaching to make use of English that is good enough to make oneself understood, and that replaces the edifice of English-proper. 27 This form of English is a language whose construction is highly localised and contingent and that shifts with every movement, every new encounter, every new interlocutor. In this respect, we are starting to see the breakdown of one very important element in the articulation of the stable subject. As ELF and other linguas franca grow, language will lose its stability, and will no longer function as a stable structure within which subjectivity is to be produced. 28

Notes 1

See, for example, Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 65; Samuel Edgerton, The Mirror, The Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 39-43 and 168-174; Samuel Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: ACLS, 2008), 153-156. 2 Harris Breslow, ‘The Crystallization of Disciplinarity within Cultural Studies’, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 1, No. 2 (1998): 104-119. 3 See, Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971). 4 A key example of this would be Althusser’s essay on the Ideological State Apparatus, where he describes fixed structural locations that enable the reproduction of ideology (the ISA), but does not discuss the material relationships that must exist amongst these locations. See, Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in On Ideology (London: Verso Books, 2008 [1971]), 1-60. 5 See Breslow, ‘The Crystallization of Disciplinarity within Cultural Studies’, 116117. 6 See, for example, John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 4-62; Peter Adey, Mobility (London: Routledge, 2010), 1-31; Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006), 26-56. 7 Urry, Mobilities, 185-210. 8 See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 [1996]), 442-446; John Urry, Global Complexity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 125-126; Urry, Mobilities, 54; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31. 9 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 151.

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__________________________________________________________________ 10

Ibid.; Urry, Mobilities, 126. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Chapter 1. 12 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Volume II (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 [1997]), 304-315; Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 33-36. 13 See, for instance, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), Chapters 2 and 3; Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-14; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory and Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), Chapter 4; Castells, The Power of Identity, 612. 14 Ibid., Chapter 5. 15 See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Towards an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso), 93-95. 16 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen Rendall (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 36 and 117, emphases in the original. It should be noted that de Certeau does not define place in purely architectonic or urban terms. For de Certeau a place may be institutional, material, semiotic, or cultural. See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 29-33. 17 Ibid., 36-37. 18 See Augé, Non-Places, 77. 19 See Urry, Mobilities, 146-147. 20 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002 [1970]), 375-400. 21 Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 39-41, 84 and 70-71. 22 Urry, Mobilities, 185-186. 23 Annemarie Mol and John Law, ‘Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology’, Social Studies of Science 24, No. 4 (1994): 643. 24 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 187-191. 25 Ibid., 219-247. 26 Mol and Law, ‘Regions, Networks and Fluids’, 658, emphases are in the original. 27 See Alastair Pennycook, ‘Beyond Hegemony and Heterogeny: English as a Global and Worldly Language’, in The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed. Christian Mair (New York: Rodopi, 2005), 6-7; Jennifer Jenkins, English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8; Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, 11

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: The Threat From Killer Languages’, in The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, ed. Christian Mair (New York: Rodopi, 2005), 40-42.

Bibliography Adey, Peter. Mobility. London: Routledge, 2010. Althusser, Louis. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’. In On Ideology, 1–60. London: Verso Books, 2008 [1971]. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Towards an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London: Verso. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory and Politics. London: Routledge, 1995. Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek. Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971. Breslow, Harris. ‘The Crystallization of Disciplinarity within Cultural Studies’. Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 1, No. 2 (1998): 104–119. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Volume I. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 [1996]. —––. The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Volume II. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 [1997]. Cresswell, Tim. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. London: Routledge, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Stephen Rendall. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984. Edgerton, Samuel. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: ACLS, 2008. —––. The Mirror, The Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2002 [1970]. Hobsbawm, Eric. ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’. In The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm, and Terrance Ranger, 1–14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Jenkins, Jennifer. English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Mol, Annemarie, and John Law. ‘Regions, Networks and Fluids: Anaemia and Social Topology’. Social Studies of Science 24, No. 4 (1994): 641–670. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Pennycook, Alastair.’Beyond Hegemony and Heterogeny: English as a Global and Worldly Language’. In The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, edited by Christian Mair, 3–18. New York: Rodopi, 2005. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. ‘Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: The Threat From Killer Languages’. In The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, edited by Christian Mair, 31–52. New York: Rodopi, 2005. Urry, John. Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.

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__________________________________________________________________ —––. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006. Harris Breslow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, where he is also a Principal Investigator on the Emirates Internet Project. Harris’ current research interests focus on the philosophy of space, new media and their role in the articulation of social space, the rearticulation of urban space in the Arab world, and the relationship between civil society, cyberspace, and urban space.

 

The Haunting Absence of Presence in Michael Eastman’s Havana Series Christina Alegria Abstract Every photograph is a certificate of presence. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida This chapter positions Michael Eastman’s Havana series of architectural photographs as an oppositional space where past wealth and privilege contests a present post-colonial location of poverty and subjugation. By choosing to erase the human image, Eastman delegates absence to the subliminal role of substantiation of presence. Further, I establish Michael Eastman’s Havana photographs as the purveyor of the repressed presence of the Cuban citizen. Through a formal and contextual examination of key images from Eastman’s two Havana series, important influences and techniques of the artist are explored. These strategies reveal that while the indigenous body is only occasionally included, these architectural photographs signify the contemporary Cuban citizen. Philosophical dialogue concerning absence and presence can be traced to Plato’s classical text, The Republic. In particular, Plato discusses the differentiation between that which exists from that which is created by the artist. Absence can also be interpreted as a form of postcolonial agenda. Eastman’s work is emblematic of the postcolonial ‘borderline’ proposed by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture. For Eastman, while physically absent, these ‘political survivors’ become a construct of postcolonial fallout. Canonical influences of photographers Eugene Atget and Walker Evans establish formal influences of documentation and political agenda in Eastman’s practice. I conclude that absence and presence create a paradigm in the Havana series: by negating the presence of the burdened contemporary Cuban, Eastman shields the viewer from an abject present, while simultaneously transporting him to Havana’s romanticised past. Key Words: Absence, presence, postcolonial, memesis, border, hegemony, architecture, interior, nostalgia, decay. ***** 1. Introduction A strange ambiguity inhabits Michael Eastman’s Havana series of architectural photographs. Ornate and shabby, opulent and decrepit, these loaded images reflect a cultural past of elegance, taste and elite prosperity. However, like many a fallen empire, these depicted structures have deteriorated into ruinous disrepair in the wake of Cuba’s revolution, termination of Soviet subsidies, and the ensuing

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__________________________________________________________________ Special Period. Like the fragile structures they inhabit, many Cuban citizens endure a lifestyle characterized by political repression, as well as a lack of capital, adequate infrastructure and basic necessities. Governed by a socialist government under the dictatorship of Fidel Castro, and most recently, Raul Castro, the oppressed and demoralised yet resourceful occupants of these once elegant villas and flats cling to the structures even as they decompose around them. These tragic shells of past architectural brilliance draw numerous tourists and photographers anxious to witness their crumbling examples of Moorish, Neo-classical, Art Nouveau and Art Deco architecture, seemingly frozen in time. In his text, Camera Lucia, Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes discussed the undeniable ability of the photograph to capture and signify the fundamental nature of what has been, stating, ‘The photograph’s essence is to ratify what it represents.’ 1 Barthes elaborated that the photograph ‘does not invent;’ but that ‘it is rather authentication itself.’ 2 These thoughts culminated in the statement, ‘Every photograph is a certificate of presence.’ Application of Roland Barthes thoughts to Eastman’s Havana series and the evidentiary images captured, supports my argument that these photographs authenticate the presence of the Cuban spirit. This chapter establishes Michael Eastman’s photographic series of contemporary Cuban architecture as the purveyor of presence of the Cuban citizen. The essence of Eastman’s images contrasts a nostalgic colonial site of wealth, power and pleasure set against the harsh present postcolonial location of poverty, disenfranchisement and malaise. Through an examination of key images from Eastman’s two Havana series, important influences on the artist are explored, which lead to the conclusion that while the body is rarely evident, these photographic images can be viewed as the embodiment of the contemporary Cuban citizen. Art historical influences of Eugene Atget and Walker Evans establish the formal influences; documentation and political agenda at play in Eastman’s work. Finally, I argue that absence is a construct in the images of Michael Eastman's Havana series, made present by the gaze of the viewer who negates the reality and presence of the contemporary Havana resident in an effort to shield himself from the abject present and transport himself to the picturesque Havana of the idealized past. In his 1993 essay, ‘Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art,’ Peter Wollen stated, ‘Today … we are in the shrinking world of transnational capital telecommunication and mass tourism.’ 3 Wollen described a contemporary tourist, drawn to the third world country (such as Cuba) to satisfy his Eurocentric curiosity of the hybridised past and present of the post-colonial culture. This Eurocentric tendency often leads the tourist to disregard the presence of the third world citizen. Instead, the tourist creates an absence of the presence of local inhabitants by mentally classifying them as just another indigenous object or curiosity. The photography of Michael Eastman appears to reflect this absence of the human

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__________________________________________________________________ presence. Eastman is clearly focused on the architectural decay of Havana - not its struggling population. While a local inhabitant occasionally slips in to an exterior shot, for the most part, this series reveals a clear absence of the Havana (or any other) resident. The viewer is free to experience the exquisite decay and grandeur of the Havana settings without the distraction of the human image. 2. Absence and Presence Defining absence and presence involves simply looking at a state of being or existence in presence and the negation of that state in absence. The Oxford English Dictionary defines absence as ‘the state of being away from a place or person.’ 4 Conversely, presence is defined as ‘the state or fact of existing, occurring, or being present in a place or thing.’ 5 The OED also continues the definition to include a ‘person or thing that exists or is present in a place but is not seen.’ 6 The terms work in an interdependent relationship for one cannot be absent without having at one time been present. However, as the OED specifies, one can be present without actually being visible. This discernment is important to the viewing of Michael Eastman’s photography. For example, in the photograph, Isabella’s Two Chairs, 1999, (Figure 1) there is an obvious absence of the human figure. The vast space, captured on colour film, in a long, 30 to 60 second exposure with a 4 x 5 camera, echoes with the inaudible sound of plaster slowly separating from hundred-year-old walls, while the dark creeping mould infects a deeper decay. Two chairs face the viewer as if to meet our gaze and invite us in to step onto the cool tiled floor of this eerily elegant space. The inclusion of the two tattered chairs belies the absence of the room, anticipating presence, as they wait unoccupied for the resident’s return. A discarded plastic water bottle nestles in the tattered cushion of one of the chairs, evidence of past presence. Philosophical dialogue concerning absence and presence can be traced to Plato’s classical text, The Republic. In particular, Plato discusses the differentiation between that which exists from that which is created by the artist. When the artist makes a second representational copy of the original object, he employs mimesis. The original object still exists, yet not as the second mimetic, or representational object, which was made to denote and mimic the original object by the artist. The representation made by the artist ‘is not “what is”, but something which resembles “what is” without being it.’ 7 Applying this dialectic to Isabella’s Two Chairs, 1999, it can be postulated that Eastman, although not leaving a direct image of the inhabitant, suggests her presence by allowing the simple evidence of a contemporary plastic water bottle to remain on one of her chairs in his photographic image. Through this inclusion, Eastman employs an evidentiary mimesis, which reflects both the presence and absence of the inhabitant, which we assume from the title to be Isabella.

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__________________________________________________________________ Michael Eastman returns to Cuba and the same room a year later to once again capture the essence of this space in Isabella’s Two Chairs, 2000, (Figure 2). This second photograph maintains a physical absence of the resident, however, her presence is substantiated due to the inclusion of personal items hanging from a clothesline that leads to a point in the center of the room above the now familiar chairs. We witness the visual evidence of the inhabitant having actually changed the interior setting. The hanging laundry serves a dual purpose as it legitimises not only the existence of one who will soon wear these shabby items of clothing, but also speaks to the modest means of the person who resides in this space. The contrast of past and present is realised by the central placement of the one elegant chandelier whose former brilliant incandescence is now replaced by the gentle glow of the Havana sunlight, shedding the solar light of the present, and whose decay devours the elegance of the past. The two chairs have been moved only slightly, turning just a bit towards each other. The resident affects only the slightest presence, that of drying her laundry, while she has had virtually no effect on the ruinous state of the room, which continues its protracted decline. 3. Context of Contemporary Cuba While dilapidation and decay in the architecture of Havana has a hauntingly aesthetic quality, the reality of deficiency and disenfranchisement experienced by the citizen of Havana presents an image that while clearly abject in reality, is camouflaged in the old mansions of Havana. A recent article in the Havana Times explained that unlike the shanty towns or ‘favelas’ which arose in other Latin American countries, Havana ‘began swallowing up those marginal elements by creating densely populated pockets of poverty … with precarious barbacoas (new living areas on floors built between in space with high ceilings) wherever there was sufficient space.’ This infestation-like overcrowding of the aging structures in Havana has created an oppressive presence that negatively effects much of the population. In her book, Havana Real, Cuban author, Yoani Sanchez, related her personal struggles in the post Special Period. Her daily trials range from dealing with scarcity of water and obtaining basic necessities, to the continual denial of her request to leave the island by the Cuban government. She describes the overcrowding in her home where multiple generations share cramped living quarters made worse by hurricane damage and the aging structure. The continual stress of these living conditions lead Sanchez to the decision not to have the second child that she had anticipated naming ‘Gea.’ Gea remained the unmet desire for a second child. I looked ahead twenty years - and imagined today’s same housing problems with two married children who would bring their spouse to live with us … Without sentimentality, Gea has vanished totally from my

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__________________________________________________________________ life. I know that we have no space for her. 8 The sacrifices and shortages faced by Yoani Sanchez and most of the contemporary Cuban population on a daily basis are visually absent from Michael Eastman’s photographs, at least on the surface. However, if one looks closely at Eastman’s images we note that he makes no effort to conceal the peeling plaster, moisture stained walls, broken windows, and festering areas of mould, in fact they are almost highlighted as integral formal aspects of the photographic composition. These photographs of long standing structures riddled with decay become signifiers of the drawn out suffering and struggles that are only too present in the lives of the Cuban citizen who is absent from Eastman’s image. Michael Eastman’s practice reveals a fascination with images of architectural spaces frozen in time. His series, Vanishing America, published in 2008, between his trips to Cuba, documented movie houses, diners, theatres and churches across America that are rapidly disintegrating and disappearing from the landscape as they become outdated, redundant, and forgotten. Historian, Douglas Birnkley aptly described the sense of loss in this series stating that the ‘sheer thrust of American dynamism has simply left Main Street unloved.’ Shifting from abandoned structures left to rot in the wake of ‘progress’ in America, to the buildings that are decaying in the stagnant economy of Cuba may seem an obvious progression for Eastman. But one might also wonder if it is the sense of nostalgia and mysterious ghosts of the past that inspire his lens. Eastman’s subtle creation of a past conflicting with a haunting presence informs his series of Cuban images, and reveals the artist’s nostalgia for a lost time. In the Havana series, the self-taught photographer reveals a longing for Cuba’s past as well as the early influences of two photographers whose documentorial processes have informed his practice. He states, ‘When I was 35, I was looking at Atget and Walker Evans, and I thought, “What wouldn’t I give to go back to Paris in 1904 or in the South in the 1930’s.”’ 9 4. Art Historical Influences The influence of Atget in both substance and composition, is revealed through a comparison of Eastman’s Flatiron #2 (figure 3) with Atget’s Coine Rue du Seine. Both artists employ a two-point perspective to create dynamic diagonal tension and deep space. This results in a powerful illusion of man’s presence thrusting towards the viewer with all the power of a railroad engine, as it passes by parallel buildings that frame the structure on each side. The presence of the architect and his vision replaces the absence of recognisable figures. The architecture and the powerful progressive force of modernity is the object here, a testament to the knowledge and advancements of man as he creates his vision and asserts his presence in the edifice.

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__________________________________________________________________ The noted scholar, Walter Benjamin studied the work of Eugene Atget and his documentation of the deserted Paris streets characterised by absence. In her book, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History and Art, Kia Linroos references Benjamin’s text, Kunstwerk, stating that Atget took photographs of the deserted Paris streets that were usually crowded and full of life creating an uneasy documentary space that Benjamin termed ‘deserted scenes of a crime.’ 10 Like the quintessential Twilight Zone nightmare, the absence of ordinary Paris citizens creates an othered image, allowing the presence of Paris masses to become present as the very result of their absence. 11 Atget’s Paris had undergone a major transformation and renovation of buildings, streets and green spaces, under the direction of urban planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, in the mid 19th century. Havana underwent its own version of ‘Haussmanization’ from 1925 to 1930 under the leadership of the French landscape architect, Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier. Much of the common spaces in use in Havana today were initiated during this time, including the Plaza de la Fraternidad, the esplanade of the Avenida de las Misiones, the extension of the Malecon, the Plaza del Maine, and the great staircase of the University. Most of these structures and locations exist today and serve as public venues for both official and leisure gatherings and often feature the Neo-classical architectural and sculptural influence of Paris. Both projects made communal spaces in the city more accessible, resulting in a more public urban lifestyle. In Paris, Atget served as a witness of what was left of the Ancien Régime of pre-Hausmannized Paris. He turned to photographing private domestic interiors in an effort to reclaim the presence of the private citizen as well as the importance of personal space. Atget copiously photographed Paris over a period of many years, documenting the importance, and in some cases the dwindling importance, of the private home. Taking photograph after photograph of both interior and exterior space, Atget harnessed the absence of the individual to conversely illustrate his importance in the unseen spaces of Paris. An article by Katie Hartsough Brion discusses Atget and includes a quote by Walter Benjamin on the photographer’s process. ‘The interior is not just the universe of the private individual; it is also his etui … . In the style characteristic of the Second Empire, the apartment becomes a sort of cockpit. The traces of its inhabitant are melded into the interior.’ 12 Kia Linroos relates that Benjamin wrote in his text, Kunstwerk, that because of their stark absence of human bodies, Atget’s documentorial images resembled a crime scene. A comparison of Atget’s Paris Interior, with Eastman’s Mercedes Hall #2 (Figure 4) reveals another instance of both artists capturing a setting devoid of the human body. Both images elicit a voyeuristic interest of the deserted settings filled with personal belongings, Arrangements of flowers, paintings, clocks, and the special chair where we can envision the occupant would sit, read, pay bills and conduct

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__________________________________________________________________ other trivialities of life, lead us to feel as if we are trespassing in this space of absence that is still filled with their presence. These images serve as the ‘etui’ Benjamin described earlier, functioning as a vessel holding the most private belongings of the resident and the memories associated with them. As previously mentioned, Eastman has acknowledged Atget and Walker Evans as early influences on his photographic practice. He admits, ‘My fantasy was, “Wouldn’t it be great to go back to a place frozen in time?” Cuba always seemed to be that place.’ 13 However, Evans’ motivations in capturing the city of Havana were clearly continuing the evidentiary approach of Atget’s photography. While Atget’s images often create a feeling of mystery and investigation, Evans’ appears to have an aesthetic variation on journalist work that comes from an ethnographic perspective. Rather than coming to find a country frozen in time and steeped in elegant ruins, Evans came to Cuba to photograph the island with a clear political agenda. As a journalistic assignment, Evans’ goal was to capture images in support of anti-dictatorial book being written by Carleton Beals. From mass gatherings and simple encounters on the street, to the quiet, still, and waiting individual, Evan’s captured images added emotional impact to Beal’s Crime of Cuba. Andrei Codrescu described Evan’s photograph, Old Havana Housefronts, as capturing ‘the primal stillness of Cuba.’ 14 Two men linger in the stillness of what may be a quiet siesta time, awaiting the return of business. Even here in 1933 the building shows evidence and decay, reflecting the failure of dictator Machado’s regime. The inclusion of human presence adds to the empathy of living in a state of disenfranchisement, decay and disrepair both physically and ideologically. In Shadows Façade, 2010 (Figure 5) Eastman photographs a similar façade minus the human figures. The centered lamp adjoined to primitive wiring echoes Evan’s image, as does the crumbling plaster. For Eastman, human presence is achieved by the television antenna and bicycle that sit on the long terrace above balconies strewn with colourful hanging laundry. While both buildings suffer from neglect and disrepair, the flaking green of Eastman’s image suggests the underlying spirit of the Cuban culture, while the black and white tones in Evan’s image erase that spirit. 5. Conclusion In conclusion, Eastman has created a body of work where absence plays a powerful yet stealthy role in representing the abject presence of the Cuban citizen struggling to survive in the post-Special Period of today’s Cuba. This absence can also be interpreted as a form of postcolonial agenda. Eastman’s work is in many ways emblematic of the postcolonial ‘borderline’ proposed by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture. He relates that this borderline space becomes a place where ‘political survivors become the best historical witnesses.’ 15 For Eastman, while physically absent, these ‘political survivors’ become a construct of the

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__________________________________________________________________ continuing postcolonial fallout where, as Bhabha describes, ‘The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living.’ 16 By choosing to erase the human element, Eastman delegates absence to the subtle role of the subliminal reminder of presence in his affirming yet haunting images. The power of his images lies in their quietness and perhaps the knowledge of the absoluteness of the image in the aforementioned theory of Roland Barthes who contends that for realists, like him, ‘the photograph is not a copy of reality but an emanation of past reality.’17 With presence assigned to this hidden realm, Peter Wollen’s statement becomes a fitting postscript: ‘Creativity always comes from beneath, it always finds an unexpected and indirect path forward and it always makes use of what it can scavenge by night.’18 Michael Eastman has scavenged a most haunting world of absence whose reality of presence both camouflages and most delicately reveals a painful present.

Notes 1

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 85. 2 Ibid., 87. 3 Peter Wollen, ‘Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art’, in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1106. 4 ‘Absence’, Oxford Dictionaries, April 2010 (Oxford University Press), December 13, 2011, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/absence. 5 ‘Presence’, Oxford Dictionaries, April 2010 (Oxford University Press), December 13, 2011, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/presence. 6 Ibid. 7 Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 424. 8 Yoani Sanchez, Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth about Cuba Today (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009), 71-72. It should be noted that travel restrictions were relaxed in Cuba on January 14, 2013. The costly ‘exit visa’ is no longer required. Ms. Sanchez began an eighty day tour of North and South America as well as numerous European countries in early February of 2013. 9 Michael Eastman quoted in Vicki Goldberg, ‘The Vanishing Point’, Havana (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 127. 10 Walter Benjamin quoted in Kia Linroos, Now-Time/Image-Space: Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History and Art (Jyvaskyla, Finland: SoPhiAcademic Press, 1998), 179. 11 Ibid., 181.

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__________________________________________________________________ 12

Katie Hartsough Brion, ‘Eugene Atget and the Fin de Siecle Interior: Revelatory Excess’, in Bulletin: The University of Michigan, Museums of Art and Archaeology (Michigan: MPublishing, 2005), 51-74. 13 Goldberg, ‘The Vanishing Point’, 128. 14 Andrei Codrescu, ‘Walker Evans: The Cuba Photographs’, in Walker Evans, Cuba, ed. Mark Greenberg (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001), 19. 15 Homi Bhabha, ‘On “Hybridity” and “Moving Beyond”’, in Art in Theory, 19002000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1115. 16 Ibid., 1114. 17 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 88. 18 Wollen, ‘Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art’, 1110.

Bibliography Archibold, Randal C. ‘Cuban Leader Proposes Term Limits in Sign of New Era’. New York Times. New York: The New York Times Company, April 16, 2011. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bhabha, Homi. ‘On “Hybridity” and “Moving Beyond”. Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison, and Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Brion, Katie Hartsough. ‘Eugene Atget and the Fin de Sicele Interior: Revelatory Excess’. Bulletin: The University of Michigan, Museums of Art and Archaeology. Volume 16. Michigan: MPublishing, 2005. Codrescu, Andrei. ‘Walker Evans: The Cuba Photographs’. Walker Evans, Cuba. Edited by Mark Grreberg. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001. Crimp, Douglas. ‘The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’. October 15, 91– 101. Cambridge: The MIT Press, Winter, 1980. Foucault, Michel. ‘“Space, Power and Knowledge’. In The Cultural Studies Reader, Second Edition, edited by Simon During, 134–141. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ Goldberg, Vicki. ‘The Vanishing Point’. In Michael Eastman, Havana. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Part 2.” The Originality of Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 210–219. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Originally published in October 4 (Fall, 1977). Lazarus, Neil, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lejeune, Jean-Francois, John Beusterien, and Narciso G. Menocal. ‘The City as Landscape: Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier and the Great Urban Works of Havana, 1925-1930’. The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 22, Cuba Theme Issue (1996): 150–185. Linroos, Kia. Now-Time/Image-Space. Temporalization of Politics in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History and Art. Jyvaskyla, Finland: SoPhi Academic Press, 1998. Sanchez, Yoani. Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth about Cuba Today. Translated by M. J. Porter. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2009. Wollen, Peter. ‘Into the Future: Tourism, Language and Art’. Art in Theory, 19002000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Edited by Charles Harrison, and Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 2003. Christina Alegria is an advanced candidate for a Master of Arts in Art History and Museum Studies at California State University Long Beach, where she also completed a dual BA in Art History and Comparative Literature. She is the Assistant Curator of Education at the University Art Museum and has taught Art History courses through the mentorship program and at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. She has curated numerous exhibitons and is finalising her thesis which traces a 19th French Orientalist painting and its appropriation by later artists through the lens of spatial, gender, postcolonial theory and contextual analysis.

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Appendix

Figure 1: Michael Eastman, Isabella’s Two Chairs, 1999. Chromogenic print.

Figure 2: Michael Eastman, Isabella’s Two Chairs, 2000. Chromogenic print.

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Figure 3: Michael Eastman, Flatiron #2, Havana, 2010. Chromogenic print.

Figure 4: Michael Eastman, Mercedes Hall #2, 1999. Chromogenic Print.

Figure 5: Michael Eastman, Shadows Façade, 2010. Chromogenic Print.

Creating Empty Spaces through Disoccupation: The Aesthetics Proposal of Jorge Oteiza Jon Echeverria-Plazaola Abstract The development of modern sculpture can be described as a process of dematerialisation, where the solid monolithic mass of a centuries-long tradition is replaced by a new conception that places the sculptures in the interplay of materiality and virtual volumes of empty space. Similar transvaluation processes can be observed in other fields (psychology, physics, religion). All of them contribute to the transformation of the metaphysical foundations of life and thought that has had numerous implications in artistic theory and practice. The objective of this chapter is to study the implications of this process in the creation of new aesthetics concepts and new artistic forms, focusing on the aesthetics thought of the Spanish artist Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003). His sculptures developed from figurative to abstract forms in parallel to a dematerialisation process that concluded in his ‘Empty Boxes’ and ‘Metaphysical Boxes’ (1958-59). The aim of these sculptures was to ‘construct the void’ by breaking the neutrality and the indifference of space. Oteiza coined the concepts ‘disoccupation’ and ‘Negative Aesthetics,’ both related to Negative Theology, to name this process of transforming neutral space into active empty space. This aim of emptying space was the base of Oteiza’s most important architectural project, ‘The Monument to José Batlle y Ordoñez’ (Montevideo). I end up by highlighting the contribution of these new concepts for an understanding of art in relation to ‘real spaces’ and ‘places’ that goes beyond the assumption that art is only about visual perception. Key Words: Jorge Oteiza, place, empty space, dematerialisation, disoccupation, modern sculpture, negative aesthetics. ***** 1. Introduction The development of modern sculpture from 1910 to1960 can be described as a process of dematerialisation, where the solid monolithic mass of a centuries-long tradition was replaced by a new conception that placed the sculpture in the interplay of materiality and virtual volumes of space. 1 This new conception reversed the way that sculptural space was defined. Instead of being a spot in which volumes could be replaced or projected, like a frame around the mass, it was considered as an absolute element with its own specific properties. Thereby, what was considered negative (space) became the positive, the constitutive element of the sculpture. 2

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__________________________________________________________________ Similar transvaluation processes can be observed in other fields: between the plenum of matter and the void of space in physics, between subject and background in painting, or between the sacred and the profane space of religion. All these transvaluations implied a breakdown of absolute distinctions and suggested the transformation of the metaphysical foundations of life and thought and the revaluation of the traditional hierarchies. 3 Two catalysts contributed to the aforementioned dematerialisation process of modern sculpture: on one side, the transition from classical physics to modern atomic theory. According to Max Planck’s quantum theory and Einstein´s theory of relativity, mass and energy are united and, under certain conditions, are mutually convertible. This idea implied that matter lost its supremacy and, consequently, the fixed and immobile ground of sculpture disappeared. This is the reason of the centrality of the theme of energy in modernist discourse and its importance in the extension of the historical conceptions of representation in art to include wider fields of visualisation. 4 On the other side, the decline of the Christian metaphysical framework and the secularisation of life and thought after the announcement of the ‘death of God’ blurred the symbolic distinction between ‘up and down’ and fullness and nothingness. The experience of the ‘absence of God’ forced many artists to reinvent the spirituality of art against the backdrop of this absence and to uphold art’s own spiritual meaning. 5 But as in a world without God man faced nothingness, the creative procces of many artists was expressed in a negative language and implied the resurrection of the previously neglected ‘empty space,’ both in its physical and metaphorical aspects. As Nietzsche claimed, the death of God forced man to feel ‘the breath of empty space.’ 6 2. The Influence of Science and Religious thought in Jorge Oteiza’s Art The sculptures and the aesthetic thought of the Spanish artist Jorge Oteiza (1908-2003) are a paradigmatic example of this new artistic and philosophical framework. Between 1929 and 1959 his artistic language developed from figurative to abstract, in a evolution parallel to a dematerialisation process that concluded in sculptures made by ‘empty space.’ His artistic practice and all his ideas about the meaning and the function of art were totally determinated by a personal crisis regarding his catholic faith. After this crisis, he defined himself as a ‘religious atheist artist,’ emphasising the idea that the impossibility of believing in the traditional religious languages impeled him to demanded to art the answers that he had previously considered to be resolved by religion. 7 By reclaiming these existential answers to art, he stressed the key idea of his thought, that art has a religious function. He even went further stating that the essence of religious thought and sensibility was provided by art. The decline of the Christian metaphysical framework and the way many abstract

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__________________________________________________________________ artists used their practice to create new religious and existential meanings were for him the clear evidences of it: The maturity of contemporary art is no random coincidence with Man’s religious crisis and his distancing from religions, because what Man is looking for and is trying to renew is not religion but the religious sensibility that has aesthetic roots and is created and repaired through art. Religion does not have, nor builds, religious sensibility. 8 But an artistic language that aspired to renew this religious sensibility had to take into account, in its conceptual and structural features, the way that the new scientific theories defined reality. In consequence, it was not a coincidence that Oteiza recognised the influence of Einstein theories in his religious approach to art. 9 According to him, the new cosmovisión proposed by theory of relativity, which could not be defined anymore as absolute and inmmobile, implied the redefinition of the notion of subject and his position within reality, and therefore, a reevaluation of the previous religious framework. As he stated, ‘we had already considered the relativist way in which we felt it would be best interpreted the material space of our sculpture, in search of an extensión to our ideas.’ 10 3. Beyond the Statue: Hollow and Transestatue In 1929 Oteiza made his first sculpture, Maternity [Image 1], a piece of cement that represents a mother holding her child in her arms. Its formal characteristics, such as its volume as a solid block, the alteration of the body proportions and the crude finish resemble the totem objects of non-occidental cultures. Until 1935, all of his works share, to a greater or lesser extent, the same formal, material and expressive characteristics highlighted in this sculpture. In 1950 Oteiza made two sculptures, Figure for a Return from Death [Image 2] and Study of Triple and Lightweight Unit [Image 3], which were a turning point in his plastic language. In comparison to the previous works, where the presence of mass determinated their formal and symbolic meaning, these antropomorphic sculptures were based on the dialogue between their material part and the space surrounding it. Due to the concavities and the hollows that define their shape, these sculptures show a radical thinning of mass, reducing the figure to a dynamic cipher in space. This formal structure works like a spatial moulds by means of which the neutrality of the surrounding space of material form is activated. In Oteiza’s opinion, this hollows allowed him to adapt the structure of sculpture to the new scientific theories, according to which the universe is full of fields of energy in different states:

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__________________________________________________________________ The hollow is revealed to us in our analysis as the key concept of a logic for formal renovation (…) In the next experimental stage, the hollow must become the object of a new plastic discourse. Until now it has been little more than the natural decomposition of the natural elements constituting the statue. And the hollow will have to provide the transition from the traditional statuemass to the statue-energy of the future, from the closed, heavy statue to the superlight, open statue, the Trans-statue. 11 This transition from mass to energy implied that the sculpture was not anymore defined as a material and stable block, but the prefix ‘Trans-’ refers to that which is beyond its material nature and that only can be revelated as a presence through it: the new inmaterialy that, according to the new scientific theories, holds up reality without revealing itself directly to the eye. As mentioned before, Oteiza was not the first artist that considered the monolithic sculpture as a denial of the presence of space. By 1920 Alexander Archipenko, Antón Pevsner or Naum Gabo stressed the importance of space in the new way of understanding the nature of sculpture. By neglecting the definition of sculpture as shape embedded in space, all of them approached space from an entirely different point of view, surrounding the space with sculpture or opening the sculpture to the external space. 12 But the radical way Oteiza tried to change both the traditional definition of sculpture and abstraction differed him from all of his precursors. In this sense, Figure for a Return from Death and Study of Triple and Lightweight Unit were just his first attempts to find his personal concept of empty space. 4. Disoccupation The most important phase in the development of Oteiza’s plastic language started in 1956 and concluded in 1959. This last phase is characterised by moving forward in his conception of space and his rejection of figuration. The first step in this direction was the group of 27 sculptures that Oteiza presented in the Fourth Biennial of the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo in 1957, the most important artistic event at that time. These sculptures were accompanied by an explanatory text, titled ‘Experimental Proposal 1956-1957,’ which can be considered Oteiza’s major contribution to aesthetics. At the beginning of this text Oteiza summarised the key ideas of his project: Empty space or proportion, a constant of contemporary sculpture, is a product either of the site the sculpture occupies or of its own nature as a vital field of energy. I observe this relationship: the greater the mass, the greater the tangible preparation of the sculpture and the more visible the hand of the

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__________________________________________________________________ sculptor, the more irrelevant or utterly alien the empty space is to the piece. Inversely, the less complex the sculpture, the more appealing the space around it (…) I posit the aesthetic nature of the Statue as a purely spatial organism, to be exact, the active disoccupation of the Statue through the fusion of lightweight or unimposing formal elements. 13 The term ‘disoccupation’ does not suggest the idea of leaving a place empty, of hollowing out by removing mass, but rather the shattering of the neutrality of the empty space. This specific meaning of ‘disoccupation’ was deduced by Oteiza from his distinction between ‘emptied space’ (or ‘unoccupied place’) and ‘empty space.’ Whereas the former is either the consequence of taking out something or just free and neutral space, the latter is the result of a treatment of space that reveals ‘emptiness’: Emptiness is the most difficult solution to the problem of transforming space. The emptiness is achieved, it is the result of a spatial emptying. This gives it its energy, created by the sculptor. It is the presence of a formal absence (…) It is the result of a treatment or a definition of space that, through its formal emptying, receives its energy. An emptied space must not be confused with an empty space. 14 The term ‘disoccupation’ also implied that Oteiza despised the material component of sculpture apart from its strictly spatial aspects, that is, apart from its formal condition and luminous quality. 15 Following these formal requirements he defined the ‘Malevich Unit,’ that he took from Kasimir Malevich´s Suprematism. In Oteiza’s version, the ‘Malevich Unit’ is an irregular square made by fine sheets of iron designed specifically to suppress any material and expressive selfreferencing. Oteiza adapted these Malevich Units to a broad spectrum of functions and built his sculptures by combining a determinate number of them in a rational process, which was only conditioned by the objective of activating empty space. The evident reductionism of this procedure and the resulting dematerialisation prevent these sculptures from having any denotative function, reinforcing the aniconic character that Oteiza wanted to achieve: ‘I seek a Statue in its experimental essence, objective, cold, impersonal, free of any spectacular passion, of any attempt to seem original or surprising.’ 16 Most of the sculptures presented to Biennial of Sao Paulo were built following this constructive procedure. But even though he was awarded as the ‘Best Foreigner Sculptor’ he was dissatisfied with the outcomes, and decided to radicalise his search for ‘emptiness’ in his final groups of sculptures, called Empty Boxes and Metaphysical Boxes (1958-1959). Empty Boxes [Image 4] are square

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__________________________________________________________________ metal cubes made up of six identical Malevich Units. Their combination describes the limits of the cube but also the invisible boundaries of the expanded inner empty space, filled with air and light and open to the world. In contrast, Metaphysical Boxes are virtually closed, since they are obtained from the opposition of two trihedrons, consisting of three Malevich Units linked together at right angles, that just leave an open vertical space through which a misterious dark void can be perceived. The titles of some of these works, such as Tribute to Leonardo’s Annunciation (1958) [Image 5] or Portrait of the Holy Spirit (1959) [Image 6], emphasise the religious character of these sculptures. But still more radical are some other works, such as Minimal Unit (1959) and Tribute to the Empty Style of Cubism (1959) [Image 7]. The last one is a kind of open receptacle that serves as an altar to emptiness. In all of these works the dialectical relationship between mass and space that defined the aforementioned precursors of modern sculpture broke in favour of empty space. The material component is just the minimum material shell necessary to activate and reveal empty space, the unique and real content of these sculptures. Oteiza coined the terms ‘Metaphysical Furniture’ and ‘Theological Box’ to refer to them, due to their austerity, inexpressivity and inmovility, that he linked to the sacred. 17 After doing these enigmatic works, he gave up doing sculptures in 1959. 5. Negative Aesthetics The material reductivism followed by Oteiza from 1950 to 1959 had its formal limits, beyond which nothing that can be called sculpture exists. This is one of the reasons of why space became a dead issue as a source of sculptural expression for many artists. 18 But in Oteiza’s case the step beyond the formal limit of dematerialisation and, consequently, the dissolution of sculpture as material object turned into his most significant achievement, which is closely linked to the religious function that Oteiza attributed to art. For him, this dissolution implied the transition from the physical reality to the metaphysical: In 1958-1959, having been dedicated totally to art for 30 years, I found myself with a sculpture that was spatially equal to zero, like a void, nothing. Not without anything: specifically with Nothing. 19 As Oteiza stated in this paragraph, what usually was considered as negative (the emptiness, the Nothingness) became the constitutive element of the sculpture, and more in general, the outcome of all the process of dissocupation followed from 1950 to 1959. He coined the term ‘Negative Aesthetics’ to summarise this process of dissocupation that ended up in the Nothingness. Both Negative Aesthetics and the concept of Nothingness are close to the Negative Theology and mystical thought that had an important influence on twentieth-century art and philosophy,

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__________________________________________________________________ since their ideas have been considered as the precedents of the modern consciousness of the absence of God or the death of God. 20 Mystics insisted on defining God as Nothingness in order to establish a clear difference between God, which is prior to created nature, and the created nature. To have the true experience of God, the created nature must be negated. Following this way of thinking, Oteiza defined Nothingness as the absolute space of God prior to the created reality. We experience this created reality as a time-space continuum. Consequently, his aim was to isolate this ‘absolute space’ by disoccupying space, which in Oteiza’s terms meant to break this relation between space and time by rejecting the materiality and the expressive nature of art. Thus, Oteiza defined Negative Aesthetics as The procedure of acting creatively by successive negations, in a progressive series of eliminations, phenomenologically, reducing between brackets everything that we need to separate, to isolate the true object or the action we are pursuing. 21 But to be absolute, space has to cease being real - a space full of phenomena and become an abstraction. Oteiza’s concept of abstract art is related to this idea. The abstraction of his sculptures is not the result of a process of essentialising or disfiguring reality (aphairesis), 22 nor of the enlargement of our concept of representation due to technical innovations. Both concepts of abstraction are deduced from and related to nature, whereas Oteiza declared that ‘what I have is nature, what I am lacking is no nature. I declare myself to be a metaphysical worker, I fight against nature, I penetrate it.’ 23 In Oteiza’s definition abstraction is what is disclosed by means of dissocupation, that is, the disclosure of a ‘spatial silence, like a religious and receptive intimacy which is in contradiction with the reality of nature.’ 24 Thus, the artistic gesture is literally the most anti-natural gesture: it is about opening the ‘interior and receptive space’ in natural space, the concave womb to live in, thus inverting the natural process whereby we are thrown to the temporal, wordly reality, first at birth, and then incessantly. 25 The obscure declaration of the last paragraph of ‘Experimental Proposal 1956-57’ summarises these intriguing ideas: I can now say that my abstract sculpture is religious art. I am not searching, in this concept of the Statue, for what we have but for what we lack. 26 6. From Empty Space to Empty Place Oteiza translated all these aesthetics ideas to his conception of the city, upholding the integration of art and architecture. As it does in his sculptures, the city is not considered from a formal or material perspective, but as a void, as active emptiness that becomes receptive for citizens. As a consequence, the

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__________________________________________________________________ aforementioned integration is not based on incorporating artworks into urban spaces simply as decoration, but in the collaboration between the artist and the architect in order to achieve the same type of empty and receptive space obtained in his sculptures. As Oteiza claimed, ‘the architecture and the city share with sculpture the same type of spatial essence.’ 27 All these ideas are reflected in the architectural proposal for the Monument to Jose Batlle y Ordóñez (Montevideo, 1957-1959, in collaboration with the architect Roberto Puig). This unrealised project was conceived in parallel to the Metaphysical Boxes and can be considered as the last outcome of this group of sculptures. The project consisted of one white building and an enormous flagstone. These two elements were connected with a projecting beam [Image 8]. The key element is the flagstone, that actually is a huge Malevich Unit (54 m x 54 m) in horizontal position and raised one and a half metres above ground-level. Thus, this Malevich unit disappears as a visible formal element, while simultaneously creating a place. In other words, the sculpture, as an object, disappears, but the work of art, as a purely spatial organism, is present. Oteiza created an open and empty enclosure that distinguished the space of the real world from the interior and receptive space, the empty space full of nothingness. Oteiza defined this place as an grand empty spiritual construction: ‘An open, receptive spatial atmosphere, which is satisfied and fulfilled with the final integration of man and community.’ Oteiza also defined it as ‘an altar elevated on the hill.’ 28 Thereby Oteiza turned a public space into a spiritual place. In Oteiza’s opinion, the spiritual nature of modern art was based on fulfilling this metaphysical function, which could be carried out taking into account the specific scientific and religious characteristics of modern societies that I have mentioned in the introduction. By doing it, art satisfies what Oteiza considered was its main purpose, the permanent spiritual renewal of human beings by protecting them from nature. But these ideas also confirm that, as has been pointed out by D. Summers, art is not just about visual perception, but art is also about creating places and real spaces with symbolic functions. 29 The aesthetics of Jorge Oteiza aimed to create human-scaled places where the deep nostalgia that the increasing rationalisation of world and life has generated could be overcome.

Notes 1

Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture. The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1967), 128. 2 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 159-164. 3 Ibid., 179-180.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4

Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 113; Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity. The Art and Career of Naum Gabo (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 398; Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible. Art, Science and the Spiritual (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 9 and 196; Bruce Clarke and Linda D. Henderson, eds., From Energy to Information. Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1-33; Linda D. Henderson, ‘X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists’, Art Journal 47 (1988): 323-340. 5 Maurice Truchman and Judi Freeman, eds., The Spiritual in Art. Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York, London and Paris: Abreville Press Publishers, 1986); Daniel Payot, ed., Mort de Dieu, Fin de l’Art (París: Cerf, 1991); Jean Loisy and Angela Lampe, eds., Traces du Sacré (París: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2008). 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted by Kern, Culture of Time and Space, 179. 7 Jorge Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, ed. Joseba Zulaika (Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, 2003), 415; Miguel Pelay Orozco, Oteiza. Su Vida, su Obra, su Pensamiento, su Palabra (Bilbao: La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca, 1978), 442. 8 Jorge Oteiza, ‘Carta de Oteiza al Escultor Navarro. Aizkorbe Escultura, Pintura’, in 40 Años de Arte Vasco 1937-1977. Historia y Documentos, ed. Maria José Arribas (San Sebastián: Erein, 1979), 134-143. 9 Jorge Oteiza, ‘Definición Personal y Concepto Religioso de mi Escultura’, unpublished document (Alzuza, Spain: Archive of Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, Register Number: 3169, dated in 1952). 10 Jorge Oteiza, ‘Carta a los Artistas de América. Sobre el Arte Nuevo en la Postguerra’, Revista de la Universidad del Cauca 5 (1944): 82-83. 11 Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 106-107. The translator translated the Spanish word ‘hueco’ to ‘empty space’ but I consider that it is more precise to translate it to ‘hollow.’ 12 Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 149-150. 13 Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 220-21. The translator translated the Spanish word ‘desocupación’ to ‘inactivity,’ but I consider that it is more precise to translate it to ‘disoccupation.’ 14 Ibid., 312; Pelay Orozco, Oteiza. Su Vida, su Obra, 21-22. 15 Ibid., 220. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 294-322. 18 Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 152.

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__________________________________________________________________ 19

Jorge Oteiza, Ejercicios Espirituales en un Túnel. En Busca y Encuentro de Nuestra Identidad Perdida (San Sebastián: Hórdago, 1984), 76. 20 Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism. Origins to the Fifth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1991), xviii; Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 186-205; Kei Uwe Schierz and Silke Opitz, eds., Unauusprechlich Schön. Das Mystische Paradoxon in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts / Ineffable Beauty. Mystical Paradox in 20th Century Art (Erfurt: Kunsthalle Erfurt, 2003); Amador Vega, ‘Images that are not Images: Notes toward an “Apophatic Theology” for the 20th Century’, in Variantology I. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies, eds. Sigfried Zielinski and Silvia Wagnermaier (Köln: Walter König, 2005), 299-318. 21 Jorge Oteiza, Quousque Tandem...!, Ensayo de Interpretación Estética del Alma Vasca, eds. Amador Vega and Jon Echeverria-Plazaola (Alzuza, Spain: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, 2007), 171-172. 22 Mark C. Taylor explains this process of essentialising reality followed by most of the abstract artist in his book Disfiguring. Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992). 23 Ibid., 271. 24 Jorge Oteiza, ‘La Escultura Contemporánea se ha Detenido (Carta Abierta a André Bloc)’, in Oteiza. Espacialato (Pamplona: García Castañón Gallery, 2000), 125-128. 25 Félix Duque, ‘Oteiza: The Metaphysics of Origin’, in Oteiza y la Crisis de la Modernidad / Oteiza and the Crisis of Modernity, conference proceedings (Alzuza, Spain: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, 2010), 744. 26 Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 243. For a broad analysis of the concept of Negative Aesthetics in Jorge Oteiza, see Jon Echeverria-Plazaola, ‘Jorge Oteiza and the “Negative Aesthetics”: Towards an Understanding of the Sacred in Abstract Art’, The International Journal of Humanities 9, Issue 11 (2012): 153169. 27 Jorge Oteiza and Emma López, De la Escultura a la Ciudad. Monumento a Batlle en Montevideo. Oteiza y Puig, 1958-60 (Alzuza, Spain: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, 2007), 7. 28 Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 256 29 David Summers, Real Spaces. World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London and New York: Phaidon, 2003).

Bibliography Burnham, Jack. Beyond Modern Sculpture. The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century. New York: George Braziller, 1967.

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__________________________________________________________________ Clarke, Bruce, and Linda D. Henderson, ed. From Energy to Information. Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Duque, Félix. ‘Oteiza: The Metaphysics of Origin’. In Oteiza y la Crisis de la Modernidad / Oteiza and the Crisis of Modernity. Conference Proccedings, 741– 759. Alzuza, Spain: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, 2010. Echeverria-Plazaola, Jon. ‘Jorge Oteiza and the “Negative Aesthetics”: Towards an Understanding of the Sacred in Abstract Art’. The International Journal of Humanities 9, Issue 11 (2012): 153–169. Gamwell, Lynn. Exploring the Invisible. Art, Science and the Spiritual. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. Hammer, Martin, and Christina Lodder. Constructing Modernity. The Art and Career of Naum Gabo. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Henderson, Linda D. ‘X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists’. Art Journal 47 (1988): 323–340. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Loisy, Jean, and Angela Lampe, eds. Traces du Sacré. París: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2008. López, Emma. De la Escultura a la Ciudad. Monumento a Batlle en Montevideo. Oteiza y Puig, 1958-60. Alzuza, Spain: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, 2007. McGinn, Bernard. The Foundations of Mysticism. Origins to the Fifth Century. New York: Crossroad, 1991. Oteiza, Jorge. ‘Carta a los Artistas de América. Sobre el Arte Nuevo en la Postguerra’. Revista de la Universidad del Cauca 5 (1944): 75–109. —––. ‘Definición Personal y Concepto Religioso de mi Escultura’. Unpublished document, Archive of Jorge Oteiza Foundation, Register Number: 3169, dated in 1952.

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__________________________________________________________________ —––. ‘Carta de Oteiza al Escultor Navarro. Aizkorbe Escultura, Pintura’. In 40 Años de Arte Vasco 1937-1977. Historia y Documentos, edited by María José Arribas, 134–143. San Sebastián: Erein, 1976. —––. Ejercicios Espirituales en un Túnel. En Busca y Encuentro de Nuestra Identidad Perdida. San Sebastián: Hórdago, 1984. —––. ‘La Escultura Contemporánea se ha Detenido (Carta Abierta a André Bloc)’. In Oteiza. Espacialato, 125–128, Pamplona: García Castañón Gallery, 2000. —––. Oteiza’s Selected Writings. Edited by Joseba Zulaika. Reno: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, 2003. —––. Quousque Tandem...!, Ensayo de Interpretación Estética del Alma Vasca, edited by Amador Vega, and Jon Echeverria-Plazaola. Alzuza, Spain: Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza, 2007. Payot, Daniel, ed. Mort de Dieu, Fin de l’Art. París: Cerf, 1991. Pelay Orozco, Miguel. Oteiza. Su Vida, su Obra, su Pensamiento, su Palabra. Bilbao: La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca, 1978. Schierz, Kei Uwe, and Silke Opitz, ed. Unauusprechlich Schön. Das Mystische Paradoxon in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts / Ineffable Beauty. Mystical Paradox in 20th Century Art. Erfurt: Kunsthalle Erfurt, 2003. Summers, David, Real Spaces. World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. London and New York: Phaidon, 2003. Taylor, Mark C., Disfiguring. Art, Architecture, Religion. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. —––. After God. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Truchman, Maurice, and Judi Freeman, ed. The Spiritual in Art. Abstract Painting 1890-1985. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York, London and Paris: Abreville Press Publishers, 1986.

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__________________________________________________________________ Vega, Amador. ‘Images That are not Images: Notes toward an “Apophatic Theology” for the 20th Century’. In Variantology I. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies, edited by Sigfried Zielinski, and Silvia Wagnermaier, 299–318. Köln: Walter König, 2005. Jon Echeverria-Plazaola, PhD is Postdoc-Fellow in Fine Arts Faculty, University of Basque Country (UPV-EHU), and visiting scholar at Universität der KünsteBerlin (UdK). He is mostly interested in the relationships between modern art, scientific thought and nihilism.

Appendix

Image 1: Maternity, 1929, cement, 43 x 28 x11 cm., Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza.

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Image 2: Figure for a Return from Death, 1950,bronze, 42 x 19 x 13 cm., Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza.

Image 3: Study of Triple and Lightweight Unit, 1950, zinc, 34 x 7 x 7 cm., Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza.

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Image 4: Empty box with dissocupaying colour, 1958, coloured iron, 47 x 41 x 40 cm., Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza.

Image 5: Portrait of the Holy Spirit, 1959, steel with copper content and marble, 22 x 28,5 x 20 cm. Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza.

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Image 6: Tribute to Leonardo’s Annunciation, 1958, steel, 28,5 x 25 x 26,5 cm. Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza.

Image 7: Empty Style of Cubism, 1959, steel, 43 x 41,5 x 41,5 cm. Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza.

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Image 8: Monument to Jose Batlle y Ordóñez, 1957-1959, photomontage.

Reconstructing the Theatre Space through Cinematographic Presence: The Film Entr’acte on Stage Karine Bouchard Abstract This chapter examines the relationships of presence and absence between film, scenic play (scenography and dance) and theatre space. In 1924, Francis Picabia directed the Dadaist ballet, Relâche, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which presented René Clair’s film Entr’acte during the intermission. The former’s screening is a short film that is an ideal case in point for this study’s purpose. Since it has often been viewed as a reproducible and portable medium due to its independence from its contextual place within the literature review of cinema, Entr’acte will be evaluated as a site-specific work in its initial framework of presentation. Consequently, this will enable a renewal of analysis, lead by an intermedial approach, that distances itself from the references of the Gesamtkunstwerk as well as from the concept of heterogeneity. To begin, we will illustrate the way in which films within the performance work have an effect on the construction of spaces, thus reversing the codes. Though the ballet dance style is absent from the stage, it reappears virtually through the screen. The varied lighting on stage enables the derealisation of the scene, as well as reinforces the materiality of the film. Rather than revolving around the theatrical dimension, the actual presence of the show appears to be increasingly based in the cinematographic dimension: in the immateriality. In regards to the dialectical approach, I will argue that the spectacle presented to the bourgeoisie of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées disrupted established conventions. This was achieved through the theatrical place’s transformation into that of a movie theatre during the screening, as well as the generation of institutional violence, by the confrontation of the audience's cinematographic and theatrical habitus. Key Words: Site-specificity, absence, presence, experimental cinema, intermediality, Dada performance, Relâche, Entr’acte, Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées. ***** 1. An Historical Avant-Garde Case Study Since the 1980s and 1990s, forms embodied by the cinema have become increasingly hybrid and deconstructed. Although movie theatres had been the prime location for screenings from the beginning of the institutionalisation of cinema in the first decade of the 20th century, the places for cinematographic artworks to be viewed have been seemingly multiplied. Defined by film scholars such as Philippe Dubois as the ‘cinema effect,’ new places brought new devices,

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_________________________________________________________________ such as a ‘cinema’ marked by the absence of traditional conventions that have been accepted for a century and that have an alternative presence to the one already known. This is related to impression or cinematographic illusion. 1 Within this perspective, the question arises as to whether the different forms, shapes and institutional nature of films are capable of challenging institutions. This issue has to be reviewed in a historical perspective in order to understand the origins of the current changes, or at the very least to demonstrate that the practices of this day seem to be rooted within the early 20th century historical avant-garde practices and experiments. An update of the historical works is worth examining as it can contribute to the methodology of modernist art history, which has often neglected interdisciplinary works as well as artistic hybridisations. According to several scholars, the practices of historical avant-garde artists failed in the undermining and deconstruction of the artistic institution. 2 In order to achieve this, artists must work to change the very place in which the artwork is situated, similarly to the neo avant-garde artists such as Daniel Buren, who developed in the 1970s site-specific works that created dialogue alongside the museum place. 3 Though similar historical avant-garde cases are rare in the early 20th century, a major case in point appears to possess this similar intention. During its intermission, the 1924 ballet Relâche that Dadaist artist Francis Picabia created for the Ballets Suédois featured René Clair’s film Entr’acte (1924), which critiqued the institutional place rooted in a cultural tradition and within an economic elite. Instead of being situated in the museum space or the gallery, which became the focus of the neo avant-gardes in upcoming years, Entr’acte was screened in a theatrical space. As noted by Günter Berghaus, the latter was a ‘sector of entertainment industry and catered for bourgeois audiences’ 4 in the 19th century. In effect, the arrival of the historical avant-garde within the art scene at the beginning of the last century has come to challenge the theatrical structure through its deep modification of theatrical codes, such as those of narrativity, the fourth wall and realism. Thus, works were created that were not only staged by the authors of texts, but rather real autonomous events unattached from tradition. Relâche is a prime example, in this regards. 5 Indeed, the avant-garde spectacle is a manifest example due to its presentation at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, which had already built a reputation, before 1920, as a legitimate institution for a number of years. Relâche is different from Dadaist evenings for it directly intervenes on the institution, as the other evenings were produced in places emancipated from all institutional laws. 6 However, a number of avant-garde (Dada) events, including the Salon Dada, presented as part of the 1921 Dada Season, had already been produced at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which was composed of three rooms: the great Italian room, the Comedy and the Studio. Although these events were generally held in the hall of the Studio, a room of lesser importance, Relâche was staged in the main Italian one, which had produced operas and

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________________________________________________________________ performances by the Ballets Russes and Ballets Suédois companies. 7 Indeed, it had been the sole performance with such strong Dadaist roots to occur in the main Italian room of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, which had hosted the Parisian bourgeois: individuals accustomed to attending contemporary presentations. Moreover, the effectiveness of Relâche’s contestation has been achieved through the integration of the film Entr’acte, thereby acting as a physical and social space for the stage and the theatrical spaces. 2. Experimental Film as a Site-Specific Work of Art Entr’acte is frequently considered to be one of the masterpieces of experimental film in the disciplinary literature of cinema. In fact, a review of the literature illustrates that with regards to general film history books such as those of Georges Sadoul, Jean Mitry and David Curtis, the film ranks alongside Dadaist and Surrealist films. 8 It is also cited in recent texts regarding experimental films, including those of A.L. Rees, François Albera and Nicole Brenez, hence demonstrating that cinema historians present the film as a unified body of work, regardless of the fact that it had initially been featured in two parts, with the prologue detached from its main part. 9 Consequently, authors shaped the film as a self-sufficient, portable and reproducible object in order to illustrate its independence from the contextual place within cinema reviews and to confirm its disciplinary autonomy in the specialised dominant discourses. However, although a cohesive view of the film is useful as a reminder of the partitioning of modernist categories, it neglects its original intent, which had been to connect the ‘pause’ in between Relâche’s two acts. Indeed, the fact that Relâche and Entr’acte seem to collaborate in order to create a single cohesive work, thereby appropriating the latter as a site-specific work, is demonstrated in the way in which images of the film are linked with the stage action, the audience, as well as the location of the show, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. For instance, the first dancer on stage during the two acts of the ballet performance, Jean Börlin, is also viewed by the audience on screen, as he is one of the main protagonists of Entr’acte. He also makes the transition from the virtual image to the physical spectacle at the end of the short by tearing the screen in order to reveal the word ‘END’ prior to his reappearance on the stage. Furthermore, the short film magnifies the value of the foundation of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées since, in addition to the view of the theatre, the opening minutes of the short film present a succession of cross-fading and reverse diagonal shots of roofs and chimneys, that had been filmed from the roof of the theatre. In effect, allusions to the Parisian environment are rendered increasingly obvious on-screen through images of the Place de l’Opéra Garnier, the Place de la Concorde, as well as the indication of urban activity with shots of circulating cars. Indeed, the creation of a montage depicting the various shots of the places unifies the space-time fragments, which the viewers were unable to

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_________________________________________________________________ simultaneously see from their theatre seats. Thus, given that the film archives the place, its acquirement of an image embodying the cinematographic presence must be taken into consideration for it is in accordance with its original location. 3. Dance and Scenography: The Absence on Stage In writing on the subject of Relâche, Picabia stated that ‘there is no stage, there are no costumes, there are no nudes, there is a space, the space where our imagination loves to travel.’ 10 At first glance, the ballet appears to be based upon the absence and the emptiness. Indeed, this is made increasingly apparent through the dominance of the ballet dance depicting thirty male dancers and one female dancer performing choreography that represented ordinary movements and daily habits such as those of smoking a cigarette, walking, listening, observing, strip teasing, etc. Thus, no longer limited to being dancers, the performers were free to use their bodies and be themselves to display the simplest movements instead of choreographed ones. The ballet Relâche carries an undeniable presence through its representation of the individual in the midst of everyday life so as to create an art form that fulfils a dissimilar function. In effect, an altered message, a different function from the expected one within a choreographed dance is therefore projected, with the movements tracing the dance itself. Despite the absence of ‘codes of dance,’ which are conventional signs that could allow for the recognition of dance movement on stage, their reappearance on screen is evident, such as during the entrechats of a bearded dancer’s performance in the virtual space of the film Entr’acte. Likewise, the film’s ballerina has a higher quality than simply being a ‘subject-object’ of second order since a direct reference is made to the (absent) dance of the ballet. Due to the fact that she appears as the most vital leitmotif within the first part of the film, she should be reconsidered at a fair value as a decisive element in the understanding of the entire work. 11 Through this virtual presence, the very subject of the ballet seems to be increasingly rooted in the cinematographic space by reconfiguring and reversing the codes. The ballet is thus projected on the screen in order to play the evident role it was supposed to assume on stage. In other words, these ‘codes of dance,’ set by the institution of the spectacle at the time of its presentation, are rebuilt by the film inside the screening place. 12 Additionally, the ‘codes of dance’ also provide independence to the cinematographic images of the dance from the original ballet work. 13 For instance, by presenting a worm’s eye view of the dancer’s image through that of a transparent glass plate, Entr’acte offers an unusual and challenging perspective that can solely be considered and contemplated as a cinematographic image. 14 While dance is present in the cinematographic space, the scenic effect of Relâche seems to instead provide a ‘cinematographic effect.’ In order to dazzle the audience, 173 reflectors, which can be compared to car headlights or

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________________________________________________________________ photographic flashes, were placed on an oval panel behind the actors-dancers, thus producing black and white points on the spectators. These dazzling projectors had the effect of preventing the spectators from clearly distinguishing the movements of the dancer-actors moving in front of the lights. Instead, without really seeing the body, they perceived the substance or the shadow of it, which appeared to blend with the light halos blinking intermittently. Hence, according to Olivier Asselin, in regards to similar experiences of the contemporary theatre, the performance was given a ‘strong presence of absence [...] as if that would have been a mirage and even a dream.’ 15 By dematerialising the dancers’ bodies into unreal and fragmented movements on stage, effects such as those related to the flow of light can serve as a reminder of different film montages and shots, as those presented in the initial part of the film. Similarly to the light setting, film images create a movement in time due to their successive nature. Indeed, an illusionary montage of the ballet appears to be shown in the film and the entire spectacle appears to reconfigure the physical space because of the influence of cinema and technology on-stage. Through its transformation into a succession of images, as well as into a montage, the performance serves to present an incredible place location in the cinema. From the point of view of the entire stage work, dance and scenography therefore remain reminiscent of a ballet: an illusionary presence of the latter. Thus, stage performance has been turned into an index. 4. Technological Presence As analysed throughout this chapter, the film Entr’acte seemingly appropriates differing physical spaces that define the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées. These spaces include the stage, the building and its location within the city of Paris, thereby losing its original meaning when presented outside of the immediate context of the event. The demonstration of the film’s new conditions of existence is embodied in the exchange between the scene and the place within the here and the now (hic et nunc), hence pointing beyond itself. Accordingly, a site-specific effect is manifested since, as a film, Entr’acte’s reproducible technological nature acts upon the entire physical components of space and place, which are available and seem absorbed by them. Therefore, the film’s attachment to its initial screening location is confirmed. Moreover, according to Relâche, the attention appears to have shifted from the scene and the absence of the ballet towards the film, which had originally been intended as a secondary attraction to the former in such a way as to create a single work within which the film aspect is related to the immediacy of a performance event. In other words, the numerous intermedial relationships of the show converge towards the same medium: that of the film dominating the work stage. Ideally positioned at the core of all exchanges, Entr’acte allows technological enhancements in order for the entire show to take on a

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_________________________________________________________________ cinematographic appearance. Hence, the genuine presence of Relâche lies within its cinematographic dimension. Through its challenge to the notion of the autonomy of the artwork, the film also questions its concepts of uniqueness and authenticity, thus reversing Walter Benjamin’s logic of the aura and allowing it to assume a technological auratic presence. 16 However, a vital consequence of the cinematographic and sitespecific presence lies in the deliberate intention of reaching the bourgeois public of the time. 17 5. The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées as a Theatre Movie: Towards a New Social Place The presentation of Relâche allows light to be shed on social issues related to technology - specifically cinema - within a space reserved to an elite bourgeois accustomed to attending the well-known ballet companies of the time. 18 In effect, by hosting the cinematographic apparatus in its space, the theatre place is reconfigured since the building is transformed into a movie theatre during the show, leading to an institutional confrontation. 19 Hence, Relâche imposed itself at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées at an opportune moment in history due to the way in which cinema had already been institutionalised and was no longer subordinated to other institutions, such as for instance, theatres or popular spectacles, like the music hall. Reaching an audience that is socially and economically diverse, the institutionalized cinema in the 1920s had already acquired its own rules and norms that define, amongst other things, the conditions of reception, as well as the different habitus of the spectators as opposed to those of theatre. In the case of Relâche and Entr’acte, Picabia and Clair oblige the bourgeois public to adopt different social behaviors that are not the ones they were used to having when attending a performance in a theatre: the audience is plunged into darkness and anonymity when viewing the film. It should be considered that at the beginning of the 20th century, the cinema-going public may have been under the ‘political education,’ ruled by the cinematographic institution. 20 According to these rules, the spectators of Relâche had to adopt a stable and immobile position during the screening, as if they were sitting in a movie theatre. This position contrasts with that of the stage part where the public may scream, move or look in all directions, announcing a chaotic and incoherent moment. 21 Throughout its hybrid status of housing the film and becoming a movie theatre, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées supported a kind of reception similar to the one of the cinematographic institution. The intent of imposing the Parisian bourgeois elite with a leisure activity fit for the masses leads towards tensions and provocations that serve as a reminder for the aim of historical avant-garde artists. In particular, according to critiques of the time such as those of Duhamel, quoted from Benjamin, the cinema’s audience had been considered to consist of a

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________________________________________________________________ mass of illiterate individuals attempting to distract themselves. 22 Nevertheless, intent on distracting the bourgeoisie instead, Picabia integrated cinema at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and thus, compared the elites to the masses. 23 The theater became a space for institutional violence, between cinema and the theatrical institution. The site-specific film plays a key role in a reconfiguration of the theatre, since it operates on the framework or format of the theatre, hence providing an alternative to the museum in the project of the institution’s critique developed by the artists of the neo avant-garde. 24 In a broader reflection, this case study aimed to demonstrate the possible changes in the theatrical institution, or at least those of the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées at the beginning of the 20th century, produced by the contamination of new institutions, which is the cinema in this case. In other words, it highlighted the complexity of the various influences and networks that operated and destabilized acquired characteristics of the institution space. If the place generated a certain power and seemed to have imposed a specific reception, it is in fact permeable and developed according to different extrinsic factors generated by the other institutions that surrounded it.

Notes 1

The expression ‘cinema effect’ has been translated from its original French version, which was ‘effet cinéma.’ According to Philippe Dubois, a ‘cinema effect’ intervenes in contemporary art since the 1990s and promotes diversity and a multifaceted medium. See Philippe Dubois, Cinéma et Art Contemporain: Vers un Cinéma d’Exposition? (unpublished paper, 2012), 4. 2 According to Bürger and Foster, neo avant-garde artists in the 1950s, 60s and 70s achieved the project of the historical avant-garde. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press, 1996). 3 For instance, if the ready-mades of Duchamp demonstrated that prefabricated objects introduced into the museum space acted on the perception and understanding of the institution by questioning the aesthetic legitimacy of the artwork, they do not change, however, the museum in itself. In effect, the readymades only attacked the conventions of art in an intrinsic way to the work itself. According to Foster, these works are a performative act to reveal the conventional boundaries of art at a given time and place. Ibid. 4 Günter Berghaus, Theater, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 45. 5 According to Berghaus, even if the first avant-garde (the Postimpressionists, Symbolists and artists of Art Nouveau) emerged in the early 20th century, only

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_________________________________________________________________ the historical avant-garde artists (Dadaists, Futurists) criticised the institutional conventions. Ibid. 6 Cabaret Voltaire encompasses the most well known example for it is the meeting place of all Dadaists in Zurich at the time. Ibid., 179. 7 Michel Sanouillet indeed describes the events that took place at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées for the Salon Dada: ‘The program, as established by Picabia and Tzara […] should include three events linked together by a permanent exhibition: this one (Salon Dada) must be held in the lobby of the Studio des ChampsÉlysées (the top floor of the building on Avenue Montaigne) pompously called “Galerie Montaigne”, from June 6 to 30 1921.’ On June 10 1921, the first evening of Salon Dada presented the ‘theatrical play’ The Gas Heart by Tristan Tzara. The author also points out the specific representations occurring in each room: ‘If the room of the Studio housed the classics (Firmin Gémier presented The Miser (L’Avare) and repeated there A Midsummer Night’s Dream), the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées gave firmly within the modern international (Swedish ballets and Russian, Ukrainian choirs, Hungarian pianist, dances of Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller).’ See Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Hazan, 1969), 276-280. (Free translation from French to English). See also Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999). 8 Georges Sadoul, Histoire Générale du Cinéma. L’Art Muet 1919-1929 (Paris: Denoël, 1975); Jean Mitry, Le Cinéma Expérimental: Histoires et Perspectives (Paris: Seghers, 1974); David Curtis, Experimental Cinema: [A Fifty-Year Evolution] (New York: Dell Publishing, 1971). 9 A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video: From the Canonical Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practice (Londres: British Film Institute, 1999); François Albera, l’Avant-Garde au Cinéma (Paris: A. Colin, 2005); Nicole Brenez, Cinémas d’Avant-Garde (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006). 10 Free translation from French to English. Original text: ‘Il n’y a pas de décors, il n’y a pas de costumes, il n’y a pas de nu, il n’y a qu’espace, l’espace que notre imagination aime à parcourir’. Francis Picabia. ‘Relâche’, La Danse (1924). 11 In this regard, see R. C. Dale, The Films of René Clair (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1986), 38-43 and Andrée Martin, ‘Le Cinéma de Danse’, Protée (1991): 73. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 R. C. Dale, ‘René Clair’s Entr’acte, or Motion Victorious’, Wide Angle (1978): 38-43.

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________________________________________________________________ 15

Free translation from French to English. Olivier Asselin, ‘Le Corps Subtilisé : L’œuvre d’Art à L’ère de la Photographie et du Cinéma’, Jeu: Cahiers de Théâtre 3 (1998): 121. 16 In the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin compares the shock effect produced by Dadaism and the one created by film by explaining that Dadaists artworks contain a moral shock while the moving images in films create an actual physical one, for which the viewer sees the images placed next to the other without having time to react to them. Benjamin considers the traditional media of Dadaist works, omitting the existence of Dadaist cinematographic artworks. Walter Benjamin, ‘L’œuvre d’Art à L’époque de sa Reproductibilité Technique’, in Œuvres III (Paris: Allia, 2000), 307-309. 17 Stating that as an artwork becomes increasingly mobile, the more its value of exposure increases, according to Benjamin’s thesis, the site-specific film Entr’acte appears to reverse towards cult and ritual values, conveying an ambiguous effect in order to destabilise the bourgeois aesthetic and its fetishisation of the traditional works of art. 18 As Alan Wood highlighted with respect to dramatic works, the existence of a stage performance is not limited to its formal components. It requires taking into account the social parameters: ‘[...] the art form exists only in the context of its audience and the larger society which it comes’. Alan Wood, ‘Emphasizing the Avant-Garde. An Exploration in Theatre Historiography, Interpreting the Theatrical Past’, in Essays in the Historiography of Performance, eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie (Iowa: University of Iowa, 2000), 171. 19 According to Emmanuel Ethis, films could be defined in part by the space in which they are intended to, which is to say, the movie theater, a place generally opened to socially and economically diverse public. The cinematographic productions are territorially appropriated by spectators who go and watch a movie in their movie theatre. Emmanuel Ethis, Sociologie du Cinéma et de Ses Publics (Paris: Colin, 2005), 10 and 28-29. 20 For instance, Gaumont cinemas printed on their programs and projected as an opening to their sessions, the ten commandments of a ‘Good Spectator’. Ethis, Sociologie du Cinéma et de Ses Publics, 31. 21 Ibid. 22 The mass has developed different interests from those of the bourgeoisie. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde. 23 According to Benjamin, the aim of distraction was to mobilise the masses. The film succeeds with this objective through the shock effect it generates, which abolishes the cult value of the object. Benjamin, ‘L’œuvre d’Art à L’époque de sa Reproductibilité Technique’. 24 Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 44.

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Bibliography Albera, François. L’Avant-Garde au Cinéma. Paris: A. Colin, 2005. Asselin, Olivier. ‘Le Corps Subtilisé: L’œuvre d’Art à L’ère de la Photographie et du Cinéma’. Jeu: Cahiers de Théâtre 3 (1998): 118-122. Baker, Georges Thomas. The Artwork Caught by the Tail. Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 2007. Balsom, Erika. ‘A Cinema in the Gallery, A Cinema in Ruins’. Screen (2009): 411–429. Béhar, Henri. Le Théâtre Dada et Surréaliste. Paris: idées / Gallimard, 1979. Benjamin, Walter. ‘L’œuvre d’Art à L’époque de sa Reproductibilité Technique’. In Œuvres III. Translated by Maurice de Gandillac, Pierre Rusch, and Rainer Rochelitz. Paris: Allia, 2000. Berghaus, Günter. Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. —––. Theater, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009. Boulbès, Carole. Écrits Critiques. Paris: Mémoire du Livre, 2005. Brenez, Nicole. Cinémas d’Avant-Garde. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Carrol, Noël. ‘Entr’acte, Paris and Dada’. Millennium Film Journal 1 (1977): 5– 11. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California, 1997. Curtis, David. Experimental Cinema: [A Fifty-Year Evolution]. New York: Dell Publishing, 1971.

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________________________________________________________________ Dale, R. C. ‘René Clair’s Entr’acte, or Motion Victorious’. Wide Angle (1978): 33–44. Dubois, Philippe. Cinéma et Art Contemporain: Vers un Cinéma d’Exposition?. Unpublished Paper, 2012. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Dada / Cinema?’. Dada / Surrealism (1986): 3–27. Ethis, Emmanuel. Sociologie du Cinéma et de Ses Publics. Paris: Colin, 2005. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. MIT Press: 1996. Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion. ‘Un Média Naît Toujours Deux Fois’. Sociétés & Représentations (2000): 21–36. —––. Cinéma et Attraction. Pour une Nouvelle Histoire du Cinématographe. Paris: CNRS, 2008. Goldberg RoseLee. Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present. New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 2011. Häger, Bengt. Ballets Suédois. Paris: Denoël, 1989. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Behind the Times. The Decline and Fall of the TwentiethCentury Avant-Gardes. New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Kuenzli, Rudolf. ‘Cinéma Dada’. In Dada Circuit Total, edited by Henri Béhar, and Catherine Dufour, 531–540. Paris: L’Âge d’Homme, 2005. Kwon, Miwon. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 2002. Lamoureux, Johanne. L’art Insituable. De L’in Situ et Autres Sites. Montréal: Centre de diffusion 3D, 2001. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 2001. Martin, Andrée. ‘Le Cinéma de Danse’. Protée (1991): 72–77.

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_________________________________________________________________ Mitry, Jean. Le Cinéma Expérimental: Histoires et Perspectives. Paris: Seghers, 1974. Moore Whiting Steven. Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall. Oxford and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999. Picabia, Francis. ‘Relâche’. La Danse (1924). Rees, A. L. A History of Experimental Film and Video: From the Canonical Avant-Garde to Contemporary British Practice. Londres: British Film Institute, 1999. Sadoul, Georges. Histoire Générale du Cinéma. L’Art Muet 1919-1929. Paris: Denoël, 1975. Sanouillet, Michel. Dada à Paris. Paris: Hazan, 1969. Vasario, Robert A. ‘Dada Language, Anarchic Theater and Tristan Tzara’s The Gas Heart’. In Crisis and the Arts: The History of Dada, edited by Stephen Foster, 276–300. New York and London: G. K. Hall and Prentice Hall International, 1996-2005. Wood, Alan. ‘Emphasizing the Avant-Garde. An Exploration in Theatre Historiography, Interpreting the Theatrical Past’. In Essays in the Historiography of Performance, edited by Thomas Postlewait, and Bruce A. McConachie, 166– 176. Iowa, University of Iowa, 2000. Karine Bouchard is a PhD student in art history at the Université de Montréal and a part-time teacher at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Her research is funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

The Construction of Space and Place in the Hollywood Teen Film Patrick O’Neill Abstract This chapter will focus on the 1980s Hollywood teen movie and how space and place is used metaphorically in relation to the different sites which are associated with the genre: primarily, the shopping mall and the parental home. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the chronotope and the carnivalesque will underpin my analysis as will the structuralist notion of binary oppositions. Also, issues such as Reaganomics, capitalism, consumerism, adolescent sexuality and development will broaden and reinforce the research. The investigation will consider how the shopping mall plays an important if contradictory role in teenagers’ lives as opinion is divided amongst commentators: those who think it has a positive effect, to those who see it as having a negative impact. Also, gender issues, consumerism, teenage employment, sex and relationships are relevant in deconstructing the mall as a place of youth development. Furthermore, the cinematic style will be examined in relation to how it comments on, and serves the themes and issues. Scenes from two films featuring the shopping mall: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), directed by Amy Heckerling and Valley Girl (Martha Coolidge, 1983), will be examples used here. Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983) will demonstrate how the parental home takes on a different meaning when the teen protagonists’ (Tom Cruise) parents go away for the weekend and he throws a party and turns the house into a brothel and in turn, the Cruise character into a Reaganite capitalist. Moreover, the analysis here will consider how the space of the family home is transformed from a place of family values, discipline and order into a site where hedonistic behaviour and casual sex flourish, which will lead to a carnivalesque reading of the chosen scenes. Ultimately, this chapter will reveal how these teen films work beyond their literal contexts and comment on broader cultural and socio-political concerns. Key Words: 1980s teen film, space, place, shopping mall, parental home, carnivalesque, chronotope, Reaganomics, consumerism, adolescence. ***** In his book, The Production of Space, Henri Levebvre inverted the traditional geometrical idea that space is an empty area and proposed that it contains ideological, socio-political and cultural meaning; he referred to this as ‘social space.’ 1 This chapter will focus on space and place within 1980s Hollywood teen movies, the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the genre. The space in this context will mainly relate to two of the key generic places or sites of the teen film: the shopping

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__________________________________________________________________ mall and the parental home. I will investigate how meaning is created within these spaces and how it works symbolically to comment on issues such as adolescent development, political and economic issues relating to 1980s America such as Reaganomics and capitalism. A structuralist approach will underpin the issues, i.e. how binary opposites function and give meaning to a society and culture. Also, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque and the concept of chronotope will give an extra dimension. Although Bakhtin never addressed cinema in this work, his ideas have become influential within the field of film studies. Space in cinema can be referred to as mise en scène, a French theoretical term which literally means ‘to put on stage.’ In a filmic context, this would mean analysing the contents of the space and their relationship to each other: the cinematography, costume, décor, objects and the actors; camera movement, framing and choice of lens are also relevant. What the aim is here is how these elements function within these generic spaces and how they comment on issues beyond the text. As John Gibbs explains, ‘space is a vital expressive element at a filmmaker’s disposal.’ 2 Also, of significance is the concept of public and private space and how this relates to youth issues. To define this more clearly, Alison L. Bain refers to space which is occupied by teens as places of ‘retreat’ and places of ‘interaction.’ The former relates to places where teenagers can withdraw from the parental and adult world, for example, the bedroom; the latter where teenagers can put themselves on display in order to be seen, like the high school and the shopping mall. However, these definitions become ambivalent as the boundaries often become blurred, for example, the privacy of the bedroom in films likes Valley Girl becomes more of a public place when several of the female teens are socialising and transforming it into more of an interactive space. This is known as ‘liminal space,’ the space between the public and the private, between retreat and interaction. 3 Similarly, a transformation takes place in relation to the parental home as the boundaries between public and private become blurred in Risky Business, which will be explained below. Firstly, the analysis will focus on space with regards to the shopping mall and its representation in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Valley Girl. Both films use the mall as a narrative framing device - it introduces and concludes the action and I will demonstrate how its symbolic values portray a broader socio-economic and cultural meaning. Michael Montgomery points out that the shopping mall, which emerged as a retail and leisure outlet in the early 1970s, has ‘provided social commentators with one of their most enduring metaphors for American society in the 1980s’ 4 and is a place where Americans, by the mid-eighties, after the home, school and workplace, spent most of their time. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, which literally means time-space, is relevant here. Montgomery discusses the mall as a film chronotope, i.e. a depiction of the relationship between

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__________________________________________________________________ a precise time and space and all the expressive and artistic elements which are produced by this. In other words, the mall is a space in which, when viewing the visual information which makes up the content of the cinematic space, e.g. food stores, retail outlets, shoppers going by, entertainment venues, bars, gyms, etc., allied with placing of this information within a precise time frame: the 1970s onwards, specific relations become visible and certain stories can ‘take place,’ because the setting is familiar. How is time and space related to each other and how does it create meaning? As Bakhtin states: In the artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indictors are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. 5 So in relation to the teen film, the chronotope of the shopping mall in its time and historical context represents America in the 1980s and this fuses with the space of the mall to produce an ideological index, which in this case comments on issues such as consumerism, Reaganomics and capitalism. Also, the chronotope creates a discourse on teen issues such as work, relationships, adolescent sexuality and identity. So how does the mall chronotope express itself in the opening sequences of the films? On the one hand, viewing the mall as having a positive effect on teenagers lives, it is very much an interactive space for them to develop relationships and forge social networks, a space where they can express and articulate themselves; it becomes a key site in the shaping of a teenagers identity. The mall offers a place free from the discipline of other spaces in the genre like the family home and the high school and away from such authority figures who would inhabit these spaces and attempt to restrict their freedom, like parents or teachers. However, in the context of liminal space, this becomes problematic and ambivalent as the teens, for example, in John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985) are able to articulate themselves within the confines of the High School, albeit away from the censor of the adult gaze. Furthermore, the mall, as Steve Bailey and James Hay argue, has a positive effect on their development and acts as a space which serves as a conduit between late adolescence and adulthood, ‘in the development of an identity and the preparation for participation in the adult world of working, shopping and sex.’ 6 The mall is a place which acts as a fantasy world for teenagers, separated from the outside world. Conversely, there is a view proposed by writers such as William Kowinski that the mall has a negative impact on adolescence as the space represents a bleak symbol of Reagan’s America, characterised by being an ‘enclosed’ and ‘protected’ space, ‘controlled’ by its own consumerist practices. 7 Teens are, as Montgomery

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__________________________________________________________________ points out, ‘programmed to consume, easily bored, and shallowly obsessed with clothing.’ 8 An analysis of the opening sequence of Valley Girl will highlight this perspective and is illustrated by the use of montage editing, which, as the film scholar V F Perkins points out, ‘becomes an active and obvious source of ‘meaning’ in the assembled sequence.’ 9 Firstly, a brief definition of the term ‘Valley Girl’ will bring the issues into sharper focus as it has a significant influence on the attitude and themes of the film. First used in the 1970s, it describes a stereotypical image of a teenage girl growing up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles; a variation on the popular girl/prom queen stereotype. They are defined by their slang: ‘awesome,’ ‘totally,’ ‘for sure,’ and, as Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh note, they are characterised by their almost cartoonish hyper-sexuality, love of shopping, obsession with personal appearance and concern with advancing their social status. [They are] white and [have] blonde hair [and their] style is attention seeking and over-the-top. 10 This stereotypical image is encapsulated in the mall montage as it works beyond the text and comments on broader socio-economic aspects. The main protagonist and her friends are framed within the space of the mall as they demonstrate their ‘love of shopping’ and ‘obsession’ with their image and status. The camera focuses on them trying on different clothing items and isolates different fashion accessories, labels, price tags, cash registers and (their parent’s) credit cards. These images are shot in close up as if to amplify the image of the Valley Girl and her act of conspicuous consumption. The scene could be interpreted as microcosm of the 1980s ‘Greed is Good’ attitude to money, wealth and self-image, and the song which accompanies this sequence: ‘They Got a Name for Girls like me’ by Bonnie Hayes, reinforces the narcissistic spree. Young people and mall culture became synonymous with the phrase, ‘shop till you drop.’ At first sight, Valley Girl may just seem fanciful and extraneous, but as Bob Bachelor and Scott Stoddart point out, white middle class youth of this period were labelled ‘the “Me Generation” - mainly because of their social and economic advantages…they represented a central ethic of this generation - you are what you wear, so long as you are seen with members of the right crowd.’ 11 The shopping mall chronotope as portrayed in this opening scene was a space to be ‘seen’ in and serves this 1980s attitude effectively. The journalist Pamela Klaffka explains that by the end of the 20th century in economic terms, there were ‘32.6 million teens roaming the malls of the United States, spending in excess of $155 million annually.’ 12 The mall could be viewed as an extension of the high school, a place where they are educated in consumption and are pressured into growing up too fast. For example, the more adult products which are targeted at teenage girls, such as provocative and revealing clothing items are all ways in which consumerism affects teens and adds

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__________________________________________________________________ to the social pressure to look like an adult. One psychologist, David Elkin, quoted in Kowinski’s, The Malling of America, coined the phrase, ‘The hurried child’ 13 in response to the pressure these issues have on youth in relation to forcing them to grow up to soon. When the montage sequence ends, the girls are shot in shallow focus in the food court; the background space is blurred as the scene becomes visually ambiguous as if to relegate the physical space of the mall and all its consumerists associations. They are framed in tight close up as the space becomes more claustrophobic as if to represent the ensuing tension of the narrative. They discuss personal issues like sex and relationships and the themes of the teenage cliques, peer pressure and conformity, all key aspects of adolescent development and behaviour, are played out. In the opening of Fast Times, the negative depiction of the mall and teen culture is extended. The opening shot of the film is viewed as an external space with the exterior of the mall entrance dominating the frame. Also, the shopping mall-high school analogy is reinforced as the mall could easily pass for a suburban high school. Its unsightly, architectural design is typical of some malls in America and when the action enters the interior space, the cinematography is gloomy and dreary, lacking any vitality and colour, a mood which foreshadows some of the more downbeat moments in the film. The original idea for the mall in America was designed to restore a certain kind of festival and marketplace atmosphere by uniting shopping with entertainment. But the design of some malls in America betray the original concept of what they were intended for, and, as Jon Goss points out, the contemporary shopping mall ‘was built on a large scale and its harsh exterior…refused any compromise with the rustic aesthetic.’ 14 In this montage, more of the mall space is shown and a more pluralistic representation of teenage culture is introduced, compared to a just a small group of female teens in Valley Girl. Some are just hanging out, some are rowdy and causing mischief, some are shopping (females) and some are working - both males and females, in pizza parlours, fast-food joints and the cinema. The general images of teens, laughing, fooling around and generally having a good time, contrasts against negative connotations which have been conveyed by the visual look of the scene. The mall space functions in Fast Times in a gendered perspective and creates a male-female binary opposition in terms of job status and power, as the male workers seem to believe that they have control, and are in a position of power over the females. This is highlighted when the fast food worker extraordinaire, Brad (Judge Reinhold) is introduced walking confidently, greeting people. Also, the ticket scalper Mike (Robert Romanus), attempts to look like a businessman and adjusts his collar accordingly as he is seen in a glass elevator. Both are framed in medium close up, emphasising what appears to be their confidence and macho characteristics. The males are seen on the move, roaming the atrium, cruising for

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__________________________________________________________________ business and recognition. Conversely, in the mall montage, the females are seen in groups: as consumers in shops or working in the pizza restaurant; all comparatively immobile within the spaces they occupy. They seem less concerned with their jobs and more interested in being ‘seen’ as the mall space offers them a chance to flirt with the male customers, turning it into a place of sexual curiosity. The character of Ron, the 26-year-old ‘audio consultant’ who works in a nearby store begins his quest to seduce the underage Stacy (Jennifer Jason Lee) who works in a pizza parlour. Again, peer pressure is evident as Stacy’s friend Linda (Phobe Cates), pressures her into having sex with him. Once more, the mall space takes on a symbolic meaning in relation to ‘hurrying’ the teens into adulthood through work and sex. Furthermore, as Montgomery points out, ‘the mall chronotope begins to manufacture flat character models for females and dynamic ones for males.’ 15 The combination of consumerism, work and sexual activity is established in the opening mall scenes suggesting a commodification of sex. Also, in the montage, the ‘controlling’ effect of the mall is evident as various male teens are seen in the video arcade which creates a separate space for them, segregated from the adult world of the mall and in turn, from their female counterparts who are seen shopping. Finally, in Risky Business, starring Tom Cruise as the young teen Joel, the space of the parental home undergoes a significant change and two scenes in particular illustrate this. It does not so much blur the boundaries between public and private, retreat and interaction, it shatters them. In others words, an extreme version of ‘liminal’ space is created. Early on in the film, a hierarchical sense or order and discipline is evident, symbolised by the symmetrical positioning and balance of the furniture and household objects: ‘My house my rules,’ Joel’s father says to his son just before he and his wife are about to leave for a weekend break. Cruise is not seen throughout this sequence; he is out of the shot and the action is viewed only through his point-of-view. He is obscured, restricted and inhibited as his parents are visible throughout the scene. But left alone in the house, Joel starts to transform from a mild mannered and frustrated teenager, to a rebellious, hormonally charged and sexually liberated one. Drinking his father’s whiskey, playing forbidden rock ‘n’ roll on the stereo and dancing around the house in his underwear, his sexual presence dominates the space and contrasts sharply from the previous one where he was invisible and remote. The space of the parental provides freedom from adult control, propelling him into a world of teenage sexual awakening. Towards the end of the film, Joel turns his parent’s house into a brothel in order to make enough money to repair his father’s luxury car which he damaged. The out-of-control party takes place - a generic ritual of the teen genre. This represents the endangering of the family home and an assault on the physical and domestic space - it has become a site of hedonism, social and sexual freedom, freed from the oppression and control of adult discipline. Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque

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__________________________________________________________________ are relevant to the two scenes, as they subvert and liberate the dominant ideology within the parent/teenage culture through chaos and humour. As Bakhtin explains: ‘Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions.’ 16 Furthermore, as Timothy Shary points out, by transforming the parental space into a brothel and making a considerable profit in the process, the Cruise character can be viewed as a ‘teen baron of Reagan-era capitalist exploitation.’ 17 In conclusion, what this chapter has achieved is that by using the space and place symbolically within the above examples, teen films, despite their critical neglect and lack of academic scrutiny, are key texts in representing important aspects with regard to adolescent development and sexuality, and also convey significant socio-political and cultural aspects of 1980s America.

Notes 1

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 1. John Gibbs, Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation (London: Wallflower Press, 2002), 17. 3 Alison L. Bain, ‘White Western Girls and Urban Space: Challenging Hollywood’s Representations’, Gender, Place and Culture 10 (2003): 203-207. 4 Michael Montgomery, Carnivals and Commonplaces: Bakhtin’s Chronotope, Cultural Studies, and Film (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 88. 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 6 Steve Bailey and James Hay, ‘Cinema and the Premise of Youth: Teen Films and their Sites in the 1980s and 1990s’, in Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, ed. Steve Neale (London: BFI, 2002), 226. 7 William Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 60. 8 Montgomery, Carnivals and Commonplaces, 89. 9 V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (New York: Penguin, 1972), 21. 10 Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid Walsh, Girl Culture: An Encyclopaedia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008), 595. 11 Bob Batchelor and Scott Stoddert, The 1980s (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 25-28. 12 Pamela Klaffka, Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), 38. 13 Kowinski, The Malling of America, 351. 2

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Jon Goss, ‘The “Magic of the Mall”: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83 (1993): 23. 15 Montgomery, Carnivals and Commonplaces, 98. 16 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1984), 10. 17 Timothy Shary, Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 231.

Bibliography Bailey, Steve, and James Hay. ‘Cinema and the Premise of Youth: Teen Films and Their Sites in the 1980s and 1990s’. In Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, edited by Steve Neale, 219–233. London: BFI, 2002. Bain, Alison L. ‘White Western Girls and Urban Space: Challenging Hollywood’s Representations’. Gender, Place and Culture 10 (2003): 197–213. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. —––. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1984. Batchelor, Bob, and Scott Stoddert. The 1980s. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007. Gibbs, John. Mise-en-Scène: Film Style and Interpretation. London: Wallflower Press, 2002. Goss, Jon. ‘The “Magic of the Mall”: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83 (1993): 18–47. Klaffka, Pamela. Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003. Kowinski, William. The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise. New York: William Morrow, 1985. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

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__________________________________________________________________ Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid Walsh. Girl Culture: An Encyclopaedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008. Montgomery, Michael. Carnivals and Commonplaces: Bakhtin’s Chronotope, Cultural Studies, and Film. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Perkins, V. F. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. New York: Penguin, 1972. Shary, Timothy. Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Patrick O’Neill is a Lecturer in Film Studies and a PhD candidate at Kingston University, London. His research concerns 1980s Hollywood teen cinema.

Narrating the City: Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction Berit Michel Abstract Contrary to what the idea of mapping implies, space is more than a geographical surface. In the past decades, spatial structures have been theorised as dynamic, multilayered living organisms created by those who inhabit them, and hence as systems almost impossible to map. How, then, do contemporary Anglophone narratives seek to represent the overpoweringly complex spatial networks of our increasingly urbanised 21st-century environment? Conceptualising spatial structures in those experiential terms that have been suggested by urban theory, and thinking of urban space, in particular, as a dynamic textual fabric, we will find that the sociological notion of appropriated spaces, as discussed in the wake of Lefèbvre’s The Production of Space, evokes an understanding of spatial structures which defies narrative representation. Michel de Certeau, Edward Soja, and Kevin Lynch, discussing how we experience the city, have put forward that the city cannot be described in its totality: Any representation of urban space rules out the idea of omniscient narration. The complex whole of ever-shifting structures which keeps being written by its participants can only be anticipated by the subjective, fragmentary view from within the city which always also connotes the many possible alternative perspectives on the city. How can urban narratives escape their inherently linear structure to depict the ‘networks of these moving, intersecting writings,’ which, as de Certeau claims in his ‘Walking in the City,’ constitute the city, and which ‘compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator’? 1 Discussing contemporary narrative strategies which seek to represent ‘urban complexity’ as identified by urban theory in narratives, such as Norman Klein’s Bleeding Through and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, I will show how the ‘translation’ of spatial structures into narrative terms gives us a closer insight into the ways in which complex urban structures are experienced and perceived today. Key Words: Urban space, urban complexity, palimpsest, simultaneity, network structures, nonlinearity, mapping, urban novel, urban narrative. ***** 1. The City as a Palimpsest in Urban Representations In her article ‘Geschichte findet Stadt,’ Assmann describes the interplay between the spatial and historical dimensions of time in cities to argue that a number of European cities may be described as ‘palimpsests.’ Through the comparison to a method of layered writing that scrapes old texts off the paper to be

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__________________________________________________________________ replaced by new texts, she points out that a city’s architecture may be regarded as a three-dimensional palimpsest containing layers of history, and stresses the simultaneity of things which do not happen simultaneously. 2 While Assmann investigates the implications of this idea for city planning, I am mainly interested in her conceptualisation of the city as a palimpsest. Assmann distinguishes between urban space which is still to be created (‘Raum’) and urban place (‘Ort’) as urban space which has already been created and has a specific history tied to it 3 in order to argue that the categorisation of a given urban area as what she regards as ‘space’ or ‘place’ is no inherent quality of a city’s geography, but instead depends on the perspective of the observer. 4 In this sense, all cities, in a way, share this palimpsestic quality Assmann attributes to a number of European cities that have gone through major architectural transformations. I will make use of Assmann’s idea of a palimpsestic quality; yet, instead of focusing on the architectural topography of the city, I will shift the attention to the social topography of the city (sensu Lefebvre and de Certeau) in order to show that urban fictions, and also fictions of cities with a less palimpsestic architectural topography, often tend to focus on this dimension of space which keeps being produced - that is, the metropolitan condition of a complex and dynamic textuality which cannot be mapped (sensu de Certeau, Soja and Lynch). Urban growth has always fascinated fiction writing. Even if such fictional accounts choose well-known cities (such as London, Dublin, New York or L.A.) as their setting, their fascination, more often than not, lies in the overpowering informational overload encountered in big cities rather than the unique features that make them recognisable as specific urban environments. Such representations thus seem to focus on what Assmann would identify as space that is still to be created. Earlier fictional urban representations, such as John Denham’s London in Coopers Hill in 1642, Wordsworth’s London in The Prelude at the beginning of the 19th century, and, in particular, early 20th century modernist accounts which, in their style of writing, also imitated the loose, incoherent and fragmentary way of perceiving urban environments (examples here may be James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses, John Don Passos’ New York City in Manhattan Transfer and T. S. Eliot’s London in Waste Land) still had to overcome the shock of urban growth. 5 However, those complex structures which challenged the experience and perception of urban environments these writers approached with a sense of awe, have become ubiquitous today, and are much more taken for granted in literature as in everyday life. Contemporary novels, we may argue, might then display a positive sense of latent awareness of the representational challenge which is posed by the continuous change and informational overload in big cities as it has been identified by 20th century urban theory. They may, as a result, more gladly accept the city’s complexity, and make it become a backdrop of countless potential stories to the stories they narrate.

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__________________________________________________________________ If the focus on, to use Lefebvre’s words, ‘the production of space’ has changed throughout the centuries, then it becomes interesting to ask the following questions: Has the representation of the idea of the cityscape as a palimpsest become even more relevant due to the ever-increasing tendencies of urbanisation, and can this be observed in contemporary urban representations? Are there, indeed, changes in representing the palimpsestic quality of big cities? To approach these questions, I will discuss Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, a representation of post 9/11 New York, and Norman Klein’s Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, a representation of the everchanging cityscape of L.A., as examples of 21st-century representations of the palimpsestic quality of cities. In either case, the representation of the city’s palimpsestic architectural quality lays bare a dynamics of urban space we have long become used to. While Foer describes the city after the collapse of one of its major architectural cornerstones, Klein revels in Los Angeles’ inscrutable layers of space. 2. Foer’s Shattered New York Topography: Between ‘Space’ and ‘Place’ Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, an intermedial novel which includes pictures and typographical ploys and which, at the same time, adheres to common narrative conventions, narrates the story of Oskar, a child, who lost his father in 9/11. After his father’s death, Oskar in his father’s closet finds an envelope with the name ‘Black’ on it which contains a key. Since his father used to create riddle games for his son, Oskar believes the key to be a hint left from a game and sets out to find the lock the key fits, a task next to impossible given the size of New York. Contemplating his chances of finding the lock, given the fact that ‘more than 9 million people live in New York,’ 6 he finds the endeavor to try them all an impossible undertaking: I timed myself and it took me 3 seconds to open a lock. Then I figured out that if a baby is born in New York every 50 seconds, and each person has 18 locks, a new lock is created in New York every 2.777 seconds. So even if all I did was open locks, I’d still be falling behind by .3¯3¯3¯ locks every second. And that’s if I didn’t have to travel from one lock to the next, and if I didn’t eat, and didn’t sleep […] I needed a better plan. 7 The novel thus becomes an exploration of New York’s complex cityscape, when Oskar decides to visit all inhabitants called ‘Black’ and thus gets to know a variety of people who all have their own stories. It is in the nature of the story that the reader, despite the individual stories told, remains aware of the fact that these are only sample stories from the large pool of stories that composes the big city.

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__________________________________________________________________ Interestingly, it is the collapse of the World Trade Center which tellingly lays bare the city’s palimpsestic quality, and which leads to a focus on those social spaces which are, in Assmann’s sense, still to be created. Not only were towers shattered in 9/11, but also the illusion of perceiving New York City and its iconic Manhattan skyline as a stable and unchangeable historical structure. Extremely Loud, being interspersed with photos (mostly from Oskar’s peculiar diary) on a double-page, shows Central Park seen from the sky as an absence, that is, as a white blank spot embedded in the buildings that frame the park. The double page, which vertically splits the blank rectangle in its middle, makes it seem as if two white towers were rising from the bottom of the page. This may symbolically signify a hole at the centre of a well-established city image left by the attacks of 9/11. Indeed, with the collapse of the major landmark of the Manhattan skyline, NYC, though still much of a structure that consists of recognisable places and that has a history of its own, was no longer as much perceived as a place of stability in the wake of the attacks. The big city, it seems, has become sensitised to its dynamic and palimpsestic dimension of space, which is, in fact, apt to change. In Extremely Loud, this awareness not only affects the city’s architectural topography but it is also transferred to the level of a social topography: The traumatic impact of the attacks on NYC’s inhabitants (Oskar, in this case) brings the city’s inhabitants to our attention, and thus shifts the focus to the spaces they continuously produce: Having the central character walk around the city to encounter a rich variety of people, the novel makes us become aware of the many people living in NYC, and represents the spatial dynamics de Certeau discusses in his ‘Walking in the City.’ Describing his view from one of the towers of the Trade Center, de Certeau reveals that the apparent promise of knowledge through ‘the pleasure of seeing the whole’ is nothing but an illusion or a ‘fiction of knowledge.’ 8 Transferred to narrative concepts, de Certeau’s idea contradicts the idea of omniscient narration, since the idea of omniscience would imply that the city could be known in its entirety. As the city cannot be mapped exhaustively, it defies representation. It is, after all, permanently created and re-created down below by its citizens. ‘The panorama-city,’ he explains, ‘is a “theoretical” (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.’ 9 The city, according to him, is defined by the hustle and bustle of those who inhabit and appropriate urban space, rather than by the panoramic sight of its architecture: The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the threshold at which visibility begins. They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. 10

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__________________________________________________________________ As a result, the city cannot be sufficiently mapped as we are shown by Oskar’s journey and his attempt to literally retrace the pedestrians’ network ‘of these moving, intersecting writings [which] compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator.’ 11 Oskar’s few encounters with only a few New York inhabitants, each with their own story, demonstrate the futility of the attempt. The novel, however, seems to welcome the fact that this complex network can only be partially explored. Its undertone is none of despair, but, on the contrary, the sudden awareness of the city’s complexity and the apparently new uncertainty resulting from the alienated cityscape does not seem to equal the shock over the attacks. The novel, rather playfully (so playfully that it has actually been criticised as too light-hearted for its approach to the 9/11 attacks) finds, in its narrative strategies, numerous ways to remind us of the city’s overwhelming and impenetrable information density. The recurring photos of door knobs and of the photo of a falling man as we accompany Oskar’s journey, bring us back to the starting point of the loss of a centre, and remind us of the city’s innumerable inhabitants. Oskar’s journey, then, seems like a sample story that synecdochically refers us to the larger complex whole of the city. Moreover, typographical ploys on individual pages simulate a digital informational overload indicating that there is too much to be said, or that there are too many ways to appropriate space (whether the space of a page or that of the city), and hence that it is impossible to document coherently all a human being has to tell, and, by analogy, all the semantic levels of urban space that become appropriated by their citizens. 12 Last but not least, the images scattered throughout the book constitute a narrative level in their own right. Trying to locate the pictures in the story, we no longer think about the story’s chronological sequence (the pictures are not arranged in accordance with what is told), but try to find the exact place where the picture was mentioned and conceive of the book in spatial terms. All the moments captured in the pictures on this narrative level seem to exist as simultaneous loose impressions comparable to the ‘fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces’ 13 that shape the city. After all, the journey ends at the Empire State Building, indicating that, despite any state of flux, there will always be architectural cornerstones. Hence, a sense of architectural structure and the simultaneous awareness of the dynamics of spatial structures do not seem to be mutually exclusive. Only that today we are more used to the palimpsestic quality of space than ever before. 3. Klein’s Bleeding Through and the Palimpsestic Quality of Los Angeles In Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, a novella which is accompanied by an interactive DVD, Norman Klein deliberately seeks to present Los Angeles in light of continuous change. His emphasis on the city’s palimpsestic quality challenges Assmann’s distinction between space and place in that the history

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__________________________________________________________________ attached to specific areas is very often the history of change itself, and change becomes a spatial characteristic in its own right to define a place. In Klein’s case, the readers themselves are sent on a fictional quest around the city, trying to solve the mystery of whether or not Molly, a character around which Klein spins a narrative hook, murdered her second husband. The self-reflexive interactive narrative only introduces us to the mystery of Molly’s obscure past, leaving the riddle for us to be solved, or rather to remain unsolved. Our attempts to reconstruct Molly’s past become our attempts to reconstruct the city she personifies and her life is related to, that is, L.A.. Molly’s life and by analogy L.A.’s topography, we will come to see, remain impossible to map. As Soja points out in ‘Taking Apart Los Angeles,’ Klein presents the city as ‘exceedingly tough-to-track’ and ‘peculiarly resistant to conventional description.’ 14 While the novella introduces us to Molly and the impossibility of mapping the area where she lived, Angelino Heights, an additional DVD invites the reader to explore a variety of hypertextual narratives. In three Tiers, the DVD provides us with a collection or an archive of pieces of information offering newspaper clippings, photos and video clips of both L.A. and films recorded in L.A.. Exploring the DVD, we do not only get clues to Molly’s past, but we also learn bits about Los Angeles today as in the past. Tier 1 still adheres to classical narrative structures in that a voiceover retells Molly’s story. Meanwhile, the reader may investigate a slide show of photos and video clips the voiceover accompanies: Film clips show Hollywood scenes recorded in L.A., and every now and then we find photos which display one and the same place in the past and today, and which, merging into each other, change from the current to the past version and back again. Tier 2 plays with the option that all might have been different. It introduces us to potential characters that might have been part of Molly's story. Tier 3 is a database big enough to provide us with a feeling of getting lost we may encounter in big cities without a sense of orientation (sensu Lynch). The reader cannot be able to make sense of the random material of photos and newspaper clippings unless he/she is familiar with the material from the novella and the first two Tiers. What becomes clear is that Klein narrates his quest for some kind of spatial truth mainly for the sake of the quest itself, as is quite explicitly stated in the novella. Here the narrator repeatedly states that he is looking for a new form of representation that does justice to the fact that Los Angeles cannot be sufficiently mapped. The novella does not only raise our awareness of our ignorance about Molly, or, by analogy, about L.A., but it indulges in the absence of factual truth. The narrator enjoys the manifold ways of providing explanations for what ultimately cannot be reconstructed, and elucidates his intention of gathering all kinds of evidence which might or might not help us reconstruct Molly’s life in L.A..

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__________________________________________________________________ Klein’s focus on Los Angeles, then, rests exclusively on a palimpsestic spatial dimension of change even though he seeks to explore the history attached to it. The mention of Hollywood, a place that might at least evoke a sense of recognition, only serves to underline the fact that space becomes appropriated and always has a fictional creative dimension to it. Bleeding Through points to the many films which have used Los Angeles as their setting and treats film murders in Los Angeles as if they were real. On balance, Klein’s story is no more than a narrative hook that serves as a pretext to have the reader, roaming the DVD, experience the informational overload of simultaneous impression Simmel describes as ‘the psychological condition the metropolis creates.’ 15 4. A Changed Perception of Urban Space? In either case, the novels do not only describe a sense of urban complexity, but, using innovative narrative strategies efficiently, have the reader feel and experience the fact that the city can never be sufficiently mapped, in a way that invites them to appreciate the city as a pool of countless potential stories. In the sense of Lynch who elaborates on our ‘image of the city,’ we seem to be provided with just enough clues to find our way around and be able to follow a thread in what would otherwise be an abundance of information or stories. Still, we are not given too much of a sense of direction which would then ‘constrain’ the sensation of an urban condition. 16 A sense that the two vast cities, NYC and L.A., are places of ever-changing space and archives of numerous stories underlies both narratives. Rather than encounter the metropolitan condition with a sense of shock, the novels seem to take for granted that, in the sense of Lefebvre’s Production of Space, we may think of any urban topography of lived space as a dynamic structural network which develops organically and is subject to a continuous state of flux, or, in other words, a complex text that keeps being re-written like a palimpsest. With regard to Assmann’s distinction, we may ask ourselves whether today there is actually a greater tendency to focus on and appreciate these urban spatial dimensions which are apt to change without denying a certain need for structural stability. Are such representations as Klein’s and Foer’s fiction, then, indicative of a changed perception of urban space?

Notes 1

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of Carolina Press, 1969), 93. 2 Cf. Aleida Assmann, ‘Geschichte Findet Stadt’, in Kommunikation, Gedächtnis, Raum, eds. Moritz Czáky and Christoph Leitgeb (Bielefeld: transcript: 2009), 18.

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Ibid., 15. Ibid., 22. 5 For a detailed discussion of representations of urban complexity through time, cf. Gurr. 6 Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (London: Penguin, 2006), 40-41. 7 Ibid., 41. 8 De Certeau, Practice, 92. 9 Ibid., 93. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 For a detailed discussion with regard to these narrative strategies, cf. Michel. 13 De Certeau. Practice, 93. 14 Edward Soja, ‘Taking Apart Los Angeles’, in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1993 [1989]), 222. 15 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in The City Cultures Reader, eds. by Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall and Iain Borden (London: Routledge, ²2004), 13. 16 Cf. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 113. 4

Bibliography Assmann, Aleida. ‘Geschichte Findet Stadt’. In Kommunikation, Gedächtnis, Raum, edited by Moritz Czáky, and Christoph Leitgeb, 13–28. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of Carolina Press, 1988. Denham, Sir John. ‘Coopers Hill [Draft III]’. Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill, 109–134. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. Boston and New York: Mariner. 2000. Eliot, T. S. ‘The Waste Land’. The Waste Land and Other Poems, 53–71. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. London: Penguin, 2006.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gurr, Jens Martin. ‘The Literary Representation of Urban Complexity and the Problem of Simultaneity: A Sketchy Inteventory of Strategies’. In Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, edited by Jens Gurr, and Wilfried Raussert, 11–36. Trier and Tempe, AZ: WVT and Bilingual Press, 2011. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Jeri Johnson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Klein, Norman. Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 [DVD and Book]. Karlsruhe: ZKM digital arts edition, 2003. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Michel, Berit. ‘Urban Identity in a State of Flux: Strategies of Representing Simultaneity, Chaos and Complexity in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’. In Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, edited by Jens Gurr, and Wilfried Raussert, 173–196. Trier and Tempe, AZ: WVT and Bilingual Press, 2011. Simmel, Georg. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. In The City Cultures Reader, edited by Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden, 12–19. London: Routledge, 2004. Soja, Edward. ‘Taking Los Angeles Apart: Towards a Postmodern Geography’. In Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, 222–248. London: Verso, 1993 [1989]. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: Norton, 1979. Berit Michel is a PhD student working on her dissertation ‘Mapping the City: Narrating “Complexity”: 21st-Century Strategies of Representing Urban Spatial Dynamics in Narrative Fictions’ as a member of the doctoral programme ‘ARUS Advanced Research in Urban Systems’ at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Harlem: Black Manhattan and the Practices of the City Joe Varghese Yeldho Abstract The prospect of the urban presents a sublimated terrain of the contested where the question of inclusion maps the site of conflict. Narrative, predicated upon occupying the position of the insider, emerges as a consequence of the rituals that govern participation in urban routines. The space where narrative routine achieves the status of practice remains unproblematised and in effect undertheorised. We tend to mistake indulgence for practice in evaluating the urban and in making this grand gesture the space of contestation, which is quite adequately theorised, suddenly ceases to become so. While the historical text that is the basis of this chapter, Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson, makes no pretensions to being an ethnography of early twentieth century Harlem, it does attempt to capture a sense of that process by which the empty urban space of New York comes alive and becomes that conscious practice of life that is Harlem. Johnson’s Harlem is an intimate account of a place that is otherwise typified as the urban ghetto and very obviously the other. In terms of geographical lay of the land captured as practice in an intervention by Johnson where he uses metaphors of transit, Harlem was not a place ‘you went out to,’ rather it was a place that you ‘went through,’ which indicates an expectation that belies the conventional sensibility of a place that you had to steer clear of. The shared narrative experience of such an autonomous rite of passage could perhaps be found in an understanding of the ‘stories’ that invite a process of sacralisation as they get caught up in the practice of being passed on. 1 Key Words: Walking, resistance, archive, representation, experience, grids, performance, home, materiality, naming. ***** If you ride northward the length of Manhattan Island, going through Central Park and coming out on Seventh Avenue or Lenox Avenue at One Hundred and Tenth Street, you cannot escape being struck by the sudden change in the character of the people you see. In the middle and lower parts of the city you have, perhaps, noted Negro faces here and there; but when you emerge from the Park, you see them everywhere, and as you go up either of these two great arteries leading out from the city to the north, you see more and more Negroes, walking in the streets, looking from the windows, trading in the shops, eating in the restaurants, going in and coming out of the theatres, until, nearing One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street, ninety percent of

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__________________________________________________________________ the people you see, including the traffic officers, are Negroes. And it is not until you cross the Harlem River that the population whitens again, which it does as suddenly as it began to darken at One Hundred and Tenth Street. You have been having an outside glimpse of Harlem, the Negro metropolis. 2 In 1930 James Weldon Johnson published Black Manhattan, an account of Negro Life in the city of New York, a book that engaged the optical metaphor behind the urban context, using it to explore the fantastic visual irruption taking place in the heart of the city. One may be forgiven for thinking that Johnson’s language is reminiscent or echoes a sense of ‘occupation,’ a feeling of having physically overrun a particular point on a map, in this case a geographic unit comprising one of the boroughs of Manhattan, but as he is quick to point out, ‘Harlem was taken over without violence.’ 3 The text goes on to explain the nature of the transition of Harlem from white neighbourhood to black city in a narrative of empowerment detailing the stories behind occupying Harlem a house, street, a block at a time. It emerges that this feeling of empowerment is also clearly understood to be a narrative of process. While this might be stating the obvious, the process being indicated here is not simply a matter of change in the topography of material ownership, but in fact a shift in an entire set of routines. The first of which is in terms of defining the boundaries of accessible space. It is important that these boundaries demarcate, in this instance by the specific streets, the space you are free to traverse without being viewed as a disruption or a problem. Johnson’s text commits to the space of the urban, 4 as a constantly evolving and transformative moment in time with consequences for the black city within the city. Harlem is a product of converging influences, such as aftershocks of the civil war, the political impetus provided by the Niagara Movement, the cultural capital prominently displayed by the Free Negro press, the realities of a post World War I social dispensation, and even more importantly for the time a catalyst for moments of change for the Negro. This results in a collection of streets bound by the thoroughfares of the city with which it is perpetually negotiating its own terms of existence. The transitioning economic threshold which determines this zone of inclusion / exclusion comes up against a social history marked by Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle where, ‘the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having.’ 5 Harlemites in Black Manhattan have their identities constituted primarily as configurations of the consumptive and the synchronic. At the same time there is a privileging of new modes of accessing an urban ‘ideal’ that traces its origins to a racial archive of stories and music that constantly seek to prospect a future understood as diachronic routines of anticipation and where ‘[t]he desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it.’ 6 Some of the physical or even intellectual routines that contribute towards a mechanism of such desire

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__________________________________________________________________ include what Johnson typifies as the art of strolling along the Harlem streets, meeting people and swapping stories. The interlocking streets and urban grid of Harlem which on the surface is restrictive in terms of pathways analogous to Foucault’s structures of power, still manages to create a visual and symbolic imaginary that powerfully extends across the African diaspora. There is a strong element of performance that can be associated with the routines of seeing, sensing and communicating which feeds urban flows and pedestrian circulation among the residents of Johnson’s Harlem, a ritual that, ‘has been proclaimed in story and song.’ 7 It is of course not by chance that Harlem has become a veritable staging ground for social and political mobilisation amongst the blacks of America and also those of the African diaspora, a combination of factors that include the numerical superiority and concentration that the black population enjoys in Harlem contributes towards a realisation by black intellectuals such as Harold Cruse that ‘for the Negro to lose his population control of the Harlem area means an uprooting from his strongest base in the American social structure.’ 8 It is however not the purpose of this chapter to delve into the history and details of such mobilisation, most of which is well documented and archived, the intent is to understand how movement and the experiential routine of the pedestrian act transitions into practices of communication. Walking in the city is a temporary moment of exile from the zones of habitation or business that a city’s population occupies. This is a general pre supposition for any urban planner as circulations or traffic is premised on absence of the other, where it is understood that the entire population is never out on the streets at any one moment and also that when a part of them are, they do not stay long. Walking with purpose or transporting, 9 even though a desirable quality in the modern day urban native, is seen as something of an imposition in the Negro Metropolis. This could be due to an understanding of the influence that modern capital seeks to wield over such spaces. As a result Johnson states that the Harlem Negro has become something of an expert at extracting ‘pleasure easily and cheaply:’ The masses of Harlem get a good deal of pleasure out of things far too simple for most other folks. In the evenings of summer and on Sundays they get lots of enjoyment out of strolling. Strolling is almost a lost art in New York; at least, in the manner in which it is so generally practiced in Harlem. Strolling in Harlem does not mean merely walking along Lenox or upper Seventh Avenue or One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street; it means that those streets are places for socializing. 10 . Such a reading could be seen as an approximation of wayfaring, 11 where one is preparing for what Henri Lefebvre calls the moment, 12 which is a creature of

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__________________________________________________________________ spontaneous possibilities and in this sense synchronic rather than a pedestrian event which in being diachronic and a spatial practice constantly foregrounds the archive, the city, that has created it. 13 When strolling in Harlem, the routine act of a walk has not become the purposive practice of movement implied in becoming the pedestrian with its nameless efficiency. The stroll is exciting because it opens up a world of possibility, the only aspect of the stroll that can be classified or categorised as routine is perhaps the duration of the movement that propels you into other routines which are not necessarily fed by a cycle of repetition but is a consequence of anticipating a horizon of experience which as Johnson says ‘is not simply going out for a walk; it is more like going out for adventure.’ 14 Extended periods of living the streets establish a sense of kinship and camaraderie, indicated by Johnson in the stories and experiences that help in articulating the urban terrain, and from where ‘people get a map of their changing social environment which helps them to steer their course.’ 15 Such a notion of movement in the community runs contrary to the notion of exile in zones of transit, in effect what Johnson highlights in his record of life in Harlem is the way in which the Backstage seamlessly integrates with the surface of performance. 16 Johnson’s Harlem also presents a different picture of the area of Manhattan in terms of what is not being highlighted or pointed out. In terms of elevation the strollers of Harlem occupy ground zero or the level of the street and not accumulations of vertically mounted flat surfaces found in that typical representative symbol of the modern city, the skyline. This is of course not to say that the space of Harlem is not a modern space, especially because the narrative of slavery is intimately linked to the narrative of globalisation, but an attempt is definitely being made by the author to exemplify a new mode of reality staged using tropes that represent a radical departure from the idea of repetition that is embedded into the process of the modern. This is something that Lefebvre also highlights in his Critique of Everyday Life using the iconic signification of the traffic signal and the redundancy that tends to be built into similar systems of the modern city so that clearly demarcated binary processes can keep informing us as to what to do, where to go and when. 17 Johnson has taken pains in his portrait of Harlem to show why the space of Harlem while typical of the modern city is also very atypical and unlike similar spaces. This idea finds resonance in the narrative of Jake, the protagonist of Claude Mc Kay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem where you find him yearning for a state of salvation which can be afforded only by that soaring rhetoric which is being talked about and passed on as you walk the streets of Harlem; Oh to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and “blues” playing somewhere…singing

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__________________________________________________________________ somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere in dark-eyed Harlem… 18 For Jake and others who go through the Negro Metropolis, Harlem symbolises a place that stands in for their fears, hopes and expectation, perhaps typical of any modern cityscape, but unlike many such places that attain signification in the overwhelming materiality of the monumental, Harlem escapes the threatened regression into artefact by remaining as an apparently innocuous set of practices, primarily the practice of life.

Notes 1

This paper was made possible with a grant from MHRD, Govt. of India. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991 [1930]), 145. 3 Ibid., 155. 4 Henri Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, trans. Roberto Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 5 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak, rev. ed. (Detroit: Black and Red, 2010 [1970]). 6 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 92. 7 Johnson, Black Manhattan, 160. 8 Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: New York Review Books, 2005 [1967]), 12. 9 Tim Ingold, Being Alive (London: Routledge, 2011). 10 Johnson, Black Manhattan, 162. 11 Ingold, Being Alive, 162. 12 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2008), 340. 13 De Certeau, Practice, 117. 14 Johnson, Black Manhattan, 163. 15 Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 188. 16 Erving Goffman, Stigma (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963). 17 Lefebvre, Critique, 278. 18 Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987 [1928]), 15. 2

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Bibliography Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow, 1967. Reprinted with introduction by Stanley Crouch. New York: New York Review Books, 2005. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Fredy Perlman, and Jon Supak, Rev. Ed. Detroit: Black & Red, 2010 [1970]. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. 2nd Ed. New York: Vintage, 1995. Goffman, Erving. Stigma. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Hannerz, Ulf. Exploring the City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive. London: Routledge, 2011. Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Knopf. Reprinted with introduction by Sondra Kathryn Wilson. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991 [1930]. Lefebvre, Henri. Urban Revolution. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. —––. Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. Vol. 2 of Critique of Everyday Life. Translated by John Moore. 2nd Ed. New York: Verso, 2008. Mc Kay, Claude. Home to Harlem. New York: Harper. Reprinted with foreword by Wayne F. Cooper. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987 [1928]. Joe Varghese Yeldho teaches English Literature at the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore. His interests include African American Fiction, Urban Narratives and Event Studies.

Conceptualising the Phenomenon of Distance Learning in Saudi Arabia: A Foucauldian Panoptic Approach Omar Basalamah and Tariq Elyas Abstract In a place-conscious culture where marked spaces define national identity and social order, the move from a teacher-centred educational system to the virtual classroom resulted in re-drawing the map of power relations. From the practices of the early Saudi classroom, the Halaga, with its panoptic circle structure, to the modern school classroom with its carefully-drawn rows and set of disciplinary techniques, the Saudi teacher had always exercised his authority from/as the centre. Yet, the educational phenomenon of the virtual-space-based distance learning has left the instructor feeling ‘out of place.’ As the setting for the physical presence and the disciplinary gaze is shifted/cancelled in the online classroom, the balance of power has also shifted in favour of the student. This chapter explores the hierarchical structure of the virtual space in the not-so-modern Saudi teaching practices and the position of the teacher which has (d)evolved into the power struggles of the 21st century modern ‘educational technological phenomenon.’ Applying Foucault’s concept of the panoptic in educational settings, we posit that the traditional power and discipline the teacher used to claim has been transmuted in the reverse panoptic gaze of the students who are in control of the virtual classroom and its time and space. The invisibility of the students in the current distance learning setting, compared to their visibility as a disciplinary tool in the physical Saudi classroom, poses a serious challenge not only to the teacher’s authority, but also to his/her style and methods. On the other hand, some might argue that the students might gain more understanding of a subject via their ‘spatial freedom’ of the online material access. However, we hypothesise that the virtual space in distance learning needs to be teacher-friendly and visual contact between the teacher and the students should still be applied freely. Key Words: Saudi Arabia, early Islamic pedagogy, Foucault, panopticism, distance learning, spatial freedom. ***** The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (hereafter KSA), sometimes called ‘The Land of the Two Holy Mosques,’ is a monarchy with a political system rooted in Islamic Shari’a Law. KSA has a population of over 25 million of which 17 million are Saudis, and the remainder are expatriates. Close to 98% of the people are Arab, and nearly 99% are members of the Islamic faith. 1 Due to the religious and legal framework of the country, which does not provide legal protection for freedom of religion, the public practice of non-Muslim religions is prohibited.

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__________________________________________________________________ Despite Saudi Arabia’s recent affluence, the influence of Bedouin traditional practices and Islamic religious attitudes continue to be a guiding force in most contemporary Saudi lives. As Quandt argues, ‘the world view of Saudi leaders is shaped by Islamic and Arab cultures.’ 2 Since, according to Islam, humanity’s wellbeing in the world, and the hereafter, is intrinsically linked to adherence to the tenants of Islamic faith, salvation for the typical Saudi requires an intense devotion to these tenants. 3 Throughout its history, KSA has also been associated with a particular version of Islam. According to Buchan, ‘to this day, the legitimacy of Saudi rule has been intimately linked with the religious and social message of Wahhabism.’ 4 Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, theoretically limited only by the Shari’a or divine law which, in its turn, is shaped by Wahhabism. Since, ‘the Shari’a is supplemented by a fairly large body of customs, the results are that demands for social change take on a political [and even in some cases anti-religious] colouring.’ 5 In fact, many Arabic and Western scholars argue that, despite KSA’s strong trade networks with the West, it still remains overwhelmingly Islamic and Shari’a Law prevails in the day-to-day lives of its citizens. 6 The traditions of learning in Saudi Arabia highlight an Islamic view of all knowledge as sacred. For example, the reverence for the teacher/lecturer is deeply rooted in Arabic society as the famous Arabic proverb suggests: ‫ﻣﻦ ﻋﻠﻤﻨﻲ ﺣﺮﻓًﺎ ﺻﺮت ﻟﻪ ﻋﺒﺪًا‬ ‘He who taught me a letter became my master’ The respect for the teacher results from his/her role as a conduit of ‘knowledge.’ Jawad cited both the Holy Qur’an and Sunnah to show that Muslims are encouraged to read, write and think. 7 In addition, she shows that foreign knowledge and broader education is encouraged by the Prophet Mohammed who prompted his followers to ‘search for knowledge though it be in China.’ 8 Hence, the concept of University Education as ‘higher learning’ originated in this period with the founding of the great Islamic institutions/universities such as the House of Wisdom. However, since 2001, following the events of 9/11, KSA’s schools and universities have been under scrutiny in Western editorials for fostering a mindset of intolerance, and even hostility, towards the West. Friedman states that ‘these institutions deserve much of the blame for fostering anti-U.S. terrorism.’ 9 This criticism has even resulted in research into the KSA school curriculum and the content of school textbooks commissioned by the USA Congress to examine whether these express fundamentalist and anti-American ideologies. 10 The USA has also started to take a more proactive role in influencing KSA politics. This is reflected in the 9/11 Commission Report which emphasises the need to agree ‘on a common framework for addressing reform in Saudi Arabia.’ 11

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__________________________________________________________________ In response to external pressure, especially from the USA, a number of reforms in both government and educational systems in KSA have taken place, and some of the social restrictions of Wahhabist Islam have been eased or discontinued as part of a modernisation movement. With these new trends of reform in education, the new phenomenon of distance learning emerged. Trying to understand this phenomenon leads us to analysing it at two levels: the diachronic and the synchronic. The history of education as it is implied in the religious/cultural/political background of Saudi Arabia is interrupted by the essentially spatial shift from the physical to the virtual - a shift that has proved to be more than a minor variable in an historical analysis of learning in this part of the world. The shift to the virtual classroom in institutions where centuries-old ‘technologies of power,’ as defined by Foucault, had been deeply embedded was a challenging one from the teacher’s point of view. 12 Such a shift required a new set of technologies that had to do without the very basic principles of the old ones. The panoptic elements of the Halagah which were consolidated by the modern ‘means of correct training’ that were part and parcel of the 20th century school structure heavily relied on controlling the space. Education took place within a context of power relations that carefully set up a demarcated space where students were strategically positioned to be observed and disciplined. It was the students’ visibility, an effect of space arrangement, which enabled the whole process and maintained the power relations that regulated it. As Foucault argues, The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power, and in which conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied visible. 13 Our interviews with two instructors show two major reactions to the challenges encountered in their respective distance education experiences. At the beginning, we can observe the frustration generated by the difficulties of coming to terms with teaching in a virtual classroom. However, further accounts on the details of the experience reveal an element of suspicion about what they perceive as a disadvantageous position within the process. Even though both instructors are in principle in favour of distance education, they felt slightly disoriented by the ‘reality’ of the virtual class room. From a Foucauldian perspective, such a feeling of disorientation may be considered a result of the disruption of the central principles governing the modern ‘means of correct training’: visibility and surveillance, or what Foucault terms ‘the spatial nesting of hierarchized surveillance.’ 14 In the absence of this control of the spatial dimension, teachers constantly find themselves ‘out of place.’

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__________________________________________________________________ Frustration at the uncertainty that marked different aspects of the process were obvious in the two instructors’ assessments of their performances in several areas, from the minor technical issues, to the more essential ones regarding their authority and identity as teachers. Without the rituals of the physical classroom, one of our instructors was, at the beginning of the course, never sure whether the lecture had ‘actually’ started. Despite the basic technical information given to him by the institution and its team of technicians, and in a typical reversal of roles in the virtual classroom, our teacher had to be informed by his students about some of the elements of his own lecture. Having to take the position of the learner, he found himself at the receiving end of instructions from the administration, the technical support team and the students. As the control over the teaching process had conventionally been inseparable from the utter domination of the classroom space, our instructors seemed to struggle with the possible ways to manage their classes within the temporal dimension alone. Yet, our instructors’ complaints about class management went beyond the technical aspects of starting the virtual lecture and making sure they were online. They also found it difficult to get used to the lack of body language feedback from the students. As students logged in to the classroom and appeared on a list of names on the margin of a screen as either present or absent, the teachers had no way of verifying their level of engagement with the lecture. Constant questions and repeated pleas for the students to participate were more often than not either ignored or dealt with through replies via the Yes/No icon. The concerns of both teachers about virtual teaching covered also areas such as testing and evaluation. Doubts about the identity of the students were consistent with other complaints about the students ‘actual’ attendance and participation. Through a Foucauldian analysis of the two instructors’ suspicions, we would like to propose that the shift in the balance of power relations in the virtual classroom has resulted in a new order that can be viewed as a reverse panoptic structure where fluid space empowers the student and makes the teacher’s central position the weakest. The departure from the conventional physical classroom with its ‘economic geometry of a “house of certainty”’ to the virtual one where space gives birth to the type of ‘fictitious’ relations often generated by the panoptic architecture creates a new kind of panopticon that significantly differs from Bentham’s. 15 While the original ‘panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately,’ the reverse panopticon that emerges in the online distance education model creates a new kind of virtual spatial arrangement where it is almost impossible to constantly see or immediately recognise the subjects within it. 16 The periphery here is not fixed as an annular building that is ‘divided into cells, each of which ... [has] two windows, one on the inside corresponding to the windows of the [observation] tower [at the centre]; the other, on the outer side, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other in order to render it transparent for the observer in the tower.’ 17 It is

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__________________________________________________________________ rather an imaginary/virtual space where the students cannot be located, except through a ‘window’ that our teachers could not see much through. This ‘window’ is transparent on the side of the student, but opaque from the perspective of the teacher who can neither recognise nor see the person behind it. ‘We can’t be sure if the student is paying attention to the class, chatting, or playing a video game. We can’t even be sure if the students are really there,’ our first teacher complained. In this virtual panopticon, the observation tower at the centre is replaced by the teacher’s central position of transmitting the lecture from which only he/she can be observed (or ignored) at any given moment by the student. Whereas the centre in the classical panopticon and the conventional classroom serves as the most powerful position occupied by the teacher, it becomes the weakest point in the virtual panopticon where he is trapped in his uncertainty about those at the periphery. Both of our teachers felt that distance learning classes were longer and thought they were less rewarding due to the fact that they ‘could not see and interact with their students.’ While for the one at the central tower in the classical panopticon ‘invisibility is a guarantee of order,’ the teacher’s nonreciprocal visibility at the centre of the virtual panopticon replaces his authoritative disciplining gaze making him the constant object of the students’ gaze. 18 Unlike the original panopticon where ‘the arrangement of [the inmate’s] room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility,’ the reverse virtual panopticon deprives the teacher of the students’ axial visibility, as he cannot see them, and empowers the students through their lateral visibility, as they can communicate with one another without his knowledge. 19 One of our teachers suspected that his students were often ‘active on other windows or chatting with each other using another programme.’ The students are no longer ‘a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised,’ which is the objective of Bentham’s panopticon. 20 In the virtual panopticon, they have the opportunity to go back to the kind of crowd that the classical one aimed to abolish: ‘a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect.’ 21 Moreover, an additional level of control makes the virtual panopticon even more complex and challenging for our teachers. The administration joins the students as an observer who cannot be observed. Aware of the administration’s full access to every lecture, our teachers exercised a higher degree of self-censorship on what they said and how they said it. As lectures, according to the regulations of distance learning, must be recorded and uploaded for the students to download, the administration alerted our instructors whenever they failed to activate the recording option. According to our teachers, the recorded lecture option makes them the object of observation and assessment by almost anyone within (and probably from outside) the institution.

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__________________________________________________________________ To summarise, this multi-layered system of observation, as far as our teachers are concerned, has made the virtual classroom a reverse panopticon where they are placed in a vulnerable position to be carefully monitored by the administration or totally ignored by the students while they perform in absolute uncertainty. In order to counterbalance the effects of the redefinition of the classroom space in distance learning, we suggest reconsidering the element of visibility and its implications about the teachers’ as well as the students’ ideas regarding their respective roles. Without a new approach towards the position of the teacher and the student within the structure of new power relations distance learning imposes, we argue that the learning process might be negatively affected, rather than reformed.

Notes 1

Richard Nyrop and Norman Walpole, Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia (Washington: US Govt., 1977). 2 William Quandt, Saudi Arabia in the 1980’s: Foreign Policy, Security, and Oil (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2002), 38. 3 Ismail Al-Farugi, Islam (Brentwood, MD: International Graphics, 1984); Amin Ahsan Islahi, Call to Islam )Safat: Islamic Book Publishers, 1987) as cited in Hassan Aldosari, The Influence of Islamic Religion on Leaning and Teaching EFL and Languages Other than Arabic in Saudi Arabia (PhD Penn State University: 1992). 4 James Buchan, ‘Secular and Religious Opposition in Saudi Arabia’, State, Society and Economy in Saudi Arabia, ed. Tim. Niblock (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1982), 107. 5 Ibid. 6 Omar Al-Rawaf, ‘The Structure of Saudi Government’, The Middle East Insight, 3 (1983): 28-32; Iftikhar Ahmad, Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Education: An Examination of the Social Studies Curriculum in Pakistan (Columbia: Columbia University Archives, 2004), accessed August 8, 2012, http://www.tc.columbia.edu/cICE/Archives/7.1/71ahmad.pdf; Iftikhar Ahmad, Islamic Renaissance: The Real Task Ahead (Pakistan: Institute Al-Islam, 1998), accessed August 1, 2012, http://members.tripod.com/iaislam/IRTRTA.htm; Bassam Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Bassam Tibi, Islam between Culture and Politics (New York: Palgrave in association with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Harvard University, 2001). 7 Haiffa Al-Jawad, ‘Pan-Islamism in the Middle East: Prospects and Future’, The Islamic Quarterly 37 (1993): 208.

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As cited by Haiffa Al-Jawad, ‘Pan-Islamism in the Middle East: Prospects and Future’, The Islamic Quarterly 37 (1993): 217. 9 Thomas Friedman, ‘The Saudi Challeng’, New York Times, February 20, 2002, accessed January 16, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/20/opinion/thesaudi-challenge.html. 10 H. Con. Res 432; cited in Suhaili Karmani, ‘English, “Terror” and Islam’, Applied Linguistics 26 (2005): 262-267. 11 John Sharp, ‘Saudi Arabia: Reform and U.S. Policy’, Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade Division, ed. C. R. F. Congress (Washington: The Library of Congress, 2004), 6. 12 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977), 131. 13 Ibid., 170-171. 14 Ibid., 176. 15 Ibid., 202. 16 Ibid., 200. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 201. 21 Ibid.

Bibliography Ahmad, Iftikhar. Islamic Renaissance: The Real Task Ahead. Pakistan: Institute Al-Islam, 1998. Accessed August 1, 2012. http://members.tripod.com/iaislam/IRTRTA.htm. —––. Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Education: An Examination of the Social Studies Curriculum in Pakistan. Columbia: Columbia University Archives, 2004. Aldosari, Hassan. The Influence of Islamic Religion on Leaning and Teaching EFL and Languages Other than Arabic in Saudi Arabia. PhD Penn State University: 1992. Al-Farugi, Ismail. Islam. Brentwood, MD: International Graphics, 1984. Al-Rawaf, Omar. ‘The Structure of Saudi Government’. The Middle East Insight 3. (1983): 28–32.

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__________________________________________________________________ Buchan, James. Secular and Religious Opposition in Saudi Arabia. State, Society and Economy in Saudi Arabia. Edited by T. Niblock. London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1982. Elyas, Tariq, and Micheal Picard. ‘Saudi Arabian Educational History: Impacts on English Language Teaching’. Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues 3 (2010): 136–145. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin, 1977. Friedman, Thomas. ‘The Saudi Challeng’. New York Times, February 20, 2002. Accessed January 16, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/20/opinion/thesaudi-challenge.html. Islahi, Amin Ahsan. Call to Islam. Safat: Islamic Book Publishers, 1987. Jawad, Haiffa. ‘Pan-Islamism in the Middle East: Prospects and Future’. The Islamic Quarterly 37 (1993): 207–222. Karmani, Suhail. ‘English, “Terror” and Islam’. Applied Linguistics 26 (2005): 262–267. Kay, Shirley. Social Changes in Modern Saudi Arabia. State, Society and Economy in Saudi Arabia. Edited by Tim Niblock. London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1982. Nyrop, Richard, and Norman Walpole. Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia. Washington: US Govt., 1977. Quandt, William. Saudi Arabia in the 1980’s: Foreign Policy, Security, and Oil. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2002. Sharp, James. Saudi Arabia: Reform and U.S. Policy. Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade Division. Edited by C. R. F. Congress. Washington: The Library of Congress, 2004. Tibawi, Abdul-Latif. ‘Origin and Character of Al-Madrasah’. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 25 (1962): 225–238.

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__________________________________________________________________ Tibi, Bassam. The Crisis of Modern Islam: A Preindustrial Culture in the Scientific-Technological Age. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988. —––. The Crisis of Modern Islam: A Preindustrial Culture in the ScientificTechnological Age. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988. —––. Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change. Boulder: Westview Press, 1990. —––. The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. —––. Islam between Culture and Politics. New York: Palgrave in association with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Harvard University, 2001. Omar Basalamah is a lecturer on English literature at King Abdulaziz. His current research interests include studying different facets of the virtual world from a critical perspective, and investigating some of the aspects of the emergent new media in the Arab world from a cultural studies point of view. Tariq Elyas, PhD, is an assistant professor of Applied Linguistics and the ViceDean for Graduate Studies at the English Language Institute at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He obtained his PhD from the University of Adelaide, Australia. He holds an MA in American Literature from the United States and a graduate degree in TESOL. Elyas also has had a Chevening Fellowship from the UK where he obtained a degree in Intentional Law and Human Rights from the University of Nottingham in England. He has presented and published in a broad variety of international conferences and journals. And he is the Winner of the 2008 Bundey Prize for English Verse, Australia and won Emerald Publication Reviewer of the Year 2010. His interests are: Global English, Teacher Identity, Policy Reform, Human Rights, International Law, Language Rights, and Pedagogy.

Movement and Involvement: Phenomenological Adventures in Cyberspace Thomas Arnold Abstract From a Husserlian point of view, cyberspace is first and foremost a special kind of space; more accurately, a pictorial space in which we can move at will - a virtual space. As such, cyberspace is a relatively young ontological structure, no older than 40 years. In the first part of this chapter, I will try to establish the phenomenological structure of this virtual spatiality, using and combining two main lines of Husserl’s thought he kept apart: (a) his theory of pictoriality and (b) his theory of kinaesthetical constitution of space. With (a) we can explain the unreal actuality of cyberspace: We experience it as actually spatial, but do not confuse it with ‘real’ space, i.e. the space in which we locate the devices used for creating virtual space (computers). (b) allows us to theorise how virtual space is not like cinema or paintings, in that we can move around in it at will. By allowing for this kind of (bodily?) activity, I will argue with Husserl, cyberspace is much more space-y than the merely passively perceived space of paintings and movies; it’s virtually space. From (c) a Heideggerian point of view however, cyberspace does not just represent a space in which we randomly move, but a genuine realm of places that we can navigate (Greek: kybernao). Navigation is a special kind of existential involvement with places, so it seems appropriate to bring Heidegger’s famous theory of involvement to the fore. This will enable us to understand how cyberspace can be home to so many virtual worlds, in that for Heidegger, the world is just the totality of involvement, the horizon that gives every action and every means for action its meaning - no matter what kind of space this action might take place in. Key Words: Phenomenology, cyberspace, virtuality, videogames, embodiment, kinaesthetic motivation, space, place, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger. ***** 1. Introduction What is cyberspace or virtual reality? I am going to provide a phenomenological answer to this question. This importantly excludes two things: firstly methodological or exegetical discussions about phenomenology; and secondly, critical discussions about the political or moral effects of virtualisation. As far as I can see, these critical discussions usually adapt one of two overtones, a utopian one or a dystopian one. In the utopian take, cyberspace enables new forms of political engagement, new and egalitarian forms of knowledge-management and communication, new forms of personal identity and generally a better and freer life

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__________________________________________________________________ for mankind. Contrary to this bright picture, the dystopian view largely features fat, friendless, massacre-planning kids and dumb masses, manipulated into obedience via matrix-like machinations. ‘Brave New World’ introduces the ‘feelies,’ advertised as being ‘far more real than reality,’ ‘Fahrenheit 451’ the interactive daily soap, bereft of all meaning, which enforces and symbolises the inauthenticity of the masses.1 Without questioning the importance of these issues I want to put them aside for now, to take a closer look at the phenomenon at their very core, cyberspace itself. Phenomenology is the philosophical study of phenomena, i.e. of things as they essentially appear/as they are essentially given. To get started, we therefore need a phenomenon or a specific group of phenomena. ‘cyberspace’ and ‘VR’ both are fairly wide (if not vague) terms, so there are a lot of different starting points I could use; for several reasons - not the least familiarity - my chosen instance of cyberspace will be the group of phenomena called videogames, especially Bethesda’s ‘Skyrim.’ 2. (a) Pictoriality When looking at videogames with a Husserlian take, first of all we must notice their visual or pictorial character (as indicated by the term ‘videogame’): We see things. Depending on the game we might see trees, flowers, wide mountain ranges, swords, dragons etc. Indexicality also works as we can point out things, for example ‘this mountain over there is very dangerous for low level characters’ or ‘you need to get rid of that archer over there’ etc. At the same time we should hesitate to conflate mere seeing and seeing as perceiving: Even if we see two dragons fighting above the barren tundra of Skyrim, we do not perceive them because perception requires real or material presence of the perceived. By ‘real or material presence’ I just mean presence in the same dimension as our own biological perceptual apparatus, i.e. spacetime. In the case of the dragons we can say that they are fictional, especially pictorial objects rather than real, material objects, in contrast for example to the screen I am seeing them on which I could perceive (with seeing-on being the 21st century version of Walton’s seeing-in). I say ‘could,’ because while immersed in the game my intentionality is directed at the dragons, not the screen or the pixels or anything real; even if it could be said that I look at the screen, it is not where my attention lies. We now have effectively differentiated between two layers of the phenomenon: On one side we find the perceivable but unperceived material base, the screen in our case, at which we look and on which we see the pictorial manifold. On the other side we have exactly this immaterial, merely pictorial manifold (dragons and such), which is ‘artificially present.’ 2 These two levels ‘conflict’ with each other, as Husserl describes it, because our intentionality is unable to actualise them both at the same time: Either we play the game and see the dragons or we do not play the game and perceive the screen instead. Either we are directed at the pictorial

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__________________________________________________________________ objects or at their material base. 3 This conflict is one between real space and pictorial space in that either we perceive what is in real space, namely a screen and the wall or space behind it, or we see what is in the pictorial space, namely dragons above a vast tundra. Flatness or depth, reality or pictorial fiction. In this way, every pictorial structure is in part fictional, even if it depicts something real. This leads us to another distinction, the one between pictorial object and sujet. We have already noted the pictorial object to be artificially present; the depicted object, what we shall call ‘sujet,’ however, is not present at all, it rather is represented. Depiction is representation. Representation has at least a dual structure consisting in whatever is represented on the one hand and whatever is doing the representation on the other. The represented is absent, the representing is present. This is exactly what the term ‘present absence’ means in the context of pictorial representations: Something is present (the pictorial object), representing something absent (the sujet). This distinction is important because it allows us to see another conflict constitutive of pictoriality, namely the conflict between sujet and pictorial object. What is at stake here is the accuracy of representation - or the lack thereof. Any pictorial representation represents only a small amount of qualities of its sujet: On a photo of the Eiffel Tower we might see it, but we cannot touch it, smell it or hear it creaking. Also, no matter how much we turn the photo, we will never see any other aspect or side of the Eiffel Tower through this, where the real thing would allow us to see other sides by moving around it. We might call this kinaesthetic motivation; in cases of regular perception we never see all sides of an object, yet we always have implicit practical knowledge of how to move to access more visual information: If I move like that, I will see this (for example if I move around my television, I’ll see its back side). The very objectivity of any real thing depends on this practical kinaesthetic horizon. 4 3. (b) Kinaesthetic Motivation and Virtual Embodiment All pictorial representations before VR have failed more or less in representing these features of perceivable objects. Pictures completely lack temporality on the level of the pictorial object - what Roland Barthes calls the ‘melancholy’ of the photograph. 5 Movies remedy this, but even in 3D-cinema the focus is still out of our hands, so even if we might be allowed to (consecutively) see an object from more than one side, kinaesthetic motivation is still suspended, as we are at the mercy of the director. And this is important as these two conflicts inherent in pictoriality in terms of space and kinaesthetic motivation constitute our understanding of pictoriality - we understand pictures as pictures because of how they differ in these points from regular perceptual objects. VR changes this, at least partly, which leads us to our second Husserlian observation. In general, every visual impression presents something under certain circumstances. The circumstances of perception are our own bodily impressions of position and movement, which motivate our perceptions. Each perception is

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__________________________________________________________________ connected to ‘correlative manifolds of kinaesthetic impressions, carrying the specific character of the “I do”, “I move.”’ 6 Every form of actual kinaesthetic consciousness is embedded in a wider ‘practical horizon’ of kinaesthetic possibilities or rather abilities, expressed by the character ‘I can.’ For Husserl, ability is a mode of activity 7 , so spatiality is disclosed essentially by the activity of bodily movement - either actual or possible, where our body plays the role of an organon in the strictest sense, i.e. a means of spatial perception. 8 And this is exactly why pictures and movies do not fool us: in pictures and movies, as described above, the practical kinaesthetic horizon does npt work properly. While videogames certainly share some features with other forms of pictorial representations, we can now see a major difference: In videogames we have ways of actively bringing unseen sides of objects into view. If you see a virtual house before you, in most cases you will know how to bring its back into view, namely by steering your character around it. On the other hand, we also have the possibility to get things out of our view; if you don’t want to see the dragons, you just run away etc. This very mundane possibility of navigation inside pictorial space is what makes all the difference, because the possibility of movement allows us to experience pictorial objects for the first time in their spatiality: As in real life, pictorial objects exhibit not only one eternal aspect, but we also apprehend currently unseen but see-able sides. In this vein, virtual objects are much more real than their pictorial predecessors, as their spatiality can be experienced in a way closer to real perception. The kind of intentionality directed toward them ranges somewhere between real perception and picture-consciousness, as virtual objects are actual (we actually see them), but unreal (they are not really there) - like pictorial objects; at the same time we can exercise our will on them, i.e. interact with them and move around in their virtual surroundings. Virtual space is pictorial space with the possibility of movement. But how exactly does this kinaesthetic motivation play out? In real life, kinaesthetic motivation is made up of perception and our bodily impressions: While sitting like this I can see that and to see some other aspect of the same object I would need to get up and walk there and bend my head like that etc. This obviously does not work the same way with videogames; walking around the television will not grant us access to the backside of whatever we have in view in the game world. To be able to interact with artificially present objects, we have to be artificially present ourselves. There are several ways this might be accomplished, the usual one being avatarisation. The so-called ‘avatar’ is our artificially present representation in virtual space; it might take any form, though usually it is humanoid. It is the only pictorial object we have direct command over (via certain input-devices, interfaces to translate our will to move into VR) - in this it shadows or mirrors our own lived body, which is also the only object in our (actual) sight we exercise direct control over, if at all. Simulating our actual bodily presence, through our avatar we are

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__________________________________________________________________ ourselves represented in a fictional, but perceivable and overall experienceable world (although not usually as ourselves). To update Diderot’s imagery: The ‘fourth wall’ does not close before us anymore, rather it closes behind us, thus incorporating us into the virtual world. So much for my Husserlian take on Videogames. To sum up: Virtual space is pictorial space and as such unreal, yet actual (1); it is also a special, brand new kind of pictorial space as it is constituted via virtual embodiment and movement (thanks to certain input devices) (2) - and in this respect is much more spacey than any other pictorial space before. It is virtually space. 4. (c) The Constitution of Place: Intersubjectivity and Stuff However, virtual space is not yet cyberspace. Just considering the semantics leads us onwards. Cyber-space literally means navigation-space (from Greek: kybernao, I navigate). Echoing Hemingway, we might advise: never mistake motion for navigation; the latter is not random movement, nor is it taking place in metric space. Cyberspace does not just represent a space in which we randomly move, but a genuine realm of places that we can navigate or explore. On a closer look, the virtual space of videogames is indeed meaningfully spaced: We do not just move backwards, forwards and sideways in an homogenous space for a fixed amount of time, but we travel, we leap, dodge, attack and flee; in short, our virtual movements have meaning. Also, they take place insofar as they do not just happen in a Cartesian virtual space, but play out within meaningful environments: roads, dark, haunted forests, towns etc. The player does not just experience movement and space, but performs actions in certain places and generally gets involved. Navigation is a special kind of existential involvement with places, so it seems appropriate to bring Heidegger’s famous theory of involvement to the fore. Where Husserl provides for an analysis of virtuality as a certain kind of spatiality, it is Heidegger who allows an in depth investigation into virtual reality as an existential-topological structure, i.e. a place. Involvement opens up a dimension of meaning: Actions and places are meaningful. Following Heidegger, I assume that nothing can have meaning on its own, actions and places have meaning because they are embedded in an overall totality or frame of meaning. This totality of meaning is, for Heidegger, the world. To understand the nature of virtual places, we therefore need to take a cursory look at Heidegger’s theory of the world. For him, the world is not the totality of objects and facts, less just a set or class of sentences. The World is the very horizon ‘wherein’ Dasein (mankind) lives. 9 It is the totality of involvement. 10 To see how the topology of videogames ties into this totality and is in fact constituted by it, I would like to consider two essential and interrelated structures found in this totality, stuff and people. A) As the totality of involvement the world is the ‘possibility of the ready-tohand,’ 11 the ‘Zeug,’ that is, items as they are understood and experienced

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__________________________________________________________________ specifically in actions rather than theory. 12 ‘Zeug’ is quite hard to translate, literally it means ‘stuff’ as in ‘clean up your stuff;’ so Werk-zeug is stuff for work = tool or equipment; Flug-zeug is stuff for flying = airplane; Fahr-zeug is stuff for driving = car; Schreib-zeug is stuff for writing etc. It always exhibits the structure of being stuff for... or stuff of... or stuff to..., instead of mere things that just are. And indeed in computer games we encounter this readiness-to-hand, we fight with swords, hunt with a bow, we trade with money, we forge (using a hammer) and repair; in short: we use Zeug. The same goes - mutatis mutandis - for all our cyberactivities outside gaming: terms like ‘toolbar,’ ‘app’ or ‘folder’ as well as ‘internet explorer’ account for this praxeological stance. The structure of Zeug is interrelated with topology in that all Zeug has its place and all places their Zeug: ‘Equipment [Zeug] has its place, or else it ‘lies around’; this must be distinguished in principle from just occurring at random in some spatial position. When equipment for something or other has its place, this place defines itself as the place of this equipment.’ 13 An airport is the place for airplanes, a children’s bedroom is no place for a chainsaw, the armoury is a place to equip yourself with weapons etc. B) The world is not a lonely place, there need to be other people (Husserl speaks of transcendental intersubjectivity in the same vein). ‘The world of Dasein is with-world [Mitwelt].’ 14 ‘The world not only frees the ready-to-hand as entities encountered within-the-world; it also frees Dasein - the Others in their Daseinwith.’ 15 Admittedly being-with mostly shows itself either as friend or as foe in most games; but the enemy as well as the ally are with you in this particular world, even if your real life worlds do not overlap. Virtually you can kill someone you will never meet (or kill) in real life - either because you will never meet the player behind the avatar or because it is a purely fictional, programmed character. As to the import of being-with for the topology of videogames: a haunted forest would lose all its meaning if there were no demons or bandits to be encountered. This structure might count less outside a certain video-game genre, although the internet as a whole certainly counts as a kind of transcendental intersubjectivity. (The relation between virtuality and the web being a topic of its own.) From the above follows that the spacing of the world (be it real or virtual) is not primarily metric. People and stuff are not located via geometrical coordinates, as things would be. Every place we discover in the world is a place for... or a place to... or a place of..., it has a meaning, which it ultimately derives from the totality of involvement: A dragons layer is not a place for dwelling, but rather a site of epic fighting and bountiful loot, a town might be a place to trade in your plunder, a temple is a place of worship and drawing a weapon there might lead you into a situation where you need to reload an earlier saved game, because you cannot continue the main mission as everyone hates you etc. The same non-metric spacing holds for distances, which are not measured by any ‘objective’ criteria either: ‘We say that to go over yonder is “a good walk”, “a stone’s throw”, or “as long as it takes to smoke a pipe.’” 16 As this concept of inner-worldly space rests heavily on

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__________________________________________________________________ the praxeological analysis of inner-worldly items, we can call that kind of spacing itself praxeological, in contrast to the purely metric spacing of the realm of spatially extended things. Location and distance in games are most definitely praxeologically spaced: They get their meaning from the actions you might perform there, the creatures you might meet and the rewards you might get. So, with Heidegger, cyberspace turns out to be not just a new space for movement but also a place of involvement. Cyberspace is part of our world in that it is more and more structured like our non-virtual life world: This is the life worldening of cyberspace, the dialectically intertwined counterpart to the virtualisation of our life world... Finally, combining the Husserlian and Heideggerian ideas (a), (b) and (c), we get the following phenomenological definition of cyberspace/virtual reality: It is a virtual space within which existential involvement takes place. Movement constitutes space, involvement constitutes place - this holds for actual space as much as for cyberspace.

Notes 1

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper, 2004), 146 and Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Simon & Schusters, 2012), 115. 2 Lambert Wiesing, Artificial Presence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 3 Edmund Husserl, Phantasie und Bildbewusstsein (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1980), Text 1, § 22, §25; Text 17 a. 4 Ulrich Claesges, Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1965), § 15, as well as page 128: ‘Das Gegebensein von Aspektdaten [visuellen Empfindungen], die in objektivierender Auffassung zur Konstitution raum-zeitlicher Gegenstände führen, ist von kinästhetischen Situationen oder kinästhetischen Verläufen abhängig. Diese Abhängigkeit nannten wir kinästhetische Motivation.’ 5 Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 122. 6 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie (Hua 6) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1962), 164; cf. Ibid., 108ff. 7 Edmund Husserl, Ms D 10 III, S. 42, quoted by Claesges, Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution, 128. 8 Edmund Husserl, Ideen II (Hua 4) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1952), 56. 9 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006), 64f. 10 Ibid., 84. 11 Ibid., 187. 12 Ibid., 64ff.

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__________________________________________________________________ 13

Ibid.: ‘Such a place [… is] not to be interpreted as the “where” of some random Being-present-at-hand of Things.’ 14 Ibid., 118. Cf. Ibid. 125: ‘Being-with is an existential constituent of Being-inthe-world.’ 15 Ibid., 123. 16 Ibid., 105, cf. also 106.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. La Chambre Claire. Paris: Seuil, 1980. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon & Schusters, 2012. Claesges, Ulrich. Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1965. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006. Husserl Edmund. Ideen II (Hua 4). The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1952. —––. Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie (Hua 6). The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1962. —––. Phantasie und Bildbewusstsein (Hua 23). The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1980. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper, 2004. Wiesing, Lambert. Artificial Presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Thomas Arnold is research fellow (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) at the University of Heidelberg, currently working on his PhD thematising the programmatic and systematic relations between Husserl and Plato.

Visualising ‘Outer Space,’ Defining Place on Earth Adrianne Santina Abstract ‘Outer space’ is an abstraction and a phrase easily taken for granted. It implies a dialectical relationship with its unspoken opposite - ‘inner space’ - both of which evoke yet another opposite in relation to them: a specific place. Implying the universe beyond planet Earth, ‘outer space’ is a potentially boundless, infinite realm which is, therefore, difficult to comprehend. Attempts to understand ‘outer space,’ then, rely on how it is visualised. While today advanced technologies create photographic representations of outer space, just over half a century ago, such depictions appeared in an ancient technology: painting. Popular artists with a scientific bent such as Chesley Bonestell (American, 1888-1986) and David A. Hardy (British, b. 1936) are known for creating sublime views of outer space in a scientifically-oriented photorealistic style. Scores of artists from succeeding generations have followed suit. By using a photorealistic style in their depictions of varied locations - our Moon, planets, the stars - these artists literally visualise specific place in outer space, making it comprehensible. If we ask about the seductive power of these images, we must engage the specific questions raised by their phenomenological implications. Following the tradition of landscape painting, such images do more than show a sight for our visual consumption - they operate as expressions of the sublime. By doing so, however, they suggest death or, more precisely, the absence of life. Such works also romantically insinuate colonialism, representing outer space as a new frontier, depicting enterprises such as extraction of resources from other worlds. Ultimately, however, the photorealistic, scientifically-oriented style of these works conceals the deeper concerns listed above, emphasising transcendent, God-like views of the cosmos and astronomical phenomena. While visually captivating, such pictures offer answers about the complexity of ‘outer space,’ but as a result, they raise key questions about human constructions of space and place that function as memento mori. Key Words: Outer space, landscape, memento mori, sublime, Lefebvre, Bonestell, Hardy, Hartmann, Cook. ***** In 1780, astronomer William Herschel, in contemplating the immensity of outer space, suggested that because some stars were so distant, their light had not yet reached Earth. 1 He stated,

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__________________________________________________________________ The thought is noble and worthy of a Philosopher. But should we call this immense distance a mere imagination? Can it be an abstract Idea? Is there no such thing as space? 2 Herschel’s comments, unconventional for their time, resonate centuries later because they express a fundamental problem in comprehending outer space. Despite the availability of photos resulting from technologies for astronomical images, space remains an abstraction. Indeed, many photos, such as those from the Hubble Space Telescope, cover astonishing distances in light years, making them difficult to relate to in human terms. A different tactic is used by artists and illustrators who employ the medium of landscape to reduce outer space to specific, if imagined, places rendered as if the viewer was actually there. Images in this genre, seen in a painting of an exoplanet or a planet outside our solar system, by Lynette Cook, 3 quote the conventions of landscape by representing a strange, yet hauntingly beautiful world, with liquid lakes, rocky outcroppings, and a sky filled with stars in the form of a globular cluster. Depictions such as this are readily compared to 19th-century American landscape paintings which routinely portrayed strange new landscapes in a sublime way. And, because some depict colonialist actions such as settlement and extraction of resources, it has been suggested that space art reinforces the ideals of manifest destiny, emphasising the primacy of the USA in exploring space as the next frontier. 4 However, by assuming that the visual similarities between 19thcentury representations of landscapes and 20th-21st - century paintings of outer space create the same meanings, the complexities of space art are denied. In fact, paintings depicting imagined places in outer space are fraught with tensions that problematise the implied human presence in the alien worlds they visually posit; unlike earthly landscapes, viewers cannot actually visit or experience these other, lifeless worlds. To examine these tensions further, Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of the production of social space provides a helpful lens because, rather than using a dyadic understanding of space and place, Lefebvre adds a third element. He understands space as embodying spatial practices, or the space produced by a society through routine and daily reality, representational spaces, or space as lived through symbolic associations, and representations of space, or space as conceptualised by artists, designers and planners. 5 Applied to the medium of landscape by W. J. T. Mitchell, Lefebvre’s view of space is altered to account for landscape as a sight to be consumed, place as a specific location, and space as practiced place, a location already inscribed with meaning via cultural and national rituals. 6 Both Lefebvre and Mitchell emphasize the role of spatial practices in creating space, a key element understanding the implicit tensions in space art. Such images show wondrous features of the universe as if we witness them first hand; indeed, they transform their viewers into interstellar armchair tourists. Yet, because

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__________________________________________________________________ many of these worlds are not just uninhabitable but actually hostile to life, they indicate that humans are, for now at least, Earthbound. In the end, the paintings serve as memento mori - a reminder that humans eventually die. While the origins of space art are many and only broadly discussed, one key point of inspiration is the landscape tradition of the 19th century that encouraged travel to and settlement of the American West. 7 Indeed, space artists, organised into the International Association of Astronomical Artists, or IAAA, associate themselves with this tradition in their manifesto, which lists Thomas Moran (18371926), Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and Frederic Church (1826-1900) as their artistic forefathers. 8 These artists travelled to the places they painted, creating aweinspiring pictures that celebrated the grandeur of the landscapes before them. Frederic Church’s 1855 depiction of The Andes of Ecuador serves as an example of this approach, emphasising contrasts in scale and transcendental qualities of light. 9 Here, the viewer is located just above the ground, hovering over a valley with waterfalls and a lake on the right, and tropical trees, a Christian shrine, and diminutive people on the left. The scene appears to recede infinitely into the distance blending into the sun, shining brightly through a thick haze. Church’s Christian background is evoked by both the shrine and the implied cross-shape of the composition; the vertical element is the sun and its rays while the upper plateau, reflecting golden sunlight, creates the horizontal element. 10 Hence, Church shows the presence of God in the dramatic landscape and natural processes of flowing rivers, waterfalls creating spray, and sunlight diffusing through the atmosphere. While humans are a part of this place, they are dwarfed by its scale and power. Space artists, unable to travel to the extra solar planets, asteroids, and comets they depict, 11 nevertheless attempt to invoke the sense of being in such worlds, despite their inability to sustain life. The illustrations space artists create often accompany books whose themes revolve around the idea of travel, as in The Grand Tour, A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System by Ron Miller and William K. Hartmann and Infinite Voyages, An Illustrated Voyage to Planets beyond Our Sun by Ray Villard and Lynette Cook. This approach is almost certainly the result of illustrations created by the 20th-century American architect-turned-Hollywoodspecial-effects-creator, Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986). Beginning in the 1940s, Bonestell created depictions of outer space, in consultation with scientists to ensure visual accuracy, that were instrumental in convincing the American public to support the USA’s developing space exploration program. 12 Bonestell’s paintings appeared in Life and Collier’s magazines, along with books including The Conquest of Space from 1949 written by space exploration proponent, Willy Ley. The illustrations were a revelation to the American audience because their realistic style, combined with viewpoints placing the viewer on a rocket or on the surface of a planet, made space exploration seem possible and, in collaboration with scientists testifying to the viability of rocket technology, inevitable.

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__________________________________________________________________ Bonestell’s approach is readily apparent in one of the celebrated paintings from The Conquest of Space: Saturn as Seen from Its Satellite, Titan. 13 The viewer, located on the snow-covered ground, sees a rocky landscape, with formations rivalling mountains on Earth, and a valley receding away in the centre of the composition. From the valley floor, the viewer’s eye rises to the sky, itself dominated by the ringed planet. 14 Bonestell’s painted illustrations were described by Ley in the introduction to The Conquest of Space as being more than mere ‘artist’s conceptions’ due to their accurate details and Bonestell’s keen ability to convincingly render spatial recession via the convention of linear perspective. He created complex compositions that accounted for the angle of human vision, the size of celestial bodies relative to each other, and degrees of inclination. Hence, it is no surprise that Ley likened Bonestell’s images to photographs, 15 which helped to define the abstraction of space into a viable reality through the depiction of specific place. As image after image by Bonestell testifies, he was a master of creating landscape-inspired space depictions, rendering new, foreign places familiar. Described by Mitchell, landscape encourages us to take in a defined space as a ‘view,’ creating a safe perspective for the viewer to ‘engage in a conscious apperception of space as it unfolds itself in a particular place.’ 16 Further, by locating the viewer on Titan or any other another celestial body, or hovering in space nearby, the viewer becomes a visual tourist. This creates potential contradictions, as the desire to believe that these views exist and to experience them is denied by the reality of the tourist: she, by passively going through the visited location, or just viewing it as a sight, does not participate in its spatial practices. 17 This is a particular conundrum for space art, which posits specific but imagined views, made recognisable through visual references to Earth-based landscapes. In fact, because they cannot travel to these other worlds, the IAAA has held workshops for its members to draw and paint in ‘alien’ landscapes on Earth, including Iceland, Death Valley, CA, and Yellowstone National Park, WY. Direct observing and recording through sketching and painting is essential for space artists because, in the words of British artist David A. Hardy, these landscapes are as close as we will ever get to Mars, Titan or Io. This is the only way to truly “absorb” a landscape; to see how light bounces off a rock and into shadow, how a boulder is full of vesicles, veins or cracks. 18 So, places on other worlds emerge as familiar enough to be recognisable, but different enough to be exhilarating. The tangibility of the scenes represented in space art implies spatial practices. While many illustrations in this genre do not depict human activity, a fair amount show astronauts, spacecraft, bases on planetary bodies, along with actions such as

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__________________________________________________________________ exploration and development of resources. Chesley Bonestell often depicted spacecraft and orbiting space stations in illustrations for popular magazines, as seen in one of the iconic images he produced in collaboration with rocket scientist, Werner von Braun: a 1952 painting showing a rocket over the earth, with the third stage separating off. While Bonestell apparently relished the challenge of accurately depicting rockets in space, his images were paired with text to indicate the inevitability of space exploration, as the 1952 Collier’s cover showing the rocket painting, proclaims ‘Man will conquer space soon!’ Although such representations have been described as promoting space exploration as the next phase of American manifest destiny, it is difficult to know if Bonestell himself shared such views. 19 What is important for our examination, however, is the nature of the human spatial practices implicated in these images. An example of human practices in outer space appears in a painting by David A. Hardy for the first edition of The Challenge of the Stars in 1972, a collaborative text with astronomer Sir Patrick Moore that argues for human space exploration. 20 In a likely nod to Bonestell, Hardy shows Saturn’s moon, Titan, as a snow-covered mountainous landscape, with the planet instead of our Sun, dominating the sky. 21 While the viewer is located near a rocky pillar, Hardy includes astronauts who have just set off an explosion to investigate the composition of Titan’s crust, presumably to determine if mining operations are feasible there. This image, by depicting a specific place and what humans may do there, engages Lefebvre’s idea that the production of social space occurs via the transformation of nature into a product. 22 While Titan may be inaccessible and uninhabitable, proposed human spatial practices there would create spaces that, essentially, replicate those on Earth. In this way, it is of note that the natural features bear such great similarities to Earth-based ones. Interestingly, Hardy’s work optimistically depicts a future of human activity in outer space not constrained by nationalistic urges. In comparison to Bonestell’s images, which present space exploration as possible and immanent, recent space art presents a different proposition: What if…? As their images visually situate the viewer in unearthly places that, excepting our Moon, no one has ever been to, they ask us to suspend our disbelief and entertain questions such as ‘What if this place exists?,’ ‘What if we could go there?’ and ‘What would it look and be like?’ This stems from our desires to see that which, according to art writer James Elkins, is most inaccessible to our vision. 23 Certainly, our desires conjure these images of the cosmos, whose inherent visual elusiveness is countered by the specificity of these representations of it. Hardy’s work exemplifies such issues, as seen in his painting of a hypothetical planet of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf star approximately four light-years from Earth. 24 Again, the conventions of landscape are recognisable with the rocky outcroppings, a body of liquid reflecting the sky, the emphasis on light, and the placement of the viewer on the surface. However, the viewer’s phenomenological

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__________________________________________________________________ experiences and expectations are contradicted by the scientific realities of this place. While this desolate world appears hot because of the predominance of ‘warm’ tones of red, orange, and yellow and the gigantic sun, it is actually cool compared to Earth. Hence, despite the implication of heat from the huge red star and smoking volcanic vents, there are ice crystals on the lake shore. 25 Hardy also adds familiar features to the sky, again evoking a specific place with recognisable elements. To the right of the red dwarf star is the constellation Cassiopeia with an extra star: our Sun. Considering that the painting’s premise is that we are on this planet, the reference to our Sun reminds us that we are simultaneously impossibly far away and small, our star is just another in a sky full of stars. Further, while the viewer is imagined to be here, it is difficult to grasp what one would do here, as the image signifies lifelessness and therefore, offers no human comfort. In short, there is no sense that humans could create a ‘practiced place’ here. Similar tensions appear in astronomer and self-taught artist William K. Hartmann’s, A Strange View from the Night Side of Halley’s Comet, 26 created for The Grand Tour. Hartmann locates the viewer on the nucleus of Halley’s Comet, the scene shrouded in darkness. The irregularly-shaped surface, black and frozen, contains no dramatic rock formations or bodies of water, just a crater at whose edge we stand, with a vent releasing soil and gas on the left. And rather than depicting a landscape infinitely receding, Hartmann creates the opposite effect, as the horizon of the comet’s nucleus appears close to the picture plane. When the viewer’s gaze reaches the sky, the sense of spatial recession is undercut by the black shadow cast by the comet’s head, emphasised by the purple haze of its coma, comprised of gas and dust. Hartmann imaginatively visualised what we might see on the side of the comet away from the sun, looking back toward the direction of the tail, making it difficult to get a sense of how far away the vanishing point is. This view of Halley’s Comet subverts our expectations of landscape in multiple ways: there is a shadow in the centre rather than a glorious sun; darkness, rather than light, fills the scene; and the implied spatial recession is unclearly defined. While this unusual image is potentially awe-inspiring, even locating us on a specific, named place, it denies easy understanding based on our experience of landscape images. Finally, our expectations are contradicted in images representing specific places in a time other than our own. In Lynette Cook’s painting, Jupiter, 100 Billion Years Older, for Infinite Worlds, we see a scene drawn from conventions of landscape, yet one that is strange and unsettling. 27 Cook shows Jupiter from the rocky surface of one of its moons, with the planet turned blue as a result of atmospheric changes. Our Sun, absent from this image, is implied to have already become a small, white dwarf star; now, the sky is brightly lit by red dwarf stars. And, even if one did not know the future setting of this painting, the viewer could easily surmise that this world is uninhabitable for humans. Further, set so far in the future it seems likely that humans would not even inhabit the solar system, as life

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__________________________________________________________________ on Earth will be destroyed when our Sun, itself, dies. Here, perhaps, is the ultimate memento mori, reminding us not just of our own inevitable death, but that of our species and all other known life made possible by our star. Space art can be seen as attempting to answer William Herschel’s questioning of the existence of space quoted in the beginning of this chapter. Artists grappling with this issue have turned to visual conventions from the medium of landscape to transform the immensity of space into specific, but imagined, places. 28 Yet, these depictions are imbued with tension and contradiction involving the practices that inform a space through human social interactions, routine, and memory. In William K. Hartmann’s ‘Family’; 54,000 km Beyond the Moon, we are encouraged to solve this problem by expanding our sense of place. 29 Hartmann shows the Moon in the foreground, the Earth just beyond, and our brilliant Sun to the right. Combined with the title, Hartmann’s painting makes an optimistic visual argument to see Earth as part of a larger system; he states: The environment is no longer just the meadow or the stream next door. Rather, our environment now as human beings is the entire inner solar system, including other planetary bodies and all the free solar energy that is flowing through the space around us. Through space programs of the various nations, often working together, we are developing a human capability to operate in that larger environment. 30 Yet, Lefebvre provides a cautionary note, arguing that the creation of an actual landscape is always circumscribed by social relations that invest it with meaning: Inasmuch as the quest for the relevant productive capacity or creative process leads us in many cases to political power, there arises the question of how such power is exercised. Does it merely command or does it “demand” also? What is the nature of its relationship to the groups subordinate to it, which are themselves “demanders”, sometimes also “commanders”, and invariably “participants”? 31 As human societies increasingly have the capability to view the inner solar system in terms of place - where we might act - questions that plague our creation of place here on Earth remain, including the constraints of nationalism and the rise of the corporation to create ‘commercial space,’ exemplified by the May 2012 expedition of the privately owned SpaceX rocket with its Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. And, along with questions pertinent to spatial practices and place, the problem of comprehending space itself remains. For, as we have seen, attempts to translate

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__________________________________________________________________ outer space into specific awe-inspiring, wondrous landscapes remind us of our dependency on Earth. When we attempt to conceive of ourselves on another world, we are reminded that such an act cannot yet be realised; when space is visualized as specific place, the issue of our inevitable death remains. Certainly William Herschel appreciated the difficulty of understanding space. As he realised that light travels incomprehensible distances through both space and time to reach us, he grasped that what he saw in the stellar landscape each night might not even be there anymore - that as described by Richard Holmes, ‘the sky was full of ghosts.’ 32 As we populate our understanding of the sky with pictures of specific places we, too, acknowledge that these places may not there and are reminded of our Earthbound, finite, existence.

Notes 1

I would like to thank the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Linfield College for supporting this project. Also, I am honoured that Lynette Cook, David A. Hardy, and William K. Hartmann, three space artists whose work is discussed here, have kindly taken an interest in my research and patiently answered my questions. 2 William Herschel, ‘On the Existence of Space’, Paper delivered to the Bath Philosophical Society on May 12, 1780, quoted in Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 93. 3 See this image in Ray Villard and Lynette Cook, Infinite Worlds: Voyages to Planets Beyond Our Sun (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 185. 4 Daniel Sage, ‘Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space’, Geopolitics 13 (2008): 27-53. 5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 38-39. 6 W. J. T. Mitchell, Preface to Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), ix-x. 7 See David. A. Hardy, Visions of Space: Artists Journey through the Cosmos (London and New York: Paper Tiger, 1989); William K. Hartmann, ‘Exploring by Paintbrush’, in In the Stream of Stars: The Soviet American Space Art Book, eds. William K. Hartmann, et al. (New York: Workman, 1990), 132-147; Ron Miller, ‘The Archaeology of Space Art’, Leonardo 29, No. 2 (1996): 139-143; Ron Miller, ‘The History of Space Art’, in In the Stream of Stars: The Soviet American Space Art Book, eds. William K. Hartmann, et al. (New York: Workman, 1990), 24-59. While the history of space art has been helpfully discussed in these sources, further

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__________________________________________________________________ in-depth analysis of its diverse origins, from 19th-century science fiction illustration to the art of early 20th-century French astronomer Lucien Rudaux, is needed. 8 ‘The IAAA Manifesto’, International Association of Astronomical Artists, accessed September 21, 2012, http://iaaa.org/manifesto.html. 9 See http://www.reynoldahouse.org/discover/collections/services_detail02.php? service-id=703585059. 10 Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 218. 11 One exception to this is the painter and astronaut Alan Bean, who walked on the Moon with the Apollo 12 mission in 1969. 12 Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 33-40. 13 See this image in Willy Ley, The Conquest of Space (New York: The Viking Press, 1952). 14 This image testifies to the changing nature of our knowledge of other worlds, as Bonestell imagined Titan with Saturn visible in a clear blue sky. After photos from the Voyager 1 and 2 probes to Saturn in 1980-1 were processed, Titan was revealed to have a thick nitrogen-methane atmosphere. Hence, Bonestell’s view of Saturn from Titan is now known to be physically impossible - the thick clouds would prevent a viewer on the surface from seeing Saturn at all. See Hartmann, ‘Exploring’, 137 and also Ron Miller and William K. Hartmann, The Grand Tour: A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System, Rev. Ed. (New York: Workman, 2005), 116. 15 Ley, The Conquest of Space, 10. 16 Mitchell, Preface, viii. 17 Lefebvre, The Production, 189. 18 David A. Hardy, email message to the author, May 8, 2012. 19 Sage argues that Bonestell’s work celebrated and perpetuated the ethos of manifest destiny. See Sage, ‘Framing Space’, 38-41. However, Hartmann, based on his many personal discussions with Bonestell, argues that Bonestell’s work, which may have contributed to the sense of manifest destiny in the space program of the 1950s, was not motivated by such nationalistic urges. William K. Hartmann, email message to the author, June 4, 2012. For a discussion of the myth of the American frontier and its application to the USA’s programme of space exploration, see Ray A. Williamson, ‘Outer Space as Frontier: Lessons for Today’, Western Folklore 46, No. 4 (1987): 255-267. 20 David A. Hardy and Patrick Moore collaborated on three editions of The Challenge of the Stars, first published in 1972. Their subsequent effort, The New Challenge of the Stars, was published in 1978. And, most recently, they published Futures: 50 Years in Space: The Challenge of the Stars, in 2004.

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__________________________________________________________________ 21

See this image in Patrick Moore and David A. Hardy, The Challenge of the Stars (New York: Rand McNally, 1972), 33. While Hardy was clearly invoking Bonestell’s classic depiction of Saturn, Hardy consulted scientists at the University of Birmingham for information on how the methane atmosphere of Titan would affect the appearance of its sky. Based on the scientists’ comments, Hardy painted the sky green, rather than the blue of Bonestell’s depiction. However, by the time of the subsequent edition of the book in 1978, the colour of the sky was thought to be red, so Hardy created a new scene of Saturn from Titan. And, with the information learned from the Voyager probes in the early 1980s, the appearance of Titan’s sky changed again. David A. Hardy, email message to the author, September 17, 2012. 22 Lefebvre, The Production, 123. 23 James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 32-33. 24 Image on Hardy’s website at the following link: http://www.astroart.org/index. php/extrasolar/209/54/prints/extrasolar/P-proxima-1972. 25 Patrick Moore and David A. Hardy, The New Challenge of the Stars (New York: Rand McNally, 1978), 44-45. 26 Image on Hartmann’s website via the following link: http://www.psi.edu/~hartmann/pic-cat/comets.html. 27 Image on Cook’s website via the following link: http://extrasolar.spaceart.org/cgibin/image2.cgi?filename=blujupiter.jpg&title=Future%20Jupiter. 28 Martin Kemp, Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60-63. 29 Image on Hartmann’s website via the following link: http://www.psi.edu/hartmann/pic-cat/sun.html. 30 William K. Hartmann, email message to the author, May 9, 2012. 31 Lefebvre, The Production, 116. 32 Holmes, The Age of Wonder, 210.

Bibliography Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Hardy, David A. Visions of Space: Artists Journey through the Cosmos. London and New York: Paper Tiger, 1989.

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__________________________________________________________________ Hardy, David A., and Patrick Moore. Futures: 50 Years in Space, The Challenge of the Stars. London: AAPPL Artists’ and Photographers’ Press Ltd., 2004. Hartmann, William K. ‘Exploring by Paintbrush’. In In the Stream of Stars: The Soviet American Space Art Book, edited by William K. Hartmann, Andrei Sokolov, Ron Miller, and Vitaly Myagkov, 132–147. New York: Workman, 1990. Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. New York: Pantheon, 2008. ‘The IAAA Manifesto’. International Association of Astronomical Artists. Accessed September 21, 2012. http://iaaa.org/manifesto.html. Kemp, Martin. Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991. Ley, Willy. The Conquest of Space. New York: The Viking Press, 1952. McCurdy, Howard E. Space and the American Imagination. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. Miller, Ron. ‘The History of Space Art’. In In the Stream of Stars: The Soviet American Space Art Book, edited by William K. Hartmann, Andrei Sokolov, Ron Miller, and Vitaly Myagkov, 24–59. New York: Workman, 1990. —––. ‘The Archaeology of Space Art’. Leonardo 29, No. 2 (1996): 139–143. Miller, Ron, and William K. Hartmann. The Grand Tour: A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System. Rev. Ed. New York: Workman, 2005. Mitchell, W. J. T. Preface to Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, vii–xi. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Moore, Patrick, and David A. Hardy. The Challenge of the Stars. New York: Rand McNally, 1972. —––. The New Challenge of the Stars. New York: Rand McNally, 1978.

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__________________________________________________________________ Sage, Daniel. ‘Framing Space: A Popular Geopolitics of American Manifest Destiny in Outer Space’. Geopolitics 13 (2008): 27–53. Villard, Ray, and Lynette R. Cook. Infinite Worlds: An Illustrated Voyage to Planets Beyond Our Sun. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Williamson, Ray A. ‘Outer Space as Frontier: Lessons for Today’. Western Folklore 46, No. 4 (1987): 255–267. Wilton, Andrew, and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Adrianne Santina teaches in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Linfield College in Oregon, USA. Her current research examines depictions of outer space in painting and photography; she has also studied depictions of cosmology in Native American art and architecture.

Looking Again: Emerging Practice in Domestic Space Ian Madeley Abstract This chapter documents some of the approaches taken in an emerging practice informed by a reassessment of relationships with objects in familiar domestic space. Sequenced as it is by a timeline of personal loss, the work unfolds as a series of stages or rites of passage starting with acts of looking and listening again, reflections on individual items and strategies adopted to re learn their visual language. Initial responses to this new territory are informed by lens-based practitioners, Nicky Hamlyn notes ‘the camera extends what is visible and the image creates a new kind of object beyond its function.’ 1 A transitional stage uses more systematic studies creating controlled juxtapositions between objects drawn together into a different syntax of organisational routine. Performative actions record how routine object placements can reveal changes in the understanding of their familiar language; conversely the empty drawer of the kitchen unit has a universality of meaning; its vacant ambiguity alluding potentially to all empty spaces, it is a symbolic space in the act of relocation, it marks the acquisition and personalisation of new domestic territory or the end of a narrative played out in a particular place; it is a gesture away from becoming a compartment of experience with the placement of a single significant item. ‘Our ordinary environment is always ambiguous; functionality is forever collapsing into subjectivity, and possession is continually getting entangled with utility, as part of the everdisappointed effort to achieve a total integration.’ 2 Developing from its use as a model for experimental practice, the drawer unit becomes structure for further placements referencing texts on how objects are organised and read; these become layered with more performative and ritual actions, loaded increasingly with fragments of personal narrative. Key Words: Spaces, objects, routine, domestic, performative. ***** 1. Synopsis of Approach This chapter documents approaches taken in an emerging practice, which has been informed by looking again at my domestic spaces and a reassessment of relationships with the objects and routines contained within them. A main artistic aim has been to initiate creative re-viewings of objects and routines through representation of the everyday environments and systems in which they are considered. Specifically the paper points to significant stages in the development of the work Spaces Actions a video installation using a series of looped recordings re examining the routine function and interior spaces of a domestic drawer unit.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. Looking and Listening Again Initial approaches in 2008 were framed by a complete sense of starting out again both in terms of the long period of time I had spent away from practice and the changes bought about by the loss of my wife a few months earlier. A heightened perception of our domestic space combined with a need to anchor myself in the things that I knew, the simple things around me determined the initial decision to work with routinely familiar objects, items that over time had accumulated trace elements of my experience with them. In response to the unfamiliarity of the situation there was also a requirement on my part for practice to be fastened within a structured approach; practitioner methodologies and critical writing around artists film informed object re-viewings as I set out to systematically re-learn their language. Hamlyn notes, ‘the camera extends what is visible and the image creates a new kind of object beyond its function.’ 3 A series of photofilm recordings were made using a hand held lens based vocabulary of passing sequences, incremental zoom, forced macro abstraction and random snapshots in what was a re exploration of the geometry of the object. The digital contact print system with which these images are presented utilises the language of collecting whilst suggesting further experiences of the object beyond the frame of the print; David Campany writing on Memories and Archives within Art and Photography notes, ‘Rather than offering anything concrete, the grid of photographs offers raw material to the viewer as potential meaning, in a manner akin to the archive itself.’ 4 I was also working with fragments of collected sound and testing its juxtaposition with object sequences; again there was this interest in re examination through a process of extraction, placing objects within a neutral territory and re presenting them with quite different sound elements. This was a way of working that set out to re challenge what I had come to understand. The domestic spaces within which I work are also marked by a specific vocabulary of sounds, Barthes in his essay listening notes: the appropriation of space is also a matter of sound: domestic space, that of the house, the apartment - the approximate equivalent of animal territory - is a space of familiar, recognised noises whose ensemble forms a kind of household symphony. 5 Juxtapositions between object images and audio fragments conducted during the early stages of emerging practice evolved in the installation by mean of the drawer mechanism developing as an almost rhythmic percussive element.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3. Transition Assumptions around what my domestic environment had become were confronted in a series of test recordings reconsidering the kitchen as a potentially reactive, experimental space. Time-lapse recordings were conducted around dawn using daybreak to illuminate the interiors of storage cupboards. An improvisational series of opening, closing, and utensil placement actions were carried out on the kitchen drawer unit; these triggered reflection on how changes in the location and placement of objects can re-challenge understanding of their perceived language and function. As the focus of practice moved from individual studies to object juxtapositions so I became informed by aspects of theory relating to interactions occurring between objects re-introduced into my organisational routine. For example Baudrillard’s application of semiotic language whereby meaning is made clear by different signs working together is relevant to the storage context of my own environment in which objects with everyday practical sign values are often juxtaposed with those from other cultural systems; objects for which domestic space has become a final destination. In his Subjective Discourse for the Non-Functional System of Objects Baudrillard defines the antique objects primary function as the ‘signifying of time.’ 6 He goes on to compare the special psychological standing of the antique object by contrasting its significance with that of the functional one described as being efficient but ‘which exists only in the present.’ 7 In one of the drawer opening sequences in Spaces Actions the slow withdrawal of the empty utensil tray is followed by a re-revealing of the compartment using a number of carefully arranged everyday knives and forks. The storage space remains stationary whilst miniature reproduction terracotta figures relocated from a gift shop at the Xian burial site are placed carefully into a recess at the front of the tray. The stage that followed set out to initiate a model for experimental practice in order to further develop what had become a more improvisational way of working. Informed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidts Oblique Strategies 8 the idea of chance selection was adapted and a series of movements to be used in sequences re examined; these included; approach/reaching for, opening and closing gestures which were then rehearsed in a series of performed actions. From these a paradigm was modeled with different arm actions and the corresponding drawer to be opened chosen randomly; action drawer pairings were then practiced further and recorded in sequences of four. An interim series of tests ‘actions/responses/new spaces’ are conducted in a public gallery providing feedback on the spatial and auditory arrangement of the work. The installation comprises two analogue monitors connected to DVD players and boxed with screens facing up for the visitor to look down upon. The monitors display looped recordings of opening and closing actions conducted on the drawer

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__________________________________________________________________ unit. The arrangement is informed by object juxtapositions conveyed through the double page mechanism of the Japanese Photobook; discussing the influence of these books some of which have put aside conventions of editorial structure Ivan Vartanian in his Introduction to Japanese Photobooks of the 1960’s notes; ‘In many such books order is abandoned in favour of the trial-and-error pairing of images on a spread.’ 9 Objects selected from the domestic environment are re-presented within the downward perspective and mirrored symmetry of the drawer space, revealing through a series of repeat opening and closing movements the architectural structure of the unit. As natural light faded in the gallery the work assumed a floating mystical quality; object pairings and actions became increasingly asynchronous as loops on both monitors became less uniform over time leading to more random breaks and pairings. Uniting the installation sequences with the actuality of the object itself the drawer unit is relocated as protagonist in the upper level of the gallery marking the end point of the visitors passage through the exhibition space. The realisation of this experimental stage in an external venue was significant in terms of shared experience and perception of the work. There was a sense of a threshold having been crossed in terms of my position in relation to the work and how the work could possibly function in other spaces. Breaks in the recorded loop sequences created by the increasing lag in the function of the equipment suggested the potential in exploring a broken narrative approach with the use of more scripted sequences alternating across both monitors. A number of increasingly autobiographical references emerge as the compartments of the drawer unit are used to stage the playing out of reflective acts using the forced imposition of items loaded with memory. One such arrangement involves reflection on the role that the unit has played in the family ritual of eating with the adaptation of the compartment as set dining space anticipating the arrival of food. Another staged action sees the scooping of a handful of chickpeas stored in the drawer space an allusion to Bachelard’s use of the story told in Henri Bosco’s Monsieur Carre-Benoit where his intelligent filing cabinet has been repurposed as larder for the storage of mustard, lentils and peas. 10 In a later sequence the drawer space becomes site for multiple crash landings by polystyrene model planes, once used on family holidays, they are now forced onto the geometry of the utensil tray in a gesture resonating with loss and forced closure. Bachelard in The Poetics of Space goes on to suggests how storage spaces become also ‘the unfathomable store of daydreams of intimacy.’ 11 Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these “objects” and a few others in equally high favour, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy. 12

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__________________________________________________________________ Objects used in the installation are subject to the structure and subdivisions of the drawer compartment. A language of constraint is created through the choreography of the object and the mechanism of the drawer, as framed extracted space is re examined through the optical language of the lens. The compartment box suggests formality and is also a mechanism for representation. The constructed environments of Joseph Cornell’s Shadow boxes use extraction, and the re presentation of images and objects combining both the autobiographical with everyday references; Diane Waldman in Collage Assemblage and the Found Object observes: Like the Surrealists, Cornell relied on the unexpected juxtaposition of objects to imbue his collages and box like constructions with a new symbolic imagery. Cornell’s major innovation was to combine the associative urgency of the estranged object with the formal power of the box construction. Cornell made of the box construction a unique means of plastic expression-a vivid, memorable realm of both real and imagined existence. 13 In responding through the act of looking again, the development of Spaces Actions has been a significant stage in my emerging practice; connected as it is to the aim of initiating re-viewings of the home environment, there are daily opportunities for challenging the auto response basis upon which we participate in the requirements of routine, or re-examine the familiar. There are also moments of opportunism that familiarity can advantage, either through the realisation of a moment or the improvisation of a readymade situation. Filmed as they are in a domestic location during a time period of many weeks the recordings form a real-time series of acts and narrative fragments subject to the changing lighting conditions of the kitchen space. Both the work and the context of its development unfolded in what to use Arnold Van Genneps study of ritual behaivour came increasingly to be recognised as a series of stages or rites of passage. 14 Using Van Gennep’s model in the context of my own experience the stage of separation brings with it a re-reading of unfamiliar, familiar objects removed and re-examined. A transition stage rechallenges the routine function of storage space in a series of imposed juxtapositions developed and relocated for viewing in an external space. The facing out of the work in this way has been the start of a process of incorporation with public engagement and reaction resulting in the work developing a narrative of its own beyond its domestic context.

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Notes 1

Nicky Hamlyn, Kino-Pixel-Exploding the Image (Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, 2008). 2 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 2005), 92-93. 3 Hamlyn, Kino-Pixel-Exploding the Image. 4 David Campany, Art and Photography (London: Phaidon, 2003), 21. 5 Roland Barthes Listening appears in Audio Works by Artists, eds. Daniel Kurjakovic and Sebastian Lohse (Zurich: Memory/Cage Editions, 1999), 141. 6 Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 78. 7 Ibid., 80. 8 Kevin Concannon, Cut And Paste: Collage and the Art of Sound from Sound by Artists Art metropole and Walter Phillips Gallery 1990, accessed June 5, 2012, http://www.ubu.com/papers/concannon.html. 9 Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian, Sequencing: Japanese Photobooks of the 1960’s and 70’s (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2009), 19. 10 In Gaston Bachelard, drawers, chests and wardrobes: The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1994), 74-75. The story of Henri Bosco’s Monsieur Carre-Benoit reasoning cabinet is used to highlight what Bachelard points to as Bergson’s overuse of the drawer metaphor to convey his dislike for classified thinking. 11 Ibid., 78. 12 Ibid. 13 Diane Waldman, Abstract Expressionism: Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object (London: Phaidon, 1992), 206. 14 Arnold Van Gennep, in his The Rites of Passage distinguishes between the rites of separation, transition and incorporation. See The Rites of Passage (The University of Chicago Press, 1960), 166.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Barthes, Roland. ‘Listening’. In Audio Works by Artists. Edited by Daniel Kurjakovic, and Sebastian Lohse. Zurich: Memory/Cage Editions, 1999. Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. London: Verso, 2005. Campany, David. Art and Photography. London: Phaidon, 2003.

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__________________________________________________________________ Concannon, Kevin. ‘Cut and Paste: Collage and The Art of Sound’. Ubuweb. Accessed June 5, 2012. http://www.ubu.com/papers/concannon.html. Hamlyn, Nicky. Film Art Phenomena. London: BFI Publishing, 2003. —––. Kino-Pixel-Exploding the Image. Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, 2008. Hultén, Sophia. More Than the Sum of the Parts: Sofia Hultén and Helen Legg in Conversation. Sophia Hulten, 12 Works, 149–153. Ikon Kunstlerhaus Bremen, 2009. Kaneko, Ryuichi, and Ivan Vartanian. Japanese Photobooks of the 1960’s and 70’s. New York: Aperture Foundation, 2009. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. The University of Chicago Press, 1960. Waldman, Diane. Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object. London: Phaidon, 1992. Ian Madeley is an emerging media artist and teaches across many areas of visual communication at the University of Wolverhampton. One of his artistic aims is to initiate creative re viewings of objects through representation of the everyday spaces and routines in which they are considered.

Contesting the Modernity of Domestic Space: Design Reform and the Middle-Class Home, 1890-1914 Patricia Lara-Betancourt Abstract Victorian Britain, and London in particular, had some of the largest and most successful department stores in the world producing and selling domestic furniture and furnishings to an ever expanding national and international middle-class clientele. Businesses such as Maple, Whiteley, Waring & Gillow and Selfridges, among many others, made London into a byword for one of the best shopping places in the world. However, in spite of their success and popularity, a loose but powerful group of artists and designers, and the design reform movement they promoted, consistently attacked the products and commercial activities of retailers and the consumers who patronised them. Thus the British middle-class home with its richly furnished interiors became a contested place in terms of taste, class and gender, and of the ideals and aspirations behind them, such as modernity and domesticity. This chapter illustrates the contested modernity of domestic space by examining reformers’ criticism directed towards the commercial sphere and towards women’s taste in particular, as reflected in advice literature published in 1890 to 1914. Key Words: Domestic space, Victorian middle-class home, middle-class women, department stores, design reform, Arts and Crafts Movement, modernity, domesticity. ***** 1. Design Reform At odds with modern industry and commerce, design reformers aspired to revive pre-industrial modes of production based on medieval notions of craftsmanship. Their reformist discourse and campaign, linked to the designer A. W. N. Pugin, art critic John Ruskin, artist and designer William Morris and, later on, the Arts and Crafts movement, was backed by institutions such as the Society of Arts, the national museums and galleries, and the Schools of Design. Hence it was successful in disseminating a new set of design principles permeating all practices regarding the decorative arts. Although essential to the nineteenth century capitalist economy and the welfare of the nation and Empire, British trade and industry had powerful detractors in the spheres of politics and arts. Those who believed industrialisation should not develop on its own initiative sought government intervention and regulation. This position opposed the powerful view promoting economic Liberalism and free trade. Aligned with the former, design reformers focused their criticism on the

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__________________________________________________________________ perceived excesses of industry and commerce and what they saw as their divorce from art and craftsmanship. Their opposition gathered momentum at the biggest trade fair ever organised, ‘The Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations’ of 1851. 1 This milestone event was a phenomenal success with over 6 million visitors, yet not everybody shared the general euphoria. An influential group of men, including the exhibition organisers (the designers Henry Cole, Owen Jones, the artist Richard Redgrave and others), condemned many exhibits as lacking in design standards and artistic merit. 2 Critics complained about the realistic representation of nature and what they saw as an indiscriminate use of ornamentation which they considered vulgar and in poor taste. One of the visitors to the exhibition was William Whiteley, a young draper from Yorkshire who was later to become a hugely successful businessman. He was only twenty years old in 1851, but the displays, the scale of the event and the city of London made a big impression on him. Four years later, Whiteley moved to London and opened his own business in 1863. By 1868 his shop had expanded to include seventeen departments, and in the next twenty years Whiteley became one of the largest and most successful department stores in Britain. 3 Following the example of the Great Exhibition, the store reproduced the sense of spectacle by having attractively arranged goods intended for a massive audience which would be captivated by their ingenuity, novelty, variety, technology and art - that is, by their modernity. In contrast to Whiteley’s, William Morris’s reaction to the exhibition was critical and negative. Morris was seventeen at the time, but what he saw appalled him. With a romantic and religious sensibility inspired by his readings on Gothic art and architecture, he felt physically ill contemplating the displays, which he judged as vulgar and ‘wonderfully ugly.’ 4 This lasting impression was later to impinge on his career as a designer, small-scale businessman, and socialist campaigner, and it provided the basis of his involvement with the Arts and Crafts Movement. 5 Morris’s designs reflected the nineteenth-century Romantic revival of Gothic craft, with its interest in interlacing patterns and medieval guilds. At odds with the modern age and opposed to industrialism, Morris worked, throughout his life, to disseminate what he saw as superior aesthetic standards in design. The lives of these two extraordinary men, William Whiteley and William Morris, exemplify the spheres of Commerce and Art, and the tensions between them that permeated the design, production, distribution and consumption of domestic furniture and furnishings in the period. Their lives also illustrate two very different ways of relating to modernity: one was based on developing capitalist business principles and potential to the full, using what capital, technology and modern industry had to offer, to enhance economic and material progress; the rival vision was anchored in the rejection of industrial production and the role of the machine in modern society.

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__________________________________________________________________ Not surprisingly, the tensions between these spheres triggered a string of debates about the role of design in modern industry in Britain. The debates illustrate the anxieties contemporaries felt in the face of changes affecting the whole of society. Back in the eighteenth century, large-scale international trade challenged and changed attitudes towards consumption and what defined social boundaries. As industrialisation unfolded, the scope of the debates widened to include matters concerning not so much the consumption of foreign goods, but the design, production and consumption of British-made goods. After the economic crisis of the 1830s, most discussions about what could improve the design of goods (although allegedly wanting to improve British competitiveness in international trade) were usually directed against fashion and popular taste, that is, against the market. 6 The architectural historian Jules Lubbock suspects that reformers’ efforts were therefore not so much about making manufactures more commercial or fashionable, but about fostering a particular set of design principles. 7 He observes that although expressed in aesthetic terms, definitions of what constituted ‘good design’ and ‘good taste’ had social and economic implications. In a similar way to their eighteenth-century counterparts, reform writers felt uneasy about the fast changes in consumption behaviour permeating wider sectors of society. This might explain why in the second half of the nineteenth century, advice writers, almost without exception, made classist remarks when discussing domestic furnishing, criticising social aspirations as reflected in consumers’ choice of articles. The most prominent and articulate exponent of design reform ideas was Morris who continuously wrote and lectured about it. In the last decade of the century, Morris and several others, including the architect and designer Phillip Webb and the designer Walter Crane, joined the socialist cause. Then their discourse and reform campaign was directed not just at commercial goods and machine production but at the economic system that fostered them. 2. Reform as Advice Literature In reality, there were many examples of designers and Arts and Crafts artists working together with trade manufacturers and bridging the gap between the spheres of Art and Commerce. Historian Alan Crawford explains this as a kind of ‘working balance’ in which artists dismissed trade as a whole, but were keen on establishing a connection with some firms they approved of. Furthermore, Arts and Crafts designs had a significant influence on furnishing firms as seen in trade catalogues, and also in the popular genre of domestic advice literature. Comprised of books, journals, and magazines which aimed to instruct the ordinary householder on matters of decoration, these publications became an important way of articulating and disseminating the ideals of the reform movement beyond an exclusive group of artists and intellectuals.

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__________________________________________________________________ The genre of advice literature became prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly from the 1870s onwards. Factors that contributed to the popularity of manuals were mainly the rise in population and in the number of households, the continuous expansion of the middle class and an increase in this class’s earning and spending power, along with growing levels of literacy in society and significant developments in the printing and publishing industries. Not surprisingly, the expanding middle class, and largely its women, were the target of many publications advising them on how to furnish and embellish the home. 8 The question is, who wrote these books? An important source was the one linked to specialised journals such as The Studio, The Architectural Review, The Cabinet Maker and The House. Editors or regular contributors to these publications would also write books on the subject of home decoration. J. H. Elder-Duncan, for example, was the editorial secretary for The Architectural Review when he wrote The House Beautiful and Useful. And Walter Shaw Sparrow, a trained artist, had already published The Modern Home and The British Home of To-Day when he wrote Hints on House Furnishing. Some of these writers were qualified architects like Joseph Crouch and Edmund Butler, the authors of The Apartments of the House. 9 The genre, in general, showed also an active participation from women as authors. 10 Most female writers were regular contributors to magazines, and it was not unusual to gather material previously published in the magazines and edit it as a book. Florence Mary Gardiner, for instance, printed her articles first on The Weekly Scotsman, The Housewife, Winter’s Magazine and The Ludgate Illustrated Magazine. Mrs Humphry wrote for Truth under the name of Madge; Mrs Jane Panton contributed to The Lady, and Mrs C. S. Peel did the same for Woman. Particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, more women than ever before wrote and published articles and books on varied matters, including home decoration. A common reaction from male authors was to put women’s writing down as inferior and inappropriate, questioning women’s authority on a matter which they considered, at least on an intellectual level, their preserve. The author Walter Shaw Sparrow spoke with contempt of ‘women decorators,’ and accused female writers of being more interested in getting a commission out of traders for recommending their products, than in learning ‘the decorative art.’ 11 And the author H. J. Jennings was not keen on: the great number of pamphlets, treatises and brochures written on the subject of “Art in the Home,” in which ladies with a pretty taste dogmatise in the nicest afternoon-tea manner on how to make artistic lamp-shades, paint door-panels, and beautify a drawing room with “aesthetic” remnants. 12

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__________________________________________________________________ Jennings was referring to the ‘Art at Home’ series published by Macmillan two decades before, and to the Aesthetic Movement that inspired it. The writers in question were Rhoda and Agnes Garret, professional interior decorators running their own business, and the artists and writers Mrs. Orrinsmith, Mrs. Loftie and Lady Barker. Regardless of Jennings remarks, their books clearly reflected their professional expertise. Male or female, the authors of these manuals wrote from an assumed position of authority, usually presenting themselves as experts in the matter, asserting a professional capacity as architects, interior decorators or writers. That they were targeting the middle class was reiterated throughout the books. But beyond the apparent altruistic motive of assisting readers on how to furnish their homes in artistic ways, the advice discourse had an unequivocal reformist tone, and many quoted famous critics, such as Morris, Ruskin or Walter Crane in the introductions, hence linking their books to the ideas and members of the artistic reform movement. 13 In view of the above, it appears as a contradiction that even though advice writers embraced the reform discourse, they did it, in many cases, with a nod to furnishing firms. The result was an ambivalent advice inspired by Arts and Crafts ideas but based also on the expanding range of consumer goods. Authors relied on commercial examples as a way of illustrating their writings and were not shy in recommending particular brands and shops. Theirs was a practical approach to the subject at hand in acknowledging that the middle class of ‘moderate means’ had access to commercially-made goods rather than to bespoke handcrafted and expensive designs. This explains why many of the illustrations displayed were taken from trade catalogues by department stores operating within a capitalist system of multiple and large-scale production, retailing, and consumption. In brief, the paradox lay in interpreting Arts and Crafts ideals for the middle-class consumer who most likely would buy from the large furnishing shop. In some cases, this pragmatic strand of advice could also be understood as a response from manufacturers and retailers to the relentless attacks from design reformers. That was the case of H. J. Jennings, who wrote a book on home decoration on behalf of Waring & Gillow. Some of the bigger firms appropriated the format of the design reform and advice discourse and used it not to condemn but to advertise and promote their goods and services. Oetzmann & Co., for example, reproduced in its trade catalogues Mrs. Panton’s previously published magazine articles where she had given decorative advice while recommending the store. 14 Within this practical approach, authors referred to the goods available in the marketplace, and highlighted the extensive range on offer. This did not preclude criticising traders in the same texts. Penelope, a contributor of The House, for instance, decried the local decorator for its ‘happy-go-lucky’ way, and did not trust the skills of a salesman in choosing a carpet. Yet her articles were based on room-

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__________________________________________________________________ schemes and illustrations provided by commercial firms such as Smee & Cobay, Heal & Son and Bartholomew & Fletcher. The explanation for this apparent contradiction lay in the context of the design reform discourse, which, as a matter of principle, portrayed commerce as opposed to ‘good design’ and ‘good taste.’ The way authors handled this inconsistency was to express general criticism of the trade, and then proceed recommending specific firms. 3. Contesting the Home and Middle-Class Women A significant element in the reformist discourse in advice literature was the criticism directed at the middle-class woman, and particularly at her judgement in matters of taste. In her role as homemaker and consumer she was repeatedly mocked and accused of committing sins against ‘good taste.’ At the time, a common criticism from male advice authors was the one aimed at the drawing room, traditionally considered a feminine space. Authors attacked what it represented: female sociability and taste, and a gendered type of decoration. J. H. Elder-Duncan complained that, The drawing-room is rather the licensed place for useless furniture-china cabinets for which specimens have to be bought; revolving bookcases to hold the hundred best books one never reads, but from which the hostess can select a volume to peruse, upside down, at the entrance of the first guest on “at home” days, and so preserve a reputation for aplomb and distinguished hauteur. 15 This middle-class woman is portrayed as copying the external signs of a more refined social demeanour. The author’s reproach contains a snobbish and moralising attitude towards social mobility, which many authors believed was the driving force behind the wrong kind of consumption. Reformers efforts were thus directed at undermining women’s increasing power as consumers, and, linked to it, their strong alliance to retailers and manufacturers. Most male authors, when discussing the principles of decoration, spoke against clutter and excessive ornamentation, blaming the housewife for it. According to J. H. Elder-Duncan, some women’s domestic arrangements and decorative initiatives spoilt the work carried out by experts: In regard to ornaments the ladies are, I regret to say, great offenders … one can only marvel at the instinct which prompts them to crowd every available shelf and table to its full capacity with nick-nacks and trifles. […] How many times, I wonder, have the efforts and schemes of the most competent architects

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__________________________________________________________________ and decorative artists been brought to naught by the mistaken energies of their clients’ wives and daughters? 16 Male authors represented the home and its rooms not as a place belonging to the family and its domestic affairs, but as a space run by architectural rules and purely aesthetic concerns. As design historian Penny Sparke demonstrates, the reason for reformers’ attack lay in a gendered design reform discourse. The male dominated reformist cause focused on the sphere of production, that is, on notions of design, function, materials, and manufacturing procedures. This approach implied a disregard of social and symbolic uses relative to family life and the private sphere of the home. There were at work two different sets of standards with which to appreciate and experience the domestic space, its furnishings and decoration. 17 From their point of view, reformers believed that women followed ‘false’ criteria when decorating the household. Because they were at odds with it, reformers failed to understand how the world of industry and commerce actually worked. The fear of contamination prevented a better understanding of modern business, which not only hindered their efforts to compete with it, but also interfered with the process of using industry for their own benefit. Furthermore, in snubbing feminine and popular taste, they missed the opportunity to relate to an important element in the design process: the consumer needs, which, besides aesthetics, reflect other important values and aspirations. Design reformers were unable to acknowledge the growing importance of women’s role as homemakers and home furnishers, through their new and empowering shopping and consumption behaviour. In criticising their taste, they disregarded the parameters on which that taste was based, such as gender, class, and domestic concerns. Overall, what underlined this antagonism was a Modernist preoccupation with the aesthetics of mass production, which, in spite of their artistic success, reformers could not resolve at the time.

Notes 1

Among the first to oppose the aesthetic of the new industrial products were A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin, and Henry Cole and his associates, Owen Jones, Matthew Digby Wyatt and Richard Redgrave. 2 See Jeffrey A. Auerback, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (London: Yale University Press, 1999). 3 Gareth Shaw, ‘Whiteley, William (1831-1907)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, October 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36870, 1-3. Linda Stratmann, Whiteley’s Folly: The Life and Death of a Salesman (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004), 8-10.

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Charles Newton, Victorian Designs for the Home (London: V&A Publications, 1999), 10. Harvey and Jon Press, William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 9. Charlotte Gere, Nineteenth-Century Decoration: The Art of the Interior (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 278. 5 The phrase ‘Arts and Crafts movement’ was coined later, probably introduced by Nikolaus Pevsner with the publication of his book Pioneers of Modern Design in 1936. 6 Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550-1960 (London: Yale University Press, 1995), xii. The discussions on popular taste were also linked to the criticism of women and femininity. 7 Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste, xi-xv and 248. 8 Charles Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1872 [1868]); Rhoda and Agnes Garret, Suggestions for House Decoration in Painting, Woodwork and Furniture (London: Macmillan & Co., 1876); Mrs H. R. Haweis, The Art of Decoration (London: Chatto & Windus, 1881); Mrs. J. E. Panton, From Kitchen to Garret: Hints for Young Householders (London: Ward and Downey, 1888); Mrs J. E. Panton, Suburban Residences and How to Circumvent Them (London: Ward & Downey, 1896); Mrs. Humphry, Housekeeping: A Guide to Domestic Management, 2nd edition (London: F. V. White & Co., 1895); and Mrs C. S. Peel, The New Home: Treating of the Arrangement, Decoration and Furnishing of a House of Medium Size to be Maintained by a Moderate Income (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1898). 9 Joseph Crouch and Edmund Butler, The Apartments of the House: Their Arrangement, Furnishing and Decoration (London: At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1900); J. H. Elder-Duncan, The House Beautiful and Useful: Being Practical Suggestions on Furnishing and Decoration (London: Cassell and Company, 1907); William Shaw Sparrow, Hints on House Furnishing (London: Eveleigh Nash Fawside House, 1909). 10 Dena Attar, A Bibliography of Household Books Published in Britain, 18001914 (London: Prospect Books, 1987), 422-429. In her comprehensive bibliography Attar lists 324 volumes published from 1888 to 1914, of which 172, that is, more than half, dealt mainly with the themes of housekeeping and decoration. Female authors wrote over one hundred of these. 11 Sparrow, Hints, 48-49. 12 H. J. Jennings, Our Homes and How to Beautify Them (London: Harrison & Sons, 1902), 17. .

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Penny Sparke made a thorough analysis of the design reform movement’s politics in As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: Harper Collins, 1995). 14 Oetzmann & Co., Guide to House Furnishing, trade catalogue, ca. 1890. 15 Elder-Duncan, The House, 161. 16 Ibid., 21-22. 17 Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink, 50-69.

Bibliography Attar, Dena. A Bibliography of Household Books Published in Britain, 1800-1914. London: Prospect Books, 1987. Auerback, Jeffrey A. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. London: Yale University Press, 1999. Crouch, Joseph, and Edmund Butler. The Apartments of the House: Their Arrangement, Furnishing and Decoration. London: At the Sign of the Unicorn, 1900. Eastlake, Charles. Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1872 [1868]. Elder-Duncan, J. H. The House Beautiful and Useful: Being Practical Suggestions on Furnishing and Decoration. London: Cassell and Company, 1907. Garret, Rhoda, and Agnes Garret. Suggestions for House Decoration in Painting, Woodwork and Furniture. London: Macmillan & Co., 1876. Gere, Charlotte. Nineteenth-Century Decoration: The Art of The Interior. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. Haweis, Mrs H. R. The Art of Decoration. London: Chatto & Windus, 1881. Humphry, Mrs. Housekeeping: A Guide to Domestic Management, 2nd Edition. London: F. V. White & Co., 1895. Jennings, H. J. Our Homes and How to Beautify Them. London: Harrison & Sons, 1902.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lubbock, Jules. The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550-1960. London: Yale University Press, 1995. Newton, Charles. Victorian Designs for the Home. London: V&A Publications, 1999. Oetzmann & Co., Guide to House Furnishing. Trade Catalogue, ca. 1890. Panton, Mrs. J. E. From Kitchen to Garret: Hints for Young Householders. London: Ward and Downey, 1888. —––. Suburban Residences and How to Circumvent Them. London: Ward & Downey, 1896. Peel, Mrs C. S. The New Home: Treating of the Arrangement, Decoration and Furnishing of a House of Medium Size to be Maintained by a Moderate Income. Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1898. Press, Harvey, and Jon Press. William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. Shaw, Gareth. ‘Whiteley, William (1831-1907)’. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, September 2004, Online Edition. October 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36870, 1–3. Sparke, Penny. As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste. London: Harper Collins, 1995. Sparrow, William Shaw. Hints on House Furnishing. London: Eveleigh Nash Fawside House, 1909. Stratmann, Linda. Whiteley’s Folly: The Life and Death of a Salesman. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004. Patricia Lara-Betancourt is Postdoctoral Researcher of the Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University, London, UK. Her research focuses on the themes of Modernity, Representation and Identity. During 2010 and 2011 she was editorial assistant to Interiors: Design Architecture Culture (Berg) and co-edited Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior (Berg, 2011).

Landscapes of Belonging: Female Ex-Combatants Remembering the Liberation Struggle in Urban Maputo Jonna Katto Abstract Mozambique’s liberation struggle that extended over 10 years from 1964 to 1974 was mostly fought on the terrain of the northern provinces of Cabo Delgado, Niassa and Tete. Yet, though the rural landscapes of northern Mozambique are intrinsically tied to the country’s national history, the public commemoration of the struggle in the present day context is subjugated by a state-led narrative more closely linked to the urban experience of the predominantly male political elite. In this chapter, I explore how female veterans living in the state-capital Maputo in southern Mozambique conceptualise national space and belonging, and construct its gendered meanings. Though significant numbers of girls and women were mobilised by the FRELIMO guerrilla army to fight in the struggle, up to date little research exists on women’s accounts of their experience. The paper is based on life history interviews that I conducted in Maputo with female war veterans in 2009 and 2011. On the one hand, I show how the abstract space of the nation is made sense of and personalised through the women’s experience of the liberation struggle, and further juxtaposed with their current experience of the cityscape. On the other hand, I discuss how the capital city as the spatio-temporal location of the ‘history-telling event’ continues to shape the memory of the liberation struggle, contributing to the enactment of a particular gendered spatiality of belonging. Key Words: Mozambique’s liberation struggle, female ex-combatants, national space, spatiality of belonging, landscape, gender, cityscape. ***** 1. Introduction Mozambique’s liberation struggle that extended over 10 years from 1964 to 1974 was mostly fought on the terrain of the northern provinces of Cabo Delgado, Niassa and Tete. Through these years, thousands of rural youths, including hundreds of girls and young women, were mobilized by the guerrilla army FRELIMO 1 to participate in the military campaign and fight for national liberation. The rural landscapes of northern Mozambique are thus intrinsically tied to Mozambique’s national history. And yet, in the present day context, the public commemoration of the struggle is subjugated by a state-led narrative more closely linked to the urban experience of the predominantly male political elite. 2 This paper shifts the attention to a so far unrecognised aspect of the liberation struggle and gives voice to the experience of women with the aim to discuss the ways

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__________________________________________________________________ national belonging is conceptualised in the personal narratives of female veterans currently living in the state-capital in southern Mozambique. My key concept in this chapter is landscape, which I take to signify a way of relating, both materially and imaginatively, to the physical and social world that we inhabit and experience. 3 Despite its historical roots, landscape, as I apply the term in this chapter, is not conceived in a visual sense, that is, as a vista that can be observed from the outside. Rather, I aim to emphasise a conception of landscape that is experienced through embodiment. As Tim Ingold argues, ‘through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it.’ 4 The individual, furthermore, is positioned within the simultaneous production of various landscapes. 5 Drawing on the life history narratives of 30 women ex-combatants I interviewed in the capital city and the surrounding area in 2009 and 2011, I suggest, on the one hand, that the changed engagement of women with the physical space (of Mozambique) through the liberation struggle, further coupled with FRELIMO’s political narrative, played a significant role in the shaping of new landscapes of home-place, and that the abstract concept of the nation became a meaningful landscape of belonging. On the other hand, I discuss how the statecapital as the spatio-temporal location of telling, that is, the location of the women’s everyday experience of the cityscape, continues to determine how national space is conceptualised and how its meaning is negotiated in relation to other landscapes of belonging. Alessandro Portelli’s model of ‘three-layered history-telling’ is a useful analytical tool to examine how memory and space are related in the narration of history. According to this model, three narrative modes - the institutional, the communal, and the personal - can be distinguished in all history-telling events, and, as he argues, each narrative level is related to distinct social and spatial referents, and a specific point of view. 6 Following Portelli’s model, I will, in the following section, focus on one ex-combatant’s narrative, 7 and through three narrative events, I will illustrate the multi-levelled constitutive relation between memory and space, and the social framing of the performative act of remembering and history-telling. In the first event, I explore how the personal spatial referents constitute sites of memory; in the second, how the meaning of the institutional narrative, that is, the official Frelimo state narrative, 8 is negotiated in relation to one’s personal history; finally, in the third, how spatial belonging is constructed. Then, in the last part of this chapter, I situate the individual ex-combatant narrative within the broader dynamics of the collective remembering of the liberation struggle that takes place in Maputo. 2. Maria’s Narratives Maria is a 57-year old retired nurse whom I had the privilege to meet, interview and converse with on various occasions in 2009 and 2011. The following are three

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__________________________________________________________________ narrative events which illustrate how she continues to actively remember and make sense of her experience of the liberation struggle and relate it to her current experience of life in the state capital. First narrative event: Personal spaces Us here, where are we? I am here in this yard. There are times that these neighbours talk: “Oh, that is a former combatant, but she fought to suffer. She fought to suffer and is suffering until today.” Do you understand? But what will you answer? You don’t have words to respond. I limit myself to saying like this: “Hey, it’s ok, I fought to suffer, but at least you are independent!” Yes [laughs]. That’s it. We are here; there is no [other] way…that’s it. 9 In Maria’s narrative, ‘here’ is the pervasive spatial referent, and although I, as the interviewer, try to keep her in the past, her story keeps returning to the present moment, and her life in the cityscape. She often talks about knitting, which she had learnt as a young girl studying at the mission school on the Mueda plateau, and which today is an important source of income on top of the state pension she receives as a war veteran. Transferred to Maputo in 1976, presently, she resides on the outskirts of Maputo’s formal ‘cement city,’ in a tiny apartment in what looks like a rundown storage building together with three of her six children and two grandchildren. She divorced her ex-combatant husband in 1989, and, as her family’s sole provider, she often laments the fact that she is ‘alone’ without the support of her extended family. While her neighbours are closely connected to her everyday living space through the common yard that they share, her relationship with them remains ambivalent. The yard is a space of social contention: surrounded by her neighbours - the non-ex-combatant city dwellers (‘they’) - it is the place where Maria is pushed to negotiate and make sense of her personal space in the cityscape. Second narrative event: Memories of war The problem…there isn’t consideration. To work, we worked, a lot! What is it that we did? We really did something, but there isn’t consideration. [Jonna: Could you explain a bit?] Fine, after the war…there isn’t a person that fought and can live in a house like this. It is a bit embarrassing! [laughs] Fine, this is my personal idea. It is a bit embarrassing for a person to live in these conditions, and to say I fought from 1964 to 1974. There is no logic! But there is no other way. I am living with my children,

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__________________________________________________________________ with my grandchildren, I don’t know what, I am living. Even so I am living. When there are these things, aah, today is the commemorative day, it is the day, I don’t know what, I go. I go. I can’t abandon my party. Because my party, our party, our government - is ours. We can’t leave it in whatever way. No. Until the last drop. [laughs] Until the last drop of blood, we won’t leave. We are, I am living well, I am living badly, but I can’t leave my party. That’s it. 10 Here the narrative is in the personal narrative mode, centred on the personal space of Maria’s house and the social referents of her family, that is, her children and grandchildren. Yet, due to her experience of the liberation struggle, this space becomes also intimately linked to the institutional spatial and social referents of the party and the state. The liberation struggle belongs not only to institutional memory, but also forms part of her personal history. War, Portelli argues, often appears in narratives as the ‘most dramatic point of encounter between the personal and public, between biography and history.’ 11 Through the ten-year war that she took active part in, Maria’s personal life history is closely tied to the history of Mozambique. Still, at the same time, Maria’s words suggest an ambiguous relationship between her personal biography and the state narrative of national liberation. Though Maria, similarly to the other ex-combatants I interviewed in Maputo, is seemingly dedicated to narrating in accordance with the script of official historiography, there are moments in her narrative, like in the excerpt above, that the tension becomes tangible between her personal experience of the cityscape and the historical narrative of the nation. When I ask her to explain what she means by ‘there being no consideration,’ she departs from the communal mode to speak of her personal experiences. Her memories of suffering, as she often emphasises while talking about her experience in the liberation struggle, are not easily made sense of in a context where she is still suffering. Victory and independence were, according to common understanding, supposed to bring an end to ‘suffering,’ also on a personal level. The victorious Frelimo narrative, far from an internalised position, requires constant negotiation. At the same time, for Maria, an alternative history in the place of ‘national liberation’ is unimaginable. The Frelimo narrative of national liberation continues to frame the experience of the female ex-combatants that I interviewed in Maputo. Interestingly, research conducted by Harry G. West in the province of Cabo Delgado, points to a different experience in the far north of the country. West argues that the cumulating disappointments that many former female fighters there have experienced in the years after independence has led to the ‘destabilization of the narrative through which their war experience was narrated.’ 12 In Maputo, as I discovered, even experiences of disillusionment with one’s personal life do not translate into an ‘unravelling’ of the institutional narrative. In Maria’s narrative this

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__________________________________________________________________ is exemplified in what is the turning point of this particular narrative event: when the tension between different narrative modes is pushed aside and the institutional mode becomes merged with the private and communal mode (‘my party, our party, our government’). Turning to speak about her participation in the public commemoration of the armed struggle, Maria, once again, affirmatively links herself to the state apparatus and the Frelimo narrative. 13 Portelli argues that the ‘choice of mode depends on the narrator’s intentions.’ 14 Yet what motivates this change in narrative mode? I suggest that it can be considered a performative act of belonging, which importantly carries material implications. Linking the state narrative to her personal narrative is aspirational in character - it is a politics of desire - though situated in the present, within the bounds of her current experience of the cityscape, it is directed towards the future. As Maria says, she wants her grandchildren to ‘tell the story of suffering [referring to the narrative of national liberation] as a story, not while they are still suffering.’ Her desire is for her family history to change for the better (even if it might not be in her lifetime). By participating in the public commemoration of the liberation struggle she reenforces her connection to the nationalist elite and their good fortunes. The personal narrative is thus intertwined with the normative claims of the citizens of the nation-state for socio-economic and political justice. Third narrative event: Belonging Because here there are those who don’t know what is war. So, we are. When it was said, “We will unite from Rovuma to Maputo,” there are the others who don’t want to know. The others don’t want to know. There are even the others that say, “Why did the government take people from there, from their provinces to here?” You see. I say “Look my sister, my brother, don’t be deceived, now we are independent. You can leave from here, go to the north, there you will encounter brothers, sisters, there.” I left the north to come here! I’m not lost. I’m on my African continent. Ehh…it’s the African continent. I’m on my African continent. I’m in my…in my city. I’m in my capital! Maputo. Our capital is Maputo. I’m here. Me, if I’m here, I’m not lost. My brother here, when he’s in the north or in the centre he’s not lost, he’s in Mozambique. You’ll recognize the people by their faces, by their behaviour; you’ll know everything, all of Mozambique. And if you say, “Ah, these here were taken from there…they are here, they’re lost,” it is you who is lost. 15 Again, the narrative is driven by the first person narrator who engages in active directional movement: ‘I left the north to come here.’ Though the call for national

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__________________________________________________________________ unity came from the institutional level (‘it was said’) and even though her perception is that some townspeople see them as having been forcefully moved to Maputo from elsewhere (‘Why did the government take people from there, from there provinces to here?’), Maria emphasizes the fact that she is not an object of other people’s actions. Moreover, the spatial boundaries drawn by the famous slogan of the nationalist discourse ‘we will unite from Rovuma to Maputo’, becomes, in Maria’s narrative, a space constructed through personal movement, both actual and imaginative. Her lived spatiality, that is, her engagement in the nationalist struggle in the Northern Province of Cabo Delgado and southern Tanzania, and her later relocation to Maputo, is established as the basis of a widened spatial imagination. Yi-Fu Tuan argues that places are known ‘both directly through the senses and indirectly through the mind,’ though places of larger scale require more ‘indirect and abstract knowledge.’ 16 Unarguably the nation is constructed through collectively shared symbols and concepts. 17 Yet, in Maria’s narratives, the emphasis in knowing is placed on experiential sensory knowledge linked to the spatial referent of one’s gendered body. Hence, a sense of national belonging, to her, is related to one’s personal embodied experience of different landscapes and people. 18 More importantly, it is a sense of belonging that necessarily requires bodily movement through the space of the nation. As the focus of political and economic power, Maputo is a ‘center of meaning’ 19 in the national landscape. 20 Though travelling in her mind with noticeable ease between different spatial planes - north, centre, Africa, Maputo and Mozambique - at the same time, Maria firmly locates herself ‘here’ in Maputo, and narrates her attachment to the city. Maputo is her dwelling place. As Maria’s exclaims ‘I’m in my capital! Maputo. Our capital is Maputo. I’m here. Me, if I’m here, I’m not lost.’ In this narrative event, Maputo is the spatial referent that effectively orders the other locations and makes possible the imagining of dynamic relations that construct and assign meaning to the otherwise abstract concept of national space. 21 Moreover, through the triumphant personal pronoun ‘my,’ the different spatial levels are pulled together and distance is eliminated. Local, national and global are brought into juxtaposition. Personal space is expanded from the private home to encompass not only Mozambique but also the whole African continent. A claim is made for global citizenship and ‘spatial rights’ 22   that are not limited to the territorial space of Mozambique. Although she is tightly bounded to the urban space she inhabits, in her mind’s eye, she is a citizen of the world. This should be interpreted not merely in terms of a fantastic imagery, but rather as an act in political, spatial creativity. 23 3. The City of Memories: Landscape, Gender and History The individual narrative, moreover, is to be located in the broader dynamics of collective remembering taking place in Maputo. Contemporary Maputo is a meeting place of a ‘multiplicity of trajectories’ (to borrow Doreen Massey’s

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__________________________________________________________________ words) 24 of which the ex-combatant population forms one small minority group. Today the women’s lives are diversely located in the cityscape: Amongst them there are members of the parliament; some have government jobs; others are employed at the women’s organisation; some still hold jobs at hospitals and health centres; and others are formally unemployed surviving mostly on their state pension. Many women speak of struggling economically. Through the years, their lives have unfolded alongside Maputo’s physical cityscape, which in turn has been reworked by larger social, economic and political shifts. Politically, Mozambique has passed through a one-party Marxist-Leninist regime to a multi-party ‘liberal’ democracy. With growing private investment in the country, new shopping malls, luxury houses and high-rise buildings, symbolising the modern middle class urban lifestyle, have occupied space in the city centre. Subsequently, inequality has increased. Raising rents and increases in other living costs have forced many poorer people, including many ex-combatants, out of the central and better districts towards the city’s peripheries. Their narratives reveal that in the face of urban poverty, the autonomy of self-sufficiency is glorified, and distant landscapes of home-place (terras natais) are nostalgically remembered as being abundant in good nutritious foods readily available in the fields. The women’s relationship to the cityscape remains ambivalent. Through their daily lives - living and walking the streets; working in hospitals, offices, in their gardens; connecting with neighbours, work colleagues, other ex-combatants Maputo has become their home-place. Yet their narratives also show that they have at times struggled to establish a sense of belonging to the cityscape due to their excombatant history. Spatially, the women’s histories are anchored to multiple places: the various lived and imagined landscapes of childhood, the war landscapes, and later, the cityscape. This is only a bare outline. During the liberation struggle a number of combatants had a chance to travel even more broadly. These experiences of ‘far-away’ places have been shared within the excombatant community and have, to some degree, become part of the shared body of memories of the liberation struggle. Though spatial belonging in the various narratives is constructed in nuanced ways, it is characterised by a sense of movement, real and imagined. Although the ex-combatant community is not restricted to Maputo, and, in a sense, the different ex-combatants in different parts of Mozambique are linked to a mnemonic community, I suggest that Maputo as the space of remembering is a crucial component of the history-telling event, gathering a specific collective remembering of the liberation struggle. Remembering the liberation struggle is considered a patriotic duty, and the official history of the liberation struggle is not significantly contested in the narratives of the female ex-combatants in Maputo. Instead, it is constructed as a meaningful narrative that helps make sense of one’s life trajectory and current location in the cityscape. This is not to say other

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__________________________________________________________________ landscapes of belonging (home-lands) are not remembered, or constructed as equally significant. Finally, the official (male narrated) history is complemented with a collective women’s narrative of their participation in the liberation struggle. This narrative is publicly constructed foremost by female ex-militant leaders based in Maputo. Seeking to assert women’s place in national history, the narrative enacts a specific gendered spatiality of belonging. Transformed into a tale of female defiance and persistence, it maintains that women were not puppets of male history, but that, together with male soldiers, they were actively engaged in the making of history. Furthermore, no matter how their personal lives have played out, the female excombatants argue that the legacy of their participation in the armed struggle is visible especially in the high number of women occupying positions in the country’s parliament and government. Gender equality is conceived in terms of equal opportunities, of women having access to jobs and work positions that, according to the cultural norms they had acquired during their childhood, belonged to a gendered male domain. Yet, on an individual level, the memory of the liberation struggle has another gendered meaning: many women argue that their own gendered self-knowledge was transformed through the struggle. This is a more precarious memory to secure, and the women worry that they will not be able to transmit this knowledge to future generations of Mozambican women.

Notes 1

‘Frelimo’ refers to the party while ‘FRELIMO’ to the liberation front. As the army maintained a dominant political role at independence, many excombatants were transferred to Maputo as part of FRELIMO’s state-building project. The ex-combatants, considered by FRELIMO to be the proto-citizens of an emerging nation-state, were expected to politically mobilise the population. By drawing on a supposedly shared experience of colonial rule, they were to inspire in Mozambicans a sentiment of national unity. 3 Tim Ingold, ‘The Temporality of Landscape’, World Archaeology 25, No 2 (October 1993): 152-174; Barbara Bender, ‘Introduction: Landscape: Meaning and Action’, in Landscapes: Politics and Perspectives, ed. Barbara Bender (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 1-17; Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 4 Ingold, ‘Temporality of the Landscape’, 154. See also David W. Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape (London: James Currey, 1989); Terence Ranger, ‘Making Zimbabwean Landscapes’, Paideuma 43 (1997): 59-71; Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds., Senses of Place (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996). 2

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__________________________________________________________________ 5

See Bender, ‘Introduction: Landscape: Meaning and Action’; M. C. Rodman, ‘Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality’, American Anthropologist 94, No. 3 (September 1992): 640-656. Rodman refers to the ‘overlapping narratives of place’. 6 See especially Alessandro Portelli, ‘There’s Gonna Always be a Line: HistoryTelling as a Multivocal Act’, in The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1997), 24-39; Alessandro Portelli, ‘Form and Meaning of Historical Representation: The Battle of Evarts and the Battle of Crummies (Kentucky: 1931, 1941)’, in Battle of Valle Giulia, 91-113. 7 What is important to note here is the idea that the autobiographical narrative is never in actuality a purely first person narrative, but always already embedded with the voices of others. In personal narratives individual and collective memories are ‘intermingled,’ and ‘borrowed memories’ become part of one’s personal memories. See Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and V. Y. Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). 8 In the period of multi-party democracy since 1994, after the end of the civil war, the Frelimo party has managed to strengthen its hold on the state apparatus in both political and economic terms to the degree that it has become once again possible to speak of a Frelimo state. For instance, in the last presidential and parliamentary elections in 2009, Frelimo further strengthened its position by claiming 191 of the 250 seats in the national assembly. Moreover, Frelimo continues to dominate the public discourse on the politics of citizenship, the narrative of national liberation legitimating its claim to state power. 9 Interview with Maria, 24 June 2009, Maputo. For the sake of maintaining anonymity, name of interviewee has been changed. The interviews with Maria were conducted in Portuguese and translated into English by the author. 10 Ibid. 11 Portelli, ‘Introduction’, in Battle of Valle Giulia, ix. 12 Harry G. West, ‘Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of Frelimo’s “Female Detachment”’, Anthropological Quarterly 73, No 4 (October 2000): 182. 13 These public events of remembering also serve to transmit national history to the wider community. See also Ana. M. Santos, ‘The Past in the Present: Memories of the Liberation Struggle in Northern Mozambique’, in 7º Congresso Ibérico de Estudos Africanos, 9, Lisboa, 2010 - 50 Anos das Independências Africanas: Desafios para a Modernidade (Lisboa: CEA, 2010), accessed October 3, 2012, http://repositorio-iul.iscte.pt/handle/10071/2248. 14 Portelli, ‘“The Time of my Life”: Functions of Time in Oral History’, in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 70. 15 Interview with Maria, 13 July 2009, Maputo.

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Yi-Fu Tuan, ‘Place: An Experimental Perspective’, The Geographical Review 65, No. 2 (April 1975): 151-165. 17 Ibid., 160-161; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 18 The memory of the liberation struggle is, moreover, inscribed in what Gaston Bachelard refers to as ‘muscular consciousness’. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 [1958]), 11. 19 Tuan, ‘Place: An Experimental Perspective’, 153. 20 See also Jason Sumich, ‘Nationalism, Urban Poverty and Identity in Maputo, Mozambique’, in Crisis States Research Centre Working Papers Series 2, 68 (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2010), accessed October 3, 2012, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28473/1/WP68.2.pdf; MPD, Poverty and Well-Being in Mozambique: Third National Poverty Assessment (Maputo: Ministry of Planning and Development, 2010). 21 On the idea that space is made through dwelling see Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 354-363. See also Pauli T. Karjalainen, ‘Place and Intimate Sensing’, in The Thingmount Working Paper Series on the Philosophy of Conservation 1 (Lancaster University, Department of Philosophy, 1999), 3-4, accessed October 3, 2012, http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/philosophy/awaymave/onlineresources/place%20and %20intimate%20sensing.pdf. 22 Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’, Patterns of Prejudice 40, No. 3 (2006): 197-214. 23 See Anne McClintock, ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family’, Feminist Review 44 (1993): 61-80; Nira Yuval-Davis and Marcel Stoetzler, ‘Imagined Boundaries and Borders: A Gendered Gaze’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 9, No. 3 (2002): 329-344. 24 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE, 2005).

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994 [1958]. Bender, Barbara. ‘Introduction: Landscape: Meaning and Action’. In Landscapes: Politics and Perspectives, edited by Barbara Bender, 1–17. Oxford: Berg, 1995.

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__________________________________________________________________ Cohen, David W., and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo. Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape. London: James Currey, 1989. Cosgrove, Denis E. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996. Halbwachs, Maurice, The Collective Memory. Translated by Francis J. Ditter, Jr., and Vida Y. Ditter. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. In Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), edited by David F. Krell, 347– 363. San Francisco: Harper, 1993. Ingold, Tim. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’. World Archaeology 25, No. 2 (October 1993): 24–174. Interview with Maria. 24 June 2009, Maputo. —––. 13 July 2009, Maputo. Karjalainen, P. Tapani. ‘Place and Intimate Sensing’. In The Thingmount Working Paper Series on the Philosophy of Conservation 1. Lancaster University, Department of Philosophy, 1999. Accessed October 3, 2012. http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/philosophy/awaymave/onlineresources/place%20and %20intimate%20sensing.pdf. McClintock, Anne. ‘Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family’. Feminist Review 44 (1993): 61–80. Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: SAGE, 2005. MPD (Ministry of Planning and Development). Poverty and Well-Being in Mozambique: Third National Poverty Assessment. Maputo: Ministry of Planning and Development, 2010. Portelli, Alessandro. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

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__________________________________________________________________ —––. The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1997. Ranger, Terence. ‘Making Zimbabwean Landscapes’. Paideuma 43 (1997): 59–71. Rodman, Margaret C. ‘Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality’. American Anthropologist 94, No. 3 (September 1992): 640–656. Santos, Ana M. ‘The Past in the Present: Memories of the Liberation Struggle in Northern Mozambique’. In 7º Congresso Ibérico de Estudos Africanos, 9, Lisboa, 2010 - 50 Anos das Independências Africanas: Desafios para a Modernidade. Lisboa: CEA, 2010. Accessed October 3, 2012. http://repositorioiul.iscte.pt/handle/10071/2248. Sumich, Jason. ‘Nationalism, Urban Poverty and Identity in Maputo, Mozambique’. In Crisis States Research Centre Working Papers Series 2, 68. London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2010. Accessed October 3, 2012. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/28473/1/WP68.2.pdf. Tuan, Yi-Fu. ‘Place: An Experimental Perspective’. The Geographical Review 65, No. 2 (April 1975): 151–165. West, Harry G. ‘Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of Frelimo’s “Female Detachment”’. Anthropological Quarterly 73, No. 4 (October 2000): 180– 194. Yuval-Davis, Nira. ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’. Patterns of Prejudice 40, No. 3 (2006): 197–214. Yuval-Davis, Nira, and Marcel Stoetzler. ‘Imagined Boundaries and Borders: A Gendered Gaze’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 9, No. 3 (2002): 329–344. Jonna Katto is a PhD student in African Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. In her ongoing research she focuses on the conceptualisation of homeplace and spatial belonging in the personal narratives of female ex-combatants who fought in the Mozambique’s liberation struggle in the northern part of the country.

Rural Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals: Living in Finnish Lapland Hanna Peltomaa Abstract Finnish Lapland is comprised of mostly sparsely populated municipalities, with only 2.1 persons per square kilometre on average in an area of nearly 100 000 square kilometres. The situation for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals living in this rural environment is prevalently painted condescendingly as ‘terrible,’ meaning that in order to live openly they are forced to move into cities or urban areas, thus becoming so called ‘sexual refugees.’ Queer space and place are usually seen as urban. It is a norm in gay culture, in academic research and the media. Moreover, studies concerning rural spaces and communities usually focus explicitly or implicitly on heterosexuality. While urban areas offer a wider selection of spaces aimed at sexual minorities (clubs, meetings, bars etc.), some LGB persons nevertheless prefer a rural setting, building their identities and their own queer space within the village or small town community. An interesting dynamic is also added by the prevalence of ski resorts in Lapland, which during ski season turn into temporary pseudo-towns, populated by tourists and seasonal workers. These resorts also offer the residents of surrounding rural areas a space in which the traditional moral orders of rural life are contested. Finnish Lapland has traditionally been a place where differences of gender, sexuality, religion, ethnic background, political views and class intersect; these differences are inescapable in small communities whereas in urban environments it is easier to choose who you associate with. How do rural lesbians, gay men and bisexuals carve out a space for themselves and their identities in relation to the environment that is predominantly seen by outsiders as hostile towards minorities? In my chapter I will also consider how queer theoretical ideas are applicable when researching sexual minorities in rural communities in Finnish Lapland. Key Words: queer, sexual minorities, rural environment, Finnish Lapland. ***** 1. Introduction In this chapter I will present a few aspects of the life of sexual minorities residing in rural areas in Finnish Lapland. The aim is not to fully describe how social life in small villages is constructed, but to highlight some prospects concerning the possibilities and restrictions of rural living in relation to sexual minorities. I have selected the aspects presented here on the basis of how well they illustrate the social dynamics of the countryside in general, and in Finnish Lapland in particular. 1 For the purposes of this chapter I define sexual minorities as

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__________________________________________________________________ lesbians, gay men and bisexuals 2 and use the abbreviation LGB to refer to them as a group. Gay men, lesbians and bisexuals are often assumed to be out of place in rural communities. The assumption is that rural areas are universally inhospitable to them, forcing them to flee to cities in order to come out and find a queer community: 3 to ‘be themselves.’ This is also the case in Finland where the situation for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals living in rural environments is prevalently painted as ‘terrible,’ meaning that in order to live openly they are forced to move into cities or urban areas, thus becoming so called ‘sexual refugees.’ 4 The term sexual refugee has strong connotations; it nevertheless highlights the extremely negative image rural LGB life has. As I see it, for the most part this image stems from a lack of knowledge. For a long time, urban settings have been the norm in gay culture, in academic research related to sexual minorities, and the media. Majority of the research concerning sexual identities, communities and gender roles has focused on urban residents. 5 This has fortunately started to change since the beginning of the 21st century. 6 The importance of the relationship between space and sexual identity has been argued at length by geographers 7 but recently sociological and communicational research on the topic has also been done, a fact represented for example by the studies of Kozyak 8 and Gray. 9 This international ‘new era in queer studies’ has not reached Finland yet. In Finland, quite a lot of research is made in the field of queer studies, but it is mostly focused on the study of literature, philosophy, visual culture 10 and history. 11 Sexual minorities have also been studied in educational research, as a minority experiencing discrimination in educational research, as a minority experiencing discrimination. 12 Rural questions, especially concerning contemporary community life, have therefore not been closely focused upon. Moreover, in studies concerning rural areas and small communities (or the north specifically) heterosexuality is often implicitly the norm 13 - seemingly without the researcher specifically acknowledging it - as heterosexuality often goes unrecognised as a form of sexuality. 14 It is undoubtedly true that urban areas offer a wider selection of spaces aimed at sexual minorities, than villages or even small towns - and this is also what some people want. Nevertheless, some LGB people prefer a rural setting, building their identities and their own queer spaces within the village or small town communities they inhabit. 15 Even though the cultural narrative that links queer sexuality with urbanism, assumes that gays and lesbians who are able to leave rural areas will do so, and considers rural life ‘terrible,’ rurality is not a monolithic concept. People living in rural areas understand the terms ‘rural’ or ‘small town’ in nuanced ways. 16 To comprehend how it is possible for a person belonging to a sexual minority to live a fulfilling life in a rural area, it is necessary to understand the social dynamics of the countryside.

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__________________________________________________________________ Although Finnish Lapland is painted as being ‘terrible’ for sexual minorities in the media, their everyday discussed experiences and existence in small villages is not usually discussed. What kinds of lives do LGB people lead there? Is there something they can or cannot do there compared to others? In a small community, people who would have nothing in common in an urban setting might find they have to depend on each other. Opinions, lifestyles and sexualities vary but one has to tolerate these differences; one cannot refuse to associate with them in everyday life. For example, having to shop in the same (in some cases the only,) grocery in the area, means more chances to come face to face with people different from you. In a small community you cannot hide in a crowd of people or to be an invisible part of the masses. 17 The reality of ‘everybody knowing each other’ can also be an oppressive side of rural living and the regulation between aloofness and intimacy becomes demanding. In this chapter I examine the possibilities and restrictions faced by LGB persons in the rural communities of Finnish Lapland. I approach this question through the interviews I have conducted as part of my dissertation work. The total number of interviews conducted is 15, but I have selected four of them for the purpose of this chapter. I found the interviewees through public announcements (e.g. Lapin Kansa, Pohjolan Sanomat, local newspapers, internet discussion forums, email lists). All of the interviewees were born in small villages in Finnish Lapland. Two of the interviewees have been living in Lapland all their lives, another returned after some years living elsewhere, and the fourth now lives in southern Finland, visiting her birthplace every summer. 2. Family and Familiarity as Key Concepts ‘Now that we have been here for a month, I think if we lived here it would be more difficult, or we would have to think about it. In the grocery store, Anna 18 she’s from Helsinki - she doesn’t always remember that people might make a fuss if she strokes my back, or that the sales lady could get confused by it. In Helsinki, when you see it everywhere it’s not such a big thing, but here you have to think more.’ 19 In the quotation above the interviewee makes her own analysis; people are not used to seeing same sex public displays of affection; they are ill at ease with it, so it must be avoided. But why it is important to avoid upsetting the sales lady? Would it be different if this had happened in Helsinki, Tampere or even Berlin? I would suggest that in those cities, if the person in question is just a visitor or lives in different part of town or city - in other words is an unknown person in the grocery - a salesperson’s confusion would not bother her so much. But even in cities if the salesperson is a neighbour or an acquaintance the situation is different. If someone you know catches you doing something weird or non-normative, the embarrassment can be greater than with a complete stranger. There is always the

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__________________________________________________________________ fear that the person could at some point remind you of that incident. In a small village this becomes even more significant. In a village everybody knows each other, perhaps not well, but they know your name and your family if they live there. 20 Most people belong to a family of some kind or another (even if geographically or emotionally distant) and it is usually considered important not to let your family down. In a small community you not only represent yourself, you also represent your whole family. You are expected to be loyal to them and avoid excessive provocativeness21 in order to be accepted into the community. A person who has grown up in a small community knows the unspoken rules by heart without paying conscious attention to them. 22 The fact that everyone knows each other helps to stay on friendly (or at least neutral) terms with others in everyday interaction. In small communities people are more involved with the other members of the community and they cannot afford to alienate other people unless they want to be left alone and as a result, be isolated from the community. In an environment where you see each other often you are under more pressure to try and get along with other members of the community. One relates differently to things or people that are near than to those that are distant. One's political views towards sexual minorities do not necessarily go handin-hand with how one treats one’s neighbours in everyday life. 23 The density of social bonds, as well as the significance of family and relatives, also plays an important role in the next quote, where the parents of the interviewee are offering advice to their daughter. The daughter has just told them that she is attracted to girls as well. ‘Don’t be in public. Don’t walk in public - just don’t. And don’t talk to anybody.’ 24 The parents are very eager to keep their daughter’s sexual orientation as an intra-family matter. This reflects the fact that in small communities ‘coming out’ is not just the revelation of personal secret. At the same time the whole family ‘comes out of the closet.’ Coming out not only concerns the person her/himself; it concerns a larger group of people. In small communities people know each other’s businesses, and word travels fast. 25 If somebody’s daughter is seen kissing another girl in public, it is likely those who see it will know whose daughter that is, and they will not hesitate to tell others about it. At least, this is what the parents are afraid of. ‘Everybody knows each other’s business’ is a very common phrase heard in my interviews. I tried to ask the interviewees how they know this, but the only answer given was ‘I just know.’ The same phenomenon was also noted by Aini Pehkonen in her research. Pehkonen 26 explains that one’s own suspicion and habits of rumour-spreading gives enough reason to suppose that people are talking about your business as well. The suspicion becomes reality if one is explicitly told she/he is being talked about. In small communities it is very important to maintain good ties with the community. If you are known to be a good person, people trust you and you are

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__________________________________________________________________ more likely to hold a respectable position. You are part of the community by definition if you have grown up in the same or nearby village. 27 Also belonging to a respected family elevates one’s status to that of a ‘good person,’ even among those who do not know you personally. This also works the other way. A ‘bad’ family name can give an individual a bad reputation. 28 The example about the daughter and her parents highlights the cultural narrative where coming out and being out can only happen in urban areas. 29 However, this is not always the case. Coming out requires drawing a line between one’s public and private life. In small communities this line is not always easy to draw. For example, in the villages in Finnish Lapland it is still common for people pay you a visit without an advance notice. Visiting is one way of showing one is accepted as being one of the villagers. The norm is that the visitor should be received. The visitor usually drinks a cup of coffee, chats a little bit, and then leaves. The host does not let the visitor bother them too much; they continue doing what they were doing before the visitor came. You cannot hide your relationship especially if you are living with your partner - in a community where visitors can come to your door out of the blue. Your relationship becomes common knowledge in the community. 3. Ski Resorts as a Meeting Place ‘Although maybe it still is more narrow-minded in some cases, but if you go to the ski resort, there are so many different kinds of people there. It’s somehow easier; they have seen so much since so many tourists visit there. It’s not a big deal for them.’ 30 The most important speciality (from a LGB person’s point of view) Lapland has to offer compared to other rural areas in Finland are the ski resorts. During ski season they turn into pseudo-towns, populated by tourists and seasonal workers mostly from the metropolitan area. 31 These resorts also offer the residents of surrounding rural areas a space in which the traditional morality of rural life is contested. The quotation at the start of this chapter demonstrates how people living in rural areas understand ‘rural’ in nuanced ways. The interviewee makes her own analysis about the differences between ski resorts and other rural areas in Lapland. My cousin, he works there, and he said that there are plenty of gays and lesbians among the workers. Jani said, “Every time I have a crush on somebody she tells me she likes girls”. It’s so common. 32 Due to the large amount of people staying at these ski resorts during the ski season, there are also many LGB people present, as workers as well as tourists. ‘I was playing music there at the resort and she always came to get drunk, so that’s where we met.’ 33

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__________________________________________________________________ Ski resorts offer local LGB people a place to meet others and to find company, perhaps even a life partner. Compared to the ‘regular villages,’ the resorts offer a very different venue for meeting other LGB people. Last Saturday we were at the resort […] there was only one man there, younger than me. He came over and got a little bit provoked when he found out Anna was with me. “That’s not an impossible obstacle, it’s only a small problem - I know those kind of women, I’ve been in Helsinki”. But I ignored him; he wasn’t worth it and he was probably drunk too. I couldn't take it so we left. 34 While resorts offer LGB people a place and a space to meet each other, the space is also fragile. Heterosexuality is the norm, and there is always the possibility that somebody from the ‘opposite sex’ will come to make an acquaintance and not be very happy to find rejection. This sort of incident is something that can happen in any bar implicitly aimed at heterosexuals. In small towns and rural areas, straight bars (often the only bar in town) are usually the only option if you fancy having a drink. By comparison, in Helsinki or a few other cities in Finland, LGB people can opt to visit bars or clubs that are aimed specifically at them. In these ‘gay bars,’ non-heterosexuality is the norm. Of course a partner can be found almost anywhere, if you are lucky, but according to my interviews the ski resorts are one of the most common places. 4. Reasons to Stay or Even Come Back So why would somebody stay or even return to the countryside? The most common reasons for returning to a rural area are caring for one’s ageing family members, finding a partner who lives in the area or preferring to raise one’s children in the countryside. 35 There might be other reasons as well: Tiina: Yeah, we go fishing a lot. Niina: Tiina fishes and now she has started to go camping with me. Myself, I go trekking and canoeing and everything, I hunt and go dog sledding. 36 According to my interviewees the best qualities Lapland has to offer are the peace and quiet and the opportunities for outdoor activities. The most common or the main, underlying reason to stay, for someone born in the countryside, is the dislike towards cities. 37 This might also be a reason to return to the countryside. ‘Urban gay culture was quite unfamiliar to me. Of course, I’ve been there, danced, and had fun, but I never really got into it.’ 38

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__________________________________________________________________ The reality is that there are people who feel uncomfortable in urban areas. This becomes evident in the following reply after I asked my interviewee if she would ever like to move to Helsinki to live a ‘gay life’: ‘No, never. There are too many houses and traffic lights, and people. Too much of everything.’ 39

Notes 1

The chapter is part of my doctoral dissertation (work in progress) Sexual Minorities in Rural Communities of Finnish Lapland. 2 I understand this definition excludes some people; those who have a nonheterosexual identity but who want to characterise themselves some other way (for example queer, pansexual) and those who have same sex experiences but who identify as heterosexual; also not forgetting those who do not define their sexual orientation at all. 3 Emily Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves: Constructing Gay and Lesbian Identities in Rural Locales’, Qualitative Sociology 4 (2011): 562. 4 See e.g. Lasse Majuri, ‘Homot Suomen Maaseudulla: Diplomatiaa ja Edustustoja’ (‘Gays in Finnish Countryside: Diplomacy and Embassies’), in Sateenkaari-Suomi. Seksuaali-ja Sukupuolivähemmistöjen Historiaa (Rainbow Finland. A History of Sexual and Gender Minorities), eds. Kati Mustola and Johanna Pakkanen (Helsinki: Like, 2007), 179. ‘Homokulttuuriin Puute Ajaa Maalta Helsinkiin’ (‘Lack of Gay Culture Drives from Rural Areas to Helsinki’) Yleisradio, (Finnish Broadcasting Company) accessed September 20, 2009, http://yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2009/08/homokulttuurin_puute_ajaa_maalta_helsinkiin _903112.html; ‘Haaveena Kirkolliset Homohäät. Homona Eläminen on Lapissa Joskus Hankalaa. Uskovaiselle Vielä Hankalampaa’ (‘Dreaming about a Church Wedding. To Live in Lapland as a Homosexual is Sometimes Difficult. For a Believer Even More Difficult’), Lapin Kansa, August 8, 2010, 9-10. 5 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Space. Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 34. 6 Michael Brown and Larry Knopp, ‘Queer Cultural Geographies: We’re Here! We’re Queer! We’re over There, Too!’, in Handbook of Cultural Geography, eds. Kay Anderson et al. (London: Sage, 2003), 317. 7 Jo Little, “‘Riding the Rural Love Train”. Heterosexuality and the Rural Community’, Sociologia Ruralis 4 (2003): 401. 8 Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves’. 9 Mary L. Gray, Out in the Country. Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 10 E.g. Sanna Karkulehto, Kaapista Kaanoniin ja Takaisin: Johanna Sinisalon, Pirkko Saision ja Helena Sinervon Teosten Queer-Poliittisia Luentoja (From Closet to Canon and Back: Queer Political Reading and the Novels of Johanna

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__________________________________________________________________ Sinisalo, Pirkko Saisio and Helena Sinervo) (Oulu: University of Oulu, 2007); Tuija Pulkkinen, Postmoderni Politiikan Filosofia (Postmodern Philosophy of Politics) (Tampere: Gaudeamus, 1998); Anne-Mari Vänskä, Vikuroivia Vilkaisuja: Ruumis, Sukupuoli, Seksuaalisuus ja Visuaalisen Kulttuurin Tutkimus (Queer Glances on Gender, Sexuality, Body and Visual Studies) (Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura, 2006). 11 E.g. Antu Sorainen, Rikollisia Sattumalta? Naisten Keskinäistä Haureutta Koskevat Oikeudenkäynnit 1950-luvun Itä-Suomessa (Criminals by Accident. Women’s Same-Sex Fornication Trials in the 1950s Finland) (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2005); Tuula Juvonen, Varjoelämää ja Julkisia Salaisuuksia (Private Lives, Public Secrets: The Construction of Homosexuality in the Post-World War II Finland) (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2002); Jan Löfström, Sukupuoliero Agraarikulttuurissa. “Se Nyt Vaan on Semmonen” (Sexual Distinction in Agrarian Culture. “That’s Just the Way She/He Is”) (Helsinki: SKS, 1999). 12 E.g. Jukka Lehtonen, Seksuaalisuus ja Sukupuoli Koulussa. Näkökulmana Heteronormatiivisuus ja Ei-Heteroseksuaalisten Nuorten Kokemukset (Sexuality and Gender at School. The Perspective of Heteronormativity and the Stories of Non-Heterosexual Young People) (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2003). 13 E.g. Seppo Knuutila, and Pertti Rannikko, eds., Kylän Paikka. Uusia Tulkintoja Sivakasta ja Rasimäestä (Villages Place. New Interpretations about Sivakka and Rasimäki) (Helsinki: SKS, 2008). 14 Little, “‘Riding the Rural Love Train’”, 405. 15 Angelica Wilson, ‘Getting Your Kicks on Route 66! Stories of Gay and Lesbian Life in Rural America’, in De-Centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis, eds. Richard Phillips et al. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 214; Lesley Marple, ‘Rural Queers? The Loss of Rural in Queer’, Canadian Women Studies / Les Cahiers de la Femme 2, No. 3 (2005): 72. 16 Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves’, 567-569. 17 See Darren P. Smith and Louise Holt, “‘Lesbian Migrants in the Gentrified Valley” and “Other” Geographies of Rural Gentrification’, Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005): 318. 18 The names of the persons have been changed. 19 II, 2009. I have numbered the interviews in chronological order. 20 Airi Pehkonen, Kylä Kutsuu… Tutkimus Tulomuuttoprosesseista Maaseudulle (Village Calls…The Research about In-Migration to Countryside) (Turku: Siirtolaisinstituutti, 2004), 101. 21 Gray, Out in the Country. Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America, 49.

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Marja Holmila, Kylä Kaupungistuvassa Yhteiskunnassa. Yhteisöelämän Muutos ja Jatkuvuus (Village in Urbanizing Society. Transformation in Community Life and Continuation) (Helsinki: SKS, 2001), 14. 23 Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves’, 573. 24 II, 2010. 25 Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves’, 575. 26 Pehkonen, Kylä Kutsuu… Tutkimus Tulomuuttoprosesseista Maaseudulle, 107. 27 Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves’, 571. 28 Pehkonen, Kylä Kutsuu… Tutkimus Tulomuuttoprosesseista Maaseudulle, 85. 29 Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves’, 568. 30 II, 2009. 31 Pekka Kauppila, Matkailukeskusten Kehitysprosessi ja Rooli Aluekehityksessä Paikallistasolla. Esimerkkeinä Levi, Ruka, Saariselkä ja Ylläs (Tourist Centres Development Process and Role in Regional Development in Local Level. Case Levi, Ruka, Saariselkä and Ylläs) (Oulu: University of Oulu, 2004), 193-193 and 206-207. 32 II, 2009. 33 III, 2009. 34 II, 2009. 35 Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves’, 567. 36 III, 2009. 37 Kazyak, ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves’, 568. 38 I, 2009. 39 III, 2009.

Bibliography Brown, Michael, and Larry Knopp. ‘Queer Cultural Geographies: We’re Here! We’re Queer! We’re over There, Too!’. In Handbook of Cultural Geography, edited by Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Niger Thrift, 313–324. London: Sage, 2003. Gray, Mary L. Out in the Country. Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: New York University Press, 2009. ‘Haaveena Kirkolliset Homohäät. Homona Eläminen on Lapissa Joskus Hankalaa. Uskovaiselle Vielä Hankalampaa’ (‘Dreaming about a Church Wedding. To Live in Lapland as a Homosexual is Sometimes Difficult. For a Believer Even More Difficult’). Lapin Kansa, August 8, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Space. Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Holmila, Marja. Kylä Kaupungistuvassa Yhteiskunnassa. Yhteisöelämän Muutos ja Katkuvuus (Village in Urbanizing Society. Transformation in Community Life and Continuation.) Helsinki: SKS, 2001. Juvonen, Tuula. Varjoelämää ja Julkisia Salaisuuksia (Private Lives, Public Secrets: The Construction of Homosexuality in the Post-World War II Finland.) Tampere: Vastapaino, 2002. Karkulehto, Sanna. Kaapista Kaanoniin ja Takaisin: Johanna Sinisalon, Pirkko Saision ja Helena Sinervon Teosten Queer-Poliittisia Luentoja (From Closet to Canon and Back: Queer Political Reading and the Novels of Johanna Sinisalo, Pirkko Saisio and Helena Sinervo.) Acta Universitatis Ouluensis. Series B 81, Humaniora. Oulu: University of Oulu, 2007. Kauppila, Pekka. Matkailukeskusten Kehitysprosessi ja Rooli Aluekehityksessä Paikallistasolla. Esimerkkeinä Levi, Ruka, Saariselkä ja Ylläs (Tourist Centres Development Process and Role in Regional Development in Local Level. Case Levi, Ruka, Saariselkä and Ylläs.) Nordia Geographical Publications. Volume 33: 1. Oulu: University of Oulu, 2004. Kazyak, Emily. ‘Disrupting Cultural Selves: Constructing Gay and Lesbian Identities in Rural Locales’. Qualitative Sociology 4 (2011): 561–581. Knuutila, Seppo, and Pertti Rannikko, eds. Kylän Paikka. Uusia Tulkintoja Sivakasta ja Rasimäestä (Villages Place. New Interpretations about Sivakka and Rasimäki.) Helsinki: SKS, 2008. Lehtonen, Jukka. Seksuaalisuus ja Sukupuoli Koulussa. Näkökulmana Heteronormatiivisuus ja Ei-Heteroseksuaalisten Nuorten Kokemukset (Sexuality and Gender at School. The Perspective of Heteronormativity and the Stories of Non-Heterosexual Young People.) Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2003. Little, Jo. “‘Riding the Rural Love Train”. Heterosexuality and the Rural Community’. Sociologia Ruralis 4 (2003): 401–417.

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__________________________________________________________________ Löfström, Jan. Sukupuoliero Agraarikulttuurissa. “Se Nyt Vaan on Semmonen” (Sexual Distinction in Agrarian Culture. “That’s Just the Way She/He Is”.) Helsinki: SKS, 1999. Majuri, Lasse. ‘Homot Suomen Maaseudulla: Diplomatiaa ja Edustustoja’ (Gays in Finnish Countryside: Diplomacy and Embassies.) In Sateenkaari-Suomi. Seksuaali- ja Sukupuolivähemmistöjen Historiaa (Rainbow Finland. A History of Sexual and Gender Minorities), edited by Kati Mustola, and Johanna Pakkanen, 175–194. Helsinki: Like, 2007. Marple, Lesley. ‘Rural Queers? The Loss of Rural in Queer’. Canadian Women Studies / Les Cahiers de la Femme 2, No. 3 (2005): 71–74. Pehkonen, Aini. Kylä Kutsuu… Tutkimus Tulomuuttoprosesseista Maaseudulle (Village Calls…The Research about In-Migration to Countryside.) Siirtolaistutkimuksia A 26. Turku: Siirtolaisinstituutti, 2004. Pulkkinen, Tuija. Postmoderni Politiikan Filosofia (Postmodern Philosophy of Politics.) Tampere: Gaudeamus, 1998. Smith, Darren P., and Louise Holt. “‘Lesbian Migrants in the Gentrified Valley” and “other” Geographies of Rural Gentrification’. Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005): 313–322. Sorainen, Antu. Rikollisia Sattumalta? Naisten Keskinäistä Haureutta Koskevat Oikeudenkäynnit 1950-luvun Itä-Suomessa (Criminals by Accident. Women’s Same-Sex Fornication Trials in the 1950s Finland.) Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2005. Vänskä, Annamari. Vikuroivia Vilkaisuja: Ruumis, Sukupuoli, Seksuaalisuus ja Visuaalisen Kulttuurin Tutkimus (Queer Glances on Gender, Sexuality, Body and Visual Studies.) Helsinki: Taidehistorian seura, 2006. Wilson, Angelica. ‘Getting Your Kicks on Route 66! Stories of Gay and Lesbian Life in Rural America’. In De-Centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis, edited by Richard Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton, 195–212. New York: Routledge, 2000.

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__________________________________________________________________ Yleisradio (Finnish Broadcasting Company). ‘Homokulttuuriin Puute Ajaa Maalta Helsinkiin’ (Lack of Gay Culture Drives from Rural Areas to Helsinki.) Accessed September 20, 2009. http://yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2009/08/homokulttuurin_puute_ajaa_maalta_helsinkiin _903112.html. Hanna Peltomaa is a PhD student at the University of Lapland in Finland. While interested in queer, gender and sports studies, currently her research and writing is focused on understanding queer life in rural communities.

Contention on the Meanings and Uses of Urban Space in Turku as the European Capital of Culture 2011 Tuuli Lähdesmäki Abstract The European Capital of Culture (ECOC) is one of the longest running cultural initiatives of the EU. Annually, the EU designates one or more cities with this competed-for city brand for one year at a time. In various recent ECOCs, the management and organisation of the cultural events have caused tensions among the citizens on the decision-making processes, financing of the events, and the power over the use of the urban space. These tensions have also caused urban activism which manifests itself in various forums: in public discussions in the local media, in the Internet sites and blogs, and in the alternative events and activities organised by the citizens within the city space. This chapter investigates the tensions and contentions related to the ECOC designation of Turku (Finland) in 2011. These tensions and contentions are explored as a counter-discourse, which produced alternative meanings and representations of the urban space. Particularly important in the creation of the counter-discourse in Turku was the Internet and social media, which enabled creating and sharing alternative representations of the city and the formation of critical communalities. The chapter focuses on a local group of urban activists and their project ‘Turku - European Capital of Subculture 2011,’ in which the opposition towards the official ECOC designation was manifested both in occupying the city space and representing and interpreting it through texts, images, and videos online. With the methods of traditional and virtual ethnography, it aims to answer the following questions: How and why was the counter-discourse created in Turku; how was the city and its urban space represented in the counter-discourse; and what kinds of practices, ideologies, and power relations were related to the activists’ aims of creating space for the ‘free’ and ‘open’ culture? Key Words: Activism, city, counter-discourse, the European Capitals of Culture, the Internet, representation, Turku, urban space. ***** 1. Introduction: Cultural Activism in the European Capital of Culture The annual designation of the European Capital of Culture is one of the EU’s longest-running cultural initiatives. Since 1985, the EU has designated cities - first as European Cities of Culture and later as European Capitals of Culture (ECOC) for one year at a time. During the following decades, the designation has grown into a competed-for city brand. According to the latest EU decision on the ECOC, the cultural programme of the designated cities has to follow two main criteria

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__________________________________________________________________ called ‘The European Dimension’ and ‘City and the Citizens.’ The first criterion demands the cities to foster co-operation between cultural operators, artists, and cities from other Member-States, highlight the richness of cultural diversity in Europe, and bring to the fore the common aspects of European cultures. The latter criterion requires the cities to foster participation of the citizens living in the city and its surroundings, upraise their and foreigners’ interest in the city and its activities, and promote the long-term cultural and social development of the city. 1 The implementation of the ECOC year is mainly financed from local, regional, and national sources. If the set criteria and expectations are considered to be fulfilled, the EU admits to each designated city 1.5 million Euros for expenditure. Turku, a city of 200.000 inhabitants in Southern Finland, was designated in 2007 as the European Capital of Culture for the year 2011. The preparation and implementation of the cultural year in Turku were organised by setting up an independent Turku 2011 Foundation which took care of planning, coordinating, and promoting the cultural events. The budget of the Turku2011 project rose to 55 million Euros, in addition to which 145 million Euros were used in capital investments in various infrastructural projects. As in the several previous ECOCs, the preparations of the ECOC year in Turku activated debates in which citizens, local interest groups, and cultural associations objected the management and financing policy of the official ECOC organisation. In Turku, several concurrent local cultural political decisions which cut the resources and facilities from local cultural operators and cultural institutions functioned as an impulse to the criticism. A part of the criticism was organised under a project titled ‘Turku - European Capital of Subculture 2011.’ In this chapter, I investigate the project as an activist counter-discourse to the official programme of Turku2011 by discussing how and why the counter-discourse was created. I will particularly investigate how the city and its urban space was represented in the counter-discourse, and what kinds of practices, ideologies, and power relations were related to the activists’ aims of creating urban space for the ‘free’ and ‘open’ culture. The research data consists of multifaceted documents on the Turku - European Capital of Subculture 2011 project: newspaper articles, texts, images and videos on the website of the project, open blogs supporting the project, open discussion forums used by the project activists, the Facebook page of the project, flyers, posters and other texts created by the project activists, YouTube videos filmed by the project activists, and TV programmes about the project. In addition, I have observed the cultural events organised by the project activists, and discussed with several of them in the events during my field research in Turku in 2011. The investigation is based on ethnographic research, which combines traditional ethnographic observation documented by notes, photographs, videos, and virtual ethnography, 2 for which the (non-participatory) observation took place on the aforementioned Internet sites.

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__________________________________________________________________ Faye Ginsburg has introduced the term ‘cultural activism’ to interpret the public efforts of various groups and movements who use cultural objects to articulate their political aims. 3 Since then, other scholars have also used the term in their investigations on various social practices, manifestations of identity-politics, and multiple kinds of public actions that people use to alter the circumstances of their lives. 4 In this chapter I define the counter discourse of the Turku - European Capital of Subculture 2011 project as cultural activism because of its strong focus on cultural aims and the cultural efforts used in the attempts to achieve them. 2. Urban and Virtual Activist Practices The launch of the Turku - European Capital of Subculture 2011 had its bases on a network of local activists. A group of art students, artists, and other similarminded local people had already organised and set up an association in Turku in 2006, with the aim of establishing a new type of cultural centre based on voluntary and independent cultural production. The association had suggested that the city assign an empty estate for the activities of the new cultural centre. To speed up their attempt and to criticise the current estate policy of the city, the group of similar-minded people started to squat the empty city-owned buildings and run cultural activities in them. The city decided to have a zero tolerance towards squatting. After Turku won the ECOC designation, the same local people launched the Capital of Subculture project as a response to the ‘culture-hostile attitude’ 5 of the city and to the unwillingness of the Turku 2011 Foundation to intervene in the faults of the local cultural scene. In addition, the high budget of Turku2011 programme and the plans of using money to invite foreign artists to perform in the city during the cultural year were criticised: the activists emphasised the importance of supporting local artists, cultural operators, and small-scale cultural activities. Their criticism also focused on the concept of culture and the audienceparticipant-artist relation in the official programme. From the activists’ point of view, the official programme focused mainly on a high cultural understanding of art and culture and saw the citizens only as passive audience of the cultural events. For about a decade, the social movement scholars have either stressed the empowering impact of the Internet in the development of social movements and the new possibilities of activism introduced by the medium, 6 or reminded that the Internet, per se, does not offer a passage from structure to action - that the Internet has to be mobilised by committed individuals or organisations in order to serve as an instrument for collective action. 7 M. McCaughey and M. D. Ayers point out that the Internet has substantially changed what counts as activism, community, collective identity, democratic space, and political strategy. 8 The easiness and commonness to use the Internet and social media for stating an opinion, showing support, or protesting against recognised faults, blurs the previous definitions of activism and social movement.

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__________________________________________________________________ One of the major changes provided by the networked social media is its potential to facilitate virtually anonymous, decentralised, and leaderless social communication. 9 The Capital of Subculture project emphasised in its counterdiscourse the decentralised and leaderless structure based on anti-hierarchical and democratic ties between the activists. As a response to the official programme of Turku2011, the project invited everybody to participate in the cultural production without control over the self-organised actions. However, the self-organisation has to be supervised in order to produce and mediate the needed collective knowledge of the movement. 10 Even though the counter-discourse emphasised the openness of the project and the equality of its agents, the project included its own structure determined e.g. by friendships, different interests in implementing the aims of the project, links to other activist networks, and activity to participate in the project. The counter-discourse had its spokesmen, whose interests determined how its discourse was formed. The activists of the Capital of Subculture project used various means in propagating their criticism towards the official Turku2011 programme and the urban policies of the city. On one hand, the activists operated in the urban space in diverse ways in order to bring to the fore and concretise their aims. On the other hand, their views were introduced and their online activities took place in various forums in the social media and the Internet. In practice, the activist on- and offline activities were closely intertwined. In addition, the activists’ views were disseminated through both local and national media. One of the most conspicuous means of propagating the aims of the Capital of Subculture project was to ‘occupy’ the urban space by organising collectively arranged cultural events and festivals in the public space at the city centre or in the squatted city-owned estates. Some of the largest events were organised annually, such as a ‘protest camp festival’ called Art Slum which e.g. aimed to ‘comment on the long continued lack of work space for artists in Turku,’ because ‘the indefensible cultural policy of Turku has chased the artists and the receivers of art into a slum.’ 11 The activists built the Art Slums on public space in the city centre from waste material and used them as venues for various cultural activities, such as band concerts, performances, poetry readings, exhibitions, workshops, and discussions (Figure 1).

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Figure 1: The performance ‘Me Syömme Omat Instrumenttimme’ (We Eat Our Instruments) in the Art Slum 2011 in the city centre of Turku. Photo: Tuuli Lähdesmäki. Another long-term cultural event organised by the Capital of Subculture project was the Festival of Free Culture, which was set up in squatted buildings. Several times police intervention ended the festival. Documented police interventions, as well as other conflicts with the city authorities, were often uploaded to the project web page or on YouTube. These images and videos were used as means of propagating the activists’ aims: the images and videos produced the activists and their notion of culture as victims of the city authorities. One of the activists’ motives for organising the Festival of Free Culture was to raise the question regarding the use and ownership of the urban space. In the counter-discourse of the activists, the city and its urban space belonged to the citizens, who had the right to use the city space for their own purposes. This is how one of the activists advertised The Festival of Free Culture in a blog entry: The Festival of Free Culture has originated from the need to make the city space look like people, like ourselves. In a public

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__________________________________________________________________ space usually only those who are able to pay for the publicity and whom the advertising companies accept on their billboards are allowed to be seen. We think that the city belongs to the citizens, and they are allowed to be seen and heard in the city space. The Festival of Free Culture is a part of the global fight for free city space. We have raised culture as an important weapon in this fight. 12 As the quotation indicates, the rhetoric of the Capital of Subculture project included anti-neoliberalist vocabulary often used by leftist activist movements. Organised cultural events, such as the Art Slum, also included small-scale and spontaneous demonstration marches at the city centre. Besides these organised events, the activists ‘occupied’ the urban space in the city by marking it with selfmade stickers and posters which propagated their views and spread information on forthcoming events. The Internet and social media offered to the Capital of Subculture project both an easy platform for networking, communication, and organisation, and a virtual space in which the activism itself could take place. Thus, the strategies of the activism in the project can be distinguished both as Internet-enhanced and Internetbased. 13 In both functions, the texts, images, and videos on the Internet and social media produced an alternative representation of the city as the European Capital of Culture. Many of the on- and offline cultural activities in the Capital of Subculture project were based on the reuse of cultural codes of the official programme of Turku2011. This type of cultural activism has been discussed as ‘semiotic terrorism’ or simply as ‘culture jamming’ which aims to reverse and transgress the meaning of cultural codes used in ideological, political, and economical campaigns. 14 The website of the project introduced several ironic cultural events which mocked or parodied the events of the official Turku2011 programme or introduced an alternative interpretation of the city space. For example, on their web site, the activists imitated thematic map projects of the official Turku2011 programme, which aimed to introduce the city for the citizens and visitors from different perspectives. The activists’ own map project was titled ‘Bongaa Turkun mulkut!’ (Spot the pricks of Turku!) referring to an official event ‘Bongaa Turun murkut!’ (Spot the ants of Turku!) in the Turku2011 programme. In the ironic map project, the small flame symbols marked cultural buildings and places which the activists considered as being threatened or already destroyed by the local cultural political decision-making. These buildings and places were introduced on the web site as housing important and unique artistic, subcultural or alternative cultural activities. One of the flames on the map marked the location of the Turku Municipal Facilities Corporation, which administrates the estates of the

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__________________________________________________________________ city. The corporation was introduced on the web page as ‘having hounded the local culture for decades already.’ 15 Even though the activists aimed to deconstruct cultural hierarchies in the city, many of the projects of the Capital of Subculture were based on dichotomies between ‘high’ culture and alternative or subculture. In the counter-discourse, the views and the course of action of the Turku 2011 Foundation and the city authorities were represented as polarised with those of the activists. Bringing to the fore the alternative cultural activities and the sub-cultural scene of the city was done through the rhetoric of victimhood, as the map project indicates. 3. An Alternative Representation of the City One of the main focuses of the discussion and action in the Capital of Subculture project was the city space. In the counter-discourse of the project, the current city space was represented as a dominated, bureaucratic, and commercial space which hindered the spontaneous creativity and independence of the citizens to influence their everyday environment. Thus, the city space needed to be regained ‘back’ to its citizens for their free use. In the counter-discourse, the idea of the city space was intertwined with its citizens. The key ideas of the counterdiscourse were expressed e.g. in a demonstration organised as a part of the Art Slum in 2011, during which the activists shouted, ‘We are the city, the city belongs to us’ and ‘Culture is homeless - there are only places for consumption.’ The public space was seen as reclaiming its original meaning only through the free, non-hierarchical and non-consumerist use by its citizens. In the view of the counter-discourse, the public space in the city and the city-owned estates were owned collectively by the citizens, and therefore, the citizens had a right to use them for collective purposes. The activists considered that the events and activities, which they organised in the public and city-owned spaces, enlivened and brightened up the otherwise un- or little used, abandoned, or declined but collectively-owned urban space. As the previous quotations reveal, the activists positioned themselves in the counter-discourse as ‘we’ and ‘the citizens.’ In addition, the activists referred to themselves as ‘artists,’ ‘street artists,’ and ‘makers and friends of art,’ thus emphasising the creative potential of the citizens. The counter-discourse produced a unified and culturally-minded image of the activists. Their opponent was also produced in the counter-discourse as a unified or even a singular agent: ‘high culture,’ ‘Turku,’ ‘Capital of Culture,’ or ‘the bureaucrats.’ Even though, in the counter-discourse the citizens were defined as forming the city, in its rhetoric ‘the city’ was often referred to as an opponent of the activists. 4. Conclusions: Interfaces of the Opposite Discourses on Urban Space One of the key goals of the official Turku2011 programme was to activate the local people to participate in the preparation and implementation of the ECOC

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__________________________________________________________________ events. This goal was also one of the main criteria of the EU for designating a city as the European Capital of Culture. The Turku 2011 Foundation aimed in various ways to encourage the citizens to participate in creative activities and processes in the city and in the public discussion on the meanings of culture in everyday life and urban space. As a part of these aims, the foundation set up a broad voluntary programme, in which over 400 voluntary citizens worked during the cultural year, and launched an open project call, in which everybody could suggest cultural projects to be funded and included into the official programme of Turku2011. In the ECOC year, the official programme included 155 cultural projects altogether, which covered a broad selection of different art genres ranging from social and community events to sports and sciences. Three fourths of the projects were based on suggestions sent to the open call. From the point of view of the official programme, the cultural content of the Capital of Subculture project manifested the idea of participating the local people in the creation of culture. Thus the Program Director of the Turku2011, Suvi Innilä contacted the activists and advised them to leave an application in the open project call in order to become a part of the official programme and to get funding, space, and publicity for their cultural aims. However, the activists rejected to leave an application. ‘Our project emerged as a response to the values and the course of action of the Turku2011 project - how could we ever want to become a part of something we try to be an alternative to?’ asked the spokesman of the activists Suvi Auvinen in a critical book on Turku2011. 16 In the counter-discourse, the official programme of Turku2011 represented the criticized values of festivalisation and commercialisation of culture and the negligence towards the local, spontaneous and self-generated small-scale cultural production. The official discourse of Turku2011 and the counter-discourse of the Capital of Subculture shared, in fact, the same ideas about the importance of active participation to local cultural production, taking care of urban space, enlivening public space in the city, offering cultural experiences for all kinds of citizens, and making the city a more inspiring place to live in. However, the modes of implementation, the discursive frames, institutional power, and authorisation of actions distinguished the discourses as the opposites of each other.

Notes 1

‘Decision 1622/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 2006’, Official Journal of the European Union L304/49, 3 November 2006. 2 See e.g. Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London: Sage, 2000); Daniel Domínguez, Anne Beaulieu, Adolfo Estalella, Edgar Gómez, Bernt Schnettler and Rosie Read, eds., Forum: Qualitative Social Research. Virtual Ethnography 8, No.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3 (2007); Robert V. Kozinets, Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online (London: Sage, 2010). 3 Faye Ginsburg, ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow: Cultural Activism and Indigenous Media’, in Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest, eds. Dick Fox and Orin Starn (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 4 See e.g. Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman, ‘Introduction’, in Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America, eds. Melissa Checker and Maggie Fishman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 5 Flyer of Art Slum, 2011. All translations from Finnish to English are by the author. 6 Sidney G. Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2005), 136-138; Lance W. Bennett, ‘New Media Power. The Internet and Global Activism’, in Contesting Media Power. Alternative Media in a Networked World, eds. Nick Couldry and James Curran (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 25; T. V. Reed, Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 271; Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, ‘Introduction’, in Cyberactivism. Online Activism in Theory and Practice, eds. Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers (London: Routledge, 2003), 2. 7 Sidney G. Tarrow and Donatella della Portia, ‘Conclusion: “Globalization”, Complex Internationalism, and Transnational Contention’, in Transnational Protest & Global Activism, eds. Sidney G. Tarrow and Donatella della Portia (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 230; Lance W. Bennett, ‘New Media Power. The Internet and Global Activism’, 24. 8 McCaughey and Ayers, ‘Introduction’, 1-2. 9 Lance W. Bennett, ‘New Media Power. The Internet and Global Activism’, 20; Lance W. Bennett, ‘Social Movements beyond Borders: Understanding Two Eras of Transnational Activism’, in Transnational Protest & Global Activism, ed. Sidney G. Tarrow and Donatella della Portia (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 203; see also McCaughey and Ayers, ‘Introduction’, 4-5. 10 Arturo Escobar, ‘Other Worlds are (Already) Possible: Self-Organization, Complexity, and Post-Capitalist Cultures’, in The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires?, eds. Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman (Delhi: Viveka, 2004). 11 Flyer of Art Slum, 2011. 12 Vapaa Kulttuuri Turussa [Free Culture in Turku] blog. Topic Mikä Vapaan Kulttuurin Festivaali? [What Festival of Free Culture?], posted 7 May 2009. Accessed June 1, 2012. http://vapaakulttuuri.blogspot.com/search?updated-

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__________________________________________________________________ min=2009-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00:00:0008:00&max-results=40. 13 About the concepts see Sandor Vegh, ‘Classifying Forms of Online Activism. The Case of Cyberprotests against the World Bank’, in Cyberactivism. Online Activism in Theory and Practice, eds. Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers (London: Routledge, 2003), 71-72. 14 Tim Jordan, Activism! Direct Action, Hacktivism and the Future of Society (London: Reaktion books, 2002), 101-117; Graham Meikle, ‘Intercreativity: Mapping Online Activism’, in International Handbook of Internet Research, eds. Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup and Matthew Allen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 364-365. 15 ‘Bongaa Turkun Mulkut!’ [‘Spot the Pricks of Turku!’] web page, created by Suvi, last updated 16 January 2011. Accessed June 1, 2012. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?f=q&source=embed&hl=fi&geocode=&ie=UTF 8&hq=&hnear=It%C3%A4inen+Pitk%C3%A4katu+47,+20810+Turku,+Suomi&o e=UTF8&msa=0&msid=208873271097650671505.000499cf547bb5a50b983. 16 Suvi Auvinen, ‘Turku Palaa: Parku Tulee. Alakultturelleja Näkökulmia Turku2011-Hankkeeseen’ [‘Turku on Fire: Starting to Cry. Subcultural Points of View to the Turku2011 Project’], in Mitä Turku2011 Tarkoittaa? [What Does Turku2011 Mean?], ed. Ville-Juhani Sutinen (Turku: Savukeidas, 2011), 37.

Bibliography Auvinen, Suvi. ‘Turku Palaa: Parku Tulee. Alakultturelleja Näkökulmia Turku2011-Hankkeeseen’ [‘Turku on Fire: Starting to Cry. Subcultural Points of Vew to the Turku2011 Project’]. In Mitä Turku2011 Tarkoittaa? [What Does Turku2011 Mean?], edited by Ville-Juhani Sutinen, 34–48. Turku: Savukeidas, 2011. Bennett, Lance W. ‘New Media Power. The Internet and Global Activism’. In Contesting Media Power. Alternative Media in a Networked World, edited by Nick Couldry, and James Curran, 17–37. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. —––. ‘Social Movements beyond Borders: Understanding Two Eras of Transnational Activism’. In Transnational Protest & Global Activism, edited by Sidney G. Tarrow, and Donatella della Portia, 203–226. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘Bongaa Turkun Mulkut!’ [‘Spot the Pricks of Turku!’]. Web Page, Created by Suvi, last updated 16 January 2011. Accessed June 1, 2012. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?f=q&source=embed&hl=fi&geocode=&ie=UTF 8&hq=&hnear=It%C3%A4inen+Pitk%C3%A4katu+47,+20810+Turku,+Suomi&o e=UTF8&msa=0&msid=208873271097650671505.000499cf547bb5a50b983. Checker, Melissa, and Maggie Fishman. ‘Introduction’. In Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life in America, edited by Melissa Checker, and Maggie Fishman, 1–25. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. ‘Decision 1622/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 2006’. Official Journal of the European Union L304/49, 3 November 2006. Domínguez, Daniel, Anne Beaulieu, Adolfo Estalella, Edgar Gómez, Bernt Schnettler, and Rosie Read, eds. Forum: Qualitative Social Research. Virtual Ethnography 8, No. 3 (2007). Escobar, Arturo. ‘Other Worlds are (Already) Possible: Self-Organization, Complexity, and Post-Capitalist Cultures’. In The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires?, edited by Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman, 349359. Delhi: Viveka, 2004. ‘Flyer of Art Slum’. 2011. Ginsburg, Faye. ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow: Cultural Activism and Indigenous Media’. In Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest, edited by Dick Fox, and Orin Starn, 118–144. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Hine, Christine. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage, 2000. Jordan, Tim. Activism! Direct Action, Hacktivism and the Future of Society. London: Reaktion books, 2002. Kozinets, Robert V. Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online. London: Sage, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ McCaughey, Martha, and Michael D. Ayers. ‘Introduction’. In Cyberactivism. Online Activism in Theory and Practice, edited by Martha McCaughey, and Michael D. Ayers, 1–21. London: Routledge, 2003. Meikle, Graham. ‘Intercreativity: Mapping Online Activism’. In International Handbook of Internet Research, edited by Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, and Matthew Allen, 363–377. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. Reed, T. V. Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Tarrow, Sidney G. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 2005. Tarrow, Sidney G., and Donatella della Portia. ‘Conclusion: “Globalization”, Complex Internationalism, and Transnational Contention’. In Transnational Protest & Global Activism, edited by Sidney G. Tarrow, and Donatella della Portia, 227–246. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. Vapaa Kulttuuri Turussa [Free Culture in Turku]. blog. Topic Mikä Vapaan Kulttuurin Festivaali? [What Festival of Free Culture?]. Posted 7 May 2009. Accessed June 1, 2012. http://vapaakulttuuri.blogspot.com/search?updatedmin=2009-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00:00:0008:00&max-results=40. Vegh, Sandor. ‘Classifying Forms of Online Activism. The Case of Cyberprotests against the World Bank’. In Cyberactivism. Online Activism in Theory and Practice, edited by Martha McCaughey, and Michael D. Ayers, 71–95. London: Routledge, 2003. Tuuli Lähdesmäki, PhD is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In her current research project funded by the Academy of Finland, she explores identity politics in the EU cultural policy, and particularly in the European Capital of Culture designation.

An Analysis of the Nexus between Popular Culture Consumption and East Asian Regionalisation Kadir Ayhan Abstract East Asia is becoming a more connected region. The emerging connectedness is driven by informal regionalisation processes. In East Asia where historical animosities and territorial problems have disrupted interstate and inter-societal transactions and communications, corporations and people have increased their intraregional interactions. An under-researched area of East Asian regionalisation is the nexus between intraregional flows of popular culture and increasing regional interactions. This research project studies the contributions made by the consumption of pop culture products to East Asian regionalisation in two dimensions: social and economic. In both dimensions, pop culture products have provided the grounds for more interactions, which have contributed to the emerging regionalisation of East Asia. The intraregional flows of Korean pop culture products and their role in increasing social and economic interactions between Korea and other countries in the region are analysed as part of the East Asian regionalisation processes. In the social dimension, pop culture products brought to light commonalities based on the interactions between societies that have some level of cultural similarities and similar modernisation experiences. Furthermore, pop culture products have provided East Asian peoples with opportunities to meet and encounter the ‘others’ in the geographic proximity, and in turn, create new (often better and less conspicuous) images of the ‘others,’ who are in this case Koreans. In the economic dimension, trends in the spread of East Asian pop culture products, including Korean products, point to an emergence of a regional market for East Asian stars and pop culture products. Key Words: East Asia, regionalisation, popular culture, Korean Wave, time-space compression, cultural proximity. ***** 1. Introduction East Asia is becoming a more connected region. The emerging connectedness, which in many ways integrates the region socially and economically, is driven by society-induced and/ or market-induced (informal) regionalisation processes rather than being initiated by interstate cooperation. This chapter will investigate the relationship between intraregional flows of pop culture products, in particular Korean products, and East Asian regionalisation on social dimensions. It will analyse the contributions of consumption of Korean pop culture products in the

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__________________________________________________________________ region to increasing social interactions between Koreans and others in East Asia, which is an indication of emerging regional connectedness. 2. Globalisation, Global-Local Nexus and Regionalisation Regionalisation is not suggested as an alternative to globalisation in this chapter. Rather it can be understood as an intermediary process within the globallocal nexus. Regionalisation, in the context of this chapter can be defined as the ‘contemporary manifestations of globalization that are more place specific’ regardless of the nation-state boundaries. 1 Spatial and temporal distances are narrowed with the processes that what Harvey describes as ‘time-space compression.’ 2 This term is even more relevant in the context of regions where spatial distance is less significant and temporal distance, particularly between the middle-classes, is getting narrower as in East Asia. The people across the region experience the similar things (e.g. similar consumer cultures) at the same time (narrowed temporal distance); then as Harvey argues it is akin to them living in the same place, which in this chapter is analysed as the region of East Asia. 3 Narratives of pop culture products portray time-space compression as well as contributing to further compression. 3. Emerging Social Cohesiveness In his empirical studies in Latin America, Straubhaar found that the audiences look for ‘cultural proximity’ in TV programmes and prefer national material first and if the national products are not available or unsatisfactory in certain genres, they tend to look next to the regional Latin American market, for which cultural proximity is the most important factor. 4 Cultural proximity includes cultural and linguistic similarities, or more specifically images, lifestyles, values, ethnic types, sense of humour and gender roles. On the other hand, Koichi Iwabuchi argues that cultural commonalities are not given and cultural proximity is ‘becoming’ and not an essential ‘being.’ 5 He points out that East Asia is much more diverse than Latin America and contends that it is not only existing cultural commonalities based on traditional Asian (or rather Confucian) values that direct the attention of East Asians to Japanese pop culture products (for that matter Korean pop culture products also), but it is also the shared modernisation experiences and narrow temporal-spatial lag that articulate a sense of ‘coevalness.’ 6 Chua argues that the ideological desire for a Confucian East Asia, which wrongly assumed that Confucianism was a major part of everyday lives of East Asians, has been replaced by East Asian popular culture which constitutes a more relevant part in the populations’ contemporary lives in the region. He concludes that the replacement of the traditional with focus on the commonalities of urban and middle-class lifestyles and exhibition of Asianness enable the East Asian audience identify with the fellow East Asian characters on screen. 7 Koichi

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__________________________________________________________________ Iwabuchi also suggests that the intraregional cultural flow connects populations of East Asia not through traditional values, but through popular culture. 8 Lifestyles and consumer cultures of East Asian middle classes are getting more similar across the region. People find it easier to identify with their counterparts beyond their national borders. Chua argues that the similar outlook (‘attractive modern and trendy aesthetics’ of places and actors/ actresses) in trendy dramas about urban stories ‘creates visual and discursive room for the insertion and projection of an idea of “Asianness”, with nationalities suppressed.’ 9 Cayla and Eckhardt’s study shows that the brand managers of various Asian consumer products use ‘deterritorialisation’ of brands from home countries and reterritorialisation in ‘Asia’ through focusing on urban imagery that is similar across the region in an attempt to create pan-Asian brands that appeal to as many people as possible within East Asia. 10 The emerging urban similarities, that are a result of globalisation as well as regionalisation, are significant enough to be capitalised by corporations as Cayla and Eckhardt’s study reveal. Popular culture consumption is indeed one dimension of the emerging consumer culture commonalities. East Asian urban societies, particularly the youth, ‘keep together in time’ through emotional bonding of pop culture products and sense of ‘Asian solidarity’ and ‘spatial affiliation.’ 11 The fans create emerging ‘imaginary communities’ that contributes to a shared consciousness and a sense of belonging in East Asia through consumption of regional popular culture. 12 Moreover, Otmazgin believes that the intraregional flows of popular culture deepen East Asian regionalisation by providing grounds to enable the possible emergence of commonalities of identities. 13 4. Consumption of Korean Popular Culture and Social Cohesiveness in East Asia Studies on East Asian audiences’ reception of Korean popular cultural products tend to agree on the point that the audiences perceive familiarity and similarities based largely on Confucian cultural traditions and physical appearances when they watch Korean dramas or movies. In addition to cultural familiarity and physical similarities, the audiences also realize the narrow temporal-spatial lag between their countries and Korea and their shared modernisation experiences having to negotiate between traditional and modern. They feel coevalness with their counterparts across the region through viewing Korean dramas or movies as the city centres and the lifestyles are depicted akin to their daily realities and/or dreams. An illustrative example of the cultural proximity argument is Jewel in the Palace (대장금) which is one of the Korean dramas that has been viewed by many throughout East Asia. It dramatises the life of the first female physician, Jang Geum, of the Chosun Dynasty. The drama has many ingredients of traditional

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__________________________________________________________________ Korean culture, the rituals, food and medicine. In addition to a portrayal of traditional Korean culture, which contains so many familiar Confucian elements, the relatively similar physical outlook, local dubbing and intensive depictions of Chinese characters (漢字) effectively transforms the drama into an almost-local drama for other East Asians (particularly for Chinese populations all over East Asia and Japanese) and creates cultural intimacy. 14 Park Jung-Sun’s empirical study in East Asia about Korean Wave indicates that perceived cultural similarities make it easier for East Asians to accept Korean popular culture on emotional and personal-level. Taiwanese interviewees perceive emotional relatedness in Korean dramas. One Taiwanese interviewee noted: ‘Even when the expressions of emotion depicted in Korean dramas are not relevant to Taiwanese society, it can be understood because of the cultural traditions shared by the two countries.’ 15 Sung Sang-Yeon’s research revealed that Taiwanese and Hong Kong interviewees find values and sentiments in Korean dramas much more acceptable than Western pop culture products since Korean ones derive from Confucianism and are more realistic expressions of Asian lives as in the portrayal of family values and respecting elders. Accordingly, some Taiwanese fans have developed a sense of cultural intimacy with Koreans because of ideas regarding common traditional cultural sentiments and values. 16 Korean dramas portray negotiations and conflicts between Confucian values and modern urban lifestyles that many people in East Asian cities can identify with. Many fans mentioned that Korean dramas are a realistic representation of ‘Asian’ expressions in relationships and emotional attachments among the characters. The emphasis on compassion for parents, siblings, friends, spouses, colleagues and people of different relations and family virtues in Korean dramas, that are different from Western productions, seem to attract East Asian audiences as they identify with these cultural values that evoke a sense of ‘resonance.’ 17 Park’s study on Chinese audiences shows that Chinese interviewees find Korea richer than their country but within reach, and this creates a more realistic admiration. Portrayals in Korean dramas are not very different from their reality. The temporal and spatial lag is narrow. Modernity in similar levels makes it possible ‘to experience similar social phenomena at almost the same time.’ 18 Common temporality activates contemporaneity which in turn contributes to emotional bonding of imaginary communities that ‘keep together in time’ through a sense of coevalness. Korean pop culture products are a hybrid production, acting as a ‘transmission belt’ for Western (mainly American) cultural trends. 19 Hybridisation of U.S. pop culture products makes them more meaningful and more familiar to audiences in East Asia. Lin and Tong, based on their empirical studies in Taiwan and Hong Kong, concluded that East Asian fans of Korean dramas are attracted to the Korean productions because the dramas ‘preserve “Asian” values while packaging them

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__________________________________________________________________ with attractive modern and trendy aesthetics.’ 20 Likewise, Shim Doobo argues that not simply cultural proximity, but also a ‘vision of modernization’ and skilful hybridisation of Western and Asian values are important in making Korean pop culture products more acceptable in some Asian countries. 21 5. New Images Consumption of pop culture products of the ‘others’ provide people of East Asia with new, often better, images of the ‘others’ in question. There have been conspicuous or negative images of the ‘others’ in East Asia, particularly of Japan, because of problems related to history and/or politics. These images are maintained with generational transmission of memories, national education, negative news reports and, probably most importantly, the lack of opportunities to get to encounter, to know and to understand the ‘others.’ According to a survey, Winter Sonata had increased interest in Korea for 22% of the Japanese who watched the drama, and 26% of them said their image of Korea changed for better. 22 Public opinion surveys of Chinese people in 2004 and in 2006 conducted by Net Intelligence & Research also confirms that exposure to Korean dramas has changed their perceptions of Korea. 23 In 2004, 68% of Chinese respondents said that they had watched Korean dramas, and the rate was 92.2 % in 2006, a 24% increase. According to the findings of the surveys, about 60% of Chinese who had consumed Korean dramas developed a positive image of Korea. Parallel surveys in Japan by the same agency reveals that in 2004 about 61% of the Japanese respondents said they had watched Korean dramas, and the rate was 67.7% in 2006. Approximately 42.5% of Japanese said after being exposed to the Korean dramas, their perception and impression of Korea has positively changed. 24 Hirata’s study showed that Japanese women Winter Sonata fans visited Korea after watching the drama and their prejudiced gaze towards Korea had been totally offset or had been softened in real going beyond the screen. 25 Another study by Kim et al. shows that Korean popular culture has had a significant impact in changing Hong Kong people’s image of Korea in a positive manner and in attracting potential tourists to the nation. 26 The study reveals that about 72% of the respondents noted that their perception of Korea was changed positively after being exposed to Korean popular culture. The 71.5% informants reported that they intended to visit Korea after they had watched Korean TV dramas/movies, while the rate was 60.4% for those who decided after listening to Korean pop music and 62.3% intended to visit after experiencing Korean food. 6. Conclusion: Summary of Findings and Recommendations for Future Research There have emerged significant social and economic interconnections in East Asia. While corporations and entrepreneurs have led the economic interactions, the youth and the middle-classes have been the drivers of social integration that is

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__________________________________________________________________ being constructed. The emerging connectedness, which in many ways integrates the region socially and economically, is driven by society-induced and marketinduced (informal) regionalisation processes rather than being initiated by interstate cooperation. Economic and social interactions across the borders within a region play a significant role in the regionalisation processes in addition to more formal processes such as security cooperation which has more to do with intergovernmental dialogue. In East Asia, historical animosities and territorial problems have disrupted interstate and inter-societal transactions and communications and in turn regionalisation processes for a long time. Meanwhile corporations and people have increased their intraregional interactions. Regionalisation, together with globalisation, has brought about ever more similarities among the consumer cultures of the emerging middle-classes in East Asia’s urban centres. Popular culture consumption is, indeed, one aspect of the emerging commonalities of consumer cultures. This chapter has investigated the relationship between East Asian (informal) regionalisation and intraregional flows of popular culture focusing on the case of the Korean Wave. Pop culture products’ consumption has contributed to East Asian regionalisation in a social dimension. Pop culture products have provided the grounds for more interactions between Koreans and others in the region. More interactions contribute to emerging regionalisation processes in East Asia.

Notes 1

Kyle T. Evered, ‘Regionalism in the Middle East and the Case of Turkey’, Geographical Review 95, No. 3 (2005): 465. 2 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). 3 Andrew Jones, Dictionary of Globalization: A Guide on How to Use This Book (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), 212. 4 J. D. Straubhaar, ‘Beyond Media Imperialism: Assymetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10, No. 1 (1991): 56. 5 Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 131-134. 6 Johannes Fabian, ‘If It Is Time, Can It Be Mapped?’, History and Theory 44 (2005): 119-120 defines coevalness as sharing of time, or contemporaneity. For ‘synchronicity’ and ‘contemporaneity’, see Eviatar Zerubavel, Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xii and 180, Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, 157; Johannes Fabian, ‘Coeval Ethnographic Research and Allochronic Discourse: Comment’, Medische Antropologie 13, No. 2 (2001).

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Heng Buat Chua, ‘Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5, No. 2 (2004): 200-202. 8 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, 218. 9 Chua, ‘Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture’, 214; Angel Lin and Avin Tong, ‘Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan “Asian Us”: Korean Media Flows and Imaginaries of Asian Modern Femininities’, in East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, eds. Heng Buat Chua and Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 98. 10 Julien Cayla and Giana M. Eckhardt, ‘Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community’, Journal of Consumer Research 35, No. 2 (2008): 216-230. 11 For ‘keeping together in time’ see William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). 12 For ‘imaginary communities’ see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 13 Nissim Kadosh Otmazgin, ‘Cultural Commodities and Regionalization in East Asia’, Contemporary Southeast Asia 27, No. 3 (2005): 501. See also Joshua Kurlantzick, ‘Pax Asia-Pacifica: Asia’s Emerging Identity and Implications for U.S. Policy’ (Pacific Council on International Policy and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, 2007). 14 Heng Buat Chua, ‘Structure of Identification and Distancing in Watching East Asian Television Drama’, in East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, eds. Heng Buat Chua and Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 77-78. 15 Jung Sun Park, ‘The Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Flows in Northeast Asia’, in Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia, eds. Charles K. Armstrong, Gilbert Rozman, Samuel S. Kim and Stephen Kotkin (London: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 2005), 251. 16 Sang Yeon Sung, ‘Constructing a New Image - Korean Popular Culture in Taiwan’, in Catching the Wave: Connecting East Asia through Soft Power, eds. Wen hsin Yeh and T. J. Pempel (UC Berkeley, 2007), 7-9. 17 Lin and Tong, ‘Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan “Asian Us”: Korean Media Flows and Imaginaries of Asian Modern Femininities’, 94-99. 18 Park, ‘The Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Flows in Northeast Asia’, 251. 19 J. Peter Katzenstein, ‘Open Regionalism: Cultural Diplomacy and Popular Culture in Europe and Asia’, in Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Boston, MA, 2002), 32.

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__________________________________________________________________ 20

Lin and Tong, ‘Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan “Asian Us”: Korean Media Flows and Imaginaries of Asian Modern Femininities’, 94-98. 21 Doboo Shim, ‘Hybridity and the Rise of Korean Popular Culture in Asia’, Media, Culture & Society 28, No. 1 (2006): 40. 22 Cited in Yumiko Hara, ‘Observation on the Image of Foreign Countries and Impact of Special Events: From Research on “Germany Year in Japan”’, Japan Media Communication Center, http://www.jamco.or.jp/2006_symposium/en/004/index.html. 23 Nation Branding, ‘South Korea’s Nation Branding: Peace Corps Created and Hallyu Explored’, http://nation-branding.info/2009/05/13/south-korea-nationbranding-peace-corps-and-hallyu/. 24 Ibid. 25 Yukie Hirata, ‘Touring “Dramatic Korea”: Japanese Women as Viewers of Hanryu Dramas and Tourists on Hanryu Tours’, in East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, eds. Heng Buat Chua and Koichi Iwabuchi (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008). 26 Samuel Seongseop Kim, Jerome Agrusa, Kaye Chon and Youngshin Cho, ‘The Effects of Korean Pop Culture on Hong Kong Residents’ Perceptions of Korea as a Potential Tourist Destination’, Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing 24, No. 2 (2008): 163-183.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Cayla, Julien, and Giana M. Eckhardt. ‘Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community’. Journal of Consumer Research 35, No. 2 (2008): 216–230. Chua, Heng Buat. ‘Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5, No. 2 (2004): 200–221. —––. ‘Structure of Identification and Distancing in Watching East Asian Television Drama’. In East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, edited by Heng Buat Chua, and Koichi Iwabuchi. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Evered, Kyle T. ‘Regionalism in the Middle East and the Case of Turkey’. Geographical Review 95, No. 3 (2005): 463–477.

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__________________________________________________________________ Fabian, Johannes. ‘Coeval Ethnographic Research and Allochronic Discourse: Comment’. Medische Antropologie 13, No. 2 (2001): 268–269. —––. ‘If It Is Time, Can It Be Mapped?’. History and Theory 44 (2005): 113–120. Hara, Yumiko. ‘Observation on the Image of Foreign Countries and Impact of Special Events: From Research on “Germany Year in Japan”’. Japan Media Communication Center. http://www.jamco.or.jp/2006_symposium/en/004/index.html. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990. Hirata, Yukie. ‘Touring “Dramatic Korea”: Japanese Women as Viewers of Hanryu Dramas and Tourists on Hanryu Tours’. In East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, edited by Heng Buat Chua, and Koichi Iwabuchi. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Jones, Andrew. Dictionary of Globalization: A Guide on How to Use This Book. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006. Katzenstein, J. Peter. ‘Open Regionalism: Cultural Diplomacy and Popular Culture in Europe and Asia’. In Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1–70. Boston, MA, 2002. Kim, Samuel Seongseop, Jerome Agrusa, Kaye Chon, and Youngshin Cho. ‘The Effects of Korean Pop Culture on Hong Kong Residents’ Perceptions of Korea as a Potential Tourist Destination’. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing 24, No. 2 (2008): 163–183. Kurlantzick, Joshua. ‘Pax Asia-Pacifica: Asia’s Emerging Identity and Implications for U.S. Policy’. Pacific Council on International Policy and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, 2007. Lin, Angel, and Avin Tong. ‘Re-Imagining a Cosmopolitan “Asian Us”: Korean Media Flows and Imaginaries of Asian Modern Femininities’. In East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave, edited by Heng Buat Chua, and Koichi Iwabuchi. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.

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__________________________________________________________________ McNeill, William H. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Mitsuya, Keiko. ‘Winter Sonata Phenomenon from the Standpoint of Opinion Polls: Surveys on Winter Sonata’. Broadcasting Research & Survey (December, 2004). Nation Branding. ‘South Korea’s Nation Branding: Peace Corps Created and Hallyu Explored’. http://nation-branding.info/2009/05/13/south-korea-nation-branding-peace-corpsand-hallyu/. Otmazgin, Nissim Kadosh. ‘Cultural Commodities and Regionalization in East Asia’. Contemporary Southeast Asia 27, No. 3 (2005): 499–523. Park, Jung Sun. ‘The Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Flows in Northeast Asia’. In Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia, edited by Charles K. Armstrong, Gilbert Rozman, Samuel S. Kim, and Stephen Kotkin. London: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 2005. Shim, D. ‘Hybridity and the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia’. Media, Culture & Society 28, No. 1 (2006): 25–44. Straubhaar, J. D. ‘Beyond Media Imperialism: Assymetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity’. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10, No. 1 (1991): 39–59. —––. ‘Choosing National Tv: Cultural Capital, Language, and Cultural Proximity in Brazil’. In The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift, edited by M. G. Elasmar, 77–109. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2003. Sung, Sang Yeon. ‘Constructing a New Image: Korean Popular Culture in Taiwan’. In Catching the Wave: Connecting East Asia through Soft Power, edited by Wen hsin Yeh, and T. J. Pempel. UC Berkeley, 2007. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Kadir Ayhan, PhD Candidate at Seoul National University Graduate School of International Studies.

Gaze and Writing: Space of Lack Xymena Synak-Pskit Abstract According to Lacan – in his interpretation of Plato’s idea of the One, paradoxical and dialectically unstable – the dissimulation or the crack between thought and being marks the lieu of the gaze which, in my opinion, metaphorises the real; the marking revealing traces, there remains only the very brim of the real that can be touched, the form of the ellipsis, where the in-between being untouched, yet, unfolding within the crack. To Lacan, the eventual distance of passing, the exigency of a letter that is never approached as such, fixates itself within representational contour; signifiance remains outlined, without remainder. What remains is the instance of the gaze. The gaze is not Nancyan ‘staring present of presentation,’ but presentation of representational lack of desire; the eventual appearance of what does not present itself in any vision (revisionary praxis of seeing as knowing) but which misses the point of presentation. Points distend and thus singularise any presentation and make traumatic encounter or rather counterencountering form a scopic field of Lacanian gaze. The gaze discontinues and exposes itself to the vision marked by Lacan with traces of opaqueness; ‘subject is what replaces one signifier for another signifier’ substitutes instantaneous and ‘continual’ misplacement of the signifier for the place of instantaneous and ‘continual’ division of the space of signifying encounter. The traumatic is already surplus: presence presenting itself exceeds the limits of its own presentation that is never there. There is is never there, which makes the object of desire excessive nothing of presence which misses the point of its inscription. ‘Nothing is more real than nothing,’ says Malone in Beckett’s Malone Dies, and adds: ‘all language is a gap of language,’ which does not speak so much about the signifying mispresentation as about the gap of presence, of presencing as such. This presencing as such verges on Lacanian trauma of the real, trauma as the real, opening up every experience as well as the space to come. Key Words: Gaze, letter, desire, metaphor, metonymy, the real/the symbolic. ***** 1. The Instant of the Cut between Signifiers Expresses the Instant of Desire, i.e., of Gaze as the Gap within the Symbolic Introduction instantiates the very incisive moment which does not begin anything; introduction – as any beginning – must evade its own evasiveness as reflexivity of negation; the beginning must be coming post factum, thus effacing any specularity of successive instants. To introduce – says Derrida on Condillac’s Essay on the Origin of Human Languages – is to seduce. To seduce the text of

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__________________________________________________________________ course and not the reader, to deviate the text from itself, but just enough to surprise it again very close to its content, which can always open out as nothing: as a central void, an alarming superficiality, a rigorous ‘abyss.’ Because of that, too busy ourselves round about; lines, grating, borders, ribs, architecture, after-cuts [après-coupure].’ 1 To introduce is to ex-cite, to cite ex post, to introduce the remnants of the text in-finitude. To cite, or rather, to re-cite, is to introduce Lacanian real of desire; desire as non-appearance or the impossible limit-line between finitude and infinitude, the gaze as lack, where the real means ‘an effect of the symbolic, not in the sense of performativity, of the “symbolic construction of reality”, but in the totally different sense of a kind of ontological “collateral damage” of symbolic operations: the process of symbolization is inherently thwarted, doomed to fail, and the Real is this immanent failure of the symbolic. . . . . the real is the effect of the failure of the symbolic to reach (not the In-self, but) itself, to fully realize itself, but this failure occurs because the symbolic is thwarted in itself. . . . it is through this very failure to be itself that the symbolic touches the Real.’ 2 The place of the touch dis/appears as it ex-poses the moment of differentiation between the symbolic and the Real, in their displacement. This change of place takes place – metaphorically speaking – au pied de la lettre, literally, or in the place of the letter which inscribes itself in an instant of exposition. The literal – (sic!) metaphorical – exposition is always already, to use Derrida’s idiom, ex post, representing the very moment of representation where ‘the signifier represents the subject for another signifier.’ (Lacan) Here not only do the expulsion of the real from the symbolic and the rejection of a signifier overlap, as Žižek suggests, but it is the very misplacement of this overlapping that ‘constitutes’ this paradoxical space itself. What is left then is a disturbance of space that gives rise to this overlap in which the space of non-coincidence is being opened up. If to overlap entails non- coinciding, there must be some surplus which thwarts the symbolic and the Real from within before they enter the paradoxical and excessive space of their interrelation; a surplus that instantiates death of what remains, i.e., of time which remains and cites itself ex post, in the form of expression or pressing against the literalness of the letter. The very act initiates a counter-movement of death which is dying à rebours, or instatiation of desire; desire as an instant produces death in its having been already counter-effect of desire. If an instant produces death, as Derrida suggests, and if desire is an ex-citation of the letter, metaphorically speaking, the I of expression (one signifier represents the subject for another signifier) as the instant of the cut between signifiers ex-presses the instant of desire that opens up the possibility of the properness of dying. Of dying as desire of the proper, or of ex-pression as a radical loss. Of materiality of absence. Of letter itself.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. What Makes the Continuity of Desire (Im)Possible is PunctuationFracture that Enters and Consequently Breaks up a Signifying Chain (Gaze – Desire – Singularity) Jacques-Alain Miller explains Lacanian gaze which constitutes the impossibility of the subject of desire in the following way: What Lacan designates as objects we cannot perceive. What he calls gaze or voice are objects whose substance, the substantiality, cannot be captured. What he calls voice is not the tone, it is not the breath, not even the feeling; the voice is what is already present in each signifying chain, and what he calls gaze is nor something that is found in the eye or that comes out of the eye. That is, he gives to these objects, gaze and voice, a definition exterior to perception. We can all approach these terms through perception but they are only really constituted when perception is not possible. … Painfully, the psychotic experiences the gaze that comes from the world, but these are the “things themselves that gaze on him”, something shows “itself”. Thus the well known example of the sardine box, Lacan’s famous little anecdote … that give precisely a simulacrum of a psychotic experience. This object gazes at me myself and I am, myself, in the perceptum of this object. Lacan says that the frame is in my eye, and this is the truth of the theory of representation, but myself, I, am in the frame. 3 In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan defines the object-cause of desire in terms of an excessive leftover, a certain ré(si)stance (‘which does nothing but remain in the sense of the permanent subsistence of a presence’ 4 ), or an impossible object ‘that is desiring subject itself’ as Žižek puts it in his latest book on Hegelianism and psychoanalysis. 5 The desiring subject cannot be located in ‘objective reality as a part of it, … I cannot include myself in reality and see myself as part of reality, but neither can the subject posit itself as the agent of the transcendental constitution of reality. … For Lacan, such a self-referential inclusion is precisely what happens with the object petit a: the very transcendental I, $, is ‘inscribed into the picture as its point of impossibility.’ 6 Sustaining the extimacy of the subject, i.e., the impossible gap within the real as the subject’s displaced residue, Lacanian gaze belongs to the order of contingency and singularity, to the order of the encounter or tuché. Absolute singularity – as in the case Barthesian punctum, ‘which is no longer of form but of intensity’ 7 – metaphorises, au pied de la lettre, the gaze, it being at the same time the lack of desire. Here Lacanian metaphoric anchoring as an impossible singularity of the real lends itself – to use Derrida’s expression in reference to the traumatic punctum of

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__________________________________________________________________ Barthes’ photography – into metonymy, desire-in-distension. It is not only singularity that pluralises itself, but also the very metonymic power that is dissociated by metaphor (‘The sheaf was neither misery nor spiteful’). I would argue that the gaze discontinues and ex-poses itself to the instantaneous and ‘continual’ division of the space of signifying encounter: this ‘minimal difference separates a thing from itself, this separation, however, possessing in Lacan the character of punctual anchoring. What makes the continuity of desire interrupted thus is the very punctuation-fracture that enters and consequently breaks up any signifying chain. This is the experience of the gaze; a gaze which ‘marks the point in the object (the picture) from which the viewing subject is already gazed at’ (Žižek). ‘Consequently, and inasmuch as the picture enters into a relation of desire, the place of a central screen is always marked, which is precisely that by which, in front of the picture, I am elided as subject of the geometrical plane. This is why the picture does not come into play in the field of representation.’ 8 Thus what remains is the hole in the center of the symbolic order; yet, the hole does not substitute some lacking object but is a substitutive delay or a delay-in-substitution: … the real – writes Lacan – does not wait [attend], especially not for the subject, since it expects [attend] nothing from speech. But it is there, identical to his existence, a noise in which one can hear anything and everything, ready to submerge with its roar what the ‘reality principle’ constructs there that goes by the name of the “outside world.” 9 3. The Impossible of Desire: Dissimulation of Metaphor If there is nothing more than a desire for desire as Lacan puts it in Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a metonymical chain of desire finds its own impossibility: if desire means a constant deferral of the object of desire – the (no)thing of desire – the very suspense of presence absolutises the point of awaiting for the having already come. In this context desire is being replaced by jouissance of the Other as the subject’s mortifying proximity. In Lacan this traumatic misplacement curves the space of a metaphoric sparking instant that – thanks to the incongruity with itself – produces the effects of signification. Metaphor is remnants, or what resists substitution, a passage between incommensurable perspectives or between negation of a thing and (no)thingness of negation. It is the space of the transformation of the lack of object into object 10 of the lack: Metaphor’s creative spark – writes Lacan – does not spring forth from the juxtaposition of two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It flashes between two signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by taking the other’s place in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present by

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__________________________________________________________________ virtue of its (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain. One word for another: this is the formula for metaphor. 11 The symbolic is not some realm incoherent with the real or an excess of representation itself; it is the very effacement of the subject, as Miller puts it in ‘The Prisons of Jouissance,’ or the inconsistency within the symbolic itself that makes the real. What Žižek calls here filling ‘the gap, the failure, of representation’ 12 by the presence of the object a, means making metaphoric ‘spark’ thwarted, radically. If, then, a subject is what is represented by a signifier for another signifier, representation – being erased at the very core of its appearance – sparks as intrusive dissimulation not of the symbolic itself but of the symbolic already having been displaced, untimely. Of the differentiated experience of the non-All. Of sense: if [t]hought is jouissance 13 and if ‘there is jouissance of being,’ 14 being is pure difference, or a traumatic point of inconsistency as an excess of jouissance. Yet, excessive as it is, jouissance remains supplementary, which captures within itself both surplus and subtractive sense of being the less of what it supplements. Symbolic redoubling of appearance misses the line of the real inscription, in unexpectancy: In Lacanian terms, Meaning belongs to the level of All, while Sense is non-All … Sense is materialist, something which arises “out of nowhere” in a magical explosion of … an unexpected metaphor … Sense is a local occurrence in the field of non-sense. … Sense is internal to non-Sense, the product of a nonsensical, contingent, or lucky encounter. Things have meaning, but they make sense. 15 4. The Impossible: Dissimulation of Metonymy Asemic sign, jouissance unknots signification: although Lacanian sinthomes – ‘signifying knots of jouis-sens, enjoyment, “meaning” which directly penetrates the materiality of a letter’ 16 – condense the excess of jouissance (as Žižek points out), this condensation never takes its place, being an instantaneous removal from place. However, in its excessive proximity to the place it is represented to occupy, the removal CUTS-INTO the excess of space. This is the paradox of ‘the curved space of desire’ 17 : the impossibility of the object/subject of desire as curved upon itself-outside. Inscribed into the picture and not being a part of it at the same time, the subject of the split is its ‘own’ impossibility, of the point of dissimulating desire, au pied de la lettre. It coincides with the indivisible remainder, object petit a; a supplementary split. The subject, or – metaphorically speaking, yet metaphorically à la lettre – what the signifier represents for another signifier is never there; it is the impassable limit of a letter, the very dissociation of the symbolic.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. The Impossible: Eye/I Split of the Real (Gaze) The eye is in the picture, says Lacan. The eye is the gaze of the real, elliptically bounded, misshaped and punctuated. The eye gazes in the act of ‘a fictious (or as he prefers to say, “imaginary”) self-reflection.’ 18 If the real is traumatic and the tuché is the real as encounter 19 between perception and consciousness, reality awaits in a rupture, en souffrance (‘in suspense,’ ‘in abeyance,’ ‘awaiting attention,’ ‘pending,’ but also ‘pain.’ This is the opening of the closure which takes place of the representation (le tenant-lieu de la representation) and re-installs itself in the lacking object – in re(si)stance of the visible, represented in a delay. The delay splits ‘the return to the real … and the consciousness re-weaving itself.’ 20 ‘What is missed – writes Lacan on the Freudian analysis of the father’s dreaming and awakening and his encounter with his dead son – is not adaptation, but tuché, the encounter.’ 21 It is the split between the gaze, the invocation, ‘the solicitation of the gaze’ 22 and that which refers to the resistant subject ‘in the machinery of the dream.’ 23 What is missed is the subject as split, or the very splitting of the subject that is becoming fixed on the line of signifying machinery – as the cut between the gaze and the seeing. This is the mis-placed place of the eye/I, elliptical in its ‘essence.’ The name of the eye/I as splitting, elision takes place of seeing, the inbetween the lack of place and placement, or the in-between the (in)visible of seeing and the gaze, which marks a cut within representation itself. The gaze makes presentation of the real impossible, whereas the bar of the real can be only representational, displaced from its lack of place, this displacement being a figuration of the real, elliptically eluded to – in a gaze: In vain your image comes to meet me And does not enter me where I am who only shows it Turning towards me you can find On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow. I am that wretch comparable with mirrors That can reflect but cannot see Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited By your absence which makes them blind. 24 6. Ré(si)stance: Space of Lack, or Dis/Tension of Desire If ‘I emerge as an eye’ 25 not extracting myself from within the field of vision, this emergence becomes a punctiform object as well as the subject itself does (‘From the moment that this gaze appears, the subject tries to adapt himself to it, he becomes that punctiform object, that point of vanishing being with which the subject confuses his own failure’ 26 ) and dis(e)rupts (within) the scopic field itself. Is this primal separation the real of the gaze? It seems so, taking into consideration the fact that the gaze ‘is specified as unapprehensible’ 27 and elusive. The very retreat of the gaze re-traits the vanishing of the subject, its vacillation enabling the

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__________________________________________________________________ seeingness to appear-in-disappearance. A gaze dis(e)rupts, from within the gap of oscillation between mirroring and seeing, res(is)tance being the name of the subject-of-the gap within méconnaissance. The gaze – the no(thing) of desire – is not pure lack but a constant diminishing and fading away of vision grounded in the less of the real: subtractive bareness of desire inclining towards nunc stans of the lack of desire, l’ objet petit a. Symbolised as a lack, the real misses the point of self-appearance executing upon the unconscious – the sum of the effects of speech on a subject 28 its bare force of ‘the self-performative presence.’ 29 Missing the point of self-appearance situates or even immobilises desire, literally, in a punctiform of ‘a metonymic remainder …, an element necessarily lacking, unsatisfied, impossible, misconstrued (méconnu).’ 30 The literariness of immobilisation makes desire a traumatic trait of the order of signifiers where the signifier ‘being something quite different, represents a subject for another signifier’ 31 and where articulation takes place in the fading of the voice, or – more deeply – in the gradual, yet, incessant appearance of its dis-appearance which emerges from re(si)stance as the less of any representation. Here the Lacanian nodal point of desire, removed from its source, anchors upon the impossibility of the real, the re(si)stance itself. 7. Desire is Inseparable from Metaphor au Pied de la Lettre (Literally) as Well as Letter is Inseparable from Metonymic Differentiation (Cut) ‘The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture,’ 32 Lacan summarises the divergent inclusion of the subject in the gaze, making the very discord within the field of appearances possible; if to appear means to suspend the non-All of sense as materiality of the letter, as the instance of (non)sense, metaphorical twist of the primordial subtraction appears in its non-appearing as such. ‘As such,’ however, should not connote idealisation of the letter (as it happens in Derrida’s reading Lacan) but the insistence of the repetitive gap, or repetition as the gap: a minimal difference which reiterates within the place lacking place, i.e., in Lacanian metaphoric spark. To spark is to reiterate the difference between already and notyet; to pass at the same time via the metonymic line of desire. ‘A single, distended point,’ 33 that’s metaphor of desire, of jouissance as excessive space, or as the lacking object of desire. This self-entanglement or folding in/out of the metonymic line of desire where ‘a self-referential inclusion is precisely what happens with the object petit a’ where ‘the very transcendental I, $, is inscribed into a picture ‘as its point of impossibility’ 34 makes metaphor an archivolic point of inscription, to use Derrida’s expression in reference to psychoanalytic legacy.

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Notes 1

Jacques Derrida, The Archeology of the Frivolous. Reading Condillac, trans. J. P. Leavy (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 108. 2 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 959. 3 J.-A. Miller in Ibid., 705. 4 Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 48. 5 Žižek, Less than Nothing. 6 Ibid., 106 and 107. 7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, in Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 291. 8 Ibid., 108. 9 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Barton Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 389. 10 Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘The Prisons of Jouissance’, Lacanian Ink 33 (2009): 39. 11 Lacan, Ecrits, 422. 12 Žižek, Less than Nothing, 697. 13 Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore 1972-1973, trans. Barton Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Company), 70. 14 Ibid. 15 Žižek, Less than Nothing, 698. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 705. 18 Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 205-206. 19 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 55. 20 Ibid., 70. 21 Ibid., 69. 22 Ibid., 70. 23 Ibid. 24 Aragon, ‘Contre-chant’ in Ibid., 17. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 83. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 126. 29 Agata Bielik-Robson, The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 17.

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Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 14. Ibid., 157. 32 Ibid., 14. 33 Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses, trans. S. Sparks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 206. 34 Žižek, Less than Nothing, 707. 31

Bibliography Bielik-Robson, Agata. The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. The Archeology of the Frivolous. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. —––. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Frank, Manfred. What Is Neostructuralism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. —––. Écrits. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Miller, Jacques-Allain. ‘The Prisons of Jouissance’. Lacanian Ink 33 (2009): 36– 55. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Multiple Arts. The Muses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso, 2012. Xymena Synak-Pskit, University of Gdansk, Poland.

The Problem of Place: A Foucauldian and Discursive Analysis on Place Veronica Ng Abstract Since the 1970s, the discourse on place emerged as a significant terrain for research across disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, geography, philosophy and architecture as approaches to eradicate conditions of ‘placelessness.’ Prior and existing studies theorised place as social and cultural constructs; place as lived experienced and the post-structuralist views of the ‘otherness’ of place. However, ‘place’ remained a problematic term due to its ambiguous and confused nature, its lack of historical understanding since the late 17th century, and the emphasis of theoretical speculations over the physical manifestations of place. Taking these issues as a point of departure, this chapter examines the historical ideas of ‘place’ in relation to architecture and the built environment. Adopting the theoretical framework of the ‘history of ideas’ and discursive analysis developed by Michel Foucault, this study drew from a wide range of multi-disciplinary historical evidences which comprised of literature, visuals and films, between the late 17th and the early 20th centuries. It revealed the multiplicity and discontinuity of the ideas of ‘place’ across historical periods, the discursive nature of ideas and the significance of practice in relation to the conception and manifestation of place. The theoretical study indicated that the ambiguity of place is a problem that results from (1) the historical transition of such ideas and the confused and idealised nature of any given sense or being of ‘place’ and (2) the lack of emphasis on practice in understanding the relations between the conception and manifestation of place. These findings contribute to the place-related disciplines by identifying conceptual problems of place that allows for re-visitation of the theoretical attitudes towards the discourse on place. Key Words: Place, placenessness, Foucault, history of ideas, architecture. ***** 1. Introduction Since the 1970s, the discourse on place emerged as a significant terrain for research across disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, geography, environmental psychology, philosophy and architecture, amongst others. While, there was a myriad of research interest on place, one focus was on the ontological and epistemological perspectives of place. There was a common perception that ‘place’ is in a state of crisis. This perception is characterised by a sense of ‘placelessness,’ which has been commonly understood as a narrative of ‘loss.’ 1 With the vast literature on the loss of identity and meaning in places, there

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__________________________________________________________________ emerged a myriad of theoretical speculations of ‘place.’ These studies theorized place as social and cultural constructs, 2 place as lived-experienced, 3 and the poststructuralist views of the ‘otherness’ of place. 4 However, the idea of ‘place’ remained problematic due to its ambiguous and confused nature, 5 its obscurity and lack of historical understanding since the late 17th century, 6 and the emphasis of theoretical speculations over the physical manifestations of place. 7 It is this situation that has defined the current issues within the discourse on place. They suggest that an understanding of the problematic nature of the idea place in relation to architecture and the built environment is needed as a way forward in re-thinking place. Based on these issues, the primary aim of this chapter is to problematise the nature of the idea and ideal of place in the context of architecture and the built environment. Although this research is a ‘problematising’ one, the findings from this research will contribute knowledge to disciplines and practices that are involved in the discourse on place. 2. The History of Ideas In order to examine the theoretical ideas of place, this chapter applies the theoretical perspective of the ‘history of ideas’ developed by Michel Foucault. 8 In the seminal book, The Fate of Place Edward Casey noted that the historicity of place has a challenging prospect, and pointed to Foucault’s argument that the fundamental ideas of place (and space) vary widely from era to era - ‘they are everaltering and never the same.’ 9 Although Foucault’s work is problematic in that the basic terms of space, place, location and site were not differentiated, it emphasised the importance of the conception of place as non-permanent and subject to extensive historical vicissitudes. According to Foucault, history is not wholly that of its progressive refinement where ‘the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, or limits.’ 10 This perspective emphasised the shifting attention of history away from vast unities like ‘periods’ or ‘centuries’ to the phenomena of rupture, or discontinuity. Foucault conceived bodies of knowledge, known as ‘discourses,’ as potentially discontinuous across history, rather than necessarily progressive and cumulative. Discourse speaks of knowledge and practices which defines certain forms of existence of ideas and makes ways of speaking about them possible. The theoretical position of the history of ideas is significant to this research because it is a problematising tool. Moving away from the conceptual position that the emergence of place is due to placelessness, this study assumes that the understanding of the historical development of a particular idea, in all its varied and often contradictory complexity, has the propensity to clear the current confusion. Thus, it has the propensity to cast light on the notions of placelessness and place in terms which are taken for granted (the former as a cause, the latter as an effect).

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__________________________________________________________________ The theoretical examination of place is undertaken through discursive analysis of ‘statements’ which informed the discourse of place. Statements are a set of rules or ‘conditions of possibility’ which underpin a discourse, and systematically form for the discourse ‘groups of objects, enunciations, concepts, or theoretical choices.’ 11 Only certain subjects are qualified and able to speak in particular ways. 12 In this respect, architecture form part of the statements. The relationship between the physical manifestations of place through architecture and the discourse of place is established by examining how discourses enter into construction and how in consequence, buildings or planned environments become statements. 13 Adopting this theoretical stance, this paper traces the ideas of place through periods of history in which they undergo change by looking at a wide variety of historical documents. The primary sources for analysis comprised of historical texts of Western thoughts and ideas between the late 17th and the early 20th centuries. From these texts, the ideas of place are isolated, and the conditions of possibility which enabled the emergence of the ideas are analysed. To examine the conditions of possibility which enabled the emergence of the ideas of place, the correlations and ordering of a plexus of concepts and objects within and between discourses which are maintained in practices are analysed. This task enabled the understanding of how new ideas are introduced and diffused to make clear how conceptions dominant in one historical transition are replaced by another. In this way, the present problematic nature of the idea and ideal of place in the context of architecture and the built environment is addressed. 3. The Genealogy of Place By adopting Foucault’s history of ideas as a theoretical framework and discursive analysis the theoretical study revealed four discontinuous ideas of place between the late 17th and the early 20th centuries. A. Place as social and functional constructs that are representative of its propriety Taking the late 17th and the 18th centuries as an episteme, the discursive approach extends Casey’s argument that during the late 17th century, ‘place’ is reduced to a point in ‘space.’ 14 The discursive relations between different discourses suggest an idea of place which was exclusively bounded and understood by sense-based engagement, and was representative of the ‘identity’ of its proprietor. Traces of ‘place’ in the philosophical and scientific discourse postulated by René Descartes, 15 John Locke, 16 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, 17 and Isaac Newton 18 suggest that the term place referred to a corporeal image, and sensation as a way of understanding place, and place refers to something which is plural, fixed and bounded. Similar themes on the concept of sensation were reflected in natural philosophy by John Locke, David Hume 19 and Immanuel Kant, 20 while themes of classification and order were evident in the ordering of knowledge in

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__________________________________________________________________ biology (the descriptive order proposed for natural history in the book Systema Naturae, published in 1735 by Carl Linnaeus), 21 mechanical arts (the Encyclopédie, published in 1751, edited by Denis Diderot), 22 and sociology (writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau centred on the classification of citizens to form a society). 23 The common themes of classification and sensation were sources for and a prefiguration of the knowledge and construction of place in architecture. Firstly, the classification of building types grouped architecture according to building use and social order. Secondly, places were understood by how they project themselves visually to the observer. The knowledge of place was generated by the sensation one gathers from the appearance of the architecture and the built environment as was detailed in the writings of Nicolas Le Camus de Mezieres 24 and works of Etienne-Louis Boullée. 25 Concepts which were routinely found in the discipline such as the Durand’s principles of type, 26 and the concept of convenance (suitability of the place and convenience of function in relation to its proprietor) and caractère (the matching of external appearance to the status or temperament of the owner) portrayed in works of Claude Nicholas Ledoux, 27 Quatremère de Quincy 28 and Germaine Boffrand. 29 In addition to the theoretical writings, the practice of place was informed by a host of architectural pattern books, such as that of Colin Campbell, 30 Isaac Ware 31 and Robert Morris 32 provided rules for building according to different building types and propriety. B. Place as historical constructs used to achieve an idealised sense of the past Despite the demise of place during the late 17th century, the term place appeared in Alexander Pope’s poetry, Epistle to Lord Burlington, through the phrase ‘the Genius of the Place.’ 33 The discursive approach reveal that the use of the term place can be linked with, and yet differentiated from a complexity of discourses and practices which share decisive characteristics related to antiquity and primitive forms of nature: the theory of the picturesque narrated through the paintings and gardening doctrines, 34 the ideas of primitivism propagated through the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, as well as writings of Daniel Defoe, for example Robinson Crusoe; the views of antiquity illustrated through the works of Giambattista Piranesi; and, the concept of cyclical history in works of Giambattista Vico, Nicholas Poussin and Thomas Cole. The spatial representations of these concepts are captured in travel books by Kyp and Knyff’s Britannia Illustrata, the visual guide of Chiswick House by Jean Rocque and The Beauties of Stow by George Bickham. The knowledge of place as an idealised sense of the past was illustrated through archaeological books for example James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquity of Athens, and Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalantro. 35

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__________________________________________________________________ These common themes are legitimised by the connections to the discourse on architecture and gardening through the concept of ‘situation’ found in gardening principles 36 and architectural publications. 37 In practice, the principles issued by the architectural and gardening discourses emphasised irregularity, perambulation of scenes, integration with savage forms of nature and the use of antiquity. 38 Concepts and ideas related to the perception of place were manifested in architecture through the ideal prototypes of the ‘primitive hut’ by Marc-Antoine Laugier and the typology of the country house. From the discursive study, the decisive characteristics of the concepts and practice suggest the conception of place as a historical constructs which sought to provoke idealised states within a cyclical historical narrative, and characterised by Classical antiquity and savage qualities of nature. C. Place as moral constructs that represent class-specific terrains While there was little mention of the term place during the 19th century, the moral attributes of the built environment within the urban context of the 19th century formed important elements in constructing and defining the sense and being of place. Literature and reports from the sanitary and health discourse such as Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, 39 Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England 40 (which focuses on Manchester and the surrounding towns),Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, 41 and Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London, 42 Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, 43 as well as the novels of Charles Dickens publicise the dirt, disease, and squalor of the slums in London. Contrary to the negative immoral sense of place, the analysis reveals that the socialist views of communities and the conceptions of the countryside were ideas of ideal place. These ideals addressed consistent issues of class, cleanliness and morality, for example, Charles Fourier’s socialist ideas of community proposed the conception of ‘good’ places through the idea of ‘phalanxes.’ 44 In addition, the archaist ideas of Fourier, William Morris, 45 and David Thoreau, 46 provided a window in conceptualising ideas of place by engaging community life and the countryside as topographical contexts for the construction of a ‘good’ place. In addition, Robert Owen in A New View of Society and The Book of the New Moral World drew connections between education, morality and ‘place.’ 47 Collectively, this literature reveals the emergence of simultaneous constructs of ‘immoral’ and ‘moral’ places which suggests a place for the upper class as conscious and deliberate construct which excluded itself from the sense of placelessness which was perceived as being immoral. It suggests the perception of class-specific terrains that defined a sense of place and placelessness. The discursive concepts that informed the discourse on place are maintained by practices that offered strategies which stressed clean and moral places through

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__________________________________________________________________ concerns on philanthropic housing. 48 Simultaneously, place as objects were shaped by the Art & Craft theories of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, 49 and John Ruskin, 50 and French structural rationalist theories of Eugene-Emmanuel Violletle-Duc 51 - in this sense, the discourse on place is shaped by theories of architecture. D. Place as psychological and perceptual constructs of pleasure and fear For the late 19th century, the discursive study revealed an alternative idea of place which extended beyond the physical qualities of place; the perceptual qualities of place became an alternative way of engaging with new possibilities of place-experience. The new forms of place-experience within the built environment and their representations such as motion pictures (The Lumiere Brothers First Films, Thomas Edison’s Scene from the Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower 52 and 104th Street Curve, New York illustrating the elevated railway), panoramas (E. T. Parris’ The Panorama of London 53 ) and paintings (Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte 54 ) constructed complex pseudo-realistic experiences through ephemeral images of the new geographies. The perceptual condition of place is related to how the individual make sense of the built environment through psychological terms, either positively as pleasure or negatively as fear. When the strange becomes familiar, a sense of pleasure is formed; when the familiar becomes strange, a sense of fear emerged. The ideas of alienation and individuality in sociological and philosophical studies, 55 the clinical explorations of psychoanalysis and a host of phobias 56 postulated analogous modes of existence of objects and the construction of knowledge. These theories were reflected in the experiences of fear narrated through literature such as Poe’s The Man of the Crowd. 57 In contrast, traversing the new urban environment was a construct of pleasure for the middle class and bourgeoisie captured in Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life. 58 These discursive relations revealed that personal sensibility and self-consciousness were important constituents of place, and the street and the arcade informed simultaneous perceptions of positive and negative senses of place for the individual. The architectural discourse played an active role in shaping the idea of place; it issued strategies for place-making by treating the sense of fear in public spaces through works of Camillo Sitte. 59 It also drew relations between place and psychology through the theory of empathy that focussed on the psychology of form attributed to explorations by Robert Vischer, 60 Heinrich Wölfflin, 61 and Wilhelm Worringer. 62 In this way, architecture acted as both the subject and object of discourse that shaped the idea of place. The web of relations implied that place was used as a perceptual construct whose form is based on the individuals psychological engagement with place.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Discussion and Conclusion: Contribution to the Problemitisation of Place Based on the theoretical study, the findings contributed several points for the understanding of the idea of place. Firstly, the term place was conceptualised, not as a point of departure, but as a moving resultant, an uncertain form whose intelligibility can only come from studying the system of relations it maintained within a discursive domain. The usage of the term place shifts from one historical period to another. This finding supports the speculation of Rapoport 63 and Adams, Hoelscher & Till 64 who suggested that the problem of place is due to its multi-use as physical objects and social relationships, and works of Casey 65 and Curry 66 argued that the problematic nature of place occurred because of its subordination to terms such as space and region. The discontinuous ideas of place across history suggest that place is a term which is constantly redefined and the emphasis on cross-disciplinary relations to understand the formation of ideas provides a richer and varied understanding of place. Secondly, the discourse on place is informed by a complex discursive formation within a dominant episteme which is linked, and yet differentiated from a complex of discourses and practices. The analyses establish that it was the interplay of rules of formation in the form of knowledge and practice that made possible the appearance of objects. As part of the discourse of place, architecture and the built environment became part of the rules that govern the construction of knowledge. This finding implies that the problem of place lies in the discursive displacement of place. Besides Curry’s argument that the seminal ambiguity of place is due to the discursive displacement of place in relation to space, 67 this study discovered that the displacement of place is not only related to the concept of space: the existing ideas of place slip into other historical ideas of place. Another problematic nature of the idea of place is the flawed perceptions of place and placelessness. This chapter argues that existing studies have taken for granted the notions of placelessness and place. The discursive nature of the historical ideas of place suggested that the perception of place as an ideal concept to resolve and eradicate the notion of placelessness is flawed. The emphasis on the return to place and the perception of placelessness as a crisis condition are sievelike concepts which neglect the crucial relations and connections to other discourses. Rather, the transition of ideas was informed by a shift in the discursive formation of place that occurred within the discourse or between other discourses; it is not an idea which emerged out of a crisis condition. Thirdly, the findings revealed that the manifestation of place is not an effect that is caused by changes within its disciplinary context, but a product of discourse. In the light of this, architecture is understood as both ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ that governed the discourse of place: ‘objects’ in the sense that they were products that were studied and produced by the discourse on place; and ‘subjects’ in the sense that they issue strategies of place-making which form practices that maintained the concept of place. This finding implies that place is a problematic term due to the

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__________________________________________________________________ lack of emphasis on practice as a way to understand the relations between conception and manifestation of the idea of place; the theoretical study revealed that the emergence of place is informed by the connection between concept and object, and the key to understand this link is through practice. In conclusion, this paper argues that the problematic nature of the idea of place results from the historical transition of the ideas of place and the confused and idealised nature of any given sense of place. It brings to light that future research needs to recognise ‘place’ as a ‘construct’ made up of a web of relations between cross-disciplinary discourses within its contemporaneous socio-historical context. The conceptual use of the term place is defined and re-defined throughout a kaleidoscope of ages, having its own distinctive representation in architecture of the past, as in architecture today.

Notes 1

Marc Augé, Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1996); Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976). 2 Michael de Certeau, ‘Spatial Practice’, in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 115-130; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Oxford, England: Polity Press, 1990); David Harvey, ‘From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Conditions of Postmodernity’, in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, eds. J. Bird, B. Curtis, T. Putnam, G. Robertson and L. Tickner (London: Routledge, 1993), 3-29; Doreen Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, in Reading Human Geography, eds. T. Barnes and D. Gregory (London: Arnold, 1997), 315-323. 3 Relph, Place and Placelessness; Yi Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); Christian Norberg Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York and London: Rizzoli, 1980); Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 4 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics 16, No. 1 (1986): 22-27; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 5 Paul Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen Till, ‘Place in Context: Rethinking Humanists Geographies’, in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, eds. P. C. Adams, S. D. Hoelscher and K. E. Till (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), xiii-xxxiii; Amos Rapoport, ‘A Critical Look at the Concept “Place”’, in The Spirit & Power of Place: Human Environment and Sacrality, Essays Dedicated to Yi Fu Tuan, eds. Y. F. Tuan and R. P. B. Singh (Varanasi, India: National Geographical Society of India, 1994), 31-45.

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Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Michael Curry, ‘Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place’, in The Handbook of New Media, ed. Sonia L. L. Lievrouw (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 502-517. 7 Casey, The Fate of Place. 8 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). 9 Casey, The Fate of Place, 298. 10 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 5. 11 Ibid., 181. 12 Paul Hirst, ‘Foucault and Architecture’, A. A. Files 26 (1993): 53. 13 Ibid. 14 Casey, The Fate of Place. 15 Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland, 1983). 16 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Dent, 1961). 17 Samuel Clarke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘The Correspondence’, in The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, Together with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Opticks, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), 5-141. 18 Isaac Newton, ‘Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Opticks’, in The LeibnizClarke Correspondence, Together with Extracts from Newton’s Principia and Opticks, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), 142-183. 19 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edition (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1978). 20 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Dent, 1934); Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). 21 Arvid Uggla, Linnaeus (Stockholm: Swedish Institute, 1957). 22 Denis Diderot, Denis Diderot’s The Encyclopedia: Selections, ed. Stephen Gendzier (New York: Harper, 1967). 23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men’, in Rousseau: Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, ed. M Cranston (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1984), 56-172. 24 Nicolas Le Camus de Mezieres, The Genius of Architecture, or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations (Santa Monica, CA: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 25 Etienne-Loius Boullée, ‘Architecture, Essay on Art’, in Boullée & Visionary Architecture: Including Boullée’s Architecture, Essay on Art, ed. H. Rosenau (London: Academy Editions, 1976), 81-116.

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__________________________________________________________________ 26

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and J. G. Legrand, Recueil et Parallele des Edifices en Tout Genre: Anciens et Modernes, Remarquables par Leur Beaute, par Leur Grandeur ou par Leur Singularite, Verlag Dr. Alfons UHL (West Germany: Nordlingen, 1986). 27 Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Architecture de C.N. Ledoux: Premier Volume (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1983). 28 Quatremère, ‘Part II: Selected Translations’, 59-271. 29 Germaine Boffrand and Caroline van Eck, Book of Architecture: Containing the General Principles of the Art and the Plans, Elevations, and Sections of Some of the Edifices Built in France and in Foreign Countries: A Critical Edition (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002). 30 Colin Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1967). 31 Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture (Westmead, Farnborough, Hants., England: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1971); Isaac Ware, Designs of Inigo Jones (Westmead, Farnborough, Hants., England: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1971). 32 Robert Morris, Select Architecture: Being Regular Designs of Plans and Elevations Well Suited to Both Town and Country (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973). 33 Alexander Pope, ‘An Epistle to Lord Burlington (1731)’, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, eds. J. D. Hunt and P. Willis (London: Elek, 1975), 211-214. Alexander Pope, ‘Essay from The Guardian (1713)’, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, eds. J. D. Hunt and P. Willis (London: Elek, 1975), 204-208. 34 William Gilpin, ‘From Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791)’, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, eds. J. D. Hunt and P. Willis (London: Elek, 1975), 338-341; Richard Payne Knight, ‘An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805)’, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, eds. J. D. Hunt and P. Willis (London: Elek, 1975), 348-350; Richard Payne Knight, ‘The Landscape, A Didactic Poem (1794)’, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, eds. J. D. Hunt and P. Willis (London: Elek, 1975), 342-348; Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque: As Compared with the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (Farnborough, Hants: Gregg International, 1971). 35 Eileen Harris, British Architectural Books and Writers 1556-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 36 Humphry Repton, An Enquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening (Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1969); Humphry Repton, ‘From the “Red Book” for Blaise Castle (1795-6)’, in The

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__________________________________________________________________ Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, eds. J. D. Hunt and P. Willis (London: Elek, 1975), 359-365. 37 Morris, Select Architecture; Robert Morris, ‘Lectures on Architecture (1734)’, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, eds. J. D. Hunt and P. Willis (London: Elek, 1975), 234-236. 38 Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening, accessed March 7, 2006, http://www.gardenvisit.com/t/w8.htm; William Chambers and W. Mason, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1972); Joseph Addison, ‘The Spectator, No. 37, 12 April 1711’, in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820, eds. J. D. Hunt and P. Willis (London: Elek, 1975), 141-143; Batty Langley, New Principles of Gardening: or, The Laying Out and Planting Parterres, Groves, Wildernesses, Labyrinths, Avenues, Parks, etc (Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers Limited, 1971); Gilpin, ‘From Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791)’, 338-341. 39 Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (Edinburgh: University Press, 1965). 40 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1958). 41 Henry Mayhew, ‘Volume I: The Street Folk’, in London labour and the London Poor: The Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work (London, Dover Publication, Inc., 1968), 4v; Henry Mayhew, ‘Volume IV: Those That Will Not Work, Comprising Prostitutes, Thieves, Swindlers and Beggars, by Several Contributors’, in London labour and the London Poor: The Condition and Earnings of Those That Will Work, Cannot Work, and Will Not Work (London, Dover Publication, Inc., 1968); Henry Mayhew and John Canning, eds., The Illustrated Mayhew’s London: The Classic Account of London Street Life and Characters in the Time of Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986). 42 Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Rev. Edition (New York: Kelley, 1969); Charles Booth, Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure: Selected Writings, ed. Harold Pfautz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 43 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollutions and Taboo (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 [1966]). 44 Charles Fourier, ‘Part V: The Ideal Community’, in The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction, ed. J Beecher and R Bienvenu (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), 233-270. 45 William Morris, News from Nowhere or an Epoch of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1970); William Morris and F. Boos, eds., The Earthly Paradise (New York and London: Routledge,

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__________________________________________________________________ 2002); Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, in The Portable Thoreau, Rev. edition (New York: Penguin, 1977), 592-630. 46 Ibid. 47 Robert Owen, The Book of the New Moral World: In Seven Parts (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1970); Robert Owen, A New View of Society: Or, Essays on the Formation of the Human Character Preparatory to the Development of a Plan for Gradually Ameliorating the Condition of Mankind (London: MacMillan Press, 1972). 48 S. M. Gaskell, Model Housing from the Great Exhibition to the Festival of Britain (London: Mansell, 1986). 49 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, ‘The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture’, in Pointed Architecture, ed. J. Weale (London and New York: Academy Editions, St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 1-76. 50 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Allen, 1907); EugeneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Discourses on Architecture (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959). 51 Ibid. 52 American Memory Library of Congress 2006, Edison Motion Pictures, accessed April 10, 2006, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmpfr.html#TOP. 53 Dana Arnold, Re-Presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London 1800-1840 (Burlington: Ashgate, Aldershot, Hants, 2000), 124. 54 Gustave Caillebotte and Norma Broude, eds., Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 55 Georg Simmel and D. N. Levine, eds., On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971); Karl Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, in Readings from Karl Marx, eds. K. Marx and D. S. Sayer (London: Routledge, 1989), 178-190; Engels, Condition of the Working Class; Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychathenia’, in October: The First Decade, 1976-1986, ed. A Michelson (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987), 58-75. 56 Sigmund Freud, A. Richards and J. Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953). 57 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1983). 58 Charles Baudelaire and Jonathan Mayne, eds., The Painter of Modern Life: And Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1964). 59 Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles (London: Phaidon, 1965).

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__________________________________________________________________ 60

Robert Vischer, ‘On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics’, in Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, eds. D. Britt and H. Wolfgang (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 89-124. 61 Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture’, in Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873-1893, eds. D. Britt and H. Wolfgang (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 149-192. 62 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). 63 Rapoport, ‘A Critical Look at the Concept “Place”’, 31-45. 64 Adams, Hoelscher and Till, ‘Place in Context: Rethinking Humanists Geographies’, xiii-xxxiii. 65 Casey, The Fate of Place. 66 Curry, ‘Discursive Displacement and the Seminal Ambiguity of Space and Place’, 502-517. 67 Ibid.

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__________________________________________________________________ Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967. Veronica Ng is an academic and a researcher who lectures at Taylor’s University, Malaysia. Currently her research and writing is devoted to the theoretical speculations of the concepts of place, and the documentation of the sense of place for small towns and places in West Malaysia.