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placemaker
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Name: placemaker
Interests: Geographical phenomenology, cyberspace, place-making, urban design.
Occupation: Graduate student
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Member Since:
4/23/2007
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| The importance of place (identity) On the way to school this afternoon I heard a story on WAMC that talked about how some municipalities in Ulster County, New York are considering consolidating services for the benefit of the taxpayers. There's an interesting bit at the end here, which I'm transcribing for the sake of convenience (I'm not sure how long these links stay active): But there's always a bit of caution as towns worry about losing their identity. And when county legislature chairman David Donaldson enthusiastically predicted that in ten years Ulster County will look nothing like it does today, there was a moment where some in the audience looked at each other and clearly wondered what that might mean.
That is, some of the residents are concerned that by consolidating services like snow plowing, their own villages and towns might somehow lose some aspect of their character or uniqueness. Although the story itself had little interest to me, I was struck by this idea that sharing public services changes the identity of a place. I thought it a simple but poignant reminder that people are very much attached to the places where they live. What I suspect most people don't think about is that it isn't just the place that holds such importance for them; it's the identity of the place. It's how people perceive it, it's reputation -- that is, it isn't just the spatial arrangement of streets and buildings, it isn't just the relationship between one municipality and the surrounding towns; it's the way people think about the place that is so incredibly important to the people who live there. The importance of place identity is especially visible when you think about what incites arguments between people about place. It's less often about things people actually do in or to a place (e.g., outsiders vandalizing a public building) than what people say about it that matters. People are proud of places, proud of their hometowns, their countries -- often to the degree that they are willing to overlook or minimize the flaws of their proclaimed home in favor of exaggerating its better qualities. Note that they are not actually doing anything to improve the place they're championing; they're merely talking about it. And talk, be it self-congratulatory bragging or casual trash talk, is thus intimately connected to both reputation and identity. Think about this the next time you feel angry about someone insulting your town -- or proud when they tell you how beautiful it is. Ask yourself whether what you're talking about is the place itself or how it's perceived. And remember that in the end, identity is just as important as place. | | |
| Baudrillard and post-modernism......or is it postmodernism (no hyphen)? I'm always partial to non-hyphenation, but there I've just contradicted myself. In any case, this entry is supposed to be primarily about Simulacra and Simulation and postmodernism in general, but I can't promise either great intellectual insight or an ability to stay completely on topic.
A caveat before I delve into this morass: I am not a social theorist. Despite having earned a degree in anthropology, I never once took a class that covered social theory as an undergrad. Don't chalk this up to a poor requirement system on the part of my university; I concentrated in archaeology and hence was blissfully free of social theory so that I could spend my time learning how to date glass bottles and use drill bits to measure pipe bores (I'm not kidding). Those were the good old days, as they say...
But it is a morass, this thing we so lovingly call postmodernism. Or post-modernism. Or, if you're really clever and don't mind sounding like you're from LA, PoMo. As I feel I can make heads nor tails of some of this, I entreat you to join in, expand my knowledge, and correct me where I'm wrong!
Baudrillard and Simulation
We are living in hyperreality. That is, there is no longer a reality, just the simulacrum, a copy without an original. There was a reality, but that's long gone, and with it things like meaning, authenticity, God, truth. At least, this is the world according to Baudrillard, as I read him. In Simulacra and Simulation, he says wonderful things like this: "Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible" (p. 19), and that's enough to make my head reel.
How is it possible that there is no reality? How is it possible to have a copy without an original? Doesn't the existence (reality?) of the copy imply that there was at some point an original, even if that original has long since vanished? I hate to sound like the philosophers who argued the necessary existence of an unmoved mover, but simple linguistic analysis requires that if you use the term "copy" there is an implicit understanding that, once upon a time, there was an original to be copied. And this is where I start to think that something is not quite right with my dear friend Baudrillard. Or, at least, with his idea of simulation.
Long story short (I will spare you the hair-pulling, tooth-gnashing two weekends I spent with this book), here are my grievances with this concept:
- It says nothing, first and foremost, about how one might recognize that reality is dead. It gives no way of differentiating between the original and the copy. If he can't do this, then he can't make the assertion. Gut feeling doesn't cut it in philosophy.
- It seems to presuppose that somewhere along the line, a conscious choice to destroy reality was made -- but then it never indicates who might be responsible for this.
- It says nothing about the fact that people aren't uniform in accepting or rejecting hyperreality.
- It says nothing about when or how the shift from reality to hyperreality took place, much less why.
Baudrillard pulls some brilliant maneuvers on this little philosophical battlefield. He suggests, for example, that the Cold War is a hyperreal war, that the war in and of itself did not exist, that there wasn't really any adversity between the US and the USSR, that it was all, more or less, posturing played out in the media. And yet in his writing he implies that past wars were somehow real. As much as I can see his point, there's always a bottom line. And that bottom line, in this case, is that blood is blood, regardless of whether the conflict was created (or reified) by government or media.
He talks about socialization as though it was once real, as though it at one time referred to something pure, untainted by miniaturization or idealization. Yet I would argue that socialization has in fact always been about the ideal, that by his own terms, socialization has always at the very least aspired to the simulacrum.
He spends little time talking about place (which is a key interest to a great many geographers), yet when he does it's purely in reference to theme parks (Disney is one of his favorites), Los Angeles, suburbia. These, he says, are all simulacra. To a degree, I might agree. Disneyworld could be interpreted as a copy without an original in a sense; it takes historical and architectural elements, it twists them into something clean and moralizing and childlike, and it juxtaposes them in a way that they have never existed. And yet, not one rational person who visits Disney would ever believe in its existence independent of the desire to create a nonexistent place. It may be a simulacrum, but it is an obvious one.
Suburbs, on the other hand, exist because of a strange marriage between the auto industry, employers, and capitalism. They don't seek to emulate anything but themselves. They may be artificial, plastic, even unrealistic -- and yet they don't claim reference to anything. In my estimation, they are the essence of the worst parts of modernism, the parts that deny history and context precisely because they are self-aware. In the end, they are just as real as city centers. Enclosed shopping malls might have been a better choice on his part.
This is not to say that I reject Baudrillard or the value of simulation, simulacra, or hyperreality. I think there's a great deal of use in these concepts. Within the right context, they can be applied to great effect -- the internet, theme parks, politics, media. Even the scientific method is not immune: "Such is the watershed of a hyperreal society, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation..." (p. 29). It has long been one of my grievances with positivist science that it holds the normalized model up and trumpets it as reality, paying more attention to its methods and to the normalization of data based on quanta rather than the whys and wherefores reality.
But let us not go too far with it. The phenomena Barry Glassner writes about in his book Culture of Fear could be wedded quite nicely to hyperreality: the media creating and reinforcing the myth of the Scary Black Rapist Waiting in the Alley to Attack White Women being a prime example of simulation. And yet even this is problematic: one could just as easily interpret this as the media oversimplifying actuality and running with the results. Hyperreality is useful in some circumstances, but it is too easy to get caught up in arguing that things are simulacra when we ought to be thinking about the behavior of people within them. (And here I won't go into whether it is possible for people themselves to be simulacra; that's going to have to be a blog entry of its own.)
The linchpin of my objections to hyperreality is this: people respond to simulacra just as they would to reality (unless they are aware of the difference, which Baudrillard argues they are not) -- so in the end, does it matter? Does it matter whether we're in the Matrix or in Zion, when we aren't capable of knowing the difference, when we live invariably as though we are within reality? To Baudrillard, it is impossible to transcend hyperreality because it is impossible to recognize it (and hence some of his objections to The Matrix as an interpretation of his theory, I suppose). If it is impossible to recognize, much less transcend, then the answer has to be, it doesn't matter.
And the beauty of all this? If we take postmodernism at face value, then any interpretation of a text is a valid one, and in the end it doesn't really matter what the author intended (look up the Sokal affair and Robert Hanley's take on it) -- which means that even if I have Baudrillard wrong, I also have him right.
The author is dead. Long live postmodernism.
Next time: more thoughts on postmodernism.
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| Welcome back! I can't believe it's been over six months since I last posted here. I'd like to apologize for that. Life got the better of me, and although I've been reading about some pretty interesting things, I just haven't been able to focus enough to write about them here. So consider this a starting over point of sorts. A quick reintroduction:
For those of you who don't know me, I'm a graduate student of geography. I came to this discipline by way of anthropology, archaeology, criminology, and psychology. Having taken courses in almost all of the social sciences, I consider myself a social scientist on the broad scale and a geographer on the narrow scale. Why geography? This is a question I get a lot. People have a conception of this discipline that revolves almost exclusively around what's called place-name geography -- making maps and putting places (cities, countries, rivers, mountains, oceans) on them. In reality there's so much more to geography than knowing where something is. In fact, it turns out to be a field that is perfect as a node for interdisciplinary work. I could go on and on about the different sub-branches and sub-sub-branches of geography (physical, human, urban, GIS, and so on), but I won't. As much as the list approach gives people a rough idea of what we do, I think there's a better way to explain it that is less discrete and more holistic. And that is this: geographers study anything and everything having to do with space, place, landscape, territory, and scale. If you can use any of those words to describe some concept, chances are there's a geographer who studies it. For my part, I study things that are less overtly geographical in the popular imagination. I'm interested specifically in the intersection of geographical concepts and psychology. I'm interested in first-person experiences of place, how places take on identities, how space and place interact, and how we talk about places as though they're living, breathing things. Some of what I'm interested in takes place primarily on the social (group) scale, but much of it happens at the psychological (individual) scale. This also means that I read a fair amount of books and articles that originate in philosophy, social theory, and developmental (and cognitive) psychology. Sometimes it's difficult to keep up with it all, and sometimes the number of interconnections I see in my readings are overwhelming. Sometimes these relationships seem obvious, while at other times I'm left wondering how two (or more) completely different understandings of the world can ever be compatible. At times it feels like I'm slogging through a morass of words and ideas that are speaking past one another -- and yet at other times it feels like I'm on an Indiana Jones-style grand adventure. I'm coming back to this blog because this semester I'm working on my thesis. I've spent far too much bandwidth over on my personal blog talking about the things I'm reading for school. Yet in some ways, I've spent far too little bandwidth talking about this stuff. So this is why I'm here. For the next few months, this will be my sounding board for my research. I'm going to rail about authors I don't like, and rave about those I do. I'm going to ask questions that I can't answer. And, if you're at all interested, I'll engage in all manner of discussion of these subjects here. So stick around. Next entry: Baudrillard and post-modernism | | |
| Group Geoblog.
I've become involved in a group geography blog over on Blogger (sadly Xanga doesn't have the capability to handle team blogging, or else we would have done it here). It's called Geographical Eclectica and it's brand spanking new. In all likelihood I'll end up cross-posting most of my stuff from there to here, but it's worth checking out because the other contributors have really interesting things to say about geography in all its glory. I've been slow in blogging anything of substance lately--I'm not giving this place up, but it'll probably be a few weeks before I manage to put enough words together to say anything interesting. In the meantime, keep your eyes open and your finger on the button.
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| City and womanI'm reading chapter 3 of Putting Women In Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World by Domosh and Seager for an essay I'm working on. I just stumbled across this passage which, despite its length, I'm going to quote in full:
We seem to be caught between two opposed images of the city: one offers the city as an exciting and fulfilling place for women (and hence "good" for women), and the other offers a potentially dangerous place (and thsu "bad" for women). Suburbs, too, are portrayed in contradictory ways: on the one hand, they are portrayed as more safe than cities, and therefore "better" for women; on the other hand, they are presented as spatial traps, where women get stuck in domestic roles with no way to escape (and therefore "bad" for women). (p. 68)
As I think about this passage, I'm reminded of a chapter written by Dolores Hayden titled "What Would a Non-sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design and Human Work" (which appears in a couple of edited volumes, including one by Rendell, Penner, and Borden called Gender Space Architecture). In it, Hayden talks about the ways that labor unions and corporations collaborated just after WWI to enhance (intentionally or not) the sexual division of labor by making private residences sites of conspicuous consumption populated by appliances and housewives whose (unpaid) job it was to manage the house and its environment to make it pleasing to male workers returning from shifts in socially alienating and psychologically stunting inner-city factories. Or something like that.
Looking at these two pieces side by side, I wonder whether the image of the city as a dangerous place, unsafe especially for women and children, was borne of an unconscious desire to maintain the cult of domesticity. If society could prevent women from living and working--especially alone--in cities, it could retain a massive unpaid labor force that contributes to a modernist ethic of consumption. Hence, stories of cities as dark, scary places are brought into the home, reinforcing the concept of man-as-breadwinner or man-as-inherently-strong, housewives feel safe in the suburbs and grateful for that safety, and all of it feeds back into itself. What is hidden in this text is the implicit assumption that cities potentially mean freedom for women; as long as cities are portrayed as dangerous, housewives will not think to escape the relative safety of their suburban homes, conventional marriages, and unpaid (and thankless) labor.
I'm not entirely sure that I agree with this interpretation, but it's food for thought. Combine all this with Macek's book Urban Nightmares--films from the second half of the 20th century onward reinforce the concept of city as dangerous, with white, sensitive, suburban males of controlled violence as heroes. I have to chew on this a little more, but I find it all quite interesting.
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