Derive and Detournement: call back to situationism

June 4th, 2009 referencesTags: ambiance, city, cyborg, derive, detournement, experimental circus, flaneur, haptic, modernity, nomad, play, situationism, space, utopia

These texts and clips had me thinking about the relationship between the modernist concern with contingency (starting with the ubiquitous presence of photographic arts from the early 20th century onwards) and the movement of situationism as it flourished in the late 50s and 60s – I see another line or relationship between the flaneur, the nomad, the cyborg and the situationist as precursors of immersive arts/installations practitioners…immersion is basically the design of playful space.

Debord advised drifters to allow themselves to be guided by those features of the street neglected by most pedestrians, like “the sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters” and the “path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the contour of the ground)”. the determinants of drift, apparently, were alternations in emotional and ambient intensity; “the appealing or repelling characters of certain places”; and the drifter’s tendency to “drain” along relatively unresistant paths, “the fissures in the urban network”. The Lettrist International even “envisaged a pinball machine arranged in such a way that the play of the lights and the more or less predictable trajectories of the balls” would represent the “thermal sensations and desires of people passing by the gates of the Cluny Museum around an hour after sunset in November,” as though drifters were like ball bearings, propelled through the city’s channels by the energized “pins” of the unities of ambiance.

Simon Sadler, The Situationist City

Nomads Revisited – postmodern flaneurs?

March 23rd, 2009 researchTags: Aleph, Benjamin, city, De Certeau, derive, flaneur, nomad, pedestrian, space

Texts:

Walter Benjamin, The Poet of Modern Life

Tim Cresswell, Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive (from Space and Social Theory, Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by George Benko and Ulf Strohmayer)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Tim Cresswell traces many postmodern theorists’ (De Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Ian Chambers) enthusiasm for the trope of the nomad to Benjamin’s articulation of flanerie, i.e. the activity of wandering through the crowded city, exercising one’s gaze on the varied, ephemeral spectacle of urban life and being gazed at in return, as a preeminently modern experience of social space.

What differentiates the ‘modern’ flaneur from the postmodern nomad (where, for argument’s sake, we understand nomad as a theoretical construct rather than as a ‘real’, historical subject) ? Despite the mobility and anonymity of the flaneur as a subject/object of desire (consumption) steering a course in the flow of urban lived space (or representational space in Lefevrian terms), he remains a contextualized entity, culturally and metaphorically ensconced in a proper place, namely 1860s Paris and its geography of flaneur-friendly arcades. Baudelaire’s poetry, which Benjamin mines for clues of the flaneur condition, is evocative because it refers so concretely to the representational/lived space of Paris, a space that can be characterized as having a multiple, ambiguous (Baudelaire depicts nameless streets vs. landmarks) but nevertheless very tangible identity.

The flaneur is at home in the shifting, fluid unwinding of urban spatiality. This space, which he traverses according to personal habit, endows him with a certain flavor, attitude, a point of view that constitutes a form of identity – an identity that Benjamin argues is that of a commodity. There is nothing reified, however, about Baudelaire’s precise, concrete, rich description of the flaneur’s experience, which emphatically contradicts the notion that mobility is necessarily tied to the experience of space as abstract, empty, or isotropic (Deleuze and Guattari). The flaneur embodies that very modern idea of at-homeness within the fractures of society, of working with the destabilizing forces of space-time compression that shake up fixed places.

De Certeau adds miltary metophors to the poetic aura of the flaneur – Tim Cresswell dubs this new figure “pedestrian hero”, the tactician of everyday life, the lone consumer who is engaged in recapturing the representations of a space daily traversed from the “strategists” or masters of abstract space (the producers of capitalist space/power structures) through an infinite series of tiny narrative gestures or metaphorical inscriptions of one’s footsteps/traces in the city. This figure, more so than the flaneur, takes part in a spatial politics as a sort of everyman guerillero, producing infinite spatial possibilities – Borges’ aleph, what Edward Soja would call Thirdspace – from reified spatial product.

The term nomad more properly applies to De Certeau’s pedestrian than to the flaneur insofar as the pedestrian is not embedded in a place (19th century Paris) but produces ephemeral, personally specific places wherever he or she goes. The identity of such a pedestrian is mysterious – the making of “spatial stories”, as De Certeau puts it, is a means to produce a richly significant experience of the everyday, but what imprint does this plethora of microscopic narratives leave within the pedestrian’s sense of self? Does this pedestrian have any allegiance other than to himself?

Nomadology: “they arrive like destiny, without cause, without reason, without pretext.”

March 10th, 2009 researchTags: De Certeau, Deleuze, derive, geography, Guattari, narrative, nomad, postmodernism, space, theory, time, utopia

Commenting on:

Tim Cresswell, Imagining the Nomad: Mobility and the Postmodern Primitive (from Space and Social Theory, Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, edited by George Benko and Ulf Strohmayer, Blackwell Publishers, 1997)

Edward Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Harvard University Press, 1983)

Diana Fuss, Inside/Out (from Inside/Out, Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss)

Deleuze and Guattari imagining postmodern space as a desert, isotropic and boundless where mobility finds a home.

Tim Creswell, Edward Said and Dianna Fuss all seem to hone in on a key issue in the discussion of postmodern notions of spatiality (centering around the nomad, the tactician, the embodied self) and which Said specifically places at the heart of the theorist’s identity. To what extent do theorists, in making sense of their world, inevitably “reify” it, turn lived experience, and in this case, the experience of space/place into an abstraction, either by institutionalizing the theory and cutting it off from its social and historical context or by practicing theory “for theory’s sake”, as itself a form of literature?

Cresswell rightly points out that under the horizon of theorists’ successive attempts to either exalt or demonize the figure of the nomad, the nomad herself, as an embodied subject, remains unknown. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s nomadology subtracts the historical and economic substance of the nomad to extract an elegant and poetic ontology of postmodern society as a utopia structured by no-structure or freedom of movement. Lines of flight or trajectories through space replace a now intolerable fixity of points, of subjects rooted in place. In a revealing parallel with Lukacs, according to whom contemporary society has catastrophically abolished the historicity of subjects to better control them as empty objects circulating through empty space, Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphysics imply that the postmodern subject/nomad only acquires total mobility in space by becoming immobile in time, unmarked by the passage of time. “Unmarked by the traces of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and geography” – Cresswell argues that it is precisely those markers that give reality and substance to a subject, a reality that theoretical obsessions with the nomad clearly lack.

Contra theorists of Deleuze and Guattari’s ilk, Said asserts the following: “the work of the humanist critic is to materialize rather than spiritualize the culture in which we live”. This notion travels closely with Lukacs idea that the practice of theory engages on a fundamental level our awareness with the material conditions of the world and therefore serves as a basis for social action. But does “materializing” versus “spiritualizing” culture necessarily go hand in hand, like Lukacs, with reestablishing the theoretical primacy of place i.e. a lieu, or proper place to quote De Certeau and all the historical, economic, political specificity that attach themselves to place, over the attention also due to space, which in its own way, also carries with it definite political and economic implications.

After all, the ideal of spatial mobility, of transience, of boundary transgression is one that carries, not only for Deleuze and Guattari, but for De Certeau (who is concerned with the condition of the consumer) and for Fuss (who is concerned with the theoretical context of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender – and by extension, ‘heterosexual’ – experience of sexuality) the promise of a social space that is no longer delimited and limited by hierarchy, by top-down design, by notions of inclusion and exclusion. We are invited to consider the theoretical transfer from a (modernist) society in which everyone has a place or stays in their place to a (postmodernist) society in which no one is chained to/oppressed by a “proper noun” (De Certeau), but instead is a “poet of their own affairs”, slipping in and out of places according to a logic of the opportune moment. In this sense De Certeau, contra Deleuze and Guattari, does not abolish the “place” of time in the human experience, but argues for a different notion of time, one that is not structured by narratives about past and future but that seizes the story (of life) in the present, in the moment of experiencing the world.