CHAPTER SEVEN
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- Capitalist production has unified and integrated the dimension of space on this planet: space which is no longer marked out and delineated by border-societies outside of the system. This unification is at the same time a wide-spread and intensive process of banalisation. The piling up of consumer goods produced one after another for that abstract place: ‘the market’, just as it was always going to break down every regional and legal barrier, and all those guild/corporative restrictions, dating from the middle ages, which maintained and upheld the quality of artisanal production, so it was also destined to dissolve every specificity of place: to break down the autonomy and the distinctiveness of absolutely every p l a c e . This power of homogenization is the heavy artillery that has made fall all the walls of China.
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…which is why a resolute NON-standardization – learned, maybe, from Jorge Luis Borges’ catalogs and cartography 1) – goes hand in hand with leet-speak, encryption and hacking of all kinds. Because, online, it is actually now so easy to recreate those havens – those “border-societies outside of the system” – that disappeared from the physical world in this last half-century of modern roads, electronics and globalizing culture. Because with a little hacking and a leave-of-absence from the database, you can have the modern, computerized enforcer – who relies on the virtual world to do his work in the physical world – sounding just like the cartographer, colonialist or missionary quoted in The Art of Not Being Governed:
- “Making maps is hard, but mapping Guizhou province especially so….The land in southern Guizhou has fragmented and confused boundaries….A department or a county may be split into several subsections, in many instances separated by other departments or counties….There are also regions of no man’s land where the Miao live intermixed with the Chinese…. Southern Guizhou has a multitude of mountain peaks. They are jumbled together, without any plains or marshes to space them out, or rivers or water courses to put limits on them. They are vexingly numerous and ill-disciplined….Very few people dwell among them, and generally the peaks do not have names. Their configurations are difficult to discern clearly, ridges and summits seeming to be the same. Those who give an account of the arterial pattern of the mountains are thus obliged to speak at length. In some cases, to describe a few kilometers of ramifications needs a pile of documentation, and dealing with the main line of a day’s march takes a sequence of chapters. As to the confusion of the local patois, in the space of fifty kilometers a river may have fifty names and an encampment covering a kilometer and a half may have three designations. Such is the unreliability of the nomenclature.”
- “The hilly and jungly tracts were those in which the dacoits held out longest. Such were the country between Minbu and Thayetmyo and the [swampy] terai at the foot of the Shan Hills and the Arakan and Chin Hills. Here pursuit was impossible. The tracts are narrow and tortuous and admirably suited for ambuscades. Except by the regular paths there were hardly any means of approach; the jungle malaria was fatal to our troops; a column could only penetrate the jungle and move on. The villages are small and far between; they are generally compact and surrounded by dense, impenetrable jungle. The paths were either just broad enough for a cart, or very narrow, and, where they led through the jungle were overhung with brambles and thorny creepers. A good deal of the dry grass is burned in March, but as soon as the rains recommence the whole once more becomes impassible.”
- “The surface has been minutely trenched by winding streams. So numerous are the creeks that the topographical map of a single representative county of 373 square miles indicated 339 named streams, that is, nine streams for each ten square miles. The valleys are for the most part “V”-shaped, with rarely more level space along the banks of a stream for a cabin and perhaps a garden patch….The isolation occasioned by methods of travel so slow and difficult is intensified by several circumstances. For one thing, the routes are round-about. Travel is either down one branch along a creek and up another branch, or up a stream to a divide and down another stream on the further side of the ridge. This being the case, married women living within ten miles of their parents have passed a dozen years without going back to see them.”
…and what happens if society’s generalized ability to stay organized – in the virtual or the physical world – becomes so degraded that the above is the norm… ???
1) from On Exactitude in Science: “… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.” or in The Library of Babel and others…
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167
- This culture, which tends to suppress geographical distance, accumulates distance internally, with all the ways that this whole culture of performances and images tends to keep people apart, and separate from one another.
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170
- The capitalist imperative – on which urbanism delivers, in that it freezes everything in life into its own designated place – can be expressed – if we were to use Hegelian terminology – as the absolute predominance of “the non-disruptive, peaceful co-existence of the spatial dimension” over “the unquiet, restless becoming of the precession of time”.
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But now it’s the information age, and the “the unquiet, restless becoming of the precession of time” fills our superficial awareness, whereas a true, profound sense of place is something we have to work for…
…even though actual change in the physical world is considerably suppressed: and that part of our life is supposed to run on auto-pilot…
But, for sure, the ubiquitous cultural fragmentation of this information age is working to break down the uneventful monolith that Guy Debord describes, but it still affords only a limited répertoire of possibility.
So our task is to find the spaces in between: that allow the complete person, and that are where we control our own lives and the lives of our communities. We have to work to find the spaces and explore the spaces in between all the models that are offered to us… in the physical a n d in the virtual realm… and be connected to the energetic realm…
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We have to be hungry for other ways of seeing…
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So we have to think and do differently from the ways that are on offer. Perform the paradoxical n o n – imitation of the models – in ways that are unconventional: playful, enigmatic, polyvalent. The teasing riddle, open-ended contrariness, hybridization…
Look for …novel combinations…and try for that Jean-Luis Borgean sense of categories that subvert reason…
And of course, always embrace the apparent non-sense that will frustrate a search engine…
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Always be hungry for other ways of seeing…!!!
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Embrace the reality that is grounded in the physically sensed, the energetically sensed, and be alive to the emotional environment…
It is for this education that, once upon a time, we travelled to study, we went on ‘the grand tour’…
And maybe we need to exchange… not just money… not just objects … but send out family members and friends, like Bell Beaker shaman-artisans, or John V. Murra’s old-Andean vertical archipelago, so they can be part of other all the other alternate, viable realities.
Go crowd-fund your friends when they travel to make art…
And know that it is not the circulation simply of physical objects, but of perceptions, ways of seeing… This is the exact opposite of hiding behind our mask…
This is the point of food with meetings. Gifts with meetings… New ways of seeing with meetings…
Ways of giving that are surreal…
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- Urbanism is the most recent way of accomplishing that perennial task: protecting class power. And this by the atomization of that working class which urban conditions of production had so dangerously brought together. The constant struggle which had to be waged, against every possible way that the workers could come together, finds in urbanism its privileged field-of-expression. The efforts of the establishment – ever since their experience of the French Revolution – to develop every possible means of maintaining order in the street, have finally culminated in the effective abolition of the street.
- “With the means of mass communication over long distances, the isolation of the population proved itself to be a much more effective means of control “, noted Lewis Mumford in The City in History 1), as he described “a world that from now on is a one-way street”. But this general trend towards isolation of the individual, which is the reality of urbanism, must also include provision for the controlled re-constitution of the workforce, according to the obvious requirements of production and consumption. Some kind of integration into the system has to organize all these isolated individuals as individuals-who-are-isolated – t o g e t h e r : in the factories just as in the arts centers, just as in the holiday camps, just as in the “housing projects”: all of them specifically organized to procure this this pseudo-collectivity, which the individual isolated in his or her family unit also experiences. And the ubiquitous use of our various video-message receptors means that their isolation finds itself peopled with images that control them – and it is only through each individual’s isolation that these acquire their full power.
1) The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
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- The present day is already the era of the self-destruction of the urban milieu. The way that our cities are exploding into a countryside covered with “shapeless masses of urban reject” (Lewis Mumford) is, in a very direct manner, a product of the imperatives of consumerism. The dictatorship of the automobile, flagship of the initial phase of consumer abundance, is inscribed into the landscape through the dominance of the freeway, which displaces all the older centers of activity and imposes an ever wider and wider dispersal. At the same time, unfinished and incomplete instances of the urban fabric are polarized along corridors surrounding the “distribution factories” that are the big-box stores, built on virgin land, and supported by the pedestal of a parking lot. And these temples of hurried consumerism are themselves in a headlong flight to the suburbs, in a centrifugal movement that pushes them ever outwards, as they become, each in turn, a fresh, secondary over-burdened center, because already they have effected a re-configuration of the whole agglomeration. But the technical organization of all this consumerism is nothing but the foreground of a general dissolution which has led the city so to c o n s u m e i t s e l f .
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As Tachibana Kozaburo wrote from exile, in 1935: “The great cities of the world did not sprout from the land. These world cities exist for themselves. They know nothing about the nation’s land. They know nothing about the farm villages. And it is not just that they know nothing. Today they have come to swell up fat by regarding the national land and farm villages as sacrifices on behalf of their own existence…” 1)
1) Tachibana Kozaburo, Kodo Kokka Nohon Kenkokuron p.9, – – –
quoted in Farm and Nation in Modern Japan, Thomas R.H. Havens, p.256
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175
- Our economic history, which has in its entirety revolved around the opposition of town vs. countryside, has now arrived at such a degree of ‘success’ that it wipes out both of these terms at the same time. The present overall p a r a l y s i s of historical progress, to the benefit of the untrammeled development of the economy, makes of this moment, when town and countryside begin to disappear, not the t r a n s c e n d i n g of their division but a simultaneous collapse. The mutual, gradual destruction of the town and the countryside – a mere side-effect of the failure of the historical process by which the current urban reality should have been transcended – is readily to be seen in the eclectic mix of the fragmented elements of both, which now entirely cover those parts [of the world] most advanced in industrialization…
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“Life is song and poetry.
“The farmer became too busy when people began to investigate the world and decided that it would be ‘good’ if we did this or did that. All my research has been in the direction of n o t doing this or that….
“The more people do, the more society develops, the more problems arise. The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity’s trying to accomplish something. Originally there was no reason to progress, and nothing had to be done. We have come to the point at which there is no other way than to bring about a ‘movement’ not to bring anything about.” 1)
We have got to get ourselves back to the garden…
1) Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution, p.159
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178
- The sweep of history that is already threatening this twilight world is the precisely the approaching change that will subordinate the dimension of space to time that is truly lived. The revolution of the people – the proletarian revolution [ – because we are all of us, now, the proletariat of the Information Age – ] is precisely the c r i t i q u e o f h u m a n g e o g r a p h y by means of which individuals and communities will create places and events that correspond to the re-appropriation and reclamation not only of their work, but of their entire history. In this mobile, ever-changing space, given over to play, and given over to freely chosen variations in the rules of play, the autonomy of any particular place can find itself, explore itself, and be rediscovered… without reintroducing an exclusive attachment to the soil… and in this way we can recover a reality that is about life understood as a journey, and encompassing in itself the entirety of its own meaning.
– – – Guy Debord, Paris 1967
– – – Takeharu Yoshi Renshi