“Subtitled ‘Observation, organization, and transformation of urban settings’, the main element of this publication are 22 sheets of clear acetate, onto which are printed different conceptual layers and frameworks of a city … In ‘You are the City’, the 22 diagram drawings are split into four operational categories: Cosmological Ground; Leglisative Agencies; Currents, Flows and Forces; Nodes, Loops and Connections. By combining different sheets, and adding layers, a huge range of different compositions can be created - a handmade decon version of SimCity. It invites the user to make new urban connections and realities, as different spatial arrangements and possibilities reveal themselves…”

Sounds and looks interesting!

Eli’s PhD project comprises an anthropological analysis of university culture, and he’s also looking at the socialisation of graduate students. I remember being told as a Master’s student that it was not entirely acceptable to study “our own,” and since I always thought that was bullshit I was really excited by Eli’s commitment to study academia. Anyone interested in institutional space and culture can check out an overview of the project, or read the full proposal (pdf).

I’m especially taken by his observations on fieldwork in French philosophy departments, and this fascinating post on reading as an ethnographic tactic.

NY Times: Data Center Overload

“Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network … But where is ‘there,’ and what does it look like? ‘There’ is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users … Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud … [T]he electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas…”

Photos: NY Times: Search Me

Reviewed by Niamh Hennessy, York University

This is an interesting and provocative collection of stories, commentaries and reviews that offer a series of meditations on the transformations of everyday life in the new century. The perspectives are drawn from a range of cultural contexts even as these particularities strike a universal chord in the themes that link them together. The tones of the various articles continually shift; even the emphasis on nostalgia in Bell’s subtle inquiry on the Garbage Museum in Curitiba, Brazil is coupled with a certain joy in the discovery of lost objects made meaningful by the social relationships embodied or projected in their display. The female workers at the museum sort objects by hand as they move along a conveyor belt. Not well paid, but with relatively good benefits and conditions, the workers are situated in relation to the poor who collect and deliver garbage to the museum in exchange for food. All of this takes place in context the active promotional campaign the city of Curitiba launches during the 80s and 90s as the eco capital of the world.

The complexities of the social relationships examined by Bell are followed by Quentin Stevens’ eerie account of the American Murdo Station as the hub of scientific conquest of Antarctica. US interests in Antarctica date back to post World War II and the Cold War, and come to reflect contradictory impulses of modernity in the design of metropolitan and frontier spaces at Murdo. In detailing the ‘architecture’ of its colonial ideology, Stevens seems to mimic the mono-tonal hum and monochromatic images of the military’s regulation of landscape and social relationships. If these lead essays offer contrasts in tone and centre-periphery dynamics, other essays on cultural production and display invert and subvert the public/private dimensions of reality television, the construction of nation and the inward/outward glances in the reporting of community tragedies.

Susan Hedges’ article on Schlemmer’s ‘The Triadic Ballet’ points to how machine technology came to be incorporated in the movement of human bodies on stage, suggesting a more futuristic vision that is simultaneously an architecture of theatre space and a repetition. The theme of nation and performance returns in Richards’ account of the increasingly urbanized Maori alongside Susan Ballard’s account of the corporeal in installation settings in which digital codes intersect with material forms. The emphasis on performance over production is troubled by Kirsten Hudson’s efforts to link the former with the production of everyday life.

The hybridity of global media and advertising that depend equally on the expansion and segmentation of new markets of consumers suggest new definitions of the diaspora in Grixti’s essay, while other essays discuss how previously untapped markets, for example senior citizens, bring the periphery to the centre of advertising strategies and formats. Kate Greenwood theorizes how films like Metropolis (1926) and The Matrix (1999) fall short of representing contemporary experiences of subjects even with their recognition of the simulated of character motivation and action. Surprisingly absent from Redshaw’s essay on speed and the car is any mention of Taylorism or scientific management in its genesis, but the essays on new technologies and forms like email evoke these themes by detailing the collapse of time and space that figures in any account of postmodern subjectivities, whether singular or collective. Accordingly, the cyborg requires new rethinking and redefinition for its original instantiation as ‘half-man’ and ‘half-machine’ is superseded by the idea of a ‘self-regulating machine’ that Wiener, for one, likens to the activity of human intelligence. In that sense, we are cyborgs because we are, at least minimally incorporated in the feedback loops of machine technology whose functions are only most recently perfected or exploited by digital forms of communication. In short, this collection of essays from Canterbury University Press in New Zealand is worth a read not only for the resonances that cross culturally, but also for its distinctive character in voice and perspective.

(Michael Gardiner’s related review essay on Sheringham’s ‘Reading Everyday Life’  appears in the journal issue 12.3)

Click below for part two of Macdonald’s commentary on Blanchot’s ‘Everyday Speech’.

For Blanchot, the everyday is, as suggested by his essay’s first paragraph heading, “what is most difficult to discover” (1987, p. 12). It cannot be captured through knowledge, “for it belongs to a region where there is still nothing to know” (p. 15). The capacity of the everyday to escape definition lends it a vitality, a “mobile indeterminacy and openness” (Sheringham, 2006, p. 16), which enables it “to subvert intellectual and institutional authority” (p. 17). As Sheringham notes, the indeterminacy of the everyday thus paradoxically becomes an identifying quality for Blanchot (2006, p. 16). Indeed, Blanchot’s somewhat striking proposal that “the everyday escapes. This is its definition” may seem internally contradictory (Blanchot, p. 15); how can the everyday be defined—pinned down, presented, accounted for—by its very ability to escape objectification? This definitive proposal, however, is just one of many that Blanchot scatters throughout his essay; it is not the only time he claims to be pointing directly to some definitional quality of the everyday. At the very beginning of his essay, Blanchot offers a “first approximation”: “the everyday is what we are first of all, and most often…. The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily” (p. 12). It is ourselves, it “is human” (p. 17), and yet it “is the movement by which the individual is held, as though without knowing it, in human anonymity” (p. 17). We are both “engulfed within and deprived of” the everyday, and yet—“a third definition—the everyday is also the ambiguity of these two movements” (p. 13). Following Lefebvre, upon whose analysis Blanchot draws quite heavily (Sheringham, 2006, p. 17), Blanchot envisions the everyday as restless and in motion, “a storehouse of anarchy” (Blanchot, p. 17). However, despite this talk of movement, Blanchot also writes: “Nothing happens; this is the everyday” (p. 15). We cannot know it; “it is the unperceived,” and yet “we have always already seen it by an illusion that is, as it happens, constitutive of the everyday” (p. 14). Near the end of his essay, Blanchot offers this perhaps almost infuriating proposition: “In the everyday, everything is everyday” (p. 18). Due to the persistent recurrence of these definitions of the everyday, I do not sense that they are independently all-encompassing for Blanchot, that each one on its own communicates the everyday as a whole; if this were so, it would seem to render the others unnecessary. Similarly, viewed as multiple aspects of the everyday, they do not appear to be mutually exclusive, although they are often ambiguous. For instance, the “nothing happens” of the everyday certainly tends to escape; as the above quote from Highmore suggests (2002, p. 21), we easily take for granted those aspects of the everyday that fail to capture our conscious attention—but which, Blanchot’s formulations indicate, are crucial to the everyday itself. Thus, each new definition Blanchot gives us does not seem to completely displace the previous ones or suggest that they are false. Indeed, the everyday for Blanchot is “a region, or a level of speech, where the determinations true and false, like the opposition yes and no, do not apply” (p. 16). Why, then, does he write in this way? If the everyday escapes by its very nature, why does he repeatedly imply that he has located it?

By providing us, his audience, with several traits and characteristics of the everyday, each of which apparently is the everyday in some essential way (although, of course, we must “consider the everyday as without a truth proper to itself” [1987, p. 12]), my sense is that Blanchot seems to convey the everyday to us not only in so many words—it “escapes,” it “is the unperceived,” etc.—but also in the form of a distinct feeling that emanates from this technique. He presents several definitional pieces of the puzzle of the everyday that somehow do not seem to capture the everyday as a whole, unified concept. Thinking through each separate definition, summing each new essential trait on top of the preceding ones, I am left with the sense that the everyday has indeed escaped, that it is more than the sum of its parts; even when taken together, Blanchot’s multiple definitions are perhaps necessary in order to characterize the everyday without being sufficient. If any of these fragments were truly the everyday, were truly its definition—even if these fragments together truly constituted the everyday as a whole—it seems to me that Blanchot could have written much more precisely. Instead, he appears to delight in exploring the fogginess and ambiguity of the everyday, reveling in the space between apparent negations: the everyday is inaccessible yet always already accessible, we are deprived of it and yet it is all around us. With each of these new definitions, Blanchot offers his audience a new piece of knowledge; however, with each piece of knowledge we gain, we must reconsider the “essential” conception of the everyday that we have formed based upon his previous definitions. It seems, then, that our conceptions of the everyday are constantly gained, lost, and modified as we proceed through Blanchot’s many definitions; due to the very fact that he constantly claims to present it to us, it constantly evades us. Blanchot’s repeated articulations of the everyday place it into a state of constant motion, of “perpetual becoming” and indeterminacy (Sheringham, 2006, p. 16), which is for Blanchot the source of its transgressive political potential (Sheringham, 2006, p. 19). He therefore not only verbally communicates the everyday’s inevitable escape and its inaccessibility through knowledge, but also performs those features by using repeated claims of definitional knowledge to place the status of the everyday’s essence into constant flux. Blanchot thus provokes us to feel as if the everyday constantly evades our grasp; this feeling also underscores his contention that “the everyday is a dimension of human experience rather than an abstract category” (Sheringham, 2006, p. 16). The reader of “Everyday Speech” not only learns that the everyday escapes, that it is inaccessible yet always already within reach, but feels this as well.

It may be that this feeling is an inevitable effect of attempting to define the everyday. If, like Sheringham, we adopt the common view that the everyday is fugitive and ephemeral, something that “cannot be explored or explained but only apprehended, attended to, always obliquely” (2000, p. 188), it seems very possible that any attempt to definitively articulate essential characteristics of the everyday—any conscious direction of attention towards the everyday’s identity—has already lost a crucial aspect of the everyday: its proclivity to escape our attention (Highmore, 2002; Sheringham, 2006). The feeling of constant evasion that I have attempted to articulate with regard to Blanchot may, therefore, be far from unique to his work. Rather than leaving us entirely stranded, however, perhaps this feeling in fact makes us feel the everyday, and maybe even deepens our understanding of it, in an important way. Perhaps the seemingly hopeless attempt to define the everyday offers us valuable insights into its nature, in our very failure to capture it as a unified whole. In the context of “Everyday Speech,” then, Blanchot’s frequent insistence that he is defining the everyday might be said to paradoxically strengthen our understanding of the everyday as something ambiguous, transitory, and perhaps even ultimately indefinable.

References
Blanchot, M. (1987). Everyday speech (S. Hanson, Trans.). Yale French Studies, 73, 12-20. (Original work published 1959) Retrieved February 12, 2008, from the JSTOR database.
Highmore, B. (2002). Introduction: Questioning everyday life. In B. Highmore (Ed.), The Everyday Life Reader (pp. 1-34). London: Routledge.
Sheringham, M. (2000). Attending to the everyday: Blanchot, Lefebvre, Certeau, Perec. French Studies, 54,187-199. Retrieved February 5, 2008, from the Project MUSE database.
Sheringham, M. (2006). Everyday life: Theories and practices from Surrealism to the present. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

 - via Siobhan

Hidden Landscapes by Chris Thompson

Geographical Methodology as Spatialization and Topology (Part of “Theorizing Place: Interdisciplinary Trajectories” A Panel Discussion at the Canadian Association of Geographers Meeting, Carleton University, May 27, 2009):

This presentation focuses on the virtuality of place, an object of study which resists specification in material or topographic terms. In effect, place exceeds the boundaries of topography. It cannot be adequately mapped. This raises a methodological conundrum for geography which has only be solved via interdisciplinary innovation, leading geographers into the study of social and cultural categorization, and statistical analysis of spatial data. What is a geographer to do? A relational approach to ‘place’ foregrounds the tissue of geographical space and the multiple flows and passages through it. Multiple passages suggests that geography explore a multiple, n-dimensional topology as a paradigmatic shift out of Cartesian space.

Maybe geographical information systems already work in n-space, but my sense is no, and geographers think of cartography as a 3d and 2d endeavour.   Any thoughts?  This is a step toward a paper on topology as method for social science in the 21st century, part of my belief that at university level we should teach methodology as something evolving, to think past mastering a particular program and ask ourselves what is it for?  And, how do our chosen methods guide how and what we see in our studies?

It is reported that the low-lying coral islands are being innundated during storm tides making the subsistence gardening of their residents impossible.  Dan Box plans to blog the move over the next months.  Although the process has been ongoing since 2003, there are funding problems for residents who are all forced to re-establish themselves anew.

Nicolas Nova describes this as a: “Tapestry made out of old motherboards, encountered in Lisbon, Portugal. Ubicomp/urban computing to the letter.”

I’ve always thought that motherboards look like architectural models for industrial neighbourhoods, but never more so than with this one. Perhaps because it’s been painted one colour?

- Anne