Blackened

It’s obvious: with each year that passes, Blair and his plastic ‘government’ become ever more reliant on fabricating an image of society which is wholly deprived of actually content. Instead, a carefully manicured and marketed alternative takes its place. It is a culture, no longer of political spin, but of political spam. Watching his speech at the conference this year, watching the face of this man as it becomes ever more stripped of spontaneity, ever more faceless.

The Blair face is mirrored in the anonymity of the faceless city street which, having being homogenised has become an unthinking clone in every respect. Like the faceless city, when uniform collectivity is disrupted, then it is immediately suppressed. Imagine it then: an 82 year old man, expelled from the conference hall, refused entry under ‘anti-terrorist’ laws at the hands of anonymous grunts! Why? Because he dared to contest the legitimacy of the war. The tyranny of an enforced democratic consent is just as ‘barbaric’ as the tyranny of terror. The only difference is that the former makes a claim to civility.

Legitimate Ruins?

I went to see the new Gustav Metzger exhibit at the Cubitt gallery the other day. Visually it was predictably underwhelming. A conveyer belt in constant rotation, some bundles of the Guardian collecting at the end, a reproduction of Klee’s Angelus Novus crudely taped on the wall, etc. Themes of progress, history, justice, yada, yada. Despite being the retiring sort, later on Metzger will give an interview, so the curator told me. I’ll probably give it a miss.

The problem with Metzger, as it is with many artists/theorists who work on the ‘fringe’, is that by legitimizing what is marginal they sacrifice the original quality of that object by rendering it a prop. This is particularly true of his erstwhile auto-destructive art where the employment of rust, corrosion and decay on a canvas was meant to mirror a society in turmoil. An unfortunate mix of Mill and Kantian ethics meant the project was aesthetically repugnant. A shame, rust, as I have written elsewhere, requires no further justification. Phenomenologically, it is already complete in its incompletion.

In the dialectic between plasticity and the real, (where plasticity means the wholesale affirmation of the generic and reproduced), the supposed bond between the real and the marginal is enforced. Thus, in everyday space, the regularity and order of city life is broken by spaces which subvert and evade order. On the one hand, this is achieved in the inversion of what is already ordered. That, for the Situationists, is how the city becomes spontaneous; by rereading the city. On the other hand, a retreat from regularity into the space of ambiguity and uncertainty is seen a critical space in which the rationality of order is contested.

In the space of decay and ruination, there is an obvious withdrawal from regulatory as things undergo a loss of form and as the distinction between the familiar and the unfamiliar is blurred. Through falling from its previous function, and so outliving the use originally conferred upon it, the ruin transgresses and subverts our everyday encounter with space and place. In the space of regulation, boundaries are delimited and linear. Thus, being in place means knowing the limits of that place. So long as those limits are respected, then indeterminacy is evaded and the impression of space as productive can be maintained.

To the ruins themselves then! Unfortunately, it is seldom that a direct, lived experience of the ruin is achieved. Instead, a manipulation of their character is enforced until the ruin is either usable in a social context or otherwise justified as contesting plasticity. Thereafter, the ruin becomes a novelty; something that startles us but simultaneously maintains a distance through having a legitimate purpose.

Here is an example of this 'romanticization' of ruins; a recent book on industrial ruins which alludes to the possibility of ruins becoming subversive anti-tourist sites: “Ruins are spaces of defamiliarization which disorder the veneer of local appearances; rebuking the purposes to which the buildings were originally put” (p. 25). So far, so true. Before long, however, Edensor introduces notions of ‘escape, playfulness, adventuring’ into the scene so that ruins “present opportunities for carrying out leisure practices which would be frowned upon in more regulated urban space, activities characteristically based around physical expressiveness, the transgression of normative relations between people, space and things, and around affective collective endeavours that tend towards the carnivalesque” (p. 30).

Rendering a ruin rational serves to annihilate its core. In claiming ownership of ruins (where ownership means conferring a static image on it), the ruin loses what is originally peculiar to it – its movement. Instead, it transpires not as an artefact but as a dead artifice, the likes of which become museum ‘pieces’. This is the problem for the fringes: they too easily give themselves over to a prop like presence in which a kitsch (or carnivalesque) aesthetic is never too far away. The romanticization of ruins, which even Tarkovsky succumbs to, satisfies only a passive aesthetic engineered to appease only the barest criterion of aesthetic judgement. So be it: often, 'delight' is enough. In that passivity however, the question of ontology is left notably unasked.

A Placeless Geography

Strangely, much geography seeks autonomy. From what? The earth, the human, temporality, spatiality itself? Sometimes, it’s a combination of all these aspects. Like analytic philosophy, which strives to annihilate the origins of ideas so they can be logically and linguistically ‘unpacked’ (a phrase which I remember had a peculiar resonance at Birkbeck) in a placeless environment, so geography suffers from a tendency to strip places of their roots. Fears concerning the ‘dehumanization’ of philosophy (example: logical positivism contra existentialism) are also manifest in the scientific homogenization of geographical place.

Humanistic geography is one response against this homogenization. In the struggle between the physicality of place and the experience of that place, the subject reclaims the centre and so becomes responsible for determining the outcome. In a recent book called Geography and the Art of Life, Edmunds Bunkse speaks of himself as a “geographical witness”. A curious statement. On the one hand, it suffers from certain inconsistencies Agamben mentioned; on the other hand, it belies a positive polemic against the autonomy of geography. Against the background of destruction – Bunkse’s own history – would an account of past spaces which did not place the subject in the centre render that account impartial or incomplete? As a witness, science and positivism falls from certainty by leaving space intact.

Humanism conspires to counter the ‘coldness’ of positivism. This is evident in both geography and philosophy. Somehow, this metaphorical dialectical between the warmth of the human centre and the cold objectivity which situates itself outside the human is unconvincing. Untangling the primitive archetypes implicit in humanity (archetypes which Bachelard – the humanistic geographer – depended on) might prove impossible through phenomenology alone. Yet, this does not entail the superiority of the archetype despite its appeal to intuition.

In-between subject and object, in-between inside and outside. Positivism alone reduces place to site: a set of geometrical divisions. In itself, attachment isn’t negated by this suppression of place. In fact, the aesthetic predilection for site is justifiably celebrated (e.g. Gregor Schneider, Andreas Gursky, & Thomas Demand). Against this propensity towards site, which some deem a threat to the ‘power of place’, humanism might answer the calls of coldness, but a suppression of homogeneity through an enforcement of particularization does not entail (nor necessitate) the formers disappearance. Further, if a humanistic account of place entail that place can only be understood through the fabric of human meaning, then the meaning which is attached to place will be largely arbitrary. There is nothing which contains place; and containment, after Aristotle, is that which separates place from site. In-between space and place, a centreless perspective is needed which can mediate between the warm abundance of subjectivity and the cold empty space which is receptive to that subjectivity.

Prognosis Negative

“We may surmise that the idea is a leftover from times when important matters were run from a single centre, a king or a jealous god, supporting and giving authority to a single world view. And we may further surmise that Reason and Rationality are powers of a similar kind and are surrounded by the same aura as were gods, kings, tyrants and their merciless laws. The content has evaporated; the aura remains and makes the powers survive.


The absence of content is a tremendous advantage; it enables special groups to call themselves ‘rationalists’, to claim that widely recognised success were the work of Reason and to use the strength thus gained to suppress developments contrary to their interests. Needless to say, most of these claims are spurious.”

(Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason,p.11)