Week4: Space & Place
I, like Jacob, will discuss the ideas of place, non-place, and home to see if I have a space in this conversation.
Unlike Jacob, I do not completely disagree with the notion of non-place, but I do agree that it needs to be finessed to achieve a fuller account of our potential experiences. Kellerman notes, referring to Auge, non-places are "sites marked by their transience ? the preponderance of mobility." As Jacob points out, Kellerman also posits that "place is pause" ? pausing transforms the space into place. To better understand this circumstance, I think we might consider "pause" as both a lack of movement and an opportunity for embodied action (here, I am drawing upon my wiki entry last week, Bissel?s "Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities."). As such, when we are pausing or waiting in airports, we are doing something, performing certain personal and social actions - browsing the shops, eating lunch, listening to iPods, etc. When we perform these actions, are we users or producers?
Manovich, drawing upon Michel de Certeau, suggests that "we can understand place as a product of culture producers, while non-places are created by users; in other words, non-place is an individual trajectory through a place" (239). Manovich, de Certeau, and Castells imply, then, that places are social, shared experiences, while non-places are personal trajectories. As a user of non-place, we are bound in a contractual relation with it; we are, first and foremost, airline passengers. The question, then, seems: are we ever not passengers in an airport? Even though we can eat at familiar restaurants and may have fond memories of past visits, we are still passengers in the non-place. We are just passing through.
Another way we might consider this producer/user dichotomy is by repurposing the look at/through trope. When we are in non-places, we move through the space as users. When we are in a place, we move in a place as producers. To move through a non-place, like an airport, we look for and follow signs to guide us where we want to go. We rely on the geosemiotics of the space to direct our interaction order: where to go, what to do next. However, when we move in a place, we create a shared space for ourselves and others. We do not have to rely on the geosemiotics to guide us, because we have helped to produce those signs. Moving in a non-place seems difficult.
Nevertheless, Meyrowitz (and Kellerman last week) points out that our enhanced technology-enabled mobilities allow us to transcend space: "There is no essential connection between the physical setting we are in and the mediated experiences we are having in that location" (7). With mobile technology, I can be in a non-place and still be in a familiar place; furthermore, as our interactions become more mediated, Meyrowitz suggests, "the more our physical bodies become backdrops for these other experiences rather than our full life space" (7). Thus, I can be simultaneously a user of a non-place and producer of a place, most likely virtual. Consequently, place is no longer Castell?s "locale whose form, function, and meaning are self-contained within boundaries of physical contingency" ? physical meaning both geographical and corporeal.
I would like to complicate this (read: confuse myself) even more by introducing the notion of "home". It seems that a place becomes a home when it becomes our fixed point, just as home plate in baseball. To layout a baseball diamond, we first need to settle on the location of home plate. To fail to do so is to remain homeless and hopeless ? just as we might feel in any postmodern airport worth its salt. We cannot find a home; we must create one. We buy houses and make homes. Home becomes our fixed point of orientation from which we experience the world?s dangers.
Although we may find ourselves in a non-place, we can build a home. For example, when moving through an airport, we may begin to move in it by looking for a seat near an outlet so that we can plug in our laptops and connect to places beyond our physical contingency. This becomes our privileged space, our fixed point, our home from which our presence radiates outward. By inhabiting this specific seat, we are creating a home (base). Therefore, next time we are in the same airport, we may seek out our familiar home just as we might settle into a seat at the ballpark: "finding a place to hang your jacket or purse, balancing your scorecard and any food or drinks you have, and re-familiarizing yourself with the field, scoreboard, and likeliest vendor routes" (Kraus 13). As such, we can overcome the "cold beauty," and existential, if not nihilistic, emptiness of the modern airport. In between non-place and home is another home called "Seat Near Wall Next to Outlet." The same principle probably plays out when as students we pick a seat on the first day and stay there all semester. We may still be in a non-place, but at least we have a home. In our homes, we are not looking for the shared social experience of place, but rather personal placeness.
Similarly, our virtual home pages, whether that page that loads after launching our browser, Facebook page, blog, becomes our home, how we interact with the interwebs. Manovich often points out the nonhierarchical, database structure of the web wherein every page is equal to every other page. But this is not so. We experience the interwebs through a variety of homes, our privileged pages, our fixed points of orientation.
To extend Kellerman, homes are not disappearing, but they are being repurposed. And homes should not be hard to find, because we first have to make a home to know where we are at and what we are doing.