>Brian lonsway wrote:
>
>> In other words, the project of capitalist consumer practice is to
>> establish an unclear (blurred) realm of overlap between image and space
>> for the consumer; by so doing, practices which indend to offer a critique
>> of this dominant practice have two _apparent_ alternatives: either to
>> flounder in the autonomous (and unimportant) realms which are blurred or
>> become dominant practices themselves.
>
>Critical practices can attempt to articulate the _procedures_ of this
>'blurring', and the kinds of modifications it compels. And since the
>economic forces operate by not only by blurring but by sectioning -
>opening rifts, inequalities, and unifications in complex, contradictory
>operations - the resistant modes that we're discussing needn't fall into
>a this-or-that antinomy: they can operate provisionally and
>strategically within those (larger) operations.
i agree, but i'd like to further point out that the critical tactic of
blurring is often deployed in an attempt to redefine a set of criteria by
which something might be articulated, or 'made distinct' as brian writes.
this is a very common politic. often enough, to initiate a trajectory of
inquiry we find that we first need to 'undo' a previous intellectual ground
or framework by which a discourse bouys itself. sometimes the terms by
which a question has been (previously) posed effectively block our attempts
to describe something outside the frame established by the terms.
(heideggar addresses this problem in "The Question Concerning Technology",
specifically the chapter on "The Age of the World Picture").
i share with brian a concern for the way in which images are deployed
within and throughout consumer culture, but i wonder how useful it is to
circumscribe 'the image' with consumer culture, or the 'urban/image' within
media culture given Jordan's proposition to "describe these hybrid
coherencies of urbanity and image". to think through the conjuction of
'the image' and 'the urban' we might proceed by - borrowing Goddard's
method in 'Comment ca va' - not just being content to enquire if 'things
are OK' or 'things are not OK' between these two things, but to ask "how
are things for each one and the two together".
regarding the image, i think we need to ask whether or not all images are
necessarily representaional in the way that they are deployed and operate
within contemporary cultures. for example, examining the historical
development of the filmic image from the italian neo-realists to the french
new wave reveals more than a few ways by which optical and sonic components
of the image work toward a very different goal than that of
representation... (i'll go into detail about this in a forthcoming post).
clearly when we use the term image we are not just referring to a 2
dimmensional representation of something, as noted by both jordan and brian
with regard to the difference between the postcard and the snapshot.
(incidentally, perhaps we consider the souvenir?) i'd be interested in
asking: what are the differnt forms that the image takes today? what are
they made of? how do these forms differ in the way that they engage/are
engaged by a subject? what different affects do each of these engagements
produce?
and the urban...?
i don't think it's possible to construct a reading of the urban today
without accounting for the "pictures, stories, and visions" Noller and
Ronneberger talk about, nor do i think that the implications of doing so
are necessarily "obstructive for an 'activist inhabitation' of urbanism" as
brian states. the production of these pictures, stories and visions is for
me an active form of both inhabitation and transformation of the urban, one
which is not (and cannot become) soley the practice of advertising. to
construe 'the urban' in terms of purely physical space (brian) is to
construe the citizen in physical terms, supplanting the immaginative
faculties of a subject with a materiality which in the end better serves a
politic of preservation than one of growth. at the same time, to
articulate the urban in absence of it's physicality carries with it a
correlative set of problems...
oder?
and/
department of public works
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