The New Inquiry
>Incomprehensible monuments of otherness
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Rob Horning considers the experience of travel as a way out of consumer culture @ The New Inquiry.
It has become harder to escape feeling like a tourist. Part of this is because cities are becoming more indistinguishable. In his essay “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction” philosopher Boris Groys notes how the local distinctions that once made foreign destinations exotic — the architectural or culinary peculiarities, the unique monuments, the cultural idiosyncrasies — have all become exportable signifiers, rapidly transmissible around the globe. This dissemination of local ideas, Groys argues, establishes a worldwide uniform city in places that were once distinct. This new global city has no particular prototype; it derives from no universally embraced ideal of what cities should be but instead derives from a capitalist logic of distributing novelties so that they can be conveniently consumed. Cities become a consistent pap of jumbled motifs imported from everywhere else. Culture shock becomes nostalgic.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )If we want it, a cocoon of familiarity and convenience awaits us wherever we go. So when I travel, I have various rationalizations to distract me from it and from the inescapable truth that I am a tourist on vacation. One of these is to adopt the Situationist strategy of the dérive, which reconceives aimless walks as what Debord, in Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, labeled psychogeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
>Culture needs social scenes
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Helen Fitzgerald on the virtues of wanting people to like us @ The New Inquiry.
In Paris this past month, I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to pretend I was part of the Lost Generation. I sat in cafes with gestural cigarettes and glasses of wine, and imagined myself crowding dialogue, confessions, secrets, and arguments that were the same as sex or sex that was the same as arguments into the earliest, wet-cheeked, wide-eyed hours of the blue morning.
Eventually I realized these adventures weren’t going to happen. I don’t speak French, don’t know anyone in Paris, and minus a few significant exceptions, everyone I love lives in New York. In what were actually rather empty cafes, I sat with my computer and participated in what passes for that sort of excitement for my generation — brief, witty comments on relevant facebook links, and off and on g-chat discussions of what was going on back home, removed discussions of what I was reading and where I had been. I told myself that since the internet permitted me myriad social interactions with the same people I’d be seeing in person in New York, nothing was lost in the substitutions.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )After all, sociality has in many ways shifted fully to the internet, and the most hopeful myth about the social internet is that it is indistinguishable from in-person sociality, each being merely a seamless extension of the other. In leaving New York for a few months, I had tried to convince myself that the difference was immaterial; one could replace the other without changing the use or nourishment I got from them. I could still talk to all the same people, still see photos of and hear stories from the events I would have attended, and still virtually participate in projects with which I was involved. If one understands the internet as an essentially social entity then it is hard to argue that there is any real difference in switching one’s social life from a real to a virtual medium.
>There’s nothing on the internet tonight
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Helena Fitzgerald considers the masochism of our online lives at The New Inquiry.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )One of the thrills of adulthood is that no one can see you. You can slough off identity, move to a large city, and get lost in the open-ended possibilities of anonymity. But the cloistered intensity of social media has pushed us to redefine intimacy back toward the adolescent. As Zadie Smith argued in a recent New York Review of Books article, Facebook’s private-in-public mode of operation traps us:
It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.)
The juvenile mentality built in the medium pushes us to broadcast our private lives and expect that the details we share will be obsessively dissected. We sense, more or less consciously, that with the capability to broadcast our lives comes an obligation to be entertaining.
As we begin to consume one another’s lives and even our own lives as entertainment, the most important person to keep entertained is, of course, oneself. Recently, a friend told me about a recent evening: She came home, checked Facebook, checked Twitter, checked her email, and said, “There’s nothing on the internet tonight.”
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