vilma

EN LT

2004-05-10

Nerijus : input

source_1
Susan Drucker, Vana Tentokali and Gary Gumpert. "The Social architecture of Space", p.52-53. "The Media Construction of Social architecture of Space", p.53-57 Is: "Time and Space in Domestic Life". Hampton Press Inc.

source_2
Pierre Levy. "The Virtualization of the body". Is: "Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age". Translated by Robert Bononno. Perseus Publishing, 1998

source_3
"Mapping the Void", p.55-57. Is: "Mapping Reality"

extra source
Residents of Vilnius are Invited to Express Their Opinion on Restoration of Former Buildings in Vokieciu street.2004-04-22

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source_1
Susan Drucker, Vana Tentokali and Gary Gumpert. "The Social architecture of Space", p.52-53. "The Media Construction of Social architecture of Space", p.53-57 Is: "Time and Space in Domestic Life". Hampton Press Inc.

THE SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE OF SPACE

In Ethics, Aristotle (1963) wrote "we occupy ourselves so that we may have leisure" (p. 228). Domestic space as a site of leisure activity is experienced differently by men and women. Studies conducted in countries in varying economic developmental stages (Belgium, Bulgaria, former Czechoslovakia, Germany, France, Hungary, Peru, Poland, the United States of America, the former Soviet Union, and former Yugoslavia) indicate men in general tend to be engaged in free-time activities when in company with family, whereas housewives on weekdays and employed women on all days are more likely to be involved in various household obligations during such contact time. As previously noted, women (even those also employed in paid labor outside the home) do more housework than men and will therefore not have the same amount of leisure time when in the home. The boundary between domestic and public space is generally more significant to men:

"'Woman's sphere" and "woman's work". . . challenged two characteristics of industrial capitalism: The physical separation of household space from public space and the economic separation of the domestic economy from the pointical economy. (Hayden, 1920, p. 3)

Time is not a homogenous concept for the two genders; it is divided by the content of the labor each gender is involved in. The distinction between working time and leisure time is not clear. Within the limits of the domestic sphere, the person doing housework continues to be "at work."

Architect and social historian Witold Rybczynski (1991), author of Waiting for the Weekend, noted:

"Working outside the home" is the correct way to describe the situation, for housework (three or four hours a day) still needs to be done. Whether it is shared, or, more commonly, falls on the shoulders of women as part of their "second shift," leisure time for one or both partners is drastically reduced. Moreover, homes are larger than at any time in the postwar period/and bigger houses also mean more time spent in cleaning, upkeep, and repairs. (The average size of a new American home in the 1950s was less than 1,000 square feet; by 1983 it had increased to 1,710 square feet, and in 1986 had expanded another 115 square feet. (p. 220)

Suburban life also requires parents to act as chauffeurs and to devote more time to commuting and shopping at a distance from home. Technologies, although offering entertainment and convenience, also appropriate time: "At home, telephone answering machines have to be played back, the household budget entered into the personal computer, the lawn mower dropped off at the repair shop, the car—or cars—serviced. All these convenient labor-saving devices relentlessly eat into our discretionary time (p. 221).

MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF THE SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE OF SPACE

Just as physical spaces serve as contexts for interaction, so do the media of communication offer alternative nonphysical sites. Media availability and use patterns as well as specific territories in the home vary from culture to culture and even within cultures (Sebba & Churchman, 1983, (pp. 191-210). Space, private rooms in particular, indicate status while shaping the experience of place in the home. Frieze and Ramsey's (1976) study of private spaces within the home indicated that many men had private rooms, including studies, offices, and workshops, that others did not freely enter; however, few women with families enjoyed such spaces. Julia Wood(1994), author of Gendered Lives, indicated that although some women were thought to have such spaces in the home, these were generally kitchens and sewing rooms or other areas in which they did things for others.

A home provides sites for interaction and, for some, a special private place that functions as a sanctuary, a place to be alone or with others when sociability is chosen. Without a "room of one's own" (with due homage to Virginia Woolf) can electronic or media retreats offer appealing alternatives?

Studies have revealed differences in the use of domestic technologies and the relative power of activities outside the home (Livingstone, 1992). Roger Silverstone, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Sussex, and his colleagues (Silverstone, Hirsh, & Morley, 1989) conducted a study on "families, technologies and consumption: the household and information and communication technologies," which indicated significant gender-based differences in the way technologies are discussed. Women talk more about the importance and of domestic necessity technologies (including washing machines, dryers.etc.:

The additional objects construed in terms of necessity can be understood as compensating for the frustrations of housework—the telephone to combat isolation, the stereo as an essential source of pleasure, a cassette player to return one's sense of self. These are necessary because, as Okley (1974, p. 223) argues, "the housewife cannot get any information about herself from the work she does." (Livingstone, 1992, p. 118)

The significance of the telephone to women in the home became readily apparent in this study as women identified the telephone as a vital source of connection and emotional involvement. Moyal (1989) found that that the telephone was much more important to women as they depend on it for their social support network. This was in direct contrast to men who described telephoning as functional, to make appointments, and as also a disruption into domestic transquility. The telephone offers not only a mechanism for reaching out and socializing when tied to the home, but also an electronic space for private interaction that may be entered even when the physical environment does not provide privacy and controlled sociability:

Domestic technologies appear to play at least two distinct roles in social interaction: they may facilitate interaction between people, and they may substitute for that interaction, providing instead a social interaction between person and object. (Livingstone, 1992, p. 121)

Although women use media to promote interaction, the Silverstone et al. study indicated that men view media technologies as a replacement for interaction. Television as an entertainment medium was discussed by men in terms of enjoyment and relaxation, but it illustrates the different experiences each gender has within the home: As Morley (1986) suggests, "television is problematic for women because it demands inactivity in a space construed as both work and leisure" (Livingstone,1992, p. 123).

Examining media consumption patterns within domestic space reveals family hierarchies and roles: "Talk about the television and telephone, for example, is imbued with notions of who lets who use what, of moral judgements of the other's activities, of the expression of needs and desires, of justifications and conflict, of separateness and mutuality (Livingstone, 1992, p. 113). Media consumption as a family has been studied (Lull, 1988) as has the trend toward increased privatization in media use . Personal communication options proliferate (i.e., a personal phone, private television, stereo, or computer). These technologies provide individuals within the home the ability to construct nonplace spaces for themselves. The telephone or computer connection enables individuals to redesign their domestic social environment, with the focus of energy shifted away from the physical surroundings into an electronic world replete with lobbies and chat rooms, bulletin boards, diners, and pubs (Lichtz, 1993). It is significant that the nomenclature of architecture has been transformed into metaphors of cyberspace. Cyberspace is the newest frontier that may change the experience of living in a domestic space and that can be escaped from by the magic of modem.

CONCLUSION

Domestic space, as any space with its material dimensions, is not only a social product, but also a container of human activity. The public domain shapes and is shaped by the private world. Attitudes and functions of public space, and ultimately the vitality and safety of public space, is determined by the functions of private space. There is a reciprocal relationship between the conditions and health of public life and private life. Public space therefore cannot be viewed without an eye to private domestic space.

Domestic space that has been considered a refuge from the outside world has been elevated in importance in the United States, as the value placed on privacy has risen with a concomitant devaluation placed on public life. Yet notions of privacy are not static:

Private life is not something given in nature from the beginning of time. It is a historical reality, which different societies have construed in different ways. The boundaries of private life are not laid down once and for all; the division of human activity between public and private spheres is subject to change. Private life makes sense only in relation to public life; its history is first of all the history of its definition. (Prost, 1991, p. 3)

The relationship of the private and public worlds have undergone dramatic changes as a result of developments in media technologies. American homes are now filled with telephones of the portable, cellular, and beeper-equipped varieties which may be equipped to screen, trace, forward, or redial a missed call. Fax machines are no longer confined to the office. Once quiet havens, homes are now incomplete without an array of radios, records, CD and cassette players, computers, modi, VCRs, and laser disc players. Ninety-eight percent of all U.S. homes are equipped with televisions, with 36% of those homes having two or more sets (77% with VCRs). Furthermore, in 1992, American homes had these sets turned on 6 hours and 46 minutes per day. The home has become the center I of each person's universe, from which radiate the antennae of involvement through which one gains worldwide connection.

The transformation of home from sanctuary to communication hub for contact with the outside world has changed the way in which domestic space is experienced. The integration of media technologies requires a reorganization of the home as social space. Lynn Spigel (1992) commented on the implications of such a restructuring with regard to the medium of television, noting that a new [domesticity was created in the United States in the 1950s with the introduction of televisions into the home, a condition marked by a retreat from the public sphere into a home theater that made the outside space part of the safe, predictible [experience of the home. From this perspective the information available in public [space (associated with a male-dominated domain) was brought into private space the traditional woman's domain).

There is a symbiotic link between the environments of place and nonplace. The division of space and time within the home is rooted in concepts of the family, the individuals in the social institution inhabiting that space. The use of space and time within the family has been studied (Tentokali, 1989), but the introduction of media technology allows for transcendence beyond limitations of time and space. The experience of domestic space is no longer solely shaped by the physical environment, but by the constantly expanding nonphysical world of connection. The alteration of time and space provided by media technologies requires a reexamination of gender as a parameter in the study of not only domestic space but public life as well.

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Livingstone, S. (1992). The meaning of domestic technologies: A personal construct analysis of familial gender relations. In R. Silverstone & E. Hirsch .(Eds.), Consuming technologies: Media and information in domestic spaces (pp. 113-130). London: Routledge.

Lopata, H. (1976). Review of The Myth of Golden Years—Socioenvironmental Theory of Aging, by J.F. Gubrium. Contemporary Sociology, 45(3), 232-234.

Lull, J. (Ed.). (1988). World families watch television. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Michelson, W. (1985). From sun to sun. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld.

Miller, B. (1994, April 24). Got a minute? The struggle to tame the high-tech
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Morley, F. (1986). Television: Cultural power and domestic leisure. London:
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Moyal, A. (1989). The feminine culture of the telephone: People, patterns and
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Prost, A. (1991). Public & private spheres in France. In A. Prost & G. Vincent (Eds.), A history of private life: Riddles of identity in modem time Vol. V (pp. 11-101). Cambridge, MA: Belnap Press.

Prost, A., & Vincent, G. (1991). A History of Private Life: Vol. V. Riddles of Identity in Modern Times. (A.Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The Belnap Press.

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source_2
Pierre Levy. "The Virtualization of the body". Is: "Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age". Translated by Robert Bononno. Perseus Publishing, 1998

By means of communications and telepresence technologies we are simultaneously here and there. Medical imaging makes our organic interiority transparent. Using grafts and prostheses, we blend our physical being with that of others and with artifacts. By extending our knowledge of the body and the ancient arts of nutrition, we have devised hundreds of ways of constructing and remodeling ourselves: dietetics, body building, cosmetic surgery. We can change our individual metabolism through the use of drugs or medicaments, which serve as transcorporeal physiologic agents or collective secretions. And the pharmaceutical industry continues to discover new active principles. Reproduction, immunity against disease, the control of emotional states, all of which were traditionally private, have now become public, exchangeable, externalized. From the socialization of somatic function to the self-control of affects or mood through industrial biochemistry, our physical and psychic life is now filtered to an ever greater extent '. through a complicated "exteriority" in which econom-i ic, institutional, and technoscientific processes are in-i tertwined. Biotechnology forces us to consider current I plant and animal species (and even our own) as partic-^ular and perhaps contingent within a vast and still un-rexplored virtual biological continuum. Like information, knowledge, economy, and society, the virtualization of the body that we are experimenting with today represents a new stage in the process of self-creation that our species sustains.

Perceptions

I would like to take a closer look at the somatic functions in detail to demonstrate the operations of the contemporary process of the virtualization of the body. Perception is a way of bringing the world to us, a function obviously externalized in telecommunications systems. The telephone for the sense of hearing, television for sight, systems of remote manipulation for touch and sensorimotor activity—all are ways of virtu-alizing the senses. In doing so they pool the resources of the virtualized organs. People watching the same television program, for example, share the same collective eye. Using cameras, video devices, and tape recorders, we are able to perceive the sensations experienced by another person, at another time and place. So-called virtual reality systems enable us to experiment with the dynamic integration of different perceptual modalities. We are practically able to relive someone else's complete sensory experience.

Projections

The symmetrical function of perception is the projection in the world of action and image. The projection of action is obviously associated with machinery, transportation networks, circuits of energy production and transfer, and weapons. In this case a large number of . individuals share the same enormous, deterritorialized virtual arms. I won’t develop this aspect of the question any further, however, since it would require more detailed analysis of technological phenomena in general.

The projection of the image of the body is generally associated with the notion of telepresence. But telepresence is always something more than just the projection of the image. The telephone, for example, already functions as a telepresence device. It does not merely convey an image or representation of the voice; it carries that voice. The telephone separates voice (the audible body) from the tangible body and transmits it to a remote location. My tangible body is here, my audible body, doubled, is both here and there. The telephone already actualizes a partial form of ubiquity. The audible body of my correspondent is also affected by the same act of doubling. So that we are both, respectively, here and there, but the distributions of our tangible bodies intersect.

Systems of virtual reality transmit more than images; they transmit a quasi-presence. Clones, the visible agents or virtual marionettes that we control by our gestures, can affect and modify other marionettes or visible agents and can even remotely activate "real" devices and operate in the ordinary world. Some bodily functions, such as the ability to manipulate objects, coupled with real-time sensorimotor activities, can thus operate at a distance, along a complex technological pathway that has become increasingly well understood in industrial environments.

Inside and Outside

What is it that makes the body visible? Its surface? Hair? Skin? A sparkle in the eye? Medical images enable us to see inside the body without breaking its sensitive surface, sectioning vessels, or cutting tissues. We could say that it brings to light other skins, buried epidermises, unsuspected surfaces that rise up from within the organism. X rays, scanners, nuclear magnetic resonance systems, sonograms, positron cameras—all vir-tualize the surface of the body. Using these virtual membranes, we can reconstruct three-dimensional digital models of the body and, through them, physical models that can be used by doctors to prepare for an operation. All these skins, all these virtual bodies have considerable importance for medical diagnostics and surgery. In the realm of the virtual the analysis and reconstruction of the body involves neither suffering nor death. Once virtualized, the skin becomes permeable. Before an infant is even born, we can now determine its sex and aspects of its physical appearance.

Each new device adds another type of skin, another visible body to our actual body. The organism is turned inside out like a glove. The interior appears on the outside, while remaining within. For the skin is also the boundary between the self and the external world. Using medical imaging systems, the center of the body teems with layer upon layer of film. By means of telepresence and telecommunications systems, visible, audible, and sensible bodies are multiplied and dispersed outside us. As in the Lucretian universe, a crowd of skins or dermatoid specters emanate from our own body—simulacra.

The Hyperbody

The virtualization of the body encourages travel and exchange. The existence of grafts, for example, has resulted in the circulation of organs among human bodies, from one individual to another, between the dead and the living, even between one species and another. We have transplanted baboon hearts and pig livers into human beings, injected them with hormones produced by bacteria. Implants and prostheses blur the boundary between mineral and animal: glasses, contact lenses, false teeth, silicon implants, pacemakers, hearing aids, auditory implants, external filters in place of healthy kidneys.

Eyes (cornea), sperm, eggs, embryos, and blood have now been socialized, mutualized, and preserved in special banks. Deterritorialized blood flows from body to body through an enormous international network in which we can no longer distinguish the economic, technological, or medical components. The red fluid of life irrigates a collective body, formless and dispersed. Flesh and blood, now shared, are stripped of subjective intimacy and move outside us. But this public flesh returns to the grafted individual, the recipient of a transfusion, the hormone consumer. The collective body modifies our private flesh. At times it resuscitates or fecundates it in vitro.

For a long time the constitution of a collective body and the participation of individuals in this physical community made use of purely symbolic or religious intermediaries: "This is my body. This is my blood." Today, it makes use of technological means. Just as we are able to share our intelligence and our vision of the world with others who speak the same language, we can now virtually participate in a communal body, along with those who belong to the same technological and medical networks. Each individual body becomes a participant in an immense hybrid and globalized hyperbody. Echoing the hyper-cortex that spreads its axons throughout the planet's digital networks, humanity's hyperbody extends its chimerical tissues throughout the earth's species, beyond borders and oceans, between the shores of life's roiling flood.

Intensifications

As a kind of reaction to the virtualization of the body, the modern world has witnessed the development of a form of sports that has affected a larger portion of the population than ever before. I am not referring to the "healthy" and athletic body emphasized by authoritarian political regimes or promoted by fashion magazines and advertising, nor even to team sports, which I will discuss in the chapter on the virtualization of intelligence. Rather, I am referring to the attempt to exceed physical limits, the conquest of new environments, the intensification of sensation, the exploration of other velocities, which have characterized the explosion of interest in sports specific to our century.

In swimming (a relatively uncommon sport before the twentieth century) we immerse ourselves in an aquatic environment. We experiment with a new way of sensing the world and moving through space. Undersea diving, a form of leisure activity, maximizes this sense of alienation. Speleology, the "journey to the center of the earth," was barely known before Jules Verne. In mountain climbing the body is confronted with a rarefied atmosphere, intense cold, implacable slopes. It is precisely for these reasons that it has become, or nearly so, a popular sport. In all of these cases the same attempt to leave the framework, the same effort of hybridization, of "becomings," that tend toward metamorphosis, is involved—to become a fish, a goat, a bird, a bat.

The most emblematic of the sports of tension and becoming are those of falling (parachuting, paraglid-ing, bungee jumping) and sliding (skiing, water skiing, wind surfing, surfing). In one sense they are reactions to virtualization. These highly individual sports do not involve the use of cumbersome collective hardware and frequently make use of discrete artifacts. They maximally intensify our physical presence in the here and now. They reconcentrate the person in his vital center, his mortal "center of being." Actualization reigns.

And yet this maximal embodiment in the here and now can only be obtained by causing boundaries to tremble. Between air and water, between earth and sky, between soil and summit, the surfer or parachutist is never entirely there. Leaving the soil and its support, he rises into the air, slides along interfaces, follows vanishing lines, is vectorized, deterritorialized. Riding the waves, living within the intimacy of the sea, the Cali-fornia surfer is cloned in the Net surfer. The waves of the Pacific are coupled to the informational deluge and the hyperbody to the hypercortex. Subject to gravity but making use of equilibrium until he is nearly air-borne, the body of the parachutist or skier is devoid of I weight. It tends toward pure velocity, transition, flight. Ascensional even when it appears to fall or move horizontally, it is the glorious body of the parachutist or surfer, his virtual body.

Apotheosis

Thus the body escapes itself, acquires new velocities, conquers new spaces. It overflows itself and changes technological exteriority or biological alterity into concrete subjectivity. By virtualizing itself, the body is multiplied. We create virtual organisms that enrich our sensible universe but do not cause us pain. Does this imply disembodiment? Using the body as an example, we can show that virtualization can't be reduced to a process of disappearance or dematerializa-tion. At the risk of repeating myself, I want to again emphasize that virtualization involves a change of identity, a transition from a particular solution to a general problematic, the transformation of a specific and circumscribed activity into a delocalized, desynchronized, and collectivized functioning. The virtualization of the body is therefore not a form of disembodiment but a re-creation, a reincarnation, a multiplication, vectorization, and heterogenesis of the human. However, the boundary between heterogenesis and alienation, actualization and commodity reification, virtualization and amputation, is never clearly defined. This uncertain boundary must constantly be estimated and evaluated by the individual, to help determine how to conduct his life, and by society, to determine how to structure its laws.

My own body is the temporary actualization of an enormous hybrid, social, and technobiological hyper-body. The contemporary body resembles a flame. It is often tiny, isolated, separated, nearly motionless. Lat-er, it moves outside itself, intensified by sports or drugs, is transmitted by means of a satellite, launches a virtual arm high in the air, flows through medical or communications networks. It entwines itself with the public body and burns with the same heat, shines with the same light as other body-flames. It then returns transformed, to its quasi-private sphere, and continues thus, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes alone or with others. One day, it will detach itself completely from the hyperbody and vanish.

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source_3
"Mapping the Void", p.55-57. Is: "Mapping Reality"

So Geographers, in Afric-maps, With savage-pictures fill their gaps; And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns. "Jonathan Swift1

The postmodern experience has been described as a blurring or fragmentation of the outlines on the map. Yet many existing contours have been blocked in all the more boldly. Religious, cultural and political fundamentalisms continue to thrive. Both modernity and postmodernity have, in various accounts, been depicted as a sweeping away of existing cartographies. In Marx and Engels' classic phrase, adopted by Marshall Berman as the tide of his study of modernity, 'all that is solid melts into air'2 in the face of the ongoing rush of change under the relentlessly revolutionizing logic of capitalist forces and relations of production. For Marx this process entails the reduction of everything to the particular narrow rationality of capitalism. Professionals are reduced to the status of wage-labourers; familial relations and national differences are obliterated; law, morality and religion alike are stripped of their facades. There is also a counter-movement, however, equally important to the maintenance and reproduction of the regime: a reassertion of structures where others have been dissolved, a redrawing of the lines on the map rather than a submission to the void.

Capitalist and various modern or postmodern dynamics may have swept away a multitude of earlier frameworks, such as the mutual obligations and clearly defined status relationships of feudalism. But the formations that result need their own limiting structures. Hence the sometimes forcible imposition of new or altered frameworks, particularly around constructions of sexuality, race, nation, 'the family' and the like, a process of 'deterritorialization', as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari put it, in which the surface of the map is rendered blurred and slippery, followed by one of 'reterritorialization', when new grid references are inscribed.3

Two. opposite responses might result from a perceived crisis of existing boundaries.'1 A last-ditch effort is often made to defend or to strengthen the lines on the map. Where geopolitical or other change is rapid, and particularly where it is seen as a movement towards dissolution, it is likely to be met by a strict reinforcement of cultural frameworks. The destabilizing effects of change may be countered, whether for the furtherance of narrowly dominant or wider interests. An obvious example is found in assertions of religious fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic, or its political equivalent trumpeting 'Victorian values' or a movement 'back to basics'. Fundamentalism presents itself as a reversion to basic values in the face of what is seen as an increasing decadence. It can also be used by others to assert their own position against forces of change. The United States in particular tends to create a simplistic and reductive image of Islam that serves a number .of domestic purposes.5 Islamic fundamentalism is presented today as one of a number of new threats to replace that of the former Soviet Union and as a justification for continued military spending.

Alternatively, the process of deterritorialization may be encouraged. Deleuze and Guattari advocate that the disintegrative movement of capitalism be pushed to its logical limits. Rather than accepting the bounds of superficially imposed structures they propose a letting loose of flows of desire. Instead of a psychoanalytic referral of all psychic problems to a triangular Oedipal mapping, Deleuze and Guattari offer 'schizonalysis', an encouragement of tendencies towards disintegration that seems to offer little realistic prospect of a model for tolerable existence.6 The problem with this position is found at two different levels in accounts of the postmodern. In Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), the difficulty occurs at the level of the strategy prescribed for the future rather than the analysis of the existing situation. Others seem to misread what they describe as the postmodern. Thus for Terry Eagleton, it is the 'depthless, styleless, dehistoricized, decathected surfaces of postmodern culture'7 that mark its wholly unambiguous implication in capitalist consumer society. In arguing for the importance of resistances to such implication Eagleton allows a slippage that implies that it is the postmodern era itself that exhibits such flattened surfaces. But this is a reductive mapping of far more ambiguous and contradictory phenomena. The point is not that existing cartographies are being strictly maintained or dissolved, or that they should be. We have to recognize both their provisionality and the fact that we need some kind of mapping within which to orient our lives.

Accounts of the postmodern that describe it in terms of unmappable surfaces fail to allow for the redrawing of lines on the map and to recognize such a dialectic more generally in the creation of cultural meanings. It may be no coincidence that the most sophisticated early maps were drawn in relatively featureless universes like those inhabited by Eskimos and the inhabitants of small islands in the Pacific. The typical cultural response to a lack of existing features is to impose mappings that create meanings and so make the territory negotiable, both physically and conceptually, rather than to submit to an undifferentiated existence. For Jean Baudrillard, the giant buttes of Monument Valley, instantly recognizable'as the setting for the westerns of John Ford, can be likened to 'blocks of language' carved out of the landscape. According to Baudrillard these, along with all other meanings, are being eroded in a process of cultural desertification. We could use Baudrillard's image differently, however. The American deserts, he suggests, 'denote the emptiness, the radical nudity that is the background to every human institution. At the same time, they designate human institutions as a metaphor of that emptiness and the work of man as the continuity of the desert, culture as a mirage and as the perpetuity of the simulacrum.'8 It is true that human cultures and institutions stand upon little firmer ground than the void evoked by Baudrillard, but they are not so easily worn away. Where they are eroded they are likely to take on different forms or be replaced by others.

(...)

History and fiction, often seen as distinct, are far from entirely separable, like the maps and territories considered above. The point is not that historical events did not exist, like those made up in works of fiction, but that we can have access to them in the present only in already-textualized forms. History tends to ignore that which is not written down: 'history is essentially an act of interpretation, a re-reading of documents.'53 But the interpenetration of fiction and history goes further than this. It is not simply that data are found in written records, but that even at the time of their comprehension and compilation the form and content of such data are shaped by an existing set of discursive practices. For E.L. Doctorow, whose own novels explicitly blend factual and fictional events and characters, 'there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.'54 The historical text tends to employ narrative tropes in order to structure the record of events. It may, according to its originating context, present a vision of history as romance, tragedy or farce: The historical narrative thus mediates between the events reported in it and the generic plot-structures conventionally used in our culture to endow unfamiliar events and situations with meaning.'5"

Narrative structures are widely used to make sense of experience, to impose an order on otherwise disjointed life. This applies to the real world as much as the pages of fiction. Life stories are shaped accounts that draw on elements of both mythic and real experience. Narrative or mythical frameworks are common in all societies, but they may be articulated with a particular emphasis in those subjected to rapid change. It is not a question of 'the crude weighing of "myth" against "reality".'56 Myth is embedded in real experience, 'both growing from it and helping to shape its perception.'57 Alternative historical narratives seek to challenge dominant myths and can be used to demonstrate their provisional status, although they are usually repressed. The same can be said of maps. If they are understood in this sense, as ideological constructs subject to contest, erasure or redrawing, we may be able to avoid the objectifying pitfalls of which Bourdieu warned. In Australia resistance might be found in the unofficial accounts of transported convicts:

In dealing with authority, the convicts revealed its rhetorical foundations: maps and memos were instruments of strategy, not incontestable facts. Place names were figures of speech, places where one could speak. But this, after all, was how reason worked, by persuasion rather than by demonstration. For, before there were facts, there had to be the fiction of facts. There had to be agreement that space was not historical, that language was not metaphorical.58

But language is largely metaphorical, as is much more of human experience than is often admitted. Metaphor is often taken to refer to the poetic device or the rhetorical flourish in hyperbolic speech. Yet it is pervasive, both in language and the conceptual systems within which we organize thought and action. Metaphor is used both in everyday life and in scientific discourse.59 The perspective that seeks rigorously to distinguish between map and territory is itself founded on a dominant metaphorical complex, what Deleuze and Guattari call an 'arborescent culture', the principal figure of which is the tree with its clearly differentiated hierarchies of root, trunk, branches and sub-branches. In its place they offer the decentred image of the rhizome, a complex, non-hierarchical system in which there is no absolute distinction between levels. The arborescent structure, they suggest, is that of a traditional representation or tracing of the real: 'The rhizome is something altogether different, a map and not a tracing.'™ Rather than standing apart, as something separate and above, the kind of map these writers have in mind remains implicated: 'It becomes itself part of the rhizome. The map is open, connectable in all its dimensions, and capable of being dismantled; it is reversible, and susceptible to constant modification.'51

The distinction between the metaphorical and the literal can be dated back to Plato's dismissal of rhetoric or figural speech as the stuff of illusion and deception. Rather than seeking to demonstrate and prove, Plato argues, the sophist seeks to persuade through the hypnotic powers of rhetoric. But all language can be said to persuade, to argue for one perspective or another. Each language implies a metaphysics, a mapping of a particular view of the world, however covertly it might be expressed. Precisely such a metaphysics is itself implied in the traditional opposition between the metaphorical and the literal. That which is termed 'literal' is generally implied to be natural and immediate in its meaning. Its surface becomes opaque and the process of production by which such a meaning comes about is effaced. Nietzsche perhaps put it best when he argued that 'truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have had their obverse effaced and are now no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.'62 Philosophy, as Jacques Derrida has argued, cannot escape its own metaphorical bounds: 'If one wished to conceive and to class all the metaphorical possibilities of philosophy, one metaphor, at least, would always remain excluded, outside the system: the metaphor, at the very least, without which the concept of metaphor could not be constructed, or, to syncopate an entire chain of reasoning, the metaphor of metaphor.'63 Obscuring this fact and seeing no farther than its own sedimented metaphorics, Western metaphysics has become 'the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call reason.'64

Everything is in a sense metaphorical, even if this is often not apparent or is deliberately ignored. The standard objection to this conclusion goes as follows: 'it cannot be that all the utterances in a language are metaphorical, since the very notion of metaphor only has a sense through its contrast with that of the literal.'65 The above argument has already dealt mostly with this complaint. In tackling these questions we remain within the confines of a map from which we cannot entirely escape. The objection is true in a certain sense. The notion of metaphor does only exist as such in opposition to a notion of the literal. This is Paul Ricoeur's position: that it was only with the ' development of a classificatory logic that sought to separate out the two that a specific and narrowed notion of metaphor came into use. That which is now dismissed as mere metaphor, a poetic kind of conceptualization, might have come first, as Giambattista Vico also argued in his New Science of 1744.66 The classificatory logic that limited the domain of metaphor was the outcome of a process akin to that of metaphor itself: a grouping together according to similarities: 'A family resemblance first I brings individuals together before the rule of logical class dominates them. Metaphor, a figure of speech, presents in an open fashion, by means of a conflict between identity and difference, the process that, in a covert manner, generates semantic grids by fusion of differences into identity.'67 The underlying logic of the two is thus the same.

In seeking to undermine the opposition between the metaphorical and the literal it is important not to dismiss the notion of the literal. It is a notion that carries great weight in Western culture. The blatant propaganda maps described in Chapter 2 are like figural or rhetorical language, used deliberately to further an argument rather than to attempt a simple statement of truth. 'Literal' language is like the ordinary map: each appears be a neutral representation. But no such neutrality is possible in either case. Each implies a view of the world, a bias that ay be all the more insidious for its claim to objectivity or trans-parency. Like maps, metaphors can create realities rather than just express existing ones. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest: 'It is reasonable enough to assume that words alone don't change reality. But changes in our conceptual system do change what is real for us and affect how we perceive the world and act upon those perceptions.'68 Metaphors establish mappings according to which future interventions are shaped in potent acts of self-fulfilling prophecy.

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extra_source
http://www.vilnius.lt/new/vadovybe.php?open=4&sub_cat1=456&id=2725

Residents of Vilnius are Invited to Express Their Opinion on Restoration of Former Buildings in Vokieciu street.

The municipality of Vilnius has commenced a public discussion on detailed layout of Vilnius Old town and is inviting residents of Vilnius to express their opinion on restoration of former buildings in Vokieèiø street. The opinion poll has been launched in website of municipality www.vilnius.lt.

The detailed map of the old town offers to follow the remaining historic, iconographic and archeological material dating back as far as 19th and beginning of 20th century and restore the old urban space of the street – former buildings. The projected function of the buildings – residential and commercial.

The peculiarity of Vilnius old town – its irregular radial layout, shaped back in 16th century. From the architectural, artistic and historic point of view, Vilnius old town is a valuable monument of material and spiritual culture. It has preserved the layout system of middle-age towns with a dense network of streets, dividing the old town into tiny blocks. However, during the war period, with the destruction of a part of buildings in Vokieciu street, the layout and spatial structure in this part of the old town was impaired and later – destroyed completely.

The idea to restore the historic Vokieciu street has been matured for several decades. In 1985 the Architects Union organized a discussion of proposed concrete projects. The restoration of buildings in Vokieciu street was drafted in the Restoration Project of Vilnius Old Town (1988-1992), the Detailed and Special Project and Project for Management of Old Town Squares and Street Spaces and Recreation Areas (2002), approved by Vilnius City Council.

On April 14, following a public discussion on detailed plan of the central part of the old town, residents of Vilnius completely disapproved of the idea to construct buildings on the presently existing green lawn – the recreational area. In their opinion, the recently shaped public space is more valuable than the historic houses, which could be possibly restored. The opinion poll showed that the recreational purpose of this street was important not only for residents of the old town, but for the entire city.

The issue of Vokieciu street is discussed outside the rage of interests of the old town community and therefore is in need of further detailed discussion. The municipality hopes that Vilnius residents will actively participate in the opinion poll and assist in reaching the most acceptable decision for residents of the city.

D. Bardauskiene, 211 2317
Dalia Perednienë, Senior Officer, Public Relations

Konstitucijos pr. 3
LT-09601 Vilnius
Tel. (8 ~ 5) 211 2327, (8 ~ 680) 61327
El. paðtas dalia.peredniene@vilnius.lt

2004-04-22