Non-places; strange allure of eerie landscape and liminal space:
Part 1: Ghosts, transgressions, thresholds, ecology, empire etc. Me being annoying.
Part 2: List of sources and reading recommendations.
Part 3, some excerpts I think you might like, here:
de Certeau, whose writing influenced Marc Augeās work on non-places, from: āWalking in the City.ā In: The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. 1984.
Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness [ā¦]. [P]roper names carve out pockets of hidden and familiar meaning. [ā¦] Ultimately, since proper names are already ālocal authoritiesā [ā¦], they are [in the modern space, the non-place] replaced by numbers: the telephone number, [etc.] [ā¦]. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. Their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a āsuspended symbolic order.ā The habitable city is thereby annulled. [ā¦] Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber [ā¦]. Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different. [ā¦] There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can āinvokeā or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in ā and this Ā inverts the schema of the panopticon.
I think Giggs said it well, too. [From: Rebecca A. Giggs. The Rise of the Edge. 2010 Draft.]
Unlike the sublime, with its axiomatic relationship with nature and its place in a history of āthe outdoors,ā the uncanny is more readily associated with anti-natural concerns - degrees of deadness; animated corpses, ghosts, and artificial beings; dolls, automatons, and doubles. [ā¦] Modern shopping malls that replicate identical layouts, and retirement communities wherein every residential unit is built in the mirror-image of the unit Ā opposite ā right down to the pearly patina of the laminex on the bench-tops. [ā¦] The uniform architecture and visual Ā parroting of W/a/l/Marts, Apple/bees, Best/Buys, Starb/ucks and Borders [ā¦].Ā This doubling of place not only arouses the unnerving suspicious ā āIāve been here before,ā and āam I here, or am I in fact elsewhere?ā ā but additionally reaffirms the underlying unnaturalness of all place-based experience. The local is eerie on account of it being familiar. In other words, it is precisely because the local is āhomelyā that it is capable of being shot-through with the āunhomely.ā The uncanny exists because there is an environment. Many of us may be struck by the uncanny compulsion to repeat in these self-same environments ā to return in search of the small dissimilarity, the idosyncrasy that distinguishes the āhereā from the āthere.ā [ā¦] Standing in the aisles of I/kea, frozen to the spot, you are seized by an alarming vision; you are split prismatically, and somewhere else another you is holding another flat-packed Ā E/ngan storage box in walnut [ā¦].Ā As multinational corporations seek to comfort and disarm through their ācommonplaceā design, they also run the risk that such places become indirectly disturbing in their duplication. [ā¦] Things are are ambiguous where there is too much multivalent, ambient information coming in from all angles. Human-animal-machine. Everywhere-anywhere-nowhere. Alive-dead-stimulant. Evolve-devolve-mutate. The uncanny concerns a dislocation of time [ā¦] the resurfacing of intuitive misgivings into a space where there is no longer a clear language or psychological register within which they can be articulated. Hence, the uncanny does not disappear, but becomes more condensed and potent in societies where there is little room apportioned for the public acceptance of the pre-logical strangeness of experience. Where uncanny dubiety persists, it can no longer be assimilated into the hinterlands of the sacred or the mythic.
And from Tim Edensor: āThe ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.ā Environment and Planning. 2005.
Within the interstices of the city there are a host of other spaces, part of a āwild zoneā, a ā[ā¦] site [ā¦] which avoids the objective processes of ordered territorialisation [ā¦]ā. What Ford (2000) calls the āspaces between buildingsā, the unadorned backsides of the city, the alleys, culverts, service areas, and other microspaces, along with wastelands, railway sidings, spaces behind billboards, and unofficial rubbish tips, as well as the āedgelandsā or āurban fringeā (Shoard, 2003), are spaces āwhere aesthetics and ethics merge and where there are no defined boundaries and constant ruptures [ā¦].ā [T]his collection of marginal sites [ā¦]. Staged [ā¦] through the intensified mediatisation and commodification of popular sites, myths, and icons [ā¦], mediated imaginary geographies circulate through adverts, soap operas, āclassicā rock stations [ā¦]. But [ā¦] the modern city can never become a wholly Appollonian, seamlessly regulated realm for it continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, and the repressed, most clearly in marginal sites where ghostly memories cannot be entirely expunged. [ā¦] And yet their absence manifests itself as a presence through the shreds and silent things ā¦ a host of signs and traces which let us know that āa haunting is taking place.ā [ā¦] Movement in ruins becomes strangely reminiscent of childhood [ā¦]. Crawling through dense undergrowth, scrambling over walls and under fences [ā¦]. Such spaces might be compared to the āfelicitousā and āeulogisedā spaces ā primarily the protective, inhabited domestic spaces, the ācorners of our worldā ā which provide the basis of feeling at āhomeā [ā¦], but are also analogous to the dens of childhood, where the sensual experience of texture and micro-atmosphere are absorbed, ānooks and cornersā which became āa resting-place for daydreamsā that may reemerge during adulthood. [ā¦] Being haunted draws us, āalways a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognitionā [ā¦].
Also, from Bob Cluness: āI am an other and I always wasā¦ā: On the Weird and Eerie in Contemporary and Digital Cultures. University of Iceland MA Thesis. 2019.
On a material level, the eerie is often not located in the humanistic confines and locales of the family and home. Often, it is located in marginal spaces, in landscapes, sites, and structures where there is either a distinct lack of human presence, or there was once a human activity which has since disappeared. Various ruins, such as the ancient sites of Stonehenge [ā¦] to more modern locations such as abandoned buildings [ā¦].
Where society is increasingly on the move, movement turns a place into a passage of space, and therefore non-place. [ā¦] To facilitate the semblance of frictionless movement and exchange, the layout, design and production of non-places tend towards a structural homogeneity [ā¦]. Non-spaces therefore create a disavowal towards exhibiting any particular cultural roots or an innate historical connection with the surrounding area. [ā¦] The basic layout of a shopping mall or an airport is the same whether it is in Reykjavik or Rio de Janeiro. [ā¦] Through their overriding spatial conformity, and the mechanical nature they invoke in the individual towards consumerism and social control, non-places invoke forms of eerie alienation [ā¦] they allow the individual to psychologically disconnect, to drift [ā¦]. Such places (or non-places) are often where there is an absence of humanity, or where there is something or some agency at work that is just beyond our realm of understanding; āThe eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non- existence.ā As such, the eerie āis constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of Ā presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there nothing present when there should be something.ā
This becomes evident with the use āeerieā as descriptive terms, such as there being an āeerie silence,ā or an āeerie cryā; at the heart of the eerie, it talks of an absence of something, or the presence of something, but something that is unknown and outside of our normal frames of knowledge and reference. [ā¦] Fisher asserts [ā¦]:
It is about the forces that govern our lives and the world [ā¦] In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. Is there a deliberative agent here at all? Are we being watched by an entity that has not yet revealed itself? In the case of the failure of presence, the question concerns the particular nature of the agent at work. We know that Stonehenge has been erected, so the questions of whether there was an agent behind its construction or not does not arise; what we have to reckon with are the traces of a departed agent whose purposes are unknown.
jacobvanloon
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turnnoffyourmind
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