Supermodernity makes history into spectacle

What is seen by the spectator of modernity is the interweaving of old and new. Supermodernity, though, makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity.

Marc Augé, Non-places (Verso, 2008) p. 89

SimAmerica

What can be seen in these quick glimpses of emergent SimAmerica is a place where conventional politics is being increasingly emptied of substance and any presumption of factuality or objectivity; where a powerfully conservative hyperreality absorbs the real-and-imagined in its own skein of simulations; where representative democracy is being rechanneled into a politics of strategic representation, dissembling reality into competitive image-bites and electronic populism; where trickle-down economics is practiced without blush or question despite all the empirical evidence of its failures; and where "political correctness" and other brilliantly devised hypersimulations are spun into ever-absorptive and appealing metafrauds.

Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis (Blackwell Publishing, 2000) p. 347

The urban condition is becoming ubiquitous

What once could be described as mass regional suburbanization has now turned into mass regional urbanization, with virtually everything traditionally associated with "the city" now increasingly evident almost everywhere in the postmetropolis. In the Era of the Postmetropolis, it becomes increasingly difficult to "escape from the city", for the urban condition and urbanism as a way of life are becoming virtually ubiquitous.

Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis (Blackwell Publishing, 2000) p. 242

Glass is the concrete negation of dwelling

Glass is the concrete negation of dwelling. Not only because architectural form drowns in it, but, because glass, when so used, renders visible those who seek shelter within it. [...] The language of absence here testifies to the absence of dwelling – to the consummate separation between building and dwelling which no heterotopia is capable of remedying. The "great glass windows" are the nullity, the silence of dwelling. They negate dwelling as they reflect the metropolis. And reflection only is permitted to these forms.

Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’ in Oppositions, 21 (M.I.T. Press, 1980) p. 114

To build is to know oneself as a dweller

To build, for Eupalinos, was to know oneself – since building is dwelling and dwelling is being, being-in-peace, being-at-home. To build is to know oneself as a dweller. And homes are cherished by the dweller as beloved objects.

Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’ in Oppositions, 21 (M.I.T. Press, 1980) p. 109

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body. “I feel good here”: the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 108

Memory is a sort of anti-museum

The dispersion of stories point to the dispersion of the memorable as well. And in fact memory is a sort of anti-museum: it is not localizable. Fragments of it come out in legends. 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. A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 108

Stories about places are makeshift things

Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world's debris. Even if the literary form and the actantial schema of "superstitions" correspond to stable models whose structures and combinations have often been analyzed over the past thirty years, the materials (all the rhetorical details of their "manifestation") are furnished by the leftovers from nominations, taxonomies, heroic or comic predicates, etc., that is, by fragments of scattered semantic places. These heterogeneous and even contrary elements fill the homogeneous form of the story. Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 107

Stories and legends that haunt the urban space

Totalitarianism attacks what it quite correctly calls superstitions: supererogatory semantic overlays that insert themselves "over and above" and "in excess", and annex to a past or poetic realm a part of the land the promoters of technical rationalities and financial profitabilities had reserved for themselves.

Ultimately, since proper names are already "local authorities" or "superstitions," they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) marks the city a "suspended symbolic order". The habitable city is thereby annulled.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 106

To walk is to lack a place

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place – an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. The identity furnished by this place is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens' positions and profits, there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 103

Theories of misfortune

The ministers of knowledge have always assumed that the whole universe was threatened by the very changes that affected their ideologies and their positions. They transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfortune.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) pp. 95-96

All places are dis-places

All places, including homelands, are dis-places.

Ackbar Abbas 'Migration as spatial fantasy' in After the event: New perspectives on art history (Manchester University Press, 2010) p. 42

At the cost of community

The polis – the Greek city – was the center of Western communal life, based on the now-faulty assumptions of a common purpose, a common consensus, and an unmediated harmony and unity of all human life. Through our postmodern deconstruction of totalizations, we think we have reinstated freedom of choice and enabled the voice of alterity to rise, but we have clearly done so at the cost of community.

M. Christine Boyer, CyberCities (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) p. 28

The urgency of the moment always missed its mark

No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty). It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have – to want and want – how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Vintage, 2004) p. 169

Life stand still here

What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying "Life stand still here"; Mrs Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) – this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Vintage, 2004) pp. 153-154