Spaces Without Time (2009) Video Lecture from Moderna Galerija Archive
Moderna Galerija from Ljubljana, Slovenia, has launched a new blog, and here is a video talk "Spaces without Time (from Communist Monuments to Shopping Malls)", from the Radical Education Conference, held 28-29 November in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The text of the lecture, as well as references for further readings, are below the video.
Jasna Koteska: Spaces without Time (From Communist Monuments to Shopping Malls) from moderna galerija on Vimeo.
Spaces Without Time
I open this article with two of my relatively recent experiences with
public spaces, invoking here Hanna Arendt’s notable saying, that the public
space is in fact deeply private.[i]
Lenin’s Cheek
In the summer of 2009 I was at the National Art Gallery in Sofia,
Bulgaria, where an exhibition called “The Faces from Underground” curated by
Bisera Iosifova was taking place. The exhibition was a collection of monuments,
sculptures and paintings from the Bulgarian communist past, with faces of Marx,
Lenin, Stalin, Todor Zivkov and other communist leaders. After the exhibition,
my five-year-old son, while running around in the back yard of the gallery,
suddenly stopped in the grass and leaned down towards something that looked
like a large sculpture of Lenin lying deep in the grass beyond the gallery.
First I saw my son giving a handshake to what appeared to be a bronze Lenin
hand; then, much to my surprise, he approached Lenin’s face and gave him a kiss
on the cheek. Since I was particularly interested in our experience of the
communist past, and with my family’s history very much in mind (my father, the
Macedonian poet Jovan Koteski, was watched by the secret communist police of
Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia for 42 of his 69 years, from 1948 to 1990, his
secret police file maintained under the code name “The Intimist”. My father
suffered severely from paranoia all his life, and eventually served two years
in a Skopje prison, from 1985 to 1987.), I was indeed shaken by the empathy
towards the dead Lenin demonstrated by my young son.
Naturally the reason behind my son’s gesture was this obvious
humiliation here of Lenin. For my son he was not a historical Lenin, but a
Lenin captured here in shame. And I remembered someone’s remark that shame is
the only intimacy untouched even by ourselves. And even though the gallery’s
back yard served as a sort of neutral
post-ideological wasteland, where an abandoned ideology was being left to decompose,
to rot, this public space was far from being neutral. As Freud says in his
“Civilization and its Discontents” (1930) in talking about the city of Rome,
you cannot fill the same space twice, with both the present and the past;[ii]
all you can have is a mixture of both, but that mixture is never actually
neutral. And of course we should be aware that the technical reasons behind
Lenin’s seeming humiliation were that either he was too big to be placed inside
the hall, or it was an (artistic) comment on the past (and if nothing else,
with his victim’s conto, Lenin does deserve to be humiliated). But the whole
problem is far bigger, for ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the
question has remained: what to do with the communist propaganda monuments all
over Eastern Europe? In some cases the monuments have simply been destroyed (or
excavated, reburied, kidnapped, attacked, etc), or in other cases, Memento
Parks have been introduced, largely outside the cities (as a suburban sack of
collective memory, but also as a solidarity pact between the abandoned ideology
and the spatial margins), where one could visit the area and take a stroll down
memory lane.
McDonald’s Asylum
I will now go on to my second experience, from the summer of 2008. We
were visiting Singapore, which in my view was a kind of a Disneyland for
adults, but with a death penalty (Singaporean law calls for the death penalty
for possession of drugs including marihuana). Nevertheless, the city is
organised as a sort of Legoland: it resembles an open shopping mall, with a lot
of units for food, shopping, fun, and leisure; everything is regulated, highly
organised, people from sitcoms live there, all are elegant, etc. From Singapore
we took a bus to Malaysia, where the first Malaysian city after the
border-crossing is Johor Bahru. When we entered the city, I experienced
something of a culture shock: everything was messy, chaotic, dirty; there
didn’t seem to be any regulations, there was no signage, people dragged us
around, the ground could have opened up and eaten us alive and nobody would
have noticed. This is, at any rate, how I felt, which is vulgar to the highest
degree, bearing in mind that I am coming from a culture which displays the very
same behaviours and lifestyle (only in my case, it is not an Asian culture, but
more of an oriental and/or Balkan one, with five centuries under the Ottoman
Empire, a long communist heritage, post-communist transitional chaos, etc), so
it was indeed a severe case of reverse culture shock I was experiencing.
Nevertheless, I felt threatened. Immediately upon seeing a McDonald’s sign I
entered the restaurant and I didn’t want to move from it for the next two
hours. In short, McDonald’s served my need of a shelter.
Now, there are many writings about the role of McDonald’s in today’s
world, and my personal favourite is Rolf Potts’s text: “Slumming the Golden
Archives”,[iii]
in which Potts says that if you are a traveler you no longer go to McDonald’s
for food; if you are a traveler you go there for the air conditioning, for the
clean restrooms, but most importantly, you go there to put a pause on your
over-excitement with your new surroundings. Potts goes on to claim that
McDonald’s is no longer a seat of American culture, but has instead become more
a place of absence of place and culture really (in Potts’ words “A Zen-like
oblivion experience”), that has come to serve as a refuge for travellers. This
even Potts doesn’t agree with himself, offering that of course it is stupid to
patronise McDonald's today, for it’s as if you were to confess to wetting your
bed, because McDonald's is a globally standardised symbol of protest with
reason. It stands behind the cultural degradation of the world, is a symbol of
corporate cruelty, etc., but at the same time, represents a postmodern asylum
for the world’s tourists – or at least that’s the way I’ve experienced it.
So, my paper is grounded in these two experiences. Although they are
entirely different, what I find similar in both cases is that we find space
there, space which is manipulated, ideologized, not neutral; but the manner, the operation
through which the ideologies rule the space is precisely via the notion of time
- its mixing, or confusing, or distorting (in the first case), or then time is
ignored, or more or less implicitly absent (in the second case). So, what we
are always missing in our discussions of public space is time itself. And by
time, I mean historical time, but also the cultural and the ideological times,
even physical time itself. In McDonald’s, just as in the shopping malls, the
notion of time, even climate, is
suppressed or concealed, there is no winter nor summer, no day nor night,
neither snow nor sun; it’s not that climate is being destroyed in the shopping
mall, but more importantly, that the climate is being suppressed.[iv]
Disappearance of Time
Now, to claim that time and space are to be treated independently is a
strange idea, because ever since the beginnings of Western philosophy, we are
used to treating time and space as inseparable: we say that time is fixed with
space; that the history of time is not to be separated from the history of
space, etc. But in Lefebvre’s famous book “The Production of Space” (1974),
one encounters a quite different and
apparently disturbing position. After affirming the idea that space is primordial (which is also a
Nietzschean concept, of space as primal), Lefebvre annoyingly concludes that
time is vanishing from space, and that this bizarre disappearance of time from
space is connected to modern sociopolitical conditions, or in Lefebvre’s words:
‘This manifest expulsion of time is arguably one of the hallmarks of modernity.[v]
Further,
In nature, time is apprehended within space –
in the very heart of space… Time was thus
inscribed in space, and natural space was merely the lyrical and tragic script of
natural time… With the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space…
Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as
threatening and dangerous (to power). The primacy of the economic and above all
of the political implies the supremacy of space over time. It is thus possible
that the error concerning space that we have been discussing actually concerns
time more directly, more immediately, than it does space, time being even
closer to us, and more fundamental. Our time, then, this most essential part of
lived experience, this greatest good of all goods, is no longer visible to us,
no longer intelligible.[vi]
However true, Lefebvre’s argument about the disappearance of time from
spaces (perhaps partly owing to the unclear concept of divine, spiritualist
nature, which one can read in and between these lines), to some extent appear
to fail to pull the whole problem of absent time from its roots, i.e. this
problem of time-space gap might actually be far larger, might extend far
further than modernity (even an ontological one?), but what one must agree with
Lefebvre on here is that the 20th century has indeed been more
severe towards the notion of time than has any previous era.
Two of the greatest ideologies of the 20th century,
capitalism and communism (even fascism with its famous call: “We need breathing
room”, which was referring directly to the notion of space) introduced space
with some radical abyss of history included in it. Space then has been
manipulated, but this manipulation was possible only according to the
conditions of operating with time itself. Time is crucial to our feeling
”normal”, the way through which people avoid madness, it’s something of a
guarantee of our sanity, and whoever regulates time actually directly regulates us. (This is most
evident in the elementary practices of
torture, the best way to drag whatever confession you want from the
person you are torturing is to interfere with and severely interrupt his/her
notion of time, by introducing irregular sleeping and waking hours).
Space is easy to recognise when it is being manipulated, because it is
largely perceived through a gaze, and is neatly connected to our experiences of
the body: the city square as a brain, an old bazaar as a stomach, etc. But time
is not so easy to grasp, as there are at least three notions of time. 1. There
is physical time (the seasons, agricultural cycles, etc.); 2. Ideological time
is time ruled by ideologies (by eliminating previous holidays and introduce
others you rule people; in all post-communist countries the new rightist
governments did precisely this when they came to power, in Macedonia, but also
in Poland, Russia, Hungary, etc., where they immediately began abolishing
existing holidays and introducing new ones. This is an old method, known and
applied since the beginnings of communism itself, when the communists announced
that time prior to the Revolution was rescinded, and that time should be
restarted from zero); 3. There is of course a third notion of time, where time
is a capital problem of metaphysics, and if the problem of time is solved, then
everything else too will be solved along with it. Luckily, however, the problem
does not seem to have an answer, therefore we can remain restless, as Borges
playfully concludes in his essay on time.[vii]
Marx or Mars?
What exactly was the manner via which communism and capitalism have long
been ideologizing space (from which time has been irretrievably lost); and why?
Public space was a trademark of communism. Space was open space, indeed
public space: communists were obsessed with open parks, city squares, stadiums,
rituals and parades, the theatricality of manifestation. The communist
revolution was proclaimed a work of art in and with the public space
(Mayakovsky spoke of making ‘the streets… our brushes and the squares our
palettes.’[viii]);
totalitarian leaders approached life as a big (historical/theatrical) scene,
leaders acted like directors of space (Stalin sought to make a ‘total artwork
of society’[ix]),
and similar. In 1919, Kazimir Malevich, the strongest abstract painter of the
early Soviet Union, just one year after exhibiting his ‘White Square on White
Background’ in 1918 (a painting where there was literally nothing!), and just
two years after the October Revolution, left his testament to the communist
artists: ‘After me comrade aviators sail into the chasm - I have set up the
signals of Supermatism… Infinity is before you.’[x]
These triumphant outbursts were in fact neatly connected to the
communist dream of the conquering of space. It is not by chance that the
detached ideological apparatus of communism recognised its favourite genre in
science fiction! The relation between science fiction and communism is well
documented. The Soviets translated Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, while some
writers were describing the ideal Marxist society on Mars, etc. There is a well known Yugoslav pun, where
after a lecture on Marxism, a student, confusing Marx with Mars, asks:
"But tell me, is there life on that Mars anyway?"[xi]
In 1920, three years after the October Revolution, Wells, the author of ‘Time
Machine’, traveled to Russia to meet the leaders of the Revolution. At the
Kremlin he met with Lenin, wherein Lenin told him: ‘If we succeed in making contact with the other
planets, all our philosophical, social, and moral ideas will have to be
revised, and in this event these potentialities will become limitless and will
put an end to violence as a necessary means of progress’.[xii]
Communism was an ideology of philosophical appeal, not only because it promised
people "the oceanic feeling for all", but because it also promised
them space as the final frontier.
So, while the idea of public space has been extended to the maximum,
private space represented the enemy under communism – communism was at war with
houses and homes. The book ‘How to live differently’ (Kostrom, 1925) from a
leading Soviet thinker Shchekin, in which, based on Trotsky’s ideas, Shchekin
writes: ‘I should immediately say that the notion ‘room’ shall only designate the
former human’s formerly inhabited space.’[xiii]
So, after the October revolution, he immediately sketches out space, and
decides there are no longer going to be any rooms, rooms shall be physically
destroyed; if one is to survive, it shall survive solely as a museum piece, the
reason being that the room is a den, it is unclear what dark moments may take
hold of the communist in the solitude of the room. But this is not a new idea:
already Thomas More in his ‘Utopia’ (1516), while explaining the ideal state, described
the rooms and doors of the citizens. (‘The doors are two-winged, they open and
close on the slightest touch and then, by closing themselves, let everyone
in.’ says – More). And in reading More,
one soon realises that houses and clothing are not just socialist décor, they
are the most intrinsic feature of the ideal society – transform the door into a
passage into the world and what you get is the ideal society. (Or Lukacs’s
childhood memory, which says “I shall not greet the uninvited guests, I never
asked them to come” Childhood is
constantly under threat, and in a time of crisis just about anything can bring
harm to the little person, and Lukacs – the child, before becoming Lukacs – the
ideologist, says “I didn’t invite you,
you have imposed yourselves on me”, but this was, however, before the euphoria
of communal life caught up with him.)
Soviet Potatoes and
Macedonian Goats
What I claim here is that all these projects were not pure experiments
with space, they were directed towards time. In what way? The communist era was
an era in search of a New Form in everything, from Malevich’s squares to the
reshaping of public space. One example is to be found in the 1920’s, when the
Soviet architect, Vladimir Tatlin, was removing the blocks from the pavement in
front of the Academy of Art in Leningrad and was instead planting potatoes in
their place! But although this looks like a communist attempt to redefine the
bourgeois relationship towards nature (Marx in 1844 wrote that in order to
abolish alienation, people needed to make peace with nature), paradoxically,
this call was not read as an ecological cry. What then was this bizarre
activity all about? It was not that Tatlin was attempting to introduce an
absolute space, in/of nature itself, as a gesture of anti-urbanism; rather the
opposite, it was a very simple gesture of juggling with the very idea of form,
i.e. communism does not recognise 'positively’ privileged matter, therefore all
that interferes with the New Form, shall, as Žižek elaborates in his book ‘The
Universal Exception’[xiv],
be cleared. To prove this hypothesis,
let me offer an opposite example, one from my native country. In September
1947, a hard-line communist Lazar Koliševski, adopted a law called “Regulation
Prohibiting the Farming of Goats”, popularly called Lazar’s Law, which brought
about a 86.6% reduction in the goat population of Macedonia over the period
1947 – 1952 , and a well documented case in Macedonia. To this day it remains
an enigma why the communists in Macedonia almost wiped out an entire animal
species – because it was obviously a useful animal, domesticated for centuries,
economical to raise and employ, long valued for its milk. This strange and
irrational slaughter seems without an explanation.
But the explanation lies precisely (with)in the basic premise of
communism, that whatever existed in the space should be erased, and that a new
form shall be introduced in its place. The goats were an accidental and stupid
choice, but no less stupid then Tatlin’s idea of planting potatoes in front of
the Academy, instead of maintaining an Academy. Where there was once nature –
goats – let there now be culture (Macedonian case); where there was once an
Academy, let there be potatoes instead (Soviet case). And though they are different
transfers, from culture to nature and vice versa, the basic premise remains
that there is no simple difference between nature-culture, there is no such
things as a privileged substance, culture too is part of nature. So although
both operations amount to a process of reducing the 'truly' existing nature (or
culture) to a raw material for the construction of the new world, what the ideology was doing -
working with the public space - was precisely in order to intervene in time
itself! In other words, erasing all previously existing objects from space will
mean erasing time itself.
There are three tenses
– and all three are future tenses
How were communists erasing time? A joke from communist Romania asked:
‘What is celebrated on 8th May 1821?' And the answer is: ‘One
hundred years to the founding of the Communist Party of Romania.’ Communism announced
the end of all bourgeois phenomena, but the most important of these was the
phenomenon of time. Time, as tracked by the capitalists, was deleted and time
was restarted. Which is why time before the Revolution is just time TO the
Revolution. There is no history. Mircea Eliade called this socialist tracking
of time the most glorious of all modern political eschatologies. Communism
introduced new points or markers in time, by changing calendars, by regulating
curfews and working hours; all religious holidays were banned and replaced by
profane holidays and similar. In communism this 'zero time’ phenomenon was
established with the announcement ‘We are waiting for communism’. That call was
messianic, and it sent the people the message that they were not yet living,
but were instead in some kind of pre-dress rehearsal, in some kind of pre-life.
A favourite saying by generations of Yugoslavs was a line spoken by
Grunf, from the Italian comic series 'Alan Ford': 'It's better to live a 100
years as a millionaire than seven days in poverty’. Nowhere was this comic more
popular – even in its country of origin – than it was in Yugoslavia, because it
was a cynical response to the empty Floskeln about time in communism. Tito’s
most famous call – ‘Live as if there will be 100 years of future peace, but
prepare like there will be a war tomorrow'. If there is war tomorrow, then
surely there is peace today. Time was structured as a moving image of eternity
that has not yet arrived. Both war and peace are part of the future. The
beginning is indefinitely postponed.
The well known ancient philosopher Plotinus’s famous saying offered that
‘There are three tenses, and all three are present tenses’. When I am here and
now, when I remember, and when I plan, all three activities are happening now,
at this very moment. Under communism it was all same, only all three tenses
where future tenses: I plan in the future, but also I live in the future
(waiting for communism), and I remember from some point in the future as well.
Hence, the most accurate communist definition of time would be this: There are
three tenses, and all three are future tenses.
Time Units of
Capitalism
In his “The Aesthetics of Disappearance” Paul Virilio asked the
question: ‘Why were totalitarian regimes negatively inclined towards Einstein's
time theory?' And answered ‘Because for them, time was not assigned, it was
locally created.’[xv]
But the problem with this explanation is that it covers all ideologies, not
just the totalitarian ones. Anthropologists warn that all time is locally created. ‘Time per
se’ does not exist.
In capitalism, time is also created, ideologized. There is a beautiful
movie, 'About a Boy’ (2002) by Chris and Paul Weitz, which is a story about a
rich young man who lives in London, who doesn’t have to work because he
inherited a lot of money. So he spends his days doing nothing, but it turns out
to be a very busy project, and in order not to suffer from any effort or
boredom he decides to organise his time in a ‘capitalist’ fashion. His day is
divided into ‘time units’, with each such unit comprised of 30 minutes –
showering counts as one unit, surfing porn on the internet two units, lunch is
three units, the hairdresser four and so on. The paradox is that he ends up
being employed at the most difficult workplace imaginable. Here he has to enjoy
himself, and he has to enjoy himself in an organised, capitalist fashion –
leisure in capitalism is restructured into precise time units, just as work is.
Capitalist time is also 'dictated’, ‘created’ time. Capitalism started
precisely when early capitalism began organising time as linear sequences of
time units. It imposed a certain rhythm on the body so that it could be
exploit. It turned agricultural cycles into a linear sequence of same-value
units. In capitalism, time is linear, but this applies not only to work, but to
pleasure too.
Capitalism organised the body as a military-political machine, in order
to draw greater profit from it. Electroshock therapy was discovered by the
Italian psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti in 1938, at a time when fascism was
blossoming, and it became the standard control method employed by the secret
police, writes Virilio.[xvi]
If you accelerate the body to a point of madness, you can then take everything
away from the exhausted body, it is a perfect body to be ruled over, it will
never protest, it will never object; in other words, you have the ideal object
for interrogation, monitoring, and exploitation, and this is a commonplace in
capitalism. The acceleration of time in capitalism, the philosophy that ‘only
stopping equals death’, etc., the fascination with planes and automobiles, set
to the rigorous beat of the city, was a
part of the capitalist understanding of time. The connecting of the moment of
departure that of arrival in late capitalism finally led to a certain
contraction of space-time in concentration points, as virtual, ‘non-existent’
points. Email, which began in the 1990s as a set of ‘pleasure buttons’, the
loving, playful and seductive 'touches' of friends and potential lovers, are
instead today the core of the mobile office (the exchange of work plans via
this e-mail address, a project via another, etc.), virtual communication became
duller than the dullest of office meetings in the real world. In the virtuality
of late capitalism, space is organised as non-space, and time as no-time, which
has culminated in the virtuality of the capitalist ‘world without a world’ (Badiou).
When in 1959 the USA and the USSR organised a cultural exchange in
Moscow, the Soviets brought paintings, art, etc., while the Americans brought,
instead of art objects, a simple, very prosaic model of a modern kitchen. Nixon
and Khrushchev are seen photographed in front of the kitchen, in what Suzan
Buck-Morss called a 'Kitchen Conference'.[xvii]
So while the communists hated rooms, capitalism did precisely the opposite: the
capitalist response was – here is this kitchen, how would you feel in it? Having
a family house and a family car represented the essential bourgeois dream;
capitalism equipped the house like a small factory, with washing machines,
vacuum cleaners (a line from a movie has the woman saying ‘I don’t need the
right to vote, what I need is a washing machine’), but the paradox is that not
only did capitalism turn the home into a sector
of capitalist production,
but in late capitalism turned it into a sector
of porn production as
well, with the obsession with reality family shows among others. The capitalist
logic went as follows: do not open a war with homes and houses (naïve communist
approach), but preserve rooms, we will turn them into television studios, and
you will even like it. Žižek writes about the television set that is always on, where although I am
not watching it, the idea is that the set is watching me. And he is right when
he says that one fear greater than the fear that someone is watching me is that
I am not being watched at all![xviii]
If someone does not put me under a looking glass, I shall personally install a
camera and broadcast myself on the Internet 24/7. Someone is bound to see me.
Post-Time and Pre-Time
And isn’t it precisely this, the combination of cooking and leisure (the
domestic fantasy of a ‘real’ home), with the added excitement of being observed
all the time, that lies at the very roots of the blossoming shopping malls of
today? Similar to my experience of McDonald’s (I was not in it for eating), we
are not at the mall for shopping – at least not primarily. The success of the
shopping mall lies precisely in its promised phantasm of ‘home outside home’,
of displaced space which not only simultaneously materialises two functions at
the same time (I am not alone, there is a ‘familiar’ crowd, but that crowd
can’t bear the claustrophobic threat of nuclear family relationships, the real
encounter with others in their unbearable corporeal presence is reduced to a
minimum, etc.), but by simultaneously serving both functions, the space for the
third, most fundamental function is opened – that of the spectator, who
simultaneously offers him/herself up to the gazes of others, and at the same
time gazes back at them. Renata Salecl
writes that shopping malls are not pure public spaces, but are mixtures of the
public and private – they may resemble the public, but one cannot engage in
truly public activities in them; you cannot protest, hold demonstrations,
distribute leaflets, sign petitions and many of the other things you can do in
a public space, simply because they are privately owned.[xix]
One is thus inclined to conclude that the capitalist obsession with
these inter-zones of public/private, eventually leads to an explosion of
cooking shows, reality TV, a vigorous porn industry, etc. (how others are doing
it?); but it also helps explain the popularity of the sitcom as a genre in late
capitalism. All of them, from Gray’s Anatomy to Scrubs, the Office, etc. play
on the same logic of closed space, situated in the limited scope of the
workplace (as Frederic Jameson rightly concludes, the workplace is neither
public nor private)[xx]
- as well as elevators, hotel rooms, bathrooms (remember the famous elevator in
Gray’s Anatomy; or that, already back in Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’, a
lot of the personal drama develops in the elevators). And we should bear in
mind that while we are aware that some shopping malls are already dying, what
we are not fully aware of is that they will soon be treated as ruined cultural
heritage: a website called Deadmalls.com already lists some 300 dead or dying
shopping malls.
This means that shopping malls, as those objects that most efficiently
and effectively succeeded in producing timeless space, space with suppressed or
implicitly absent time (the paradox being that the more these spaces are working
to be timeless, the more measuring and numbering is being introduced in them,
more of Lefebvre’s ‘terror of clocks’), will nevertheless soon be presented as
objects of cultural history, very similar to the crumbling historical sites we
know and recognise today. In other words, in some distant future, they will
represent a hallmark of our late capitalist timeless temples. Or, as Badiou
would have it: ‘Capitalism is the first world civilization without world’, it
has infrastructure, it has space, but the time is a cancelled time. However,
the same process also held true for communism: communism too had an
infrastructure, but instead of the accelerated, virtual and canceled time of
capitalism, it had the postponed time of communism (the ‘we are waiting for communism’ parole). In the
long history of the 20th century, we have come to live all along in
some sort of a transfer, in a passage from
time to post-time (in
capitalism), or from time to pre-time (in communism). The 20th century
turned out to be a long history of the abyss of time, between communist pre-time and
capitalist post-time; what we never actually managed to do is to live in-time.
[i] To
be precise, Arendt’s actual quote is: ‘the public life today is in fact private’,
as quoted in: Frederic Jameson, Spatial Systems in North by Northwest, in: Everything You Always
Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock, edited by
Slavoj Zizek, Verso, London, 1993, p. 52.
My inaccurate quoting of Arendt
here, in which life is to be equalized with space, is deliberate. It does not
come from the perverse assumption that life should simply be seen as a
geometric phenomenon that resides in space, but quite the opposite, as evidence
of the supremacy of space over time that according to Lefebvre, is deeply
rooted in modernity. And precisely on account of this assumption, space has
come to serve as one of few consistent (though phantasmatic) positive supports
of our very being, while with the same operation, time has been expelled as a
‘guarantee’ of the same being.
[ii]
Sigmund Freud, Civilization
and its Discontents, The Standard Edition, With a Biographical
Introduction by Peter Gay, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, 17-19.
[iii]
Rolf Potts, ‘Slumming the Golden Archives’ in: The
Art of Independent Travel (weekly column on Yahoo News), 5 June 2006.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/rolf_potts/20060605/rolf_potts/rolf_potts5166
[v]Henri
Lefebvre, The
Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, 1991,
Blackwell Publishing Ltd, p. 96.
[vi]
Ibid, 95.
[vii]
H. L. Borges, Borges
Oral, Emecé Editores, S.A. – Editorial Belgrano, Buenos Aires, 1979.
Here I used the Serbian translation of the book: H. L. Borhes, Usmeni Borhes,
Izdavačko preduzeće Rad, Beograd, 1990, p. 63.
[xiii] Quoted in: Igor Shafarevich: The Socialist
Phenomenon (1980),
translated by William Tjasma, foreword by Aleksandar I. Solzhenitsyn, Harper
& Row, New York. Here I quote from the Serbian translation from 1997, p.
275.
[xv] Paul Virilio, The
Aesthetics of Disappearance, MIT Press,
1991, Quoted here from the Macedonian translation from 2006, Magor, Skopje, p.
124.
[xviii] Slavoj Žižek, The Spectator’s Malevolent Neutrality, public lecture on
the 8th June 2004, Theaterformen Festival, Brunswick, Germany. See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAS5P6RZw2A&feature=related
[xx] Frederic Jameson, Spatial
Systems in North by
Northwest in: Everything
You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan: But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock,
edited by Slavoj Zizek, Verso, London, 1993, 69-72.
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