10:32am, 14/05
It's raining outside, and I'm sitting at a desk by a window on the third floor of the UL, part learning references for my Human paper, part staring out the window at passers by. Pathetic fallacy? An allegory for the daily slog that is repetitive revision? A metaphorical musing to set the scene for this post? Or perhaps, it's simply raining outside, and I'm sitting at a desk inside the UL revising and occasionally being distracted by the happenings and myriad of daily lives outside.
I can't remember the last time I wrote a post (and published it); I've had so many ideas over the past two and a bit terms of university, and have been challenged in innumerable ways, but I've just never sat down to type them. They've been written in many places - odd scraps of paper; letters; notes on my phone; scribbles in my Moleskine; far too many post-it-notes - but are yet to take on coherent form. But does that mean that they haven't existed? Because they don't have coherent form? Is their lack of public form constitutive of their non-existence?
11:38am, 30/05
Since starting this post I've written both of my 3-hour-long, hand-stiffening, essay-full exams and (unofficially) finished my first year of university. I'm one of the first to finish both my exams and work, so the daily slog of revision continues for most people whilst I wander through the city enjoying it for the first time without the ever-present nudge of supervisions, essays, lectures, reading and what else have you in the back of my mind, waiting for my first elusive May Week. After three days I was ready to return to work (not revising, but learning)... then I thought: "Ha! You started writing nearly two summers ago to prepare for the thinking that would be thrown at you in university and you've not, since starting university, written anything on there! If you miss writing and learning, then write and learn." Your probable thought line concerning my weirdness - Isn't she on holiday? Hasn't she just finished three terms at university of intense, non-stop work? - is definitely qualified.
Anyway. Normative vocabularies of the everyday: reflections.
One of the modules I studied this year was called 'Understanding Cultural Geographies' and concerned the ways in which culture is construed, manipulated, normalised, put to work and reconstructed. Essentially: how is the world narrated to us? Who is narrating this to us? What is included (and, perhaps even more significantly, excluded) from this narration? Mitchell (2000) aptly surmises the gist of this module in his referral to culture as socially produced through struggles over and in spaces, scales and landscapes, refuting the existence of any culture in the world and instead pointing to 'differing arrays of power that organise society in this way and not that'. So forget your atypical understanding of culture as the paintings that hang in museums, the annunciated accent and pinky-high cups of tea assigned to Britishness, and other such ideas; we're concerned here with culture as a discourse.
- Cinema and Literature - storytelling? Bowman; O Tuathail 1994; Haushofer; Wylie; Cameron 2012... Dystopia? Bond (Dodds, 2004); THG; Divergent... suburbia? American Beauty. Performance?
- Landscape - painting? Gainsborough 1750. Shopping malls. Urban theory. Parallels today in Instagram? Editing? Snapchat? Saviour Barbie (Rudyard Kipling)?
- Identity - gender; place; space; binaries of 'us' and 'them'; otherness; Orientalism (Said, 1978); post-colonialism; magazines; Atwood 1992
A BNOC in the Geography lecture theatre throughout first year, critical geopolitical scholar Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal) wrote a paper in 1994 to redress the classical geopolitical writings of Wittfogel, Bowman and Lacoste, making a statement which has stayed with me since I first read it (and, both annoyingly and inevitably, I didn't manage to slip into any of my exam essays). He writes both that 'all reading is implicitly a writing', noting how Wittfogel's reading of the meaning of Haushofer's texts was also a writing of that meaning, and that 'all writing is merely a reading', Haushofer's writing of the state of global politics in 1930's Germany being merely his own reading of the surface of global politics (context: Wittfogel was a German-American marxist scholar who fought Nazism in an engaged intellectual, political and personal way; Haushofer was a German general turned geopolitician who proposed the idea of Lebensraum amidst the German outrage at territorial loss in the Treaty of Versailles). All reading is implicitly a writing; all writing is merely a reading. Essentially, everything is a reproduction of something else and these reproductions implicitly seek to naturalise one interpretation in a normative manipulation of power. If we translate Ó Tuathail's ideas into popular arenas of politics (the everyday) like Cinema and Literature, this discursive nature of culture becomes inherently obvious. There are so many examples of this already published, including the role of video games in shaping militarist subjectivities (Power, 2007), war and spy films such as the James Bond franchise in gendering international relations (Dodds, 2010; Toal, 2005) and superhero comic books in producing and disseminating nationalist values (Dittmer, 2007), amongst others (Dittmer & Gray, 2010), and the implied cultural work is not restricted to the said mediums of Cinema and Literature. It's inherent in landscape and identity itself too.
I realise this post starts in the abstract and is rapidly heading that way in a tangled mess of words and lines of thought, so I'll briefly contextualise the theory of landscape and feminist scholarship following the cultural turn of the 1970s leading into identity contestations, before cumulatively exploring the three thematic scribbles I made (and the preceding excursion into Ó Tuathail's 1994 paper) through the medium of Instagram, a platform of words, pictures and videos.
Landscape is a particularly useful framework for thinking about how the world is narrated to us (and by us), and hence is one of the longest traditions in human geography. Indeed, it was Marx who stated that the maintenance and reproduction of the working class is ever necessary for the reproduction of capital, the finished nature of the commodity erasing the work that went into making it - landscape therefore both is work and does work (by naturalising and erasing particular social relations). Mr and Mrs Andrews by Gainsborough (1750) is a useful painting to illustrate this theory at its base level. A quick google search reveals that this painting depicts two figures by a tree in the left foreground of the pastoral scene, their land stretching out behind them, untouched, finished and beautiful. A standard painting of the picturesque era? But a series of binaries are inherently and implicitly hidden by this painting: Mr Andrews is standing with a dog at his heel and a gun in his hand, whilst Mrs Andrews sits as though rooted to the tree, with what appears to be a painting in her hand; the landscape is beautifully cultivated and rich in harvest, but there are no workers depicted. Through such binaries, gendered, class and capitalist work is done even as the painting is work itself to normalise a patriarchal, aristocratic and exclusive make-up of society. The theory of landscape thus seeks to deconstruct these dualisms of work inherent in landscapes - not just paintings, but also physical landscapes such as shopping malls (Mitchell, 2000), racialised and other settlements such as Chinatown in Vancouver (Mitchell, 2010) and residential areas such as Bedford, Westchester (Duncan & Duncan, 2004). Whilst a useful framework for narrations of the world however, landscape theory ought to be critiqued for the ways in which empirical observation falsify the theory of landscape as a social agent for the reproduction of social relations, ignoring the dynamic nature of landscapes (shifts such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the reconstruction of regions after the financial crises of 2007) as well as the agency of individuals.
It's much harder to contextualise feminist scholarship and contestations of identity, but of arguably greatest significance concerning their background is the fact that the growth in feminist scholarship and voices in the 1970s led to a broader focus upon the body and personal politics; eminent examples include Judith Butler and her explorations of gender and performativity, and Linda McDowell and her work on gender contestation. Like landscapes, identity is a social construct depending on the insertion of the self into webs of interlocution (Benhabib, 1999) and reliant upon the constative 'other' (male to female etc.). Therefore, following loosely the argument made by Simone de Beauvoir that women are not born but made, identity is something tenuously constituted in time and normalised by a stylised repetition of acts (Butler, 1990) - I am not born a bibliophile, but cultivate a love of books and writing through my exposure to reading from an early age, the opportunity to learn how to read, and the availability of books both in itself and above other distractions such as technology. As with other things explored in Cultural Geographies, identity is a social construct.
So, Instagram.
Instagram has rapidly become one of the most popular social media platforms, based around the sharing of pictures (and more recently 60-second videos) with those who follow you. Innocent enough. But, as the explosion of Essena O'Neill's decision to quit Instagram and reveal the true captions behind her pictures shows, it's anything but. The pictures that we choose to post help to construct a page that construes an identity we hope to promote for ourselves; the captions we post and the filters, crops, angles we paint our pictures with seek to imbue this identity with further validity; those we follow and those we allow to follow us create an audience of exclusivity to which we project this identity and through which we normalise it. Take Essena O'Neill's 'Behind the Image' on her blog; having deleted all other forms of social media because, as she writes, 'Have you ever looked yourself in the mirror and then to your horror can't recognise, let alone respect, the person staring back? That happened to me. Big time.', she created her own platform and made videos rewriting the images she'd previously posted, having made a living on Instagram. It begs the question of validity and reality: what is real? Who is the real you? Freud once wrote that 'Das Ich ist nicht Herr im eigene Haus' (the ego isn't master in its own house), intimating that one cannot be a self on ones own. Individuality inherently depends upon the constative other; identity depends as much upon what you are as what you are not. It's the classical Orientalist school of thought (see Said, 1978) dichotomising 'us' from 'them', the familiar from the unknown, the 'self' from the 'other'. Hence, O'Neill's quitting Instagram highlights the ways in which it actively does work relating to identity and in this respect power/agency. And it's true. Would we really post the dull, the mundane, the darkness, of our lives on social media platforms like Instagram? In the same sense, do the filtered pictures of idyllic scenes, laughter with friends, and artistic food reflect reality in its whole sense? There's an Instagram account called 'Saviour Barbie' which implicitly satirises such a dualism. Building upon the unfortunate reality of post-colonialism and privileged power relations on the base level of development and volunteering, this account seeks to expose the manipulative construct of the contemporary culture surrounding the aforesaid relationships which, in themselves, as Arturo Escobar (1999) argues, are social constructs themselves. With captions such as 'Who needs a formal education to teach in Africa? Not me! All I need is some chalk and a dose of optimism. It's so sad that they don't have enough trained teachers here. I'm not trained either, but I'm from the West, so it all works out. Good morning, class! #barbiesaviourtheeducator #wildwildwest #theyteachmemorethaniteachthem #PhDindelusionalthoughtprocesses #degreesplease #qualifiedisnotafeeling #godstillQUALIFIESthecalled #gettingschooledandoverruled', Saviour Barbie takes the assumption of Western privilege and the ways in which social media has been implicitly utilised to normalise such and through exaggerated diction exposes the fallacy of assumed privilege. Besides its challenge of development, this highlights the ways in which contemporary landscapes on the platform of social media themselves perform cultural work and seek to normalise constative identities based upon privileges of power and agency.
Normative vocabularies of the everyday. It all begs the question, what things do we take advantage of in our everyday speech, actions, interactions that in themselves implicitly perform work at normalising some particular idea or relation?
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