space in the age of non-place in this article in the recent issue of drain with topic on deterritorialization Ian Buchanan takes on a journey from his definition of postmodern uncoded, thus deterritorializing non-places on to the ‘over-coded’ space which tries to reterritorialize the disoriented ‘traveller’:
Disorientation brought on by the disembedding process requires in its turn a compensating process of reembedding to accommodate us to the alienatingly ‘faceless’ world of modernity.
[..]
In both Jameson and Giddens, then, but in a range of other writers too, the existential quality of everyday life in postmodernity is theorised in terms of what it feels like to be trapped in an hallucinogenic space which in its newness seems literally other-worldly and for which no existing vernacular seems appropriate.
[..]
If we have moved into a space that isn’t coded and therefore cannot be read, then as Jameson narrates in his account of the Bonaventure it would indeed be impossible to navigate.
[..]
It is the mode of place-conferring that has changed. In Flaubert’s age, the mode was ‘oedipal’ (of which orientalism is but one of the better known strains), but now its mode is deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. These two processes go hand in hand, Deleuze and Guattari always insist, but that does not mean they are of the same order or somehow reciprocal – one cannot think of it as the left hand returning what the right hand takes away. In clarifying how these terms operate I hope to better explain how chain stores function to confer upon us a sense of place (in a place-less world) and in the process answer what Jameson describes as an ’embarrassing question’ raised by this process which in his view does not seem very different ‘from classical existentialism – the loss of meaning everywhere in the modern world, followed by the attempt locally to re-endow it, either by regressing to religion or making an absolute out of the private and contingent.’
[..]
In both Jameson and Giddens, then, but in a range of other writers too, the existential quality of everyday life in postmodernity is theorised in terms of what it feels like to be trapped in an hallucinogenic space which in its newness seems literally other-worldly and for which no existing vernacular seems appropriate.
[..]
If we have moved into a space that isn’t coded and therefore cannot be read, then as Jameson narrates in his account of the Bonaventure it would indeed be impossible to navigate.
[..]
It is the mode of place-conferring that has changed. In Flaubert’s age, the mode was ‘oedipal’ (of which orientalism is but one of the better known strains), but now its mode is deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. These two processes go hand in hand, Deleuze and Guattari always insist, but that does not mean they are of the same order or somehow reciprocal – one cannot think of it as the left hand returning what the right hand takes away. In clarifying how these terms operate I hope to better explain how chain stores function to confer upon us a sense of place (in a place-less world) and in the process answer what Jameson describes as an ’embarrassing question’ raised by this process which in his view does not seem very different ‘from classical existentialism – the loss of meaning everywhere in the modern world, followed by the attempt locally to re-endow it, either by regressing to religion or making an absolute out of the private and contingent.’
linking here back to chain and promissing for more to come …. to follow the mentioned claim of Deleuze and Guattari that the schizo lives history, but has in a sense lost the luxury of the distance of historicity
