1. On elevators and identity
2. Saying terrible and elitist things about Auge
3. Reclaiming Tourism
Elevators.
The bulk of my experience with elevators comes from when I worked as a bicycle messenger, and would spend a significant portion of my time going up and down in them—back and forth on the streets, up and down in the elevators. In my experience, elevators are rather homogenized by location and type, but within these parameters, are expressive of individual character and placeness. The biggest, newest skyscrapers have the fastest elevators, usually divided into banks of lower floors and upper floors (ie 1-20, 21-40). These high speed ones can make you feel really crazy if you jump up and down in them, or duck and squat and turn your head back and forth, while zooming so so fast up or down.
After September 11, 2001 there was a change in many buildings to forcing couriers to enter through the freight or cargo elevator. This was a frequent cause of confusion and delay, as the cargo entrances are often not at the address listed, and the elevators are generally slower. In the large buildings of American metropoli, the cargo elevators and many of the lobby elevator systems usually have a guardian (sometimes even a progression of them) with whom one must sign in. These individual characters differ widely, but they are usually in formal uniforms of solid colors with trim. In the lobbies, these uniforms give a simultaneous reification (ha! I said it!) of the fancy formal austerity projected by the typical marble, glass and brass interiors but also diminish and formalize the people in the uniforms. The characters in the loading bay are often uniformed as well, but appear more like security guards when this is the case, even when the uniforms are the same as their counterparts at the front they appear differently in the concrete or carpeted environments they inhabit. And the people in the freight or service elevators tend to move slower, are more likely to be sitting down, and are generally less stiff and formal. I think that the lobby is much more of a stage in which a public performance must take place. The people who guard the elevators are very much of the places that they work, in their manner and appearance.
But yes, what of within the elevator itself? It is a place unto it’s own, and in defining it, I can use the elevator to be vindicative of Auge’s first two tenets of non-place; they can easily be nonrelational and ahistorical, but from my experience it is much more difficult to peg them as not being concerned with identity. The elevator can be very hilariously relational, but this is so because the assumend social contract of elevator life pretty clearly discourages of relations between unfamiliar parties. Elevators are arguably historical, but are probably easier to describe as functional than meaningful from a historical perspective.
People belong to them.
There are millions upon millions of people whose identities are at least unconsciously tied up in their relationship to elevators, but for simplicities sake we can identify a few types of character for whom elevators are important to their identity. For one, there are the bike messengers, who go up and down in different elevators all day. The people on the inside of the buildings often seem to regard messengers as a kind of alien barbarian class; stinky, dirty, sexy, scary, rude, stupid… Whiffs of the wild world of the streets outside get delivered to the elevators along with the packages and letters on their way to offices. Then there are the guardians of the elevator, and rarely, in the case of older elevators, an actual human operator who really identifies with the place. In high school I knew a girl who worked in an elevator. She also drew a comic book. I think it was called ‘Elevator Girl’. And then there are the installers, inspectors and mechanics of elevators, who are so intimate with them, but also with so many, that I wonder how special of a place each one is.
And they have names.
“This elevators name is Otis.”
I heard a co-rider say this in an elevator the other day. The person read it on the plaque that is mounted in the elevator:
“Otis”
I used to deliver to the Otis elevator company at 444 Spear, in San Francisco. Despite this tangible location, this company is rather representative of non-place and supermodernity: http://www.otisworldwide.com/
“This elevators name is Otis”
THEY ARE ALL NAMED OTIS!
I was amazed recently to ride in an elevator that was NOT name Otis! Otis is a non-being. A semiote of global corporate elevation.
2. There is probably no good reason for me to be so critical of Auge
But, when I read his book 'Non-places : introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity' it was difficult not to imagine Auge as a nostalgic, befuddled and scattered, aging academic who was struggling to come to grips with the way of things at the time of the seeming triumph of capitalism over socialist state-governments. To someone like myself who grew up during this time, his intellectualization of the fracturing and discreetizing of spatial-social units carries about the same weight of a repetitive late night conversation at a party:
“Whoa man, it’s crazy, y’know, how all these people just stay in their houses and watch tv and then get in their car and go to this other place, like their work or whaterver, that is inside too, and just like everywhere they are going the places and the people are protected and disassociated from their surroundings, even the car, y’know? I call it ‘pod culture’. Get it, right? Like each place is just a pod and these people (y’know, not like me and you, cuz we’re down with the streets) never leave their pods, and just watch tv all the time but have no idea what’s going on outside…”
This general trend in conversation is not passé, but I would say that it is familiar to the point of saturation. But who knows? Maybe the prevalence of this knowledge and discourse about hyper-reality, the explosion of representative space, and the disassociation and decontextualization of localities and places largely came about as a trickle down effect from the radical reconceptions and theorization of Auge.
But it got better!
The second part of the work, the critique of anthropological place making, is much more interesting, but somewhat in a ‘super-modern’, as in disassociated, relationship to the proceeding supermodernity elements. The depth with which he goes into writing about anthropology takes me as a reader from an obvious and one sided re-statement of the ‘supermodern’ condition to a very highly nuanced and involved conceptualization of anthropology that I do feel a bit left out from. This is not to say that I don’t understand his main points, or that I don’t see how the section should function. It is a segue into his defining of place as point from which non-place can be defined, and details how the co-construction of the indigenous fantasy from within and with out defines both knowledge and the production of place, and how these ideas are the seeds of complication that make all places turn out to be some combination of non and non-non place place non place place place non non. Anon. and on.
The section on definition of place and non-place is at times the most refreshingly concise, and with the most interesting tidbits of quotes and case studies.
3. Travelling to tourism
Continuing with the discussion about travel guides and tourism that we had in class, I thought of when I lived in Philadelphia, and how on cold winter nights I would lurk about in Barnes and Nobles Booksellers reading travel guides. One evening, on a lark, I looked at the lonely planet guide (or was it 'let's go!'? I dont remember for sure) for the city of Philadelphia. I was very curious to see what it would have to say about where I lived in West Philly. The book said to just not bother going anywhere west of University City. Almost my entire life was taking place within that area that was written out of the guidebook as being too potentially dangerous to be a place in any approachable way. Or, in a convenient reversal, perhaps the place was too real to afford the non-place of the tourist that Auge discusses, lacking any safe space for viewing.
Another longstanding trope that I have about travel and tourism is an idea of reclaiming tourism as a project of self-identification. In the popular culture of my people, tourists were bad, an exploitive other, and travelers were good, genuine and authentic people in search of real experiences. In my short life, the explosion of this notion has led to the backpacker-lonely planet communities and infrastructures with which many of us are familiar. This identity left me feeling embarrassed, and only wanting to go places if I supporting the local traveler-tourist economy was one of the explicit reasons for the undertaking of a journey. The idea of returning to an ideal of tourism is both an embracing of the economic realities (can we call them realities any more?), and a way towards more meaningful and communicative interactions.
What do you call it when a musical ensemble or a circus travels about and performs? I say that they go on tour. And what does that make them? That’s right! Tourists! With the tourist as such, at least entertainment or novelty is brought in exchange for the entertainment and novelty that travel to a place that-is-not-one’s-own canonically affords. I am not trying to say that this is a better thing to do than a strong interest in supporting the local economy, in fact it is probably worse, but a potential solution to the wounded pride of the erstwhile ‘traveler’.
