the disappearance of place (1)*

Are we moving towards a world where there are no places anymore, only spaces and flows?

We talk about globalization as a way of promoting diversity, of connecting all the disparate places in the world. But I wonder: does it not just convert our cultural treasures into commodities? Will our saris grace the catwalks of Paris, Milan and New York, before trickling their way to sweatshops and Wal-Marts? Will our ancient mosques and cathedrals suffer the repetive flash of tourist cameras? Will our culinary delicacies end up in a fast food restaurant? Will our ethnic music become a special CD available for sale at the Starbucks at the corner of every block in New York City? Does globalization allow us to experience more? Or does it level everything to a sameness that gives us ever so more, but ever so less. Do we change places into spaces? Spaces where we can go visit, and consume, swallow up all we want from, and then leave.

I graduated from a program supposedly promoting international studies, global exchange and communication. I wonder if it does so much that… or whether it just opens the door for entrance into the “technocractic elite” of today’s global world, those who are disconnected from place, and only inhabit these in-between spaces and flows. When we studied abroad in foreign countries, very few of us took advantage of anything beyond the nightlife, the travel and other forms of consumption afforded to us by our American wealth. But it was easy—because more and more, the so-called globalized world has become organized as such:

"A second major trend of cultural distinctiveness of the elites in the informational society is to create a lifestyle and to design spatial forms aimed at unifying the symbolic environment of the elite around the world, thus superseding the historical specificity of each locale. Thus, there is the construction of a (relatively) secluded space across the world along the connecting lines of the space of flows: international hotels whose decoration, from the design of the room to the color of the towels, is similar all over the world to create a sense of familiarity with the inner world, while inducing abstraction from the surrounding world; airports' VIP lounges, designed to maintain the distance vis-a-vis society in the highways of the space of flows; mobile, personal, on-line access to telecommunications networks, so that the traveler is never lost; and a system of travel arrangements, secretarial services, and reciprocal hosting that maintains a close circle of the corporate elite together through the worshipping of similar rites in all countries.

"Furthermore, there is an increasingly homogeneous lifestyle among the information elite that transcends the cultural borders of all societies: the regular use of SPA installations (even when traveling), and the practice of jogging; the mandatory diet of grilled salmon and green salad, with udon and sashimi providing a Japanese functional equivalent; the "pale chamois" wall color intended to create the cozy atmosphere of the inner space; the ubiquitous laptop computer; the combination of business suits and sportswear; the unisex dressing style, and so on. All these are symbols of an international culture whose identity is not linked to any specific society but to membership in the managerial circles of the informational economy across a global cultural spectrum." (p. 417)

~ The Social Theory of Space and the Theory of the Space of Flows, Manuel Castells

As someone who enjoys the privileges of globalization, and who does enjoy globe trotting, I hope that we can come in contact with other parts of the world the world, without destroying the place, and transforming it into some exotic version of ourselves. I hope that we can tread gently on the different lands of this globe, conferring to each place dignity.

If we do travel, let us not confine ourselves to sanitary hotel rooms and guided tours; let us not turn a blind eye to the skinny, starving children on the streets. Let us not consume a place through the filter of our comfortable privilege, but instead make ourselves vulnerable, and allow ourselves to feel the pain (and the joy) of a location.

Because most notably, Castells’ information elite live far apart from the poor—it is becoming easier and easier for the rich to live in a simulated, safe environment, of their gated communities and airport lounges, far away from the filth and the danger of the streets:

"It is important to grasp that we are dealing here with a reorganization of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of the intersections between lives of the rich and the poor, which transcends traditional social segregation and urban fragmentation…. Rodgers, following Anthony Giddens, conceptualizes the core process as a “disembedding” of elite activities from local territorial contexts, a quasi-utopian attempt to disengage from a suffocating matrix of poverty and social violence."

"Laura Ruggeri (discussing Hong Kong’s Palm Springs) stresses as well the contemporary quest of deracinated Third World elites for a “ real imitation life,” modeled on television images of a mythified Southern California, that “to succeed must be bounded – [i.e.], isolated from the ordinary landscape."

"Fortified, fantasy-themed enclaves and edge cities, desembedded from their own social landscapes but integrated into globalization’s cyber-California floating in the digital ether- this brings us full circle to Philip K. Dick. In this ‘”gilded captivity,” Jeremy Seabrook adds, the Third World urban bourgeoisie “cease to be citizens of their own country and become nomads belong to, and owing allegiance to, a superterrestrial topography of money; they become patriots of wealth, nationalists of an elusive, golden nowhere.”

~ Planet of the Slums, Mike Davis

And I wonder, what will become of the glitz and glamour of globalization, when its underbelly is anything but? What hubris will remain of our legacy? (Sameness? Simulation? The loss of the real?) Because we know all that rises to such Babel-like proportions must eventually fall.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

~ Ozymandias, Percy Shelley

* Something that has been on my mind recently. These are scattered thoughts and interest tidbits I have been reading.