Space, Place and identity, the implications of non-space or transitory places on identity.

“Structures are both the mediums and the outcome of social practices they are modified continuously as the actions that constitute them change”

Giddens1984.

Mashell and McLuhan1997 “subjects encounter not a signifying structure, or even the materiality of the signified, but the signified or sense of itself as it is materialised”.

Exterior relations might be argued to constitute objects, subjects.

In Augéʼs theory in absence this constitutes non-places.

The initial structuring of space………….

` 

“The atomization of individuals as discreet relatively poorly integrated producers – consumers defines this extent of their meaningful relationships increasingly exclusive in terms of

one”.

Darryl S. L. Jarvis 2002

The authority is upon us, the panoptican…. The individualization of the gaze. Behaviour is to be checked, governmentality.

The machines certainly successfully divide us if analysed aesthetically they offer little beyond the unified authority, faceless… 

Who may be considered an individual and who is excluded, what do the differing aesthetics of the gates suggest?

Abstract systems

Stages of simulacra: value into worth, into money, into cards, de-territorialized from the staging of the action in terms of personal exchange to

technology based and even geographically removed across the internet.

… “the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials – worse: by their artificial resurrections in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning… substituting signs of the real for the

real itself”… (Baudrillard, 1981 )

Official spaces

The need to place people behind glass, seems to suggest both the bureaucracy of the authority

and simultaneously the violence of the passenger, held in check only barely.

The need for division…….

The ʻGAPʼ represents an ungovernable space, a professional tube workers website draws particular attention to this. …

“The step plate of the doorways on the Underground was originally

designed to cover the gap between the train and the platform. Of course,

this creates a step. You can't win them all.  

A certain amount of space is necessary to allow the train to run in

and run out of the platform without striking it. Introducing a level step

between platform and train will re-introduce a gap which wasn't there

before. It's just swapping one gap for another at huge expense. What a

waste.”

http://www.trainweb.org/tubeprune/unstories.htm

individualising homogenisation ? Who is addressed ?

The audience, often carefully targeted, in the tube seems ambiguous, the assumptions of the adverts

here seem to run from a person who may enjoy holidays to a passenger, to a person that needs to eat more healthily.

 m   

Where else to these adverts appear? Does the nature of the audience mean that adverts need to be unspecific in

their appeal. Are there effects that can be discerned from this?

The nature of the tube, from the gates to the announcements from speakers located in the far or so close as to seem just over your shoulder. The instalment of

passengers into their personal worldsʼ and the studied ignorance of their fellow passengers seems to fit with the theory offered by Marc Augé. Based on the

view that we exist in relation to others and that our environment is constitutive of us. Are we in a non-place?

I think that the tube creates an aesthetic identity that is based on ourselves as sign omitting beings…

Instead we become hyper-real

Around the tube there exist multiple digital utterances, in various media, demonstrating that the tube is a heavily contested in terms of peoplesʼ identity

within it … Or heavy

referents to floating signs: ?baudrillard? silent daLandian assemblages ?

internally surveyed and isolated?: Foucault 75 a lashite (02), creating meanings freely, infinitely,

A Flattened self…..

discussion seemingly so sparse on the tube is teeming on the internet.

BBC News The discomfort of strangers

By Sean Coughlan

“Is it a coincidence that no one else is sitting near us? Is it an accident that he's pushed out his corporate ID ….

  Public transport can be a world of

unspoken signals and gestures - but am I right in thinking that he looks self-

conscious, sometimes burying his face in his arms as though asleep?

  What's going on in the thoughts of

passengers? What judgements are they making?

It's a mind-game being played out all over the Tube network,  Mind-games”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4717251.stm

Marcus, who says his family are Greek-Cypriot, has devised a

strategy to avoid "odd looks" on the Tube (which he attributes to his

Mediterranean appearance).

To make himself seem non-threatening, he now wears a Make Poverty History wristband and

makes a point of reading the Economist.

"Whilst this sounds ridiculous it does reassure people around me. Of

course, the whole thing is ridiculous but these are

ridiculous times we are living in," he writes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4717251.stm

  "Millions of people

travel on the London Underground each day, and they have no choice but to view whatever adverts are posted

there," a spokesman said.  

"We have to take into account the full

range of travellers and endeavour not to cause offence in the adverts we

display."

Politician calls subway ban 'bonkers'

  In essence the tube contains a number of devices both material

and discursive that serve to limit the impulses of the passenger to the acknowledgement of either other passengers or perhaps

their own self. we become conscious of ourselves as

displayed and seek to provide a normalized front we are well

aware of the notices asking for suspicious behaviour to be reported. The tube represents a

place where identity is expressed in signs perhaps the nervous glances

reflect the absence of grounding of these signs.

whose tube: tom n