BENJAMIN EDWARDS  WRITINGS   To the Convenient Landscape and Back: The Effects of Mobility, 1997 
I. Expansion    II. The Rational Services The Romantic    III. Resistance is Futile    IV. Taxonomy, Classification, Analysis    V. Thematics    VI. Collapse    VII. The Welcome      Bibliography

Resistance is Futile: You Will Submit To Convenience

The convenient landscape is now undeniable. It is nature. The automobile has not just changed our environment, it has created a completely new one. Our mobility generates the energy which circulates through the landscape, creating demands and desires, new niches to be filled and services to be performed. Dictated by the laws of an increasingly rationalized market economy, a system continues to build itself as an expansion of the traditional notion of place in order to accommodate the omnipresent consumer. These new "places" which constitute this system are standardized, operating under the procedure of the strategy, the formula, and the implementation. These are the places we commonly refer to as chains.
Reverse the inhabitant-habitat relationship:
Instead of gas or food fueling me, I picture my actions feeding a superstructure of convenience. I am the environment, the nutrition, the food, existing in symbiosis with a network of stores, restaurants, and megamarts which service me, and I serve in return. I am an automaton; I act "naturally." I am not an agent who determines action, rather, my behavior and my experiences are prescribed. Through my freedom I submit to the natural law of convenience: value, efficiency, and the pursuit of comfort.
What is this superstructure which we support? What Jean Baudrillard asked of consumer goods themselves may be asked of the space in which they are consumed:
"Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?" (Baudrillard, p.3) What is the design and the hierarchy? What are its patterns, its strategies? As it is our production, and a reflection of ourselves, what does it mean?
To approach this superstructure as a pure scientist is, of course, impossible. The individual cannot escape and reach a point of detached observation, because it is an integral part of a culture which defines and binds that individual as a consumer. It is possible, however, to approach it with the methodologies of the scientist and observer without losing sight of an inherent subjectivity as a consumer-participant. Consider two scientific models as providing a strategy for engagement with the ever-evolving superstructure of consumption: that of the explorer, which is essentially romantic, and that of the cartographer, which is the approach of the rationalist.
To explore an environment which is not unknown but completely everyday and mundane seems, on the face of it, an absurd thing to do. Taking on the role of explorer, however, transforms a passive attitude and approach into a very active one, in a forced, unnatural, and hyper-aware activity. The Situationists called this technique the "derive":
Among the various situationist methods is the derive [literally: 'drifting'], a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. The derive entails a playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.
In a derive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the derive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
But the derive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science- despite the apparently narrow social space to which it limits itself- provides psychogeography with abundant data.
The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network1 of the role of microclimates, of the distinct, self-contained character of administrative districts, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the derive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology. (Debord, Situationist Anthology, p. 50)
While the purpose of the derive was a type of subversion in the relationship between individual and environment, when modified as strategy of activist and aware consumption, it is subversive neither in its purposes nor in its effects. Change will not be affected; behavior is the same; mass consumption will continue uninterrupted. Exploration and the modified consumer-derive merely offer a strategy for coping with the larger, unalterable superstructure, if only through inconsequential enlightenment and understanding. This strategy strives for transcendental results, but it can never be so. It is a preoccupation, a remedy for frustration: being active is more tolerable than being passive.
The map is the rationalist product of the romantic excursion. It is not used for transcendental purposes but as a tool for domination. As a representation of a space from an omniscient perspective, it locates the individual and reveals information for the purposes of control and power. For the individual lost against the sublimity of the great superstructure of consumption, it seems that a strategy of mapping could be a way to regain control, a strategy which Fredric Jameson has termed "cognitive mapping."
Our latest dilemma of alienation and dislocation is a product of continued industrialization and modernization. In the progress of modernity there has been a concurrent struggle on the part of the individual subject to retain a sense of place and order within the flux of an increasingly disorienting and alienating environment. This condition has been expressed and familiarized through an aesthetic of fragmentation (as in the paintings of the Analytic Cubists and the Futurists, a formalizing aesthetic with the former, a celebratory one with the latter) which has practically defined twentieth century art and culture, tied to advances in our understanding of space-time through the Theory of Relativity, as well as changes in technology which altered the individual’s perception of space.
Jameson has argued that with the cultural condition of postmodernism, which is not a break from but an advance of modernism and "Late Capitalism" (now Later?), the struggle reached a climax:
…This latest mutation in space- postmodern hyperspace- has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment- which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile- can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (Jameson, p. 44)
Jameson prescribes an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, which would re-position and disalienate the individual subject within the social totality through the practical reconquest of a sense of place. (Jameson, p. 51) Is the prospect of "disalienation" absurd? Would an individualized, cartographic approach to the current superstructure of consumption, which is indeed one embodiment of global capitalism, lead to any sense of empowerment, or simply the same impotent enlightenment of the modified derive? Can it have any subversive and/or transformative effects, or is it a mere expression of the cultural and political climate at the end of the twentieth century?