| I. Expansion
II. The Rational
Services The Romantic III. Resistance is
Futile IV. Taxonomy, Classification,
Analysis V. Thematics
VI.
Collapse VII. The Welcome
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| Where is Starbucks? Which Starbucks is best? Imagine collecting all possible information from every Starbucks location, from square footage to the percentage of colors to the number of employees, and so on, and processing it to determine the completely average Starbucks. What would this place look like? Would this give us an approximation of the essence of Starbucks? What about the Barnes & Noble cafe
serving Starbucks Coffee? Or the Starbucks Coffee Proudly Served on United Airlines? Or the cup brewed at home? |
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| The McMemories advertisement had it right- McDonalds is not a place but a collection of memories and experiences, an internalized aesthetic. It is a fictional place but also a very real one. The "restaurant" is merely a set which delivers the intended and expected product-experience, accessing the real place, which is in you. What is McDonalds? Starbucks? Nike? Disney? I can't quite get a fix on them, but I know them. |
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| In the landscape there has been a reversal in the direction of traditional one-point perspective. The grid is no longer a device which projects outward from the individual subject, as in the Renaissance, but a condition which
collapses back into you (McLuhan, p. 125), like a net which has been cast out only to saturate physical space and deflect back to cover the individual's psychogeographical space. |
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| The grid is not strictly a spatial phenomenon but a method of division and duplication, a strategy which evolves to keep the customer happy while furthering mass production in adherence to the logic of capitalism. As a tool for control and domination of space, it has mutated throughout our history of industrialization and commercialization to meet the needs of the time: as a representational and positional device in the Renaissance; as lines of latitude and longitude to slice and distribute tracts of land to Homesteaders; in the city, two-dimensionally as urban planning and three-dimensionally as the
skyscraper (Sennett, p. 57). With Henry Ford, the grid became a mode of production. In the 1950s, it boomed as a mode of consumption, and as a mode of living, in the suburb. The unnaturally winding streets of the planned community and the gentle, grassy hills of the industrial park appear to be reactions against the grid, when in fact, like the theme, they are its logical
extensions (Sennett, p.50). The current trend of New Urbanism, which seeks a return to the values of community through the methods of pre-automobile urban planning, is no different. In a forced and contrived attempt to return to tradition, New Urbanism merely scrambles the options. You can choose from different styles of traditional housing, colors, roofing- mix and match, YOU decide. Rather than consuming within the theme, you can live in one. You can even live in a theme
town (Disney's Celebration, Florida). Through the appropriation of history and tradition by way of the theme, the grid dominates space as well as time. |
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| We no longer exist in a grid- we consume it. Having completely conquered the physical realm of space-time, it invades, colonizes, and entrenches itself within psychogeographical space. Dislocated from its previously fixed position, the place of consumption is now as mobile as the consumer. As one moves from city to city, state to state, country to country, “place” is packed up and carried along. It begins and ends as an ideal model, a standard, first within its corporate design, then through its repetition, uniformity, familiarization, and internalization, the ideal implants itself through a process of transference into the consciousness, the body-aesthetic, the very being, of the consumer, carving out attitude, atmosphere, tastes, smells, images, colors, all combining to form the
essence of the experience. ("Along with the geometrization of the landscape, there occurs the geometrization of thought. Specific reality is displaced by the primacy of the model. And the model is in turn imposed on the landscape, further displacing reality in a process of ever more complete circularity... We are convinced. We volunteer. Today Foucauldian confinement is replaced by Baudrillardian deterrence. The worker need no longer be coerced into the factory. We sign up for body building at the health club. The prisoner need no longer be confined in the jail. We invest in condominiums. The madman need no longer wander the corridors of the asylum. We cruise the interstates. We are today enraptured by the very geometries that once represented coercive discipline."
Halley, p.127-30) |
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| The domination of these corporate "simulacra" is now complete. Guy
Debord's theorum that "the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image" was
visionary (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 24) Jean Baudrillard's formulation of the "simulacrum" and the "hyperreal" was merely
perceptive. Today, this condition is painfully obvious. No longer approaching, it surrounds us. We are saturated. It is useless to re-present it; we can only observe and participate. |
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| Capital continues to accumulate, corporations merge, signs collide, themes coalesce, and the liquidity of mobile consumption is absorbed. |
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| Utopia, or at least its image, is here. |
