The City in Pieces

Burgin, Victor. In/Different Spaces : Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
UoA Fine Arts Library: 701 B956i

DESCRIPTION
(taken from http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6720.html)
Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity--sexual, racial, national--and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the "media." Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Sembéne, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andrè Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle.

In/Different Spaces explores the construction of identities in the psychical space between perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories to describe the constitution and maintenance of "self" and "us"--in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to "other" and "them"--through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.


7 The City in Pieces - 2/05/2007 Reading Group Discussion
This chapter introduces us a history of architectural space: from that of the Italian Renaissance period to the disappearance (or, displacement) of space in the contemporary world.

Starting with Walter Benjamin's One Way Street which shows us a romantic personal engagement with space and that links us to the history of body-city representations in the Renaissance. The famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci demonstrates the "well-formed man" whose outstretched limbs contained perfectly in a circle and a square, which urges that buildings should display the same harmonious relation of parts to whole as Vitruvius found in the human body. Thus the human body is not only seen as the origin of the building, but of the entire built environment -- this could be found evident in the writings of Alberti that "the city is like a large house and the house like a small city," and "every edifice is a body." A corporeal city needs not geometry or mathematics, for that man is the measure of all things.

However, major changes in representations of space and space of representations that took place in the early twentieth century shattered a certain space, a space Lefebvre defines as "the space of common sense, of knowledge, of social practice, of political power..." Urban modernisation blurs the distinction between interior and exterior, i.e. private and public, by using steel and glass to build transparent walls. The concept of the membrane that Lefebvre supplies suggests a possibility of coexistence, and that brings us to look more closely on the psychoanalysis of space.

The development of cities is based on need, and the priority has shifted from the representation of 'surface' to that of 'interface.' Today, our conception of space has gone beyond what our eyes can ascribe, and as a result, one can no longer find balance between physical and psychological space...

And is that it?? I came out of this writing totally confused as to not knowing the point of this essay and with a fear of what may (or may not) come next. The essay takes us through a history of the concept of the concept of space, and leaves the questions unresolved in a uncomfortable way -- "Today, the autistic response of total withdrawal, and the schizophrenic anxiety of the body in pieces, belong to our psychocorporeal forms of identification with the teletopological puzzel of the city in pieces."

And may I also add that the group discussion left me more confused than ever! Is the purpose of a reading group simply expressing one's feelings (direct responses to certain passages in the reading) without much reference to any other support material? A chat session would do just that. The point is though, I just need to chat more.