I don’t remember seeing the Eiffel Tower.
I have a picture of my mother holding me in her arms, against the Tower.
Is it the Eiffel Tower or some thing else that in my mind is etched as the Eiffel?
I have no means of finding that out.
As I transit in Paris, I think of its presence.
And as my plane takes off, the desire to see it from above makes me do stupid things.
On my flight from Paris to Philadelphia, a co-passenger is upset about not being able to spot The Eiffel. He complains and in the same moment takes a picture of himself, thrusting the camera into my face.
The lure of this view from above is empowering in the same moment it deceives.
The totalizing view of the spectacular eventually turns out to be a myth.
The distance between the viewer and the object desired- to- be- seen makes it impossible for these positions to interchange. And as technology permeates into our most intimate spaces and emotions, I wonder if these positions of the viewer and the viewed could be collapsed; or interchanged. The scope of haptic digital arts/technology that would locate ‘touch’ as a means of pulling the viewer into the narrative is inviting but what if one is dealing with something more than distance as represented as by points of origins/ends. The idea of distance as embodied by class and gender; an idea one confronts repeatedly working in the context of erstwhile ‘Third World’ economies.
In ‘Machina’ Perloff puts forth a fascinating history of how the Eiffel came to be ‘seen’. While Joris Karl Huysmans would call it a ‘folly of an iron monger’ for Barthes this upward thrust meant a celebration of a kind of materiality, a physicality that at its best could just about appropriate an idea of the physical.
Never reach anything beyond that. Never signifying anything more.
It was ‘popular’ in that sense.
For Huysmans the Eiffel represented a ‘vulgarisation’ of the aesthetic form.
For Barthes, this very absence was to be celebrated. He notes, “It was not in the spirit of a period commonly dedicated to rationality and to the empiricism of the great bourgeois enterprise to endure the notion of useless object, unless it was declaratively an object of the Arts”.
It is interesting to note that in July 1913 the Eiffel sent the first global electronic signal that seemed to promise what the poets and painters were to call ‘simultaneity’.
An idea of surveillance was built into the idea of the tower: As Perloff notes, trench warfare and bombing made the idea of watching the enemy within a radius of 45 degrees, obsolete.
In that moment of its obsoleteness, the Tower came to be celebrated for its emptiness. Its attempts to speak no more than what it stood as: an overarching iron structure, a feat of architectural accomplishment signifying at best a past and a function that had ceased to exist.
For Barthes, the Tower shoots up like an act of rupture. A symbol of subversion not only because of its non-aesthetic form and an aggressive straddling together of material. But because it was a gesture by which the Past could be said NO to.
“Take a pencil and let your hands wander…It shall be the Tower”, he says.
The conjunction between the materiality of the Tower as it existed once it ceased to justified by a ‘rationale’ and Language as a way of traveling but going nowhere marks the moment where a linear relationship between he signifier and the signified cease to exist. The Text suggests that a neat line cannot be drawn between the expository and poetic modes of discourse.
Language, in the spirit of the post- industrialist /postmodernist landscape, becomes a site of rupture. It follows a dreamlike logic of the subconscious where the signifier and signified are no longer monogamous.
This brings me again to the Plane journey.
Every time it begins to taxi, I am reminded of my inability to dissociate myself from its hurtling speed. The moment is there in front of me, on my in-flight entertainment screen that after showing me the speed at which I am hurtling over computer generated map imagery, leaving behind the past and present all mixed up,
slips into a popular Bollywood movie.
Or let me put it this was-I choose to slip at the push of that button there.
And in that moment I often want to think of the pleasures of being the itinerant seller of home remedies I interviewed sometime back in a ‘ghetto’ in New Delhi.
(Within parenthesis, let me acknowledge that I have been uncomfortable with the word ‘Ghetto’ ever since I learnt what it meant.
It embodies a notion of the inside of the ‘ghetto’ as against the outside of the larger City. My experiences of growing/living in one in New Delhi, India, have been quite the opposite.)
So I was talking of the pure pleasure of walking through the streets and not follow an imposed order.
Much like my current ramblings on the google maps where I think that one of the ways of subverting/redefining order (in this case Google) could be through re-inventing the idea of journey. Becoming like Language as a means of traveling and going nowhere.
To arrive at a personalized sense of order/disorder through taking on the labyrinth of the street. The pleasure of a zero-perspective as against the ‘ wave of verticals’, to use De Certeau’s term. The idea that the Concept –City ruptures with urban spatial practices.
So who is the most ordinary of spatial practitioners? What does spatial practice in its most ordinary sense mean in times where the boundaries between amateur and professional practice are fast disappearing?
In an era where more than a million cameras would flash in any given moment...what would an image mean?
Am thinking with hope of going nowhere.
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