Social Space

"In linguistics, pragmatics consists of that branch of linguistics concerned with what transpires between the text and its reception, i.e. the way in which language produces meaning and influences its interlocutors. Semio-pragmatics prolongs Metz' speculations, in "The Imaginary Signifier," concerning the active role of the spectator whose look brings the film into existence. Semio-pragmatics is less interested in a sociolistic study of actual spectators than in the psychic disposition of the spectator during the film experience, not spectators as they are in life, but spectators as the film wants them to be. Within this perspective, both the production and the reception of the film are institutional acts involving roles shaped by a network of determinations generated by the larger social space."

Stam R et al, 1992, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, Structuralism, Pos-structuralism and Beyond, Routledge, pp214

 

Text taken from V01D, by Iain Borden. published by IDAT.
Significantly, this spatiality and temporality is different to that of 1970s found terrains; whereas the latter colonised a specific place for a weekend or afternoon, and so mimicked the idea of ownership, urban street skating is more ephemeral, taking over a number of sites for shorter periods, often just a few minutes or seconds. ‘Always move on.’ For example, New York skaters considered 20 minutes to be a lengthy session on a single site. Stagnating at the same spot is a step backward to a place where the regular world will always know where to find us.

Urban skateboarding is not so much a colonisation as a series of rolling encounters, an eventful journey. It is also, consequently, the reverse of the temporal logic of built-in obsolescence; where capitalism produces objects which wear out faster than necessary (a light-bulb), or which become technically out-of-date (audio formats), skateboarding creates a use which is shorter than the life-time of the object. Televisions, file cabinets, and cars are the offal of a disposable society. Wasted resources alone are a crime, but not recycling is high treason . . .

From now, its search and destroy.Skateboarding here is a critique of ownership, but not of wealth. If society should involve the rehabilitation of wealth as the socialised sharing of amenity, possession is not private ownership but the ability to ‘have the most complex, the ‘richest’ relationships of joy or happiness with the ‘object.’’ – we should own not nothing but more of things, without recourse to legal relations. And it is this which street skating addresses, being concerned with those parts of the city ‘which people own but no one possesses.’ The important thing is not that I should become the owner of a little plot of land in the mountains, but that the mountains be open to me. Or as one skater put it:
Just because you own it doesn’t mean you’re in charge of it.

If the relation between the skater and the city is not one of production or exchange, what is it? For the skateboarder, consider that ‘primary relationships are not with his fellow man, but with the earth beneath his feet, concrete and all – the relation is of the self to the city, where human needs are rescued from the blind necessity of staying alive to become the appropriation of the self and the city together. Thus where possession focuses on the sense of having, the rejection of ownership enables the resurrection of all the senses; and where some have seen the modern architecture of the city as alienating of the self, this architecture can also be the means by which social relations are constructed. Practices like skateboarding therefore suggest not only the re-distribution of urban space according to the maxim ‘to each according to his needs,’ but also the reformulation of the self according to the physical potential of the built environment. The experience of the self in relation to the city is, then, neither A sea of shapeless angles . . . With an imaginative development corporation and Boro Council with an eye for progressive architecture, but no taste in leisure facility for the plank and four wheeled among us, the option seems to be adaptation.

But making a decision about which spaces and relations to enter into is not easy, being conditioned by not only location and economics but time, friendship, gender, race, age, culture and ideology. In particular, it is difficult to make such decisions based on any sense of urban style, for while commercialisation pervades into every aspect of urban life, we have little style of experience beyond the formal ‘styles’ of architecture and the commodified ‘lifestyles’ of fashion, food and such like. Analytically, this is in part due to an inheritance from Marx, who tended to reduce urbanisation to organisation and production, and so ignored the possibilities of adaptation to the city. Instead, Lefebvre argues, productive potential should be oriented to urban society. In such a city, creation of creations, everyday life would become a creation of which each citizen and each community would be capable.

 

Singapore and Everytown

Plymouth