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"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
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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out-of-date (audio formats), skateboarding creates a use which is shorter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 doesnt mean youre 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.
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