White People Mourning Romney
I am really captivated by the idea of death in Baudrillard’s piece. The real does not produce itself because never had an origin. Instead the real is an idea that circles around certain models that operationalalize difference or indicate difference through the substitution of meanings. Therefore, the real will always die and an have an anticipated resurrection. Baudrillard notes however that, “Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy.” I wonder if this has any bearing on the recent Presidential election and the language of mourning around Romney supporters. (http://whitepeoplemourningromney.tumblr.com/page/6)
I think that De Certeau’s intervention into understanding the city away from its obvious, architectural, and visible components bears onto Sassen’s piece about why cities matter. In noting both the digital exchange of financial information, as well as the seemingly nonsensical commodities exchanges, Sassen notes that although there is a visual vocabulary of power in the cities this assumedly homogenizing power is still imbued with specific differentiation . Just in the way that walking the city makes and renders a certain non-representational knowledge and relationship with spaces can we also say that the logic of “meaning of information” that Sassen points to can be implicated in a similar process of spatialization in the city?
Does the Sassen challenge the Foucauldian formations of power used by De Certeau? Does she believe in the centralized, dispersed, and everyday manifestations of power as domination? Going between her discussion of logics and De Certeau’s discussion of power in the everyday was interesting and sometimes confusing because I was unsure how each author was approaching both how power manifest in spaces as well as what power does to spaces?
Space: A infinite processes whereby interconnecting systems of global, social, cultural and embodied knowledges inform the value of place. Space is a right.
Place: Fixed in the material and moving freely. Facilitated by place marking objects like maps.
Identity: The processes of having the ability to sense your presence in space—to know you are alive. How you make sense of places’ relationships to the idea of individualism.