Through Which to Think the City

            When I am feeling lonely, tired, delaying cleaning my home, or about to write an essay, I always find myself putting Under the Tuscan Sun into my DVD player. The escapism I feel watching the movie’s visuals relaxes me. Not only do I get to travel to Italy, as a divorcee author, buy and fix up a run down Tuscan villa, meet the community and fall in love with a backpacker, I get to do all of this while sitting in sweats on my couch; no fuss of airport lines, bumpy taxi rides, foreign conflicts or financial worries. I am able to be transported to an imagined city through media which represents to me a 'collection of signs,' 'representational spaces,' and transporting 'productive transactions' of urban realities as I sit comfortably in my Los Angeles home. (note: in this blog I am viewing Tuscany as a city, not a country setting).  

            As James Donald explores Des Esseintes’ experience with London in "The Immaterial City: Representation, Imagination, and Media Technologies,"  I follow suit by exploring Frances’ experience in Italy. However, if I want a real experience, without flying, “as it would be madness to risk spoiling such unforgettable experiences by a clumsy change of locality,” I could go to  San Francisco’s Cow Palace next month to experience Dickensian London of the 19^th century at the Dickens Fair. Whichever “representational space”  (Lefebvre) of any “entwined reality” I choose, will create such an imagined and immaterial city.

            Yet, this imagined view from the “panoptic” and “estheticizing gaze” on my television, never fully represents the reality of Frances’ memoir. Watching Diane Lane for the 200^th time stand on her balcony and wave to the old man replacing flowers for his dead loved one, sheds tears for the audience, when at the resolution of the movie he finally waves back to her . We cry, not because this action shows that she has become part of the community (for the old man’s accepting wave signals that he finally allows a foreigner’s intrusion and she can can call Tuscany home and move on from her cheating spouse), but we shed tears as we can only ever be a watcher, a “flaneur” of reality, as we can never “know” this feeling of acceptance, as we are not truly experiencing it ourselves, we are only watchers. This loss of ours, from being disconnected from understanding of the “social force” which exists as a public space in a city,  is what Donald suggests is the ultimate variable in making an illegible or imaginable city intensely coherent.

            This “city as a state of mind,” while watching Audrey Wells’ version of Tuscany, becomes a state of memory, state of prophecy, state of fiction. Not only is our experience “internal,” as sociologist Robert Park suggests, but fictionally internal. The subjective plural distances created for me - from the memiorist’s representation (a second remove), the movie director’s representation (a third remove) and my fantastical media forced representation (a fourth remove) all distort any perception of an ‘Italian Tuscan Villa’ truth. Then, as the movie ends, I still want to prolong my journey in Italy, I Google maps Tuscany and walk along the paths of the city center by using my thumb to hit and enlarge and watch on a computer screen another visual version of the truth, again distancing my imagined city into a fifth remove.

            Besides the lack of social force behind my Googling, the other missing factor is the “superficial individualization” which disconnects me to any chance of being in Tuscany. See, just as the city stimulates Des Essientes, the city also disconnects him from his surroundings. Simmel also explained this by saying the “the intensification of nervous stimulation” forces us to ignore all the passer-bys, for if we were to care deeply for everyone we passed it would be too much stimulation. So, we see with Des Esseintes that his senses too are “dulled by the monotonous chatter drifting into a daydream,” which becomes more real than the reality of the urban landscape. Even if I were to physically go to a village piazza in Tuscany, the foreign language and customs would differ so much from my own, I would often find myself escaping into my English/American perceptions, and not “see” Italy at all.

            (When I lived in New Orleans, there were customs the tourists did not see; umbrellas were carried by locals and busses were empty between 2 and 4 pm. It was only after I had lived there for enough time did I notice these Southern customs. It rained in the early afternoon everyday, locals knew this, and carried their umbrellas. Because of the rain, and wet, no one was out and about between 2 and 4 pm. As a tourist, these details could not be seen as the “overwhelming fullness of crystallised and impersonalized spirit” did not “see” the true locality, but saw only the jazz bars on Bourbon Street. (The most meaningful custom I learned in Nawlins was looking every single person in the eye, while saying “hello,” as I passed them on the sidewalk, which frightens people in Los Angeles immensely).

            In any case, Donald’s essay gave me enough ideas in “which to think the city” that I thoroughly enjoyed his take on using characters from literature to explain his thesis, so I wanted to copy his experience. Connecting to his ideas of ‘publicness’ and the question of community taught me that it is in the “phantom spheres” which truly define a city for me, and gives me many more ingredients to create many more imagined spaces.