Representation?: Proximity and Distance

I always take buses to campus. My bus route has changed several times over the last few years. I would estimate that I go to campus maybe three or four times a week by bus. This means that maybe every year I take the bus maybe 210 times to go campus. This means that I see the same scenery, from two different orientations, just as many times. I change my seat on the bus, and occasionally don't have a seat at all. The weather changes, the time of day changes, other passengers come and go, and, most of all, my mood changes. I am thinking of a certain broken clock tower, Holmby Hall, in Westwood Village; its copper dome greened from oxidization. Every bus route I have ever taken goes past this tower. Although I rarely notice the tower now, when I have, its meaning has been ambiguous.

Reading representation in geography is a difficult task. How should it be done? Is there one sort of cultural meaning that is attached to the tower that I can read? Sometimes I look at the tower and think of commercial place-making, other times I am thinking directly through theories from academia - the towers' historical citations, a performative landscape, elite ideology, post-modern capitalist transformation, Heidegger, feeling and affect, etc. Still other times the tower in its grandiose absurdity -its lapsed beauty and clock that only gets the right time twice a day- only remind me of not wanting to be in LA. Those thoughts have gradually subsided with time. A little over three years here, and I am finally content. So what does or did the tower mean?

The tower means only what one invests into it. One can argue either for a post-structuralist multiplicity of meaning, or a collapse of meaning itself. Perhaps the tower doesn't signify anything. I am the one always calling the tower to task - asking myself what it means. Of course, the historical chiasmus that brought Holmby Hall, or Westwood Village, into being is interesting for what it says about its creators and the larger milieu they operate within. Psychologically, it is noteworthy how changing lights and times inflect the phenomenon of the tower. For an anthropologist, my personal sojourn vis-à-vis this tower could be revealing of displaced peoples (though others' stories would be more interesting). All of these things are real and important, but they all depend on a post-representational subject, imbuing the world with contingent meanings that shift in and out of one's purview. Is nothing solid? Or at least temporally more persistent?

Maybe things with "meaning," with a semiotic anchoring outside of the self, whatever that is, must be distant. If I see something everyday, it will be subject to my whims and sea changes. One day I will be inspired, the next trodden down. Warm weather and a cheery mood make the tower a symbol of humans creating beauty. Stress and personal dissatisfaction cause me to turn my bitterness outwards, besmirching the "they" that erected this edifice at the expense of expropriated Indians and commercial pursuit, sowing an inauthentic, dissimulating landscape. Other times I don't even look up, only wait below it for the bus, it is place where me and two dozen others ignore each other and check our phones over and over.

Yet distance places are perhaps more secure. We can't subject them to our whims quite as easily. The opposite of a Utopia or Heaven is a caricature, a Dystopia or Hell. Even if one is cynical about these conceptions, they still persist. No one wants to subject their vacation spot to the vagaries of the mood of his or herself of that of a companion. That would be to "ruin" the vacation. Bad moods can certainly ruin everyday life as well, but we know that they are unavoidable. Distant places often avoid these "mooded readings" because they might only come up in one mood or another. When one wants to escape, anywhere else already in good personal standing can seem a utopian alternative.

But when one does become proximate to that other, rosier place, it will become subject to moods or disenchantment. Yurchak explains how the "Imaginary West" of late Socialist Russian youth lost its aura when the government finally allowed people to visit. It was a let down. A Norwegian explained to me how, in his youth, the land behind the Iron Curtain was always imagined as stark and overcast. When he finally visited Poland, he was surprised how beautiful and sunny it actually was. If he had stayed their longer, it would probably become cloudy and grey at least for a bit! Paradise only exists as a concept to aspire to as long as it is, in our mortal lives, inaccessible. For because of its distance, it may remain perfect.

So if representation breaks down in proximity, maybe it persists at a distance.