Core Post #2 – Max Berwald

“The process of distancing the worker from the workplace and the enclosure of domestic life in the home, separated from its social surroundings, allowed a compensatory realm of fantasy to flourish, a conglomeration of exotic remnants in which new and old intermingled. This phantasmagoria of the interior broke with the immediate present in favor of a primal past and the dream of the epoch to come. However, the twentieth-century phantasmagoria idealizes not the primal but the immediate past, and is an agent responsible for its decay.” (Morse, 201) 

As life becomes less bearable, the need for distraction intensifies. Wage stagnation and intensifying income inequality since the late 1960s have fueled the need for particular escapisms. The Morse piece allowed me to broaden that intuition to think spatially and temporally about distraction, rather than in terms of, say, narrative. I’m also thinking about notions of distraction and how they map onto alienation. Morse’s discussion of freeways especially struck me as an extension of the processes we read about last week. For instance, in the Lipsitz, we read about how a variety of policies initiated at the federal level (but obviously working in conjunction with market incentives) produced the suburbs, and how the suburbs as constituted– combined with other cultural forces also rooted in a mixture of state policy and market incentives– severed many of the links that had previously connected the nuclear family to the extended family. 

The situation Lipsitz described made the situation of the suburban nuclear family, its relative isolation, seem more clearly antisocial. Not only is one cut off from one’s neighbors, but perhaps in new ways from one’s extended family. This produces more striking isolations within the nuclear family: the housewife whose husband goes to work and whose children go to school, but also more recently the latchkey kid. The Colomina gets at other particular causes producing, it seems to me, quite similar effects; after all, the militarization she’s describing is not the kind to forge new, intense bonds of comradery, but the kind that might inspire us to move underground, troubling the distinction between home and bunker. (6–7) 
    In the Morse, the freeway appears as another example of the same phenomenon. Now movement between nodes in the urban network is conducted in perfect isolation. The mall too, as the privatization of the street or arcade, heightens this sense of the withering away of public spaces from people’s everyday lives. It’s antisocial (“…growing withdrawal into enclosed systems…” (207)), but Morse goes farther to address the actual perceptual changes for subjects: to what extent is the driver on the freeway invested in the reality of the neighborhoods he passes through? To what extent is viewer of TV news invested in the “dereferentialized” simulacrum of reality that the news comments on?