Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
took place in the present. Thus, he argued that the present is not simply “that
which is, but simply what is being made.... When we think this present is
going to be, it exists not yet, and we think of it as existing, it is already past”
(1991:149). Bergson protested against the reading of time in terms of space,
as if the two dimensions could be separated in experience. In his view, spatial-
izing time via representations (e.g., the clock) inevitably posits the existence
of static slices of in
nity. In literature, the interior monologue became popu-
lar, as seen in James Joyce's Ulysses , in which the reader is led on lengthy
voyages through the narrator's memory that have little similarity to the “real
time” experienced by the character in his interactions with others.
Simultaneously, in music, experiments in multiple tonalities and syncopated
rhythms, as found in the compositions of Debussy, Proko
fi
ev, and Stravinsky,
captured the spirit of the age by giving the impression of unpredictability.
Maurice Ravel's La Valse arose as a frantic recasting of the Viennese waltz
and was denounced as scandalous before it became popular. Ragtime sprang
forth from African-American culture in the South in the 1890s, o
fi
ering
a great variety of rhythmic variations that both attracted the young and
irritated the elderly. Scott Joplin's immortal Maple Leaf Rag (1899), for
example, was full of unexpected accents, halts and delays, and rapid acceler-
ations. Throughout the early twentieth century, various forms of jazz, with its
rhythmic base and syncopated, improvised, often intentionally jarring melod-
ies, changed how people listened to music, and their sense of time, in subtle
and interesting ways.
The Western tradition of ocularcentrism that began with the phantasma-
gora reached its apex with the merger of photography and the phonograph in
the cinema, which represents one of the most powerful extensions of visual
experience in the history and geography of modernity. By capturing tem-
porality and spatiality simultaneously,
ff
films began to uncouple vision from
its historical association with static form. If photographs interrupted the
fi
ow
of temporal experience, movies celebrated it. Film brought the world qualita-
tively closer to the viewer, and brought viewers closer to each other, literally
and cognitively. Cinema allowed people to “get a sense of the world without
moving very far at all” (Allen and Hamnett 1995:3). Indeed, it was now
possible for viewers to feel as if they were in two places simultaneously, i.e.,
the cinema itself and the locale depicted on the screen. Film demonstrated
the potential of integrating societies consisting of large pools of poor urban
immigrants, many illiterate, drawing them together around shared experi-
ences in a manner that preceded the similar role played by television a half
century later. No technology could claim a more perfect representation of
time and space. Yet time in the movies was not real time but a simulacrum,
moving at an accelerated pace as scenes were edited to omit the boring,
mundane details of everyday life in favor of the glamorous and exceptional.
Jay (1993:474) sums this notion up perfectly, noting movies “stitch together
the dispersed and contradictory subjectivities of the actual spectator into a
falsely harmonious whole.” The cinema made it possible to reorder the
fl
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