Part 2

The City
Image 10: Potsdamerplatz, 1998.

From the InfoBox in Leipziger Platz, tourists as well as the citizens of Berlin could observe (mostly itinerant migrant) workers toiling away before their eyes, transforming what was, not all that long ago, the rubbish dump of history back into a throbbing centre for commerce and industry. I was somewhat amazed to see people willing to pay for the privilege of looking at a city undergoing this sort of open heart surgery.

On reflection, this should not have been too surprising, for Berlin seems to have an ingenious tradition of developing innovative, original, and sometimes highly aesthetic (not to mention financially rewarding) ways of capturing, representing, and marketing itself. Along the way, the city has fostered, nourished, and inspired many new artistic (and other) movements during the twentieth century. As the InfoBox suggests, even the reconstruction of Potsdamerplatz could be commodified and marketed.

Yet in spite of the best marketing, Berlin is still unable to obliterate its past. Instead the city clumsilly tries to turn even the darkest aspects of its history into something saleable. This could be graphically seen on one of the new tower buildings in Potsdamerplatz, which seemed determined to preserve the memory of the past by posting a monumental reproduction of a soldier helping an East German citizen to scale the Berlin Wall. Like other advertising campaigns, images of liberation, multiculturalism, even the tragedy of AIDS, may be used as marketing tools? Is this is the same as Simonedes' re-membering the bodies of the dead inside the banquet hall, I ask?21 That question, along with another that arises, namely, whether the ritual of 'honouring' the dead and the past can be appropriately performed when it becomes commercialised, would be the subject of another paper.

If space, coming back to the theme of this paper, was indeed one of the most striking features in Cold War Berlin, what is equally striking today is how quickly commerce and industry have occupied the emptiness of the city. If Wenders was right in saying, in what seems now so long ago, that "the Americans have colonised our subconsciousness",22 it seems equally true today to say that capitalism has colonised every inch of time and space, in the city, as well as in our lives.

In examining what is happening to the open space of the city, one is tempted to repeat an all too often made observation - that capitalism turns everything in the city to the interests of business. Even the City's own citizens have been turned into consumers, tourists in their own backyards. But this sounds like a cliche, today. Besides, one of the things that the end of the Cold War promised was a liberation from the tyranny of ideology. As the economic rationalists of the 1980s had us believe, the market place is without ideological baggage or meaning. Capitalism is a value free system of free floating signs without any fixed referents whatsoever.

The problem is how do we convince those poor souls living in Thatcher's Britain, who are still being shunted from one odd job to another, that they really shouldn't feel "fixed" to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.23

The Citizen
Image 11: Monumental Marketing. This impressive image of an East German soldier helping a civilian climb over the Berlin Wall in 1989 was placed over the entire facade of this building in Potsdamerplatz. Is this a monument to the liberation of The People or is it now a marketing tool?

Economics was not the only thing that motivated the citizens of Berlin in the late 1980s, however. The falling of the barriers across the Berlin Wall gave rise to powerful dreams - dreams that gave people a sense of belonging in a city that was once their home. By the end of 1989, it really looked like the people were really taking power, and claiming the city, finally, as their own, while asking the occupying superpowers to leave.

Back in 1990, the collapse of the Wall did promise the people that longed for freedom of movement. Destiny and history looked, at last, to have come together over the same time-space. Thus re-united, Germans could finally move towards a universal, pan European, participatory democracy, where citizens could enjoy the freedom to shape their own personal lives as well as taking part in shaping the future of a new State. At last, Berlin had redeemed itself by simultaneously lifting the terrible burden of history and realising a new democracy where all can be a part.

Today, however, it appears that the body politic that emerged in 1989 was naïve in believing it could really fill the gap created by the collapse of Communism. As Howard Caygill soberingly suggests, the future of the city was already becoming clear as early as November of that year, when the reconstruction of Berlin was being "secretly"24 pre-figured in leather clad lounges and wood-panelled interiors of the city's tower blocks and administration buildings. At the centre of those "imaginings" may have been the question of how Potsdamerplatz could be re-occupied. Perhaps not so far below the surface of such "dreamings" was a mythical Homeric25 recollection of Berlin in the 1920s. Then Potsdamerplatz buzzed as people teamed all over the streets, sat in Cafes, smoked cigars, and talked excitedly about all sorts of possibilities. In those days, so legend has it, you could buy almost anything in Potsdamerplatz. Was this the pedigree that attracted German as well as multinational corporations to take up residence there?

It seems somewhat prophetic then, in the light of what has happened, that Wenders put the circus for Wings of Desire at a place called the Belle-Alliance Platz. Although that place is today called Mehringplatz,26 there is still room for a Circus in central Berlin, only now it is located in nearby Friedrichstrasse. There it may stay in the City, but like the Circus in Wender's film, only as long as the belle alliance between money and entertainment is properly maintained. The Circus still has to pay the rent.

Caygill's conclusion, therefore, was that the Berlin City Forum, where Wenders, Derrida, and company gathered in the early 1990s, became just another showcase for a "technocratic 'democracy ...where the people were to be guided by experts.'"27 Like the tourist and the migrant, the newly freed citizens of the capital were left standing in the Cold.

Language
Image 12: The artist Christo wanted to wrap the Reichstag as long ago as the 1970s. Finally in 1995, he got the opportunity, and Berliners came out in droves to celebrate the lifting of the black shroud of history from their city.

Without reducing the importance of such socio-economic, historical and political analyses in understanding how the City was re-occupied, I want to turn now to the relationship between language, knowledge, and power and how these form part of a mechanism to occupy empty space. But first I want to stress that language, as used here, signifies any system of communication, from the written words in this essay to spoken phrases in the street, from sculpture to architecture, and from urban planning to the cinema.

For, as Derrida pointed out at the Berlin City Forum, space is not only about geography - space is also symbolic. Indeed, one may argue that empty space is first brought into being, into the realms of knowledge, when it is identified through language. One could take this further and suggest that space, any space, is both shaped and formed in this initial, reflexive act of naming, an act of identification.28

The drawing of space with words and images - the two semiotic systems used here - constitutes this space and forms the first and perhaps most important step towards capturing and territorialising what would otherwise remain empty and silent - the space of difference and the space of the other. This is one of the most important features of empty space: it is available for anyone to occupy, irrespective of where they come from, who they are, what they believe, and what they have to say. Language created space for those other-selves to come into being through the act of writing, as well as placing a limit around them. Through such acts of writing, a sense of belonging (identification with and through writing) could slowly emerge.29

The graffiti artists inscribing themselves on the Berlin Wall were engaged in precisely such an activity when they uttered their cheeky critiques right under the Communists noses. The West German authorities, who treated the Wall as a kind of "no-man's land," were happy to tolerate such disorderly expressions because it served the overall objectives of the West. The East Germans, on the other hand, kept their side of the wall in a pristine state of white sterility, a blank, clean slate just begging to be written on. That whiteboard of concrete, kept forcibly at bay from the hands of the East German people, allowed the West to invisibly write a message of freedom and democracy in indelible ink.30

Yet if space is left open for occupation by the people, the voice of the State (especially a State that depends, however superficially, on the people to legitimate itself) may become fractured into many differing, conflicting, and contradictory voices. This might especially appear to be so if the people are given 'too much' of a say. That is why the East German authorities would never have allowed Christo to wrap up the Reichstag in the 1970s, when he originally wanted to do it. For that would have freed the meaning of the building, which the Communists wished to tie down as a sign of World War II, the tyranny of Hitler, and the fall of German democracy. Christo's act would have turned the Reichstag into a lighter, freewheeling, symbol.

Yet it was not only the gravity of the symbol the Communists wished to maintain, but also its fixity. Totalitarian systems seem to prefer to maintain their authorial voice through absolute control over the production of meaning. That iron-fisted rigidity of the Eastern Bloc's signifying system actually allowed the West to develop a more flexible network of signs that didn't rely on fixing internal locations for meaning to achieve credibility. By providing the West with a set of fixed referents, the East allowed the West to outmanoeuvre it.

Yet it was not only the East German authorities who struggled with this dilemma. For if the tolerance of graffiti at the Berlin Wall came to symbolise the difference between the people's ability to express themselves in the two States, the graffiti artists capacity to define and occupy (empty) space in West Berlin was really only true for a time. A different story emerged when those same graffitists sprayed anti-American slogans during President Reagan's 1987 visit to the Brandenburg Gate.31 Now it was the West Berlin authorities who hastily removed such writings.

In this essay, I have conflated the idea of the East (usually thought of as Asia and the Middle East) with the former Soviet Bloc to emphasise the dependence the West (as distinct to Europe) has had on identifying an 'Evil Empire' to the East as the straw figure at the core of the binary (linguistic) opposition that gave the West its signifying 'orientation' during the Cold War.32 The dependence on the other for the generation of meaning is amplified in every aspect of culture, not just the military, but also economic, as well as cultural, through which the West asserted its superiority. Today, however, we are confronted by the apparent failure of that system as part of the bedrock for a universal rationalism, and this has affected every aspect of Western culture.33 As Iain Chambers pointed out, even critical thinkers in the West today

... find ourselves employing a language that is always shadowed by loss, an elsewhere, a ghost: the unconscious, an 'other' text, an 'other' voice, an 'other' world; a language that is 'powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.'34

And there are other contemporary Western thinkers besides Chambers who recognise the "other's" roles in shaping the languages of the self. These theorists too, continue to struggle to acknowledge and accommodate the other's contribution. Here is how Paul Carter sees it;

it becomes more than ever urgent to develop a framework of thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical processes. We need to disarm the genealogical rhetoric of blood, property and frontiers and to substitute for it a lateral account of social relations, one that stresses the contingency of all definitions of self and the other, and the necessity always to tread lightly.35

Transition (Osmosis)
Image 13: View of Glienicker Bridge as seen from the Volkspark on the shores of the Havel. The Glienicker Bridge was where the East exchanged captured spies and other political prisoners with the West during the Cold War.

At this point I must confess to feeling silenced and emptied by these attempts to pursue this task. I especially feel displaced when artists and theorists such as Derrida and Wenders, even Sontag, Chambers, and Carter, talk about invisible spaces - the spaces of the other. I lose my sense of place, that wild, untrammelled, open terrain, of difference, and being, on the outside - even while standing in. That space to be, in my hitherto empty silentness, is recuperated and lost by its translation into language and transliteration into words and images. But I stand distanced from my own created artifices now too, these words and these images, as much as from my experience of being an immigrant and tourist.

This new sense of silence and emptiness seems both inexplicable and inescapable, as if the very act of being an author encroaches on the other, whose space remains invisible - but no less real. Reduced, again to silence, he is obliged to keep on moving.

Emmanual Levinas argued that this exteriority (illeity) needs to be acknowledged without reduction to the self's language, if the other is to be truly honoured, negotiated with, and 'moved towards.' For Levinas, this other remains beyond the phenomena of the self in language, an absoluteness that interrupts the self's linguistic systems, an unmitigated trace or presence beyond self 'being.'36 It is difficult to articulate this point precisely because here we are at the breakdown of language and the (emergency) immersion into what might be termed the sublime, a moment created when we are forced to co-habitate with our Immanent Selves, where the contingency of all our possibilities is suddenly realizable.

I see connections here to Jean Luc Nancy's attempts to deal with a body-of-the-senses. In The Birth of Presence, Nancy suggests that what is needed is a new, impossible corpus, a corpus of discourse (of language as well as of the body) as if it were an itinerary or a dictionary. Nancy's "Corpus" is of a permeable body where organs and body parts point towards their emergent openings rather than a totality as their origins. Those open wounds become openings that signify themselves and "where [their] sense gets lost."37 This suggests a bank of body parts after a surgical operation, where the body's capacity for discourse (to render or totalise itself whole in language) is abandoned for the sense of feeling, touching, smelling, tasting, seeing. There is, in Nancy's corpus, an irreducible sense of excess, a body beyond the reach of its own limits, which is to say both beyond and before the self, where sensation floods the body's senses with the recognition of its 'saturated totality' (p 206). This extended/distended/attenuated 'naked body' is where senses are exposed to senses, and nerves end up on nerves. Nancy's corpus is thus a glossary for a sensing body, open to all sorts of possibilities left by a surgeon's knife that has opened wounds that act like bioports.38

We again arrive at the floating of significance performed by Christo on the Reichstag, an event witnessed by millions, in which a weathered and battle scarred building was made so buoyant that it almost disappeared into the sky just by being wrapped in a silver foil. No longer fixed as a sign pointing towards the wounds Hitler and the Second World War inflicted on the German people, Christo's transformation of the building opened up those scars and allowed people to reflect on the emergent possibilities presented by the 1990s. Now, once again, the people could exercise their freedom by just walking around that sealed off building. Their corpus, the wounded polity of The People, still bore the potential (and longing) for that body to be healed, but how to do it? By suturing its wounds in yet an(other) act of enclosed solipsism? Or might it be done by connecting with other, open bodies?! Either way, Nancy's open corpus is a difficult one to live in, as he himself admits.39

History has repeatedly shown that the State is more inclined to sealing off such an open body, like East and West Berlin, even though there must remain some portals, no matter how insignificant, for no human system is capable of independent survival. Berlin's Glienicke Bridge was one such place where the two systems once connected together. Across that bridge, both sides exchanged their captive spies in an act that mediated their separate meaning at the same time as enabling each to negate the other.

On the other hand, many artists, writers, thinkers try to bear an open, wounded body into existence - through our art, a form of language. But as we do, we cannot help but realise that in doing so, we come to occupy another's space, obliging them to move. The thing we really long for, to enter and be a part of, is abandoned once more, and is again retreating, back, beyond, behind, beneath. Standing, again defeated, we still don't have what we came looking for. Even this attempt to enter my silent emptiness, what once seemed a sovereign right, has failed again! Again and again, I stand on barren, abandoned land, a hollow act made speechless.

What's really interesting about writing or art-making is not that the voice of the author, any author, your Ego-I or mine, is incapable of speaking for this, that, or any other. Or even that such attempts to speak the others truths renders our thoughts to shallow utterances, like simple, solipsistic reflections of and on the self (masquerading as the other). Such problems have consumed the minds of many including Derrida and Spivak.40

I want to explore the losing of the space, space once occupied by the self as other, living in the self, like standing on the outside while also standing in. This magical disappearing-reappearing act seems partly to hinge upon culture and also - partly - to hinge upon language. But in continuing to exist in different cultures and different languages, one sometimes becomes aware, glimpses for a moment, that the very things once promised by language and by culture, our selves and others realised, are lost again to lasting silence.

Emptiness
Image 14: A behind the scenes view of the reconstruction of the Reichstag in 1998. This image was taken only months before the German Parliament was to again take its seat in Berlin. Yet the Reichstag is a symbol of mixed meanings, the house where the will of the German people was excercised, as well as the place where German democracy was curtailed and overthrown.

Not everyone agrees that the self and other are linked in silence. Homi Bhabha, for example, suggests the loss of the other can be overcome through parody, by cloaking in the language of the self half jokingly, in mimicry of the centre.41 For Bhabha, the act of faking a semiosis of the self, acting like a naughty shadow if you like, distorts the self and allows the other to be seen. But that seems an extreme position, eccentric and freakish, and one that undermines the integrity of both the self and other. It also avoids the problem of the many sided bodies co-existing in the one and many places simultaneously. Bhabha's formulation may be appropriate to a non-European other coming from beyond a European self but I'm inclined to Tzvetan Todorov's position, which he came to on returning to his native Bulgaria after living in Parisian exile for eighteen years.

My double belonging only produces one result: in my own eyes, it taints each of my two discourses with inauthenticity, since each can correspond but to half of who I am; yet I am indeed double. I thus once again confine myself to an oppressive silence.42

Is there something more compelling in Todorov's silence, a resistance that stays beyond both time and space, beyond the language of oppression and discourses of capture? Is the other-self more real in emptiness, in silence, and in loss? Wouldn't it have been better if the German Parliament remained seated elsewhere, therefore, leaving the Reichstag, a tragic symbol of mixed and (now) empty meanings, to stand in silence? In an essay about the emptiness in the word-paintings of Ilya Kabokov, Mikhail Epstein writes ...

Art ...becomes a rite of circumnavigating emptiness, of slow, cautious, and deliberate capitulation. It is [Mikhail] Kutozov's, not Napoleon's tactics of encountering emptiness: instead of attacking it with militant cultural projects, one retreats, ceding ...where emptiness least expects to find a place - at the heart of the artist's creation. In order to prevent emptiness from swallowing up this creation, depriving it of meaning from the outside, it is made to curl up inside it, like a quiet, well-fed, docile wild animal in a cage.43

Well now, is that all there is left, the work of art in the age of global capitalism?44 Is a caged up silent terror, that wild and cunning beast at the heart of creation, still the centre of our culture? If so, where will that lead us now? Should we still be satisfied by such mythologising explanations? Kutazov's technique, as successful as it might be in avoiding capture, still leaves us, as self and other, in a (linguistic) conundrum with nowhere apparent left, logically, but to remain in separation, as if we are at war.

In thinking further about this problem, and I'm thinking out aloud, right now, at least part of the dilemma seems to be of situation, as Sartre45 might have replied, of discerning when to withhold or withdraw into-beyond one's location, and when to uncloak and become an other-self in language. Because, more than just a connoisseur, the flâneur finds the animal in its cage not only picturesque, he also wants to engage it. Paradoxically then, the German Parliament may be quite right to re-occupy the Reichstag and confront the questions it raises head on. Danger remains, however, whether we leave that animal locked up or we open up the door.

Conventionally, The City-State resolves this problem by deferring special properties - for example, when the migrant becomes entitled to the mantle of the citizen. This solution, however, reproduces the mechanisms of capture and colonisation by re-instating boundaries between our selves and others. Are other language games possible, then, as suggested by Ernesto Laclau,46 that seek to move through empty spaces without filling them with a rigid, sealed off self? What is needed is a kind of multiple epistemology(ies) that allow(s) an ever-emerging ontology(ies) to dissect both time and space, by constantly entering unknown time-spaces that remain logically (and linguistically) irreconcilable. What is missing, it seems to me, is an extra-sensory, out of body experience, a sense of that other-self - the body of a traveller if you like - always moving within/without The City. Must that traveller remain contained and invisible, like a Trojan Horse, even if, on the margin, they are reduced, accept in silence? Is this a silence of respect?

If we conclude, as Markus Wolf, one time Stasi boss conceded,47 that the erection of the Berlin Wall was as much a sign of failure and defeat as it was a sign of force and (attempted) containment of The People, then we must also recognise that closing the city gates (like Fortress Europe) on those unwanted migrants and tourists is an admission that we have yet to learn from history. For if we really want out of the cage, and bridge the gap between our selves and our imprisoned others, we must be reconciled to being with them. We are still haunted by the question - can we co-habitate?
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Conclusions

Image 15: Car showroom, Potsdamerplatz,1998. Dreaming of freedom or base material aspirations?

Perhaps the greatest legacy we've inherited from the moderns is an inescapable sense of exile, an exile not just from our physical homelands, but also from the home that is ourselves. As postmoderns we still know this condition, although it does not seem as strong as the alienation our parents and grandparents might have felt. Unlike their sense of total separation through migrant duality, we merely feel displaced, as tourists, today, decentred, disjointed subjects, somewhat incoherent, and unintelligible, like drug-fucked addicts going through cultural withdrawal.

Berliners know such feelings, but at the same time, maybe they don't, or maybe they've forgotten. Nevertheless, its important to acknowledge that Berlin today has come a long way from the war ravaged tyrant city of the twentieth century. The beginning of the end came when Real Living Socialism tried to contain and direct the people's imagination. Yet in spite of all intention, the vacuum at the Berlin Wall still gave people space to roam and soar and climb once more, over the strictures of the everyday.

On the other hand, it could be said that the greatest "success" of the West is its rapacious capacity to occupy and exploit free and empty space. But where is that now leading to? Is there still space for an other-self? For, as capitalism drives us harder, into the immersive immediacy of the moment, have we succumbed to the desire of the present, without regard, as Derrida might have put it, for others-spaces deferred to others-times? Can the invisible still be seen beneath the drying concrete on the holes within the heart?

Berlin provides a somewhat glossy reminder of where Western culture has come from, and where it might be going. In such peaceful scenes of civic reconstruction we may yet find ourselves in a moment of new creation, symbolic as well as geographical. But just as surely as our chiefs of capital seek out ever new and unexploited places, they bind them up with money, the language of our power, and lock them up behind the glassed in walls of sanitised shopping malls. You could see this literally taking shape at Potsdamerplatz, where the empty space that once signified a longing place for freedom has today become a shopping arcade. Inside are exclusive showrooms where dreams of freedom are underwritten with credit cards.

Now, yet again, another timely reminder: The City must still fulfil its founding task, to allow the people to actualize their lives, not just as tourists, migrants, or citizens, but simply as The People - for that is the meaning of a metropolis.48 Is there still room, one has to ask, for that strange, mystical power, the source of our creative energy, name it what you want, "God"49 if you like, to surge us forth and point towards a yonder, a beyond dot com? Or are we about to find that, in the end, our dreams were only ever primed for ads?
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