Dialectical Production & Construction of Visual Culture in Public Spaces:
Epistemology & Social Learning
By
Nadia Arbelo
PhD Candidate- University of Primorska,
Capodistria, Slovenia
Abstract
Isolation and separation has largely hidden Eastern responses to the ‘shock of the new’ in the post-socialist
world. Although readings in English, or translated into this currently hegemonic lingua franca, have almost
exclusively neglected comparable movements in the Eurasian/Balkan East, Misko Suvakovic’s three volume
edited collection of recent writing from the Eastern sphere (History of Art in Serbia XX century), opens a new
vista and discourse. Using Serbia to model the breadth of multicultural Balkan’s realities, Suvakovic transverses
disciplines to depict artistic and literary movements broking through closed frames to diverge from globally
dominant Western discourses. In positioning diverse artistic movements within a mosaic of Balkan cultures, thus
“marking a change in the historicization of art and culture,” Suvakovic states,
… there now appears an interdisciplinary history of art used to establish relationship between different
arts and their positioning within culture and society … a methodology … [that hopefully] will stimulate
the development of interpretive will stimulate the development of interpretive discourses regarding
modern , postmodern, and avant-garde arts and culture.
This methodology also “represents a new art history within an academic context … [not as] the key to all
theoretical problems … [but] as a starting point needed to get to a fully developed critical theory”.
Suvakovic further contributes toward a contemporary, all-encompassing theory of culture by recognizing that
“the global comprises all of the locals at every geographic or population level”. Thus a further step toward
holism sees the whole as greater than the sum of its parts. Some amorphous, synergistic zeitgeist thus affects so
many relatively independent yet interdependent processes hence contributing to an interconnection and
interdependency, whether or not consciously perceived and acted upon.
This fresh critical perspective from the Eastern sphere assesses the values within Euro-Anglophone theory, but
goes beyond Romano-Germanic roots to internally explore Slavic, Central/Eastern European and Balkan
aesthetic discourses and artistic practices in the Post-Soviet and Post-Yugoslav eras.
This paper will also critically challenge the rubric of new-as-new, alternatively situating that ground as old winein-new-bottles, and providing a historical context from Descartes’ thesis that the eye does not see, merely
transfers information to a brain that sees. Likewise, the shock-of-the-new continually replays itself in layered
archaeological strata of experiments with technologies and productions, theories and methodologies of
production and consumption. The rubric “art is in the eye of the beholder” holds true within a post structural
thesis surrounding Barthes “Death of the Author” and allied psychological, neurological, and philosophical
theories of “reading” text, images, film and the creation of meaning within the viewer/reader.
According to a significantly influential body of 20th century social theory and methodology, human interaction
occur through dramaturgical exchanges of symbols via language, body language, proxemics, or choreographies
within performative events, which also constitute the “social construction of reality” (Goffman, Blumer, Hall,
Berger & Luckmann, et. al.).
Such interactions take place in both private and public spaces, and according to a later set of social theories, they
are encompassed within the “practices of everyday life” that constitute the “production of space” (de Certeau,
Lefebvre, etc.).
Taken together these two bodies of theoretical and methodological research constitute a paradigm, (a set of sets
or subsets), inclusive of an even wider range peripheral bodies of thought that partially draw upon core elements
to the paradigm, which might be labeled social interaction models that frame and construct human perception
and empirical social realities.
Keywords: Post-socialist, post-structural, dramaturgy, social interaction, performative, social theory
Introduction
To be engaged in the practice of a/r/tography means to inquire in the world through an ongoing process
of art making in any artform and writing not separate or illustrative of each other but interconnected
and woven through each other to create additional and/or enhanced meanings. A/r/tographical work are
often rendered through methodological concepts of contiguity, living inquiry, openings, metaphor /
metonymy, reverberations and excess which are enacted and presented/performed when a relational
aesthetic inquiry condition is envisioned as embodied understandings and exchanges between art and
text, and between and among the broadly conceived identities of artist/researcher/teacher. A/r/tography
is inherently about self as artist/researcher/teacher, also social when groups or communities of
a/r/tographers come together to engage in shared inquiries, act as critical friends, articulate an
evolution of research questions, and present their collective evocative/provocative works to others.
Rita L. Irwin — http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/Artography/
Presentation/ Performance of Self / Beyond Freud, Lacanian Performance as Mirror Self
According to a significantly widespread and influential body of 20th century social theory and methodology,
human interaction occur through dramaturgical exchanges of symbols via language, body language, proxemics,
or choreographies within performance events, which also constitute the “social construction of reality”
(Goffman, Blumer, Hall, Berger & Luckmann, et. al.).
Such interactions take place in both private and public spaces, and according to a later set of social theories, they
are encompassed within the “practices of everyday life” that constitute the “production of space” (de Certeau,
Lefebvre, etc.).
Taken together these two bodies of theoretical and methodological research constitute a paradigm, (a set of sets
or subsets), inclusive of an even wider range peripheral bodies of thought that partially draw upon core elements
to the paradigm, which might be labeled social interaction models that frame and construct human perception
and empirical social realities.
In this research, I draw from within this paradigm as a baseline from which to develop a thesis of performity as a
process of constructing identity and gender, a Lacanian dialectic between externally generated social
construction and an internality of mirrored self. Within this dialogical process external aesthetic and cultural
productions construct representations in public spaces, which are visually perceived and thus influence identity
formation. Therefore, identity is produced and reproduced through dramaturgical ensembles of aesthetically
driven social spaces of visual culture. Moreover, this body of theory applies to conditions developed within
discourses around contemporary aesthetics that surround, encompass &/or penetrate, Bio-Art, post-dramatic
theatre, photographic and cinematic images. Approaching image and imagery in cinema, Roland Barthes
discusses how a constructed-self selectively conditions an observer’s “reading” of both syntagmatic and
paradigmatic elements. Thus the ‘constructionist’ paradigm dialectically creates differentiated aesthetics of
social space. But it also co-evolves along an enactment of “epistemological pathways toward knowing art”
(Suvakovic, 2008) as a phenomenological experience within a Nietzsche-like “will to power” over control and
use of such knowledge. As both Foucault and Barthes theorize, every human event, exchange, or encounter
involves a challenge over knowledge and power. Therefore any encounter with a ‘work of art’ draws on
previously held perceptions and discursive fragments to construct a cognitive model of the thing itself, what it
may represent, and ownership of that experience. Hence, a linguistically constructed power of will inherently
challenges any subjective phenomenological sense that an intrinsic power exists within the object observed. But
an inner-subjective sense may reverse that challenge, so that the work observed can, in-and-of-itself, create an
emotional experience outside the framing process of language. While we exist in a “prison house of language,”
our cognitive ego seeks to imprison experience, including aesthetics, within the same prison that controls
meaning through an instinctual will to power over any quest for knowledge. Reputedly, a pre-Socratic
philosopher postulated that; to name an object is to know that object, hence to control that object, through the
power of language — having named it we now control that which is named.
Framing this course as Performance, Visual Perception and Performing Arts, creates a wide angle lens in which
to view a wide range of readings, but reference to one artist in particular — peter handke and his work —
appears across many readings. Taken together, these readings, including Suvakovic’s, explore different
modalities of an/the Avant-garde, a label stretching from fin de siècle 19 th-20th century across much of the 20th
century, and reemerges in the 21st century via an ambiguous post-postmodernity. But however more or less
avant-garde, propositionally, all arts are performative and representational, including text, which appears not
only as iconic surfaces marks &/or words that represent stage or screen plays, choreographic notation, or musical
scores, they all represent some form of narrative visual culture. For example, Jenny Holtzer’s neon text message
boards, challenge both writing as signs, and signs as writing while abstracting the surfaces and substances into
digital electronics (Holtzer, et. al.). As a bridge, Holtzer’s work transits text, public display, and digital art,
toward a contemporary expansion of performative digital and video arts that integrate embodied movement and
digitized representational images.
A historical review/intervention into varied avant-garde works as transformative of a continuous-contemporary,
whether labeled postmodern or post-postmodern, they all hark back to their early 20th century origins. In
particular, whatever the innovative media, whether digital or biological, these experimental circles mirror
underlying intentionality found, for example, in the DaDa movement. Comparing such processes of
radical/dramatic (re)presentations, most seem analogous to DaDa events such as Tristan Tzara and Wassily
Kandinsky’s multimedia / multidimensional 1919 performative events at Zurich’s Café Voltaire. Mixing
Anarchism with Socialism and a widely ranging rejection of mainstream culture and political economy, the
DaDaists broke all the established rules and forms of cultural expression. Were their intents so different from
those of today’s experimental artists? I think not. Then and now, “shock value” situates artists at the edge of
both art and society, basking in a milieu of notoriety, through a range of affects, which Robert Hughes labels,
The Shock of the New” (Hughes, 1980). Thus the urge to produce such shocking newness seems continually
emergent among some artists as an underlying necessity, whatever their media, genres or forms.
What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence,
the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most
disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture
could be explained to its inhabitants. (Hughes, 1980)
In short, each generation of artists and cultural workers consciously or unconsciously reinterpret the past, either
through mainstream (established) genres, or as edges, experimental / avant-garde. This intent/ tendency crosses
media, using whatever forms most effectively deliver the intended message, or shock factor, whether
(re)presenting an ideological, philosophical or theoretical construct, or not.
But if “art is in the eye of the beholder,” how do social constructions of visual perception change over time and
across places? According to philosophical and anatomical research from Descartes onward, the eye is an organ
that transmits images to the brain, which in turn interprets or sees what it receives. Thus it is the brain of the
beholder that sees, yet the thinking or seeing involved in perception is inseparable from language, which is
necessary to process impressions and sensations as thought. Wittgenstein, for example, postulated that “there is
no thought a priori to language,” a line of reasoning continually developed through neuro-linguistic and related
scientific research (P & P. Churchland. 2008.).
From another perspective, Pierre Bourdieu’s excursion into the production and reproduction of social
distinctions occurs within a habitus, or a disposition among groups of closely interacting individuals. That
process constructs a qualitative phenomenon of taste (a predilection for making distinctions), which according to
Bourdieu, is imbibed from childhood through social learning that occurs within class bound structures (habitus).
Amidst the practices of everyday life in which individuals holistically experience their environments through a
dialectic of structure and agency, the individual produces space as a social phenomena. Thus the visual
environment, its decoding, recoding and code shifting, combines with habitus derived dispositional experiences
to primarily select individuals from within specific social classes producing tendencies toward becoming artists
and cultural workers.
To select or be selected, that is the question. Or is it? How much of our individual identity formation (as a
Lacanian divided self) consciously / subconsciously (autonomously) self-construct an identity from external
social influences (constructs/ structures)? Beyond nature/nurture, this research contends that that the individual is
mythic, a fictional linguistic construct of a psyche desperately seeking unity from between desire and absence
(lack) of what is desired but which can never be attained. Thus the creative impulse toward making art, may
result from a need to materialize / externalize this quest for some form that can express a reflection of the
unresolvable dilemma of a divided self and its ever-present other.
Performative spaces: social constructions and Avante Garde
“The world is a stage and we but players upon it.” Wm. Shakespeare
In Postdramatic Theatre Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal work, he references the work of Peter Handke as an
iconic representation of artists working within a loose frame of contemporary avant-garde theatre. But digging
contextually into this contemporary frame situates its direct origins within 1960’s experimental work, especially
The Performance Group (TPG) inter-media productions, both informing and informed by Richard Schechner’s
theoretical constructions. While TPG was iconic of a 60’s Zeitgeist, those movements were also a continuation
of 1920’s avant-garde experimentation, whether from a political-realist Brecht, a surrealist Cocteau, or
Kandinsky’s arts fusion produced in Tristan Tzara’s Café Voltaire as a frame labeled DaDa.
It would seem that humanity has long known a dramatic & theatrical perspective on life & love, war & peace
through narratives of comedy & tragedy. Perhaps modernity emerged when Ancient Hellenism extracted a
psychologically secularized, popular theatre from religious-political rituals, previously enacted and commanded
by rulers and priests. Yet they also envisioned a hybridity between Gods and Mankind, with mythos & mimesis
playing a symbolic role to bridge natural and supernatural worlds prior to monotheism emerging from a Hebraic
tribal cult. But Roman-Byzantine appropriation of a singular, omniscient and omnipotent Hebraic deity, retained
elements of mythic constructs with ancient deities intervening in human procreation through narratives of birth,
death and resurrection, thus resulting in a new dramaturgy. Perhaps as Foucault envisioned, a historical process
of surveillance and control emerged when the Roman State united with Monotheistic Religion to form a
systemic all-seeing-eye, a panopticon, observing and directing human dramas. Asked about the role of the
Catholic Church, Carl Jung reputedly replied, “it is a repository for the cultural heritage of Western
Civilization.” Not dissimilar to the role of the visual in pre-Christian Europe, a Christian (Catholic) Europe
provided a revised /visual extravaganza, a totalizing semiotic of built environment, from the village level shrines
that marked points along pathways and pilgrimage routes to basilicas and cathedrals. The metaphor of life-as-
journey was embedded in an abundant system of signs, reminding all of the finality of this life and promises of
an afterlife, whether in paradise, hell, or purgatory.
As church and state were bound together into a European system forming a religion (re-ligare) penetrating
upward into the feudal ruling classes, downward through the rural peasantry, and among the urban classes. The
cities, however rough, evolved as interwoven visual artifacts in which every element in the built environment —
churches, plazas, walls and pathways — were embedded reminders of a religious narrative displaying the power
held by state and church over each individual life and afterlife. In predominantly illiterate societies, a totalizing
visual culture narrated a hegemonic script to be perceptually imprinted into both individual and collective
perception, conscious and unconscious. Always jealous of its power over the social fabric, the elites managed the
institutions of church & state attempting a totalizing net over all aspects of life and social interaction. Urban
architecture of the built environments created gathering points, public spaces as performative stages for social
rituals and dramas spilling out from church and palace into plazas. Taking the place of the Greco-Roman
Amphitheatre and Coliseum, European urban public spaces mimicked both village commons and Athenian
Agora and embedded formality of church and state. Even today, to walk down most Catholic European streets
one will encounter multiple shrines, whether of local patron saints or of the Virgin Mother Mary, an image
receding back into ancient history of Gaia or Cebele, Earth Goddesses of a pre-Christian world.
The collective visual perception of people born and raised in such cultural landscapes / cityscapes, thus
consciously and subconsciously embeds an integration of political and spiritual history within their sense of
place. Yet over recurring cycles of everyday life practices a collective sense evolves of the totality as a physical
and metaphysical merger, an ethos of place (genus loci) that transcends state or religion. Beyond such
cityscapes, rural landscapes have been shaped by human habitation over centuries and hold even stronger genus
loci, mythic elements embedded in natural forms, a palimpsest of stone carved into statues, polished and
reformed by wind and rain. Unlike the New World, Eurasia has little if any real wilderness, lands untouched by
human agency. Yet that label of wilderness is also a construct, since archaeologists have not explored every
meter of the Americas, whereas in Eurasia, wilderness implies lands gone fallow or forests and mountains
populated by wild and mythological creatures. But according to Barthes (1972), “myth is a type of speech” and
in contemporary usage may be a floating signifier detached from its signified, yet remaining embedded in
language as a system of signs, i.e., “a mode of signification, a form . . . not defined by the object of its message,”
and thus can be applied to any object or set of objects. Hence, any set of visual / visible objects, whether
alphabetic letters, Arabic script, Chinese characters, icons, images, digital or analog, can be constructed as
simultaneously belonging to both mythic and a semiotic systems.
Coming toward a conclusion for this section, visual perception since Descartes has been understood to be a
mental process, whereas the eye is no more than a device that transmits sensory data to the brain. But, what can
be said about the role of the eye within The Gaze?
Modern philosophers, Sartre, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, among others, have all explored The Gaze, as a
phenomenon relative to interactive human existence and sense of self within a power/knowledge framework.
Gender distinctions and contradictions are also explored through The Male Gaze, about which feminist critics
have widely discussed as central to inequality. However from another, more Lacanian perspective, film critic
Bracha Ettinger criticizes the centrality of a male gaze, proposing instead a Matrixial Gaze that is external to the
power struggle when a Male Gaze opposes a Female Gaze, rather, when both gazes act as positive entities, thus
constitute each other from a lack of dominating desire, which is what Slavoj Žižek claims is the proper Lacanian
use of The Gaze. “Ettinger's proposal doesn't concern a subject and its object, either as existing or lacking, rather,
it concerns trans-subjectivity…". That theory thus proposes a partial sharing, “a feminine-matrixial difference
that escapes the phallic opposition of masculine/feminine” hence produces a “process of coemergence”. (Ettinger, Bracha.)
In a critique of normative theoretical film criticism, Henry Krips (“The Politics of the Gaze: Foucault, Lacan and
Žižek,”) presents Žižek’s argument that the critical lineage of Metz, Mulvey, and Copjec, all misunderstand both
Foucault and Lacan’s use of the Gaze in relation to reflection, especially in understanding how the self, however
ambiguously constructed, interprets both cinematic narrative and visual representation.
http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v2/a06/cu10v2a6.pdf
When we assess visual culture and performance, artificial distinctions between performers and audience seem
amplified by a secondary representation in film. Yet whether the observer /consumer engages in direct critical
discourse over what has been observed / read / consumed from the film, or consciously / subconsciously
examines the mirror of self in relation to the film in question, or even using that cinematic object as a portal into
cinema in all its genres, s/he will inevitably construct meaning hence engage in a language act. According to
language philosophers, a speech act, pre-verbalizes meaning in the utterance, thus transforms sense perceptions
into meaning (W. de Gruyter, 1990).
During this cognition process, and taking Žižek’s understanding of Lacan, it is possible to claim that a
performative sequence occurs when the subconscious connects with the conscious thorough a mirror effect of
self-gaze. Whatever objectivity or subjectivity plays into a processual sequence triggered through an experiential
relation to an cinematic or visual object, Ettinger claims that experience produces less of a contradictory gaze.
She also claims it has a greater potential for producing a Matrixial Gaze, a resonance with self as both female /
male, or what Jung labels Anima / Animus. If this is correct, then it could be true for both male and female
performances of thought/action/language, hence may induce a critical performance within an individual reaction
to the visual object. But if we subject that theory to what Judith Butler analyses as gender constructing
experiences, it may be doubtful in male and female processes would yield the same result (Butler & Weed, 2011)
In conclusion, we might cease differentiating cinematic visuality from static visuality, other than as a genre
difference while still recognizing the simulation power of film/video as images-in-motion. Thus a generative
performance theory embeds self and other as constructions within all visual perception, whatever the external
object observed. Hence no observation exists without intrinsic performance within the observer. Therefore, does
the cinematic experience trigger any truly different underlying psychological reactions within the observer /
reader than stage presentations, performance art, or a static work of art? Perhaps the situational environment in
which the event occurs, causes differential reactions, but if our premise is correct, that — life is performance —
then both the experience of everyday practices and unique events comprise actions of sense perception / thought
/ language / speech. All experiential phenomena thus constitute active forms of subconscious/conscious
performance, with little difference between what is experienced by performer/producers of visual imagery /
experience and consumers of the same. Acknowledging such theoretical distinctions as developed by Goffman,
e.g., front stage / back stage, are more situational, ephemeral or epiphenomenal, than the existential /experiential
process — Sartre’s
“Je suis, j'existe, je pense donc je suis; je suis parce que je pense, pourquoi est-ce que je pense? je ne
veux plus penser, je suis parce que je pense que je ne veux pas être, je pense que je... parce que...
pouah!”( La Nausée, Jean-Paul Sartre, éd. Gallimard,)
(“I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I want more
thinking, I am because I think I don't want to be, I think that I... because... ugh!!”) (L Nausee,
Jean-Paul Sarte, ed. Gallimard, 1938, p.145)
“I am therefore I think … etc. . …” but existentially, sense perception precedes thought, which axiomatically
requires language, hence eternally trapping us within its prison house. Do we seek a mirror for the gaze-at-self,
to legitimate existence in the process of acknowledging our performances in relation to self and with others?
Where do we escape from the power/knowledge dance with others? Do we experience a matrixial gaze with
ourselves as much as with others? What is possible within our existence as performers in our own productions of
action/reaction to fate.
Celluloid & Digital Re-Representations
In his semiotic explorations into images, Roland Barthes first examines oppositions — langue/parole,
mythic/mimetic, and syntagmatic/paradigmatic, in relation to still (photographic) images. Even when examining
Eisenstein’s films, Ivan the Terrible or Battleship Potemkin, Barthes seems more comfortable situating a
language construction describing meaning and movement to a still image rather than confront the inherent
motion of syntagmatic shifts that makes motion pictures move sequentially in telling their narratives. His most
poignant observation links the movement of the camera as it shifts from one scene to another as a narrative
process, structured as langue (grammar/passive) rather than parole (speech/active). Continuing his theoretical
stance that the death of the author axiomatically focuses on the role of the reader in creating the text, Barthes
applies this frame to visual images as well as the images constructed in the text and interpreted
(read/constructed) by the reader.
Representations / Re-representations embodied in Bio-art as mimesis
What is Bio-Art in an era that Baudrillard termed “the age of the virus” and in what way can biosciences,
technologies and the visual arts find common ground? To situate his 1997 artwork Time Capsule as a genre,
Eduardo Kac, coined the term "Bio-Art" quickly picked up by other pioneers in that genre, e.g., Joe Davis, and
the SymboticA group.
But an earlier philosophical-theoretical perspective, — Donna Haraway’s Cyborg approach — suggested that
digital and mechanical technologies had become integral within biology, any exclusion of the bio-mechanical
being obsolete. But not only has the bio-mechanical become a norm in that invasive inorganic objects such as
pacemakers, artificial joints and plastic valves, but scientifically, the body itself contains and runs off of an
elecro-chemical system connecting a neurological sub-system to its natural mechanical sub-systems of joints and
movable parts. Where then, if anywhere, does the human body’s biological elements exclude mechanical or
electric phenomena? Medical science recognizes that integral relationship among natural electrochemical/mechanical systems and artificial components that can successfully interface with those systems. That
established, the issue of body art using insertions, implants, etc., can be addressed. But as bio-art addresses both
the use of the human body and other scientifically recognized biological phenomena, what distinguishes it from
science? Here arises the question of aesthetics, yet body decoration and enhancement, e.g., tattoos, piercings,
breast implants, also re-presents aesthetic choices. This issue addresses a continual paradox – what is art, and if
art is in the eye of the beholder, rather than the domain of expert critics and academics, then Body Art is just a
new spin on avant garde extremism, a new Edge to explore and intentionally violate. Yet, what can bioart
contribute to scientific knowledge, whether biological or sociological? Could, for example, bioart exploring
Tesla’s theories to create aesthetic phenomena perhaps strike a new approach toward electric currents or use
thereof? Thus, while not as revolutionary as its proponents might claim, bioart might establish a frame for
further scientific explorations, including direct work with living tissue or related materials.
But the ethical, social, and philosophical considerations of Bio Art are enormous, especially in the context of a
capitalist-corporate drive toward hegemony over ownership and manipulations of genetic materials. But the most
directly relevant question for this research concerns visual perception. While Picasso’s statement “… Art is not
truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand” [Barr, 1980] may
offer philosophical credence to questions of illusion and realism, but how does that construct encompass the
visual lies that overlay potential truths offered by Bio-Art that experiments with cellular and sub-cellular
biological and genetic matter? Perhaps Bio-Art might represent an ultimate extension of postmodern abstractions
and reflections, such as tattoos, piercings, or other Body-Art-as-body-distortions, which abstract representation
from other media to focus on the bio-physical body of the artist or as canvas for body artists to decorate.
Conclusion — To know the world is to change the world, or is it?
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways:
the point, however, is to change it.” ― Karl Marx, The German Ideology
A return to the initial premise regarding the production, representation and consumption of art, I have attempted
to provide both theoretical arguments and empirical generalizations that support the thesis. First, that all
production, consumption, and exchanges are performances. Second, that arts are all performances and exchanges
both within the self, and as interactions with an external other. Third, that bodies of art (genres) experience
continual returns to certain core elements, re-presentation of natural or material artifacts, or abstractions from
such. That is, all forms and representation of forms build on a historical foundation of a dialectic between
reproduction and innovation, even when new technological media and tools are used in the construction of the
forms. So too, divisions of public from private change from place to place and time to time. Even viewing global
corporate capitalism as a monstrous consumer of state enterprises and lands — encompassing privatization of
publically held land, capital, and spatial configurations of production, representation and consumption — does
not necessarily change the basic equations of power and control over public use of public space. Liaisons among
private sector owners and public sector managers conclude agreements to regulate common uses of public spaces
and places. Thus no universally common demarcation or rule of governance over public spaces and places exists
and most regulatory compacts are both invisible and yet unique to each place and its contemporary stakeholders.
Finally, I have addressed the social learning process as universal, yet inherently unequal and subjective. Every
human being experiences social learning from infantile imprinting through the successive stages of child
development and on into adulthood. Therefore, life itself represents both organic and super-organic performance
of convergence, separation and recombination of self and the self-other paradox.
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