mahr'svierteljahrsschriftfürästhetik
8
(2005), Nr.4/December
Miszelle
Passengers. 4090 Zeichen.
I watched two couples walking on a pedestrian mall.
They saw each other, no other force intruded, and yet they kept walking with
directions and speeds unchanged. Steering their courses would have made them
bump into each other. They certainly recognized the situation. Yet even though
already close to each other none of the four changed the parameters of their
movements. Short off an accident, one of the four shouted: „Attention!“. The
other couple lowered the walking speed. What a strange and ridiculous situation!
For me it testifies to a communicational crisis. In danger of getting lost
seems to be the respect toward people on sidewalks passing by at each other.
That respect is not as natural as it used to be. People seem to increasingly be
unable to take notice of, to have a regard for each other. The crisis sets out
as a perceptual one. Today you walk on the wild side instead of the „right“
side of the sidewalk and, after some provocation, you may well get off with it.
To be sure most people who abstain from this „natural“ law don’t subvert the
rule purposively, consciously. They may pass in a distance too small. Yet this
and other forms of dangerous-passing leave no doubt that the
action-with-perception in question has become a matter of individual power and
violence, of more or less successfully “fighting” for respect, for a street
credibility of an own kind. It has been the arts again who welcomed crashes of
some sorts, who thematized a drama that has become more or less private and
public: Marina Abramovich and Ulay Bonsiepen performed running naked onto and
into each other over and over again until a final exhaustion set in. Other
people experience sexual pleasure with their cars crashing into each other, as
David Cronenberg’s reported in Crash. Still others feel rewarded for violently
crashing into punk and hard rock audiences, with “stage diving” down from the
concert stage and hopefully being caught and saved. It is such a kind of
instantaneous arbitrariness, of momentary indifference or just moods like
anxiousness that yield different kinds of „side“-walks. The behavious may may
be caused by pavements becoming roads without traffic rules – it may have started with a
laisser-faire to bikers on sidewalks causing some people keeping them close to
the walls of houses. It may correspond to „one-way“ highway driving manners,
the increasing regulation of passenger streams in airports, subways and the
like. Be it an unconscious expression of protest against the imposition of a
special kind of bodily movement by means of the phenomenon called wrong way
driver – the deceptively „unbodily“ Geisterfahrer – , people on sidewalks,
unlike in earlier times, are ready and willing to show much more personal, even
private details. In consequence, people passing by are confronted with
individuals they’d rather ignore which used to be an advantage to all of us. At
that the crisis of aisthesis entails a transgression of the usual aesthetics of
designed symbolization with using clothes and other things worn. So, gender,
age, class, season, group identity and other more or less conscious
representations do not seem to suffice anymore. They have given way to a bodily
presence set in motion by individual beings. Once we needed to pass (with)
vehicles. Now we need to pass (with?) people. That change will bring forward a
new perception proper. The passenger behaviour in question will not any longer
entail just a kind of urban minimal perception, a petite perception. Perception
from now on will have to be much more conscious and for the first time in
history not only sufficient for the requirements of regulated, but also of
unregulated space. Keep in mind that passing through bodies of people in
ego-shooter games is surprisingly not tolerated by the gaming community,
although a vast cultural tendency of distanceless telecommunication that runs
into mutual permeability, penetration, porosity has taken possession of us. Be
that as it may: we are still speaking of public space, of areas that may at
least partially become again the haven and refuge of our materialities –
scilicet bodies – to be protected. Navigation devices will not solve the
problem. What is needed anew is a respectful perception-causing-perception. Our traditional docta
ignorantia of non-perception – leaving people on streets guided with but a few
rules of politeness – will not do. What about those old walking
ceremonies of roundabouts in pedestrian
precinct streets, those turning chains of people in meditarranean towns and
villages like
Peter Mahr
© 2005
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