Habitus

[imomus]

Moving house shakes you up and prompts insights into your life. This week I've moved house. Not a great distance, just a kilometer to the south and east within the Berlin district of Friedrichshain, from the Karl-Marx-Allee to the Simon-Dach Strasse. But that kilometer changes everything. It trades old people for young people, economic depression for economic boom, car-domination for bike and tram domination, Mexican and Greek restaurants for Thai and Japanese ones, and Stalinism for the small-scale avant-capitalist funk of fleapit cinemas, headshops, and skatewear boutiques.

So I've been thinking about psychogeography this week. I've been thinking about how I assemble the same sort of environment around me wherever I live: I have a personal culture, an aesthetic, habitus. It goes into boxes and comes out of boxes, the cardboard boxes I move my books and records and clothes in, or the satellite boxes I buy to tune in the internet and the only TV channel I watch, french-language Arte. Different vessels, but the same wine: I now capture Arte as a digital signal from the TV tower rather than on cable, but it's the same Arte. I now get my DSL streamed from the TV tower too, but I'm hitting the same websites. And I now have a new apartment on a new street, but it's basically "my apartment" -- blended, of course, with "Hisae's apartment", consisting of her graphic design books, her rabbit, her smoking area out on the balcony, her Japanese foodstuffs, the desk where she does her German language exercises, the computer she uses to surf a set of Japanese websites quite different from the ones I'm hitting, although they're brought in on the same signal.

On Monday I took the tram that passes our door up to Prenzlauer Allee to rent a van. The tram took me with surprising suddenness into areas I'd never seen. As soon as it passed Frankfurter Allee we were in a series of run-down working class suburbs where unemployed men sat on benches looking grim, businesses all seemed to have closed down, women pushed prams, and huge 1970s housing blocks attempted to inject a little colour with rainbow murals painted on their facades. This "north-eastern ring" district just went on and on until we hit Prenzlauer Promenade. Driving in the van I also saw a Berlin I never see, a place of heavy traffic, stressed people, ugly roads. (This is one of the reasons I have never owned a car, by the way: cars make you see the ugly side of your city and the ugly side of people.) I can't tell you how good it felt to return the van, take the tram back through that grim, depressed north-eastern corridor and re-enter the funky "bubble district" where I live, an environment I feel fit and fitted for in an almost Darwinian sense (if, perhaps, a few summers too old).

The only time this part of Friedrichshain feels alien is at weekends, when its nightlife cranks up a few notches and the place is invaded by "bridge and tunnel people" from god-knows-where, people with different faces and an air of drunken menace about them, people who stop you to ask directions, people who have slightly-too-pale skin and slightly-too-beady eyes. But most of the time what strikes me about this district is what struck me about Chinatown in New York, or the King's Road in Chelsea when I lived there, or the Tokyo districts I know and love. It's really remarkable how different districts, and even different streets within districts, have such a defined, distinct quality, a habitus. By some self-filtering, self-censoring action, poor people stay out of rich districts, old people stay out of young districts, uncool people stay out of cool districts, and so on. What's more, you can take just a few steps away from the main drag and be in a totally different world, as if you've crossed an invisible barrier. I think of the distinction between Oxford Street and Soho: totally different people with different mindsets, yet it's incredibly rare to see "Oxford Street people" wandering down Berwick Street. Why would they go there? They've come to see big department stores. Their routines, the habitual routes they take through cities, are as rigidly fixed as mine are. They only change them when some disaster, diversion or displacement forces them to take a different route. And, like me, they peer with astonishment at streets they barely knew existed, and people shockingly different from themselves. Appalled, enthralled, filled with the mixed feelings and slipping glimpses that difference engenders, we stray off the beaten track for a moment before returning to our customary habitus, which is to say our customary blindness.

Comments

[emjayne.livejournal.com]

There are streets here in Montreal that affect me the same way. walk 10 blocks and cross from anglo into franco, or run-down rich to rapidly-gentrified.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Back here in sweden in the town where I live it's a great different if you walk around a district when it's sunny or when it's all autumn grey!

Also, these districts with a lower "quality" to the houses and etc or how to explain it are a bit fascinating to me. I love looking at them, even would imagine me live in a one/two room apartment in such a district just because of the "fun" of it.

The chance of me getting a car is by the percent 0! I like the busses and trains much better. Inspirations on top when "bussing" back home through a autumn grey Södertälje with Cornelius "Watadori" playing on the mp3!

Though I live a bit outside the city, almost on the countryside, I love the city more than my home. At times.

[me-vs-gutenberg.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I could live in a bubble the way you describe it (and I don't think that you do to the extent of complete seclusion.) I have a habit of taking trips around the cities I live in, and it is great fun to observe the social fault lines the way you do above, and it is also great fun to cross them. Living along a fixed route sounds a bit unfulfilling.

Tangent

[transient-poet.livejournal.com]

http://www.petoffice.co.jp/catprin/english/

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

I experience this contrast everyday when I leave the sophistication and refinement of Deptford, south east London, (ahem) to travel by bicycle to the Catford. Catford is full of track suit wearing, burberry hatted guys and Croydon-face lift gals with a fag in one hand and a sausage roll in the other. The place is desparately poor, yet it costs a quarter of a million quid to buy a house there and estate agents refer to it as "Ladywell village". There are pathetic attempts to gentrify the place everywhere you look, expensive housing schemes, non-greasy spoon restuarants...even a new (and sadly, very empty, Japanese restuarant, callled 'Hello Tokyo'). Goodbye Tokyo. They all fail after a few months due to the economic situation which is far more extreme and critical (for instance 1000 pound council tax bills, severe unemployment) than the government will admit. I should know - I've been an outreach community worker in an around Catford for nearly 12 years.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are lies, damn lies, statistics, government claims... and villages invented by estate agents.

[(Anonymous)]

However, London's real villages are, as you describe, spendid in their shocking and abruptly contrasting juxtapositions.

A personal favourite of mine is to take the 20 second trip to Bonnington Square from South Lambert Road. A tiny oasis of quiet green behind a huge grinding intersection.

This is why London is the best place on Earth and I am voting BNP in the election.


just kidding

[(Anonymous)]

hey I live in Bonnington Square...amazing to see it mentioned

[(Anonymous)]

this has nothing to do with your subject, but have you read "habitus" by james flint? his "habitus" motto comes from deleuze, not debord, but it's a brilliant book.well.
(odot)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, I haven't read that. My use of habitus follows Bourdieu, not Deleuze or Debord, although they may have been using the term his way too. I think B. invented it.

By the way, Monsieur Lamm, I'm going to write about one of your album sleeves in Design Observer (http://www.designobserver.com) this Saturday!

[(Anonymous)]

wow. can't wait to read it!
i was mentioning debord for the "psychogeography" part
and deleuze's habitus concept is in "difference & repetition" is about, i think, merging with your environment, and become part of it...

(o.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm going to write about one of your album sleeves in Design Observer this Saturday!

Actually it's been put forward to Monday now.

[intergalactim.livejournal.com]

Hey, I love that book! Does anyone know about the second novel James Flint wrote? (I've never seen it anywhere, just an interview when Habitus came out that he was writing it - I've forgotten the title.)

[sparkligbeatnic.livejournal.com]

Nice selection of images today. Reminiscent of the old pre-Click-Opera Momus composites.

[(Anonymous)]

Just listening to Gavin Bryars' "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet" (1971) which is sung by tramp on his last legs in Euston, taken away and orchestrated by Bryars, Nyman etc. Sometimes you have to look through these people's eyes, where each night could genuinely be their last. These kind of places remind my why art is important, more than hanging with creatives, though. If one song finds a way to toughen these shaky, trigger-sensitive boozers or give them a sense for themselves and not just of themselves, something's been done.

[nickink.livejournal.com]

I think this is lacking, or else on a much diminished scale, here in Seoul. The nightlife areas, residential areas and industrial areas all seem to be generic reproductions of one another. And then you go to Busan or Kyongju and it's the same again, just on a smaller scale. Perhaps I'm just not looking at it properly, missing the nuances.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

'By some self-filtering, self-censoring action, poor people stay out of rich districts, old people stay out of young districts, uncool people stay out of cool districts, and so on.'

So many people think that they need to travel abroad in order to find the exotic or alien, in truth, they can often find it in the next street but one. I hate the idea of a bubble world to live in. It sounds so self-satisfied - so like these bland middle-class gated communities where like only ever lives alongside like. There are places I don't like, but at least I've been there to find out I don't like them. The contrasts and variety, generally, are what makes life interesting.

As for ugly behaviour, you can see that inside and outside of cars, unfortunately.

[(Anonymous)]

I like to think of it as center & periphery. Maybe bubble is a bad word for it, suggesting set boundaries. What strikes me about gated communities just now is that a nonmember would not want to be there. There's nothing there for them. Even if scenic and luxuriant. The artificial homogeneity is really what keeps people out, not walls or gates. (Not blandness. Have been reading Jullien's book, 'In praise of blandness' .) Many centers and peripheries overlapping. Being a young person is a certain orientation to a place. Being a musician, etc. Middled aged gated people too.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I wear my habitus on my back; I meet a wider assortment of people that way.

W

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Your fascination with the natural world has gone too far M'Lud, you are turning into a tortoise.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

...a jewel-encrusted tortoise being walked through Paris on a silken ribbon. Oh, were it thus!

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

The Boulevard Haussmann is yours for the taking ... but look out, there's a lobster coming up fast on your left.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

(rolls eyes, sighs)...Gerry, what a hack...just watch, he's going to do that tired-ass 'it does not bark and it knows the secrets of the deep' bit for the tourists. Way to crap on our habitus, de Nerval!

Habitus

[(Anonymous)]

Not sure about oxford street and soho - I walk through soho and down oxford street to bond street every day after work, and have been watching the people for a while (i mean, i've lived here for twenty years). Oxford street has completely infiltrated Soho - Wardour st has two Starbucks on it alone, the place is full of pret a mangers, chinatown is going to be re-developed for the £££, and the whole place is just as rife with bag-swinging consumers as Oxford Street is. I think people are beginning to believe it's the same difference, and they cross over the so-called invisible line without thought. Soho is becoming more accomodating to chain shops, and homogenizing with the rest of the West End.

Still, thanks for making me think! Maybe i need to leave this city!

Re: Habitus

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

Here in Los Angeles -- which is built on the scale of The Strip -- neighborhoods are more pronounced. The poor working class who can't afford cars (i.e., the Chicana and Latina women who clean house; the illegals who cut grass and paint houses) have to ride in the backs of trucks and on the few city buses to come to work for the affluent west siders, then make the long track back in the evenings to the East or South sides.

I live in Santa Monica, which is a predominantly white, new-money neighborhood. I'm not white and not wealthy, but I like living by the water. As an artist (a non-movie industry artist), and as an artist of color, I often feel like I'm living here in defiance of neighborhood lines.

I enjoy reading these.

[nytrash.livejournal.com]

I always feel left out though, I never have any clever comments to leave. But, I will just say 'hello' this time that way I can be a part..

Re: I enjoy reading these.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, hello back (saucy wink)!

Those Cities of Fear and Love

[(Anonymous)]

I love the fact that you understand the concept of Psychogeography. I used to live in Savannah, Georgia when I was in school and during that time I was mugged, chased, robbed, broken into, harassed, stalked and nearly shot. I made a "terror map" of the city out of foam. Luckily the whole city is completely flat but I made mountain peeks of fear and canyons of suspicion turning the whole city into a always moving and changing landscape of paranoia. I thought my idea was vague and boring but now I am happy to see there has been some academic study into the matter. Thanks, I learn more from this site than I can absorb.

Just an update:

I'm making a love map of my present city based on riding my bike in longing for that special someone and sitting in bars sulking over them as well as other nonscientific factors. But when was love or fear scientific or geographical for that matter?

Kim

Re: Those Cities of Fear and Love

[(Anonymous)]

Love and fear are central or not at all. Wouldn't be too concerned about analysis killing love, it tends to soldier on regardless, but it can be thought about if needed. I'd say start by saying there is no difference, in essence, between romantic or sexual love and the empathy you might feel for a hopeless homeless on the street. These kinds of love feel different but if you accept all desire is social, external, they won't feel so different after a while.

Re: These Cities of Fear and Love

[(Anonymous)]

Huh?

Kim

Admissions of Cartesian Reluctant

[epymetheus.livejournal.com]

I sometimes feel goache here among the esoteric and the high minded to merely appreciate the beauty of your language, but I loved the line "which is to say our customary blindness." In a world of hyper-literacy and media super-saturation, a cultivated blindness is a necessary part of survival. And though we may rightly filter out what we do not want to see (often disguising it as 'taste'), and see only what is familiar, and what is similar to what is familiar, it is either a mark of naivete or bravery to admit that which is not only truly foreign, but unwanted as well.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm glad you've moved down to simon dach strasse!i actually spend most of my time in punkland just a couple of streets apart from there so i guess i'll see you around a lot more.congratulaations!
mario