We should inhabit our places with more lived sense of their complex dimensions and tensions. This sounds very similar to the strategies of unmasking and defamiliarization that have been so prominent in modernist art and in Marx-influenced theories of culture. Those try to make fluid what is taken as static, and to reveal as socially constructed what is taken as naturally given. They try to break through ideological constructs and remove false consciousness.
Although it shares with such strategies the ideal of more active self-relation for both individual and community, the strategy of complexifying is broader than strategies of unmasking, and not necessarily as political. The aim of complexity is to undo the illusions of simple immediacy, which is a broader category than the notions of ideology and false consciousness. Complexity will always mean less isolation, more connection and mediation, and more intertwined self-relations, but immediacy does not always equal false consciousness in the Marxist sense.
Stan Allen urges that "the radical gesture today is not to unmask the simulacrum as a lie, but rather to require the simulacrum, against expectation, to function as the real." (Allen 1995, 53-54) The tactics I suggest for themed places a nd the suburban sprawl ask them to "function as the real," that is, to meet their obligations as a more complex place than their self-definition prescribes.
Index
Complexity outline
strategies
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001