Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 111 The Unsettling, Urban Uncanny: The Case of Secured Settlements
Sandra Evans
Abstract (E): In the context of global trends such as urbanisation, migration, social isolation and inequality, socio-cultural interaction is increasingly influenced by fear and anxiety. In response to an apparently dangerous social climate, people are retreating into gated communities with protective walls and surveillance technology, hindering human interaction. Familiarity is associated with safety, while any perceived threat is externalised and projected onto the unknown. This essay argues that the uncanny is closely bound up with the shifting relationship between concrete walls and human emotions, between subjective sensations and an objective understanding of threat.
Abstract (F): Dans une culture qui se définit par les phénomènes globalisés de culture urbaine, migration, isolement social et inégalité, toute interaction sociale est de plus en plus marquée par la peur et l’angoisse. Un nombre croissant de gens se détournent d’un contexte social qu’ils ressentent comme dangereux et se retirent dans des structures d’habitation closes, entourées de murs et sous surveillance technologique, dans l’espoir de réduire ainsi le plus possible tout contact avec le monde extérieur. La sécurité est identifiée à l’exclusion de tout ce qui n’est pas connu, tandis que toute forme de menace est projetée sur un inconnu venant de l’extérieur. Cet article tente de montrer que l’inquiétante étrangeté est fortement liée aux rapports sans cesse changeants entre les murs de béton et les émotions humaines, entre les sensations subjectives et une approche objective de la menace.
Keywords: Community, Emotions, Politics, Security, Uncanny
“Critical inquiry into phantasmagorias is a good place to begin mapping out future forms of city life: with its suspicions about the appearance of things and about immediate experience; with its built-in emphasis on emotional work; with its recognition of the significance of space-work (and its collaborator, time-work).” (PILE 1997, 180)
One of the prevalent social processes in urban spaces is exclusion and seclusion, whereby this segregation is demarcated with gates, walls and intricate security systems. While the term phantasmagoria is primarily associated with a succession of images that blend into one another with their source essentially remaining hidden, this concept is nonetheless conducive to describing the visibility of new experiences and techniques of life forms in urban spaces and the invisibility of
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 112 underlying or hidden social processes. It is Walter Benjamin who associated Freud’s uncanny with the phantasmagoria of urban life in Das Passagen-Werk, addressing the uncanny and the disturbing presence of an unsettling unknown. For Benjamin, cities are constructed as much from ideas as from concrete, as much from fantasies and desires as from rational plans, and they are shaped as much by psychodrama as they are by the political economy. In the same vein, Robert Park maintains that a city is a state of mind (PARK 1925), essentially a set of social processes, customs and traditions that move people to behave in certain urban ways. Yet when inquiring about what is real in cities, the response will nonetheless more than likely include material and visible aspects such as streets, buildings and associated municipal or national policies which are primarily held responsible for structuring interpersonal contacts. But what about the emotional matrices that constitute urban spaces and consequently social relations?
In this paper I will focus on the interrelationship between the emotional and concrete, that is, between intangible qualities such as sentiments and sense of being in urban spaces, which move people to resettle their homes behind gates, and tangible walls that demarcate these exclusive and excluding life forms. In this regard I will refocus on two aspects of the unsettling uncanny, specifically in the Freudian sense, as a socio-cultural resource, namely: 1) “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”; and 2) the act of doubling as “preservation against extinction” (FREUD 1919). A constant sense of an ostensibly ubiquitous yet indeterminate threat that emanates from the walls influences and orders personal and social experiences to where physical and cognitive barriers are erected in order to keep the threatening unknown from getting too close. In society, lack of interaction, contact and understanding only exacerbates the notion of the unknown, the unfamiliar and hence the unsettling uncanny, which I believe originates nonetheless from behind the concrete walls, that is, from within. This raises the following questions: how does the familiar become uncanny? Does the uncanny originate in homely or unhomely spaces? What types of spaces perpetuate sensations of the uncanny? And finally, what is the difference between the uncanny which is experienced and that which is merely imagined?
Visual Landscapes of Fear
In reaction to a social climate that is perceived as increasingly dangerous, gated communities are growing in numbers not only in areas of conflict, but also in “modern liberal” societies. A BBC news service article with the headline “‘Gated’ Community Warning” cautions: “The growth of US-style ‘gated’ communities threatens to divide Britain’s cities into rich and poor ghettos [...] Well-off city
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 113 dwellers are increasingly shutting themselves away in high-security compounds, with surveillance cameras, electronic gates and even private security guards…The trend is being driven by fear of crime” (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2518747.stm
As fortified residential areas, gated communities are creating new forms of exclusion and seclusion in urban spaces. In Europe and the United States, the spatial and structural seclusion of residential complexes is not a new phenomenon: historically, structures such as monasteries and fortresses have been enclosed in a system of walls, while public spaces have not always been widely accessible. While in the 19th century women and the industrial proletariat were excluded from the public sphere, today the homeless, drug addicts and the “other” are primarily affected by mechanisms of segregation (SIEBEL and WEHRHEIM 2003). At the turn of the 20th century, special types of gated communities were constructed with the purpose of protecting family estates and wealthy households. Currently however, the securing of residential areas is becoming prevalent in a much broader segment of society. Setha Low analyses the discourse of urban fear within gated communities and suggests other fundamental reasons in explaining this trend, namely the complex and multi-dimensional interconnections between a discourse of fear, the loss of a sense of place and an increase in social fragmentation (LOW 2001). In this vein, Richard Sennett states: “In a community, people try to compensate for their dislocations and impoverished experience in the economy with communal coercion and illusion” (SENNETT 1997: 67).
). This excerpt highlights most of the prevalent issues concerning gated communities. The phenomenon of the wealthy shutting themselves away in high-security compounds implies both segregation and fragmentation. Surveillance cameras and walls symbolise the rules and regulations that are created and enforced by an elected private government. Electronic gates and private security guards illustrate the growing privatisation of public services that is increasingly threatening to exclude people from public space. And, finally, fear of crime can be viewed as symptomatic of the uncertainties created in society by increased plurality and complexity.
While the image of diversity is upheld in urban spaces, heterogeneity nonetheless tends to be regulated and ordered. Gated communities are part of this socio-spatial ordering and their order or communal coercion is maintained primarily by shared standards of behaviour, which are formally enforced by a private government rather than via informal social relationships. Those located behind gates are trying to control their environment by inducing a sense of cohesion within the community. The “familiar” is (re-)created by means of concrete boundaries, emotions and the implementation of strict rules and regulations which not only redefine the borders of the public and private spheres, but
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 114 also of good and bad, safe and dangerous, predictable and unpredictable. Walls represent a cognitive or mental barrier indicating that people end up having gated minds and consequently living gated lives (BRUNN 2006). Gates, walls and security systems have become a distinctive feature of urban residential landscapes throughout the world, indicating a multidimensional and ambivalent border: they simultaneously communicate danger and protection as well as inclusion and exclusion. Regardless of the type, size, shape, dimension and material used, living behind walls visually adds to the feeling of imminent danger and an uncanny threat, both to those outside the walls and also to those living on the inside.
The Unsettling Uncanny
Aside from the distinctive infrastructure and sense of community, the primary reason people state for choosing to live behind gates and concrete walls is fear of crime and violence. However, statistics do not support this discursive focal point since in actuality the crime rate is sinking and its ”real” causes such as poverty, for instance, are being ignored (GLASSNER 1999). There seems to be an indeterminate intermingling of fears, such as the fear of social harm, physical harm, psychological harm and financial harm, whereby the sources of fear and sense of danger are often misplaced and misinterpreted. According to the American sociologist Sally Engle Merry, “crime serves as an idiom for expressing and legitimating fear of the strange and the unknown. Such fears often focus on populations that are racially, culturally and economically distinct” (ENGLE MERRY 1981: 85). As a consequence, strangers or outsiders are held responsible for crimes committed while in actuality most violent crimes are committed by people who know their victims (GLASSNER 1999,LOW 2001). In the same vein, members of a certain neighbourhood perceive their own community to be safer than the surrounding city, even if it has a high crime rate. Familiarity seems to impart an aura of safety while the unknown imparts a sense of danger. Thus, in order to relieve contemporary fears, a sense of familiarity needs to be reconstituted. This train of thought suggests that the real motives for people moving into gated communities are the sense of community and the infrastructure, which, in both their emotional and spatial dimensions, instil a sense of familiarity, even if this is false or merely constructed. This notion is confirmed by Nan Ellin who states that “prevalent responses to postmodern fear […] are nostalgia and attempts by designers to provide legible environments that are meaningful to their constituencies by referring to a certain context or to mass imagery” (ELLIN 1999: 177).
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 115 essentially a disorientation experienced in the familiar world we live in, which turns into a potential source of unease and even fear. The uncanny divulges a hidden interrelationship which essentially remains unresolved, causing a sense of loss of control and a disconcerting disturbance in the relationship between the self and the surrounding space. This sensation is confirmed by an interviewee in Blakely and Snyder’s seminal study on Fortress America: “It was a lack of control is what it was. You could not maintain the environment you thought you had moved into” (BLAKELY AND SNYDER 1999: 59). This statement illustrates phantasmagorical aspects in interaction with the spatial environment: in his mind the interviewee had imagined a different neighbourhood, indicating a discrepancy between the actual state of the neighbourhood and the one in his imagination. A perceived lack of control stems from the interviewee’s inability to influence the spatial in the form of laws, whereby laws and corresponding structures are understood here as tangible manifestations of an environment. With this unsettling realisation, he and his wife resettle in a gated community with the objective of having more social- or self-control over their environment, as they had envisaged. Another interviewee comments on the disorientation caused by an unfamiliar presence, that is, an intangible notion of the uncanny. She would prefer to turn the intangible into something tangible, such as paper and walls, which might be seen to represent law and order: “Maybe because it is a little more manageable, and it isn’t a nebulous thing out there, you can put your hands on it” (BLAKELY AND SNYDER 1999: 63). The respondent would like to be able to grasp the world around her, in both senses of the word; she desires not only to comprehend but also to touch it and place her hand or finger on it. The colloquial expression that one is “not able to put one’s finger on it” means that something remains unclear and indeterminate. In both examples quoted here, respondents strive for the materialised spatial in order to compensate for the loss of social- or self-control which they experience.
But what about the emotional dimension? Another gated community resident broaches this issue by commenting: “It’s nice at least part of the day to be able to come into something where you know what to expect, that you can count on it, and that is calming” (BLAKELY AND SNYDER 1999: 62). Here the respondent suggests that the tangible structures and associated laws contribute to a disambiguation which in turn causes a calming sensation as opposed to the feeling of being disturbed which is evoked outside of these structures. As an emotional experience, the uncanny functions as an intermediary between the inner and the outer life of an individual as well as between the inside and the outside of the wall. One of the respondents in Low’s study describes her emotional state when she is located outside the gates and walls: “When I leave the area entirely and go downtown, I feel quite threatened, just being out in normal urban areas, unrestricted urban areas” (LOW 2001: 52). As
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 116 soon as this respondent leaves the confines of these restricted, contained and preserved spaces, she feels threatened and experiences anxiety, essentially illustrating that her emotional state is dependent on the tangibility of spatial limits.
These spatial limits can also take on a temporal dimension, since, as Ellin has observed, one of the responses to postmodern fear is nostalgia. In their search for the familiar and for a sense of community, gated community residents try to recreate the small-town feeling from the past, where everybody knows and can trust everybody: “It’s an artificial setting here, but you’re creating that environment which duplicates what Middle America used to be back when you had small towns.” (BLAKELY AND SNYDER 1999: 63) Some of the residents might have experienced this small-town feeling when they were younger, while others might not, but what unites them is the common understanding of what a small-town feeling means, along with the coercive values contained within the image and its associated rules. This fantastic and familiar(-ised) past, as well as the emotional state that accompanies it, can be grasped with the imagination. Yet it is fake and situated within a multidimensional spatial-temporal diffusion.
While the interviewee points to the artificiality of the environment and is aware of its construction, that is, the act of doubling which it initiates, he nonetheless considers the gated community to be real, since he is part of it as a real person and also has a sense of social- and self-control. Not only are time and space doubled and reconstructed, but the self is also divided into one that exists in both the constructed and the actual reality. According to Freud, doubling assumes the function of “preservation against extinction”. As a primary emotion and a culturally universal phenomenon, fear takes on the vital function of activating the self-preserving flight instinct in threatening situations. Fear is a productive phenomenon and a necessary existential affect in order to protect against threatening situations, and one of the ways of providing protection in contemporary urban space lies in the doubling of realities. Thus, the “preservation against extinction” turns into a notion of “immortality through duplication” (ECO 1990:6).
In addition, the image of the gated community as a small town forms part of the residents’ common interest and shared values. Thus, the gates and walls not only protect this imagination but also take on the function of “containing” the nostalgic image of a small town in both senses of the word, that is, they incorporate and include as well as hold, control and restrain the image.
Alongside communicating, symbolising and creating the simultaneous experience of threat and protection, another ambivalence becomes apparent at this point: while residents of gated communities search for a lost sense of community and are eager to recreate a familiar space, this
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 117 takes place after a deliberate separation from and exclusion of another urban space. Separation has become a determining feature of social life in American neighbourhoods, and as “Americans have moved up, they have moved apart” (ENGLE MERRY 1993: 86). Upper-middle-class suburbs are physically and socially structured in order to provide privacy and separation. According to Engle Merry, one of the reasons for the preference of separation is a move away from the intimate, that is, away from reliance on neighbours and the enduring ties of community. Benefits gained from the loss of intimate community are a “low level of daily conflict, freedom from the need to maintain readily available networks for support, and a diminished demand to compromise one’s own interests in the light of others’ interests” (ENGLE MERRY 1993: 88). Residents monitor their environments, “closely identifying those who do not belong”, yet at the same time they are sheltered by the privacy made possible by these loosely held relationships (LOW 2003: 182). Although many residents complain about the sometimes petty and intruding regulations of every aspect of life by neighbours, the benefits of community living nonetheless seem to override the drawbacks. Residents are willing to give up some of their liberties in exchange for stability and a sense of security, both necessary characteristics for establishing familiarity. Many inhabitants seem to be glad that the rules exist and welcome the resulting discipline and sense of order; the prospect of their neighbours having to obey these rules lends them a greater sense of security. In this vein, it seems as though an uncanny disorientation not only originates in a familiar environment which has become strange and unfamiliar, but also in a deliberately dissociated environment which in turn becomes too familiar and intimate, as in the case of the gated community.
The residents of gated communities deliberately dissociate themselves, not only from the environment, but also from reality, which in itself represents a threat. One such resident describes this impending danger thus: “It’s a false sense of safety if you think about it, because our security people are not ‘Johnny-on-the-spot’, so to speak, and anybody who wants to jump the gate could jump the gate [...]. There’s a perception of safety that may not be real, that could potentially leave one more vulnerable if there was ever an attack” (LOW 2001: 52). This resident acknowledges the unreal perception, or rather, the phantasmagorical imagination of security. Essentially, gated communities have similar crime issues to any other suburban area: “We have drugs and other issues to deal with here too. The gates don’t keep out the world outside”, an executive director of a property owners’ association (POA) comments. He continues: “The gates give people a false sense of security. Some of our residents tell me that they relax as soon as they get beyond the gate” (BLAKELY AND SNYDER 1999: 67-8). The POA executive director points to the false sense of security which is adopted to counter the constant sense of an ostensibly ubiquitous yet indeterminate threat. However,
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 118 as the above illustrates, the threatening unknown is also located inside the gates, inside both the concrete and the mental barriers.
The Subjective, the Objective, the Projective
In an increasingly pluralising society, the relationship between social and physical security is essentially shifting (WEHRHEIM 2002), along with the relationship between subjective sensations and an objective understanding of threat. This fluctuating relationship means that the actual causes of subjective emotional feelings and an objective cognitive understanding of these do not always stand in direct relationship to each other. It is at this juncture that a gap comes into existence which needs to be filled. Here the indeterminate and unknown is made responsible for the intangible notions of threat which are becoming increasingly difficult to discern. They are more elusive and thus more insidious; threat is everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous yet at the same time absent. “Glocal” contexts essentially turn into planes of projection for personal and subjective sensations of threat and fear, regardless of whether they are of economic, socio-cultural, political, medial or personal origins, that derive from an overall societal and/or international context and manifest themselves for instance in the form of walls. Within this context it would be revealing to analyse the inter-relationship between “subjective”, “objective” and “projective” notions and emotions.
An increasing fear of the unknown and unpredictable “other” essentially leads to distrust and paranoia, and rather than face the causes of fear, people resort to avoidance, self-protection and seclusion from the uncanny “other”. According to a critical discourse analysis of the interviews, residents of gated communities were mainly concerned with “social order, social control, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, class consciousness and status anxiety, social mobility, and racism, as well as fear of crime and violence” (LOW 2001: 52). One of the residents interviewed by Low simply states: “It’s ethnic changes”.
The connection between poverty and crime has a long history, and the danger that allegedly originates with the poor is projected onto urban spaces (WEHRHEIM 2002). What seems to dictate the cognitive reaction to crime is the irrationality of fear. Merry identifies three components of personal reaction to crime: the cognitive, the emotional and the behavioural. Cognitive components identify the personal risk at stake in a specific situation, based on cues from the environment and experiences from the past. Emotional components refer to feelings about danger, while the term behavioural components describes the strategies adopted in order to deal with perceived danger. If one envisages these stages of danger perception, sensation and resulting action as a circular sequence and extends
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 119 this flow from the personal or the familiar to the “other” or the unfamiliar, which in turn experiences and engages in the same stages and dimensions of danger perception, sensation and resulting (re-)action to fear, with the resulting pattern resembles a figure of eight.
This sequence might be designated as othering, a practice whereby the “other” is differentiated from the self. In this context, this othering seems to assume two different roles: 1) in an increasingly diversifying and pluralising world, where individualisation dominates, the other or the unknown takes on the function of forming a significant contrast to the self in order to be able to strengthen one’s own identity; and 2) in an unstable global world, the fear of one’s own social decline is projected onto the “other”, thus turning the construction of walls and the fortification of urban spaces into an individual and also political strategy for compensating for and suppressing this intangible notion of the uncanny.
The two sides converge at the centre, and this is where socio-spatial structures like walls, corresponding laws and practices manifest themselves in response to a perceived disruption of the familiar. The feeling of insecurity in response to this disruption stems from a heightened sense of danger, a fear of losing social- or self-control and the fear of the unknown and unfamiliar. In methodological terms, an in depth analysis of gated communities would benefit from a separation of these dimensions. In practice and in everyday reality, however, they form a dangerous blend of (re-assuring) projections, interpretations and illusions. Thus, the discourse of fear and (in-)security feeds on a dangerous intermingling of real socio-cultural changes, shifting patterns of perception and imagination, and unconscious projection. Subjectively perceived notions of an intangible uncanny threat are objectified in order to make them tangible and enable rational (re-)actions to be developed accordingly. A feeling of social insecurity is transferred into a need for physical security. It is at this point that the borders between real and imagined familiarity blur, along with any understanding of self and other, good and bad, safe and dangerous. And it is precisely here that the uncanny is located.
Conclusion
At the macro-level of society, an increase in urbanisation, migration, social fragmentation and isolation, economic and social inequalities and medialisation are important factors in rendering society more unstable, indeterminate and insecure. Within this context, the multi-dimensional and reflexive interaction between space and people, concrete and emotions, shapes the urban landscape at the mezzo- and micro-levels, engaging in a certain form of socio-spatial dialectics. In trying to describe and understand the visibility of new experiences and techniques of life forms in urban
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 120 spaces, and the invisibility of underlying or hidden social processes, and sensations of the uncanny and the phantasmagorical are insightful. In a world where our surroundings cease to be familiar and turn into mere phenomenon (WEHRHEIM 2002), an indeterminate relativism turns into the determining factor. While concrete walls are erected in order to organise the socio-spatial sphere, they simultaneously regulate emotions and consequently cause dissociation from the familiar and the known. It is in these surrogate homely spaces that the uncanny resides.
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Sandra Evans completed a PhD in Slavic Studies at the University of Tübingen in 2008, with a dissertation entitled ‘Intimate Texts. Intimate Spaces. The Construction of Intimacy in Russian Culture’.
