Shifting the Center

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We would be hard pressed to look into the human past and find a social group, town, nation or civilization that did not identify with a particular physical place as a spiritual or at least communal center, and yet our post-modern globalized landscapes (metaphorically and physically) seem to have made no room for these spaces. The concept of the cosmic axis is found across many cultures, a spot at which the four directions intersect, the sky and earth meet and the gods descend as prayers ascend. The marker for these spots is called the omphalos, greek for navel. Often times mountains such as the Kun Lun in China or Mt. Fuji in Japan acted as omphaloses, but any place could be marked as one.


The Omphalos stone of Delphi

Omphaloses place the believer in a world with an affirmed center; once this center is established the believer imagines his physical and spiritual world around that point. As sites of spiritual epiphany as well as social exchange, the omphalos is the focal point of reference from which to judge one's closeness to god and humans, a place to either move away from or come towards. Communal purpose can often supersede spiritual, as is the case with village greens and common spaces in England, Scotland and Wales, which for hundred of years have served as spots for resource harvesting, outdoor meetings and sport events as well as holiday and religious celebrations. As locuses for collective and sacred communication, omphalic centers define the self in relation to larger human and spiritual systems.
With the advent of global trade and finance, immigration, communication, came a vision of humanity encompassing the globe, containing it. The omphalos shifted from the local and became the world itself. The globe became the center, the commons, in the eyes of some eliminating the significance of local centers altogether while to others increasing the need to keep omphalic spaces. The debate of the significance of these spaces has become increasingly relevant in the past century as all natural and cultural resources rapidly become translated into and exchanged as capital. Land, water, air space and the human genome itself are all part of a rapid bidding system for ownership while biomass appropriation begins to reach its limits and species diversity plummets in numerous regions of the world. When Teilhard spoke of the coming psychic compression, reorganization and re-emergence of man, he was also referring to the literal compression of land and space, but it is hard to see at what point humans, let alone earth itself, will be elevated by what Teilhard concisely calls our "internal tensions."
The sense of displacement and pushing outward into non-identifiable space is not only felt of course, by the increasing millions of immigrants who simultaneously move in search of capital while fleeing its effects, but by the way landscapes are modeled for the middle to upperclass. Here I will take the United States as an example. With the advent of car culture, suburbs were sculpted to accomodate these new vehicles: Streets were widened, sidewalks eliminated and central-green space ignored. Neighborhoods were designed on the presupposition that cars were the main purveyors of transportation and access to communication with others, and thus they became one of the major resources for these needs. The alternatives, of course, were technoscapes or mediascapes that the middle class urban inhabitant could access from home via internet or television. The significance of land as an anchoring site for identity was literally blacktopped.
Ironically, the most commercially controlled spaced found today are the ones that create the illusion of social space the most effectively. Recognizing our yearnings for omphalic space, malls provide central space as a celebration of the shared community built on consumption.



One company has managed to fully exploit the yearning for center, sublimating its logo into an entire town. Celebration, FL was created by the Disney Company in the late 1990's as a real estate venture. Using visual and literary propaganda which provoked images of small town America, it drew in hundreds of families by emphasizing the communal atmosphere of the town center and encouraging community organizations which "each play a role in the governance of Celebration."


Downtown Celebration

Twelve years after its launching, Celebration is the model of commercialized community. Since Celebration is wholly owned by Disney, the need for the Disney logo disappears, the illusion of communal autonomy through central shared space is complete.
Our displacement from physical landscape drives us more consistently into the imagined worlds that Appadurai divides into spheres of technoscape, mediascape, financescape etc. As we make basic exchanges- from purchasing foods at a supermarket to sending e-mail we "see" our actions extending outward into a global sphere. Through a fusion of self-made and media-constructed imagery the mind's eye imagines a globe connected by light: a manifestation of the world growing ever claustrophobic and imprisoned by the enlightening beams of global transference. Our imaginations manifest and re-inforce this reality and vice versa.
If the globe is the omphalos, and the omphalos is choking on itself, how then to re-claim room? The imagination as social practice is the place to begin. The scapes we live in and make exchange through are reinforced by our very acknowledgement of them. The projected worlds produced at every level of society are what move nations to war, reinforce hierarchy, topple regimes etc. The landscapes of exchange (communal, ideological etc.) that operate within us are what maintain or disintegrate organized society. Appadurai asserts:
"An important fact about the world we live in today is that many persons on the globe live in such imagined worlds...and thus are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them."
Appadurai proposes that a sort of democratization of the imagination has occured in the post-modern era, that imagination as a social practice is a new phenomenon. This assertion is altogether false. Certainly our imagined worlds are more complex and in some ways more ()pervasive than ever before, but are these worlds not monopolized, as they always have been, by certain elite groups? The access to a greater number of visions of the worlds operations are certainly available, but one must account for the cornucopia of visions that are forcibly excluded from the list of acceptable world views. When Appadurai reduces imagination's past usages to "mere fantasy," "simple escape," elite pastime," and "mere contemplation" he does not account for imagination's fundamental usage as a propagandist tool that manifests dominant landscapes first in the mind and then in reality. In doing so he is also denying the importance and vital usage of radical or alternative scapes envisioned by those who do not have a general monopoly on reality. In every era alternative landscapes have been manifested and traversed via imagination. In the 17th century the Diggers, who founded small agrarian egalitarian communities on common land (which in reality was always owned by a lord), relied upon specific visions to manifest their goals. They believed in a Golden Age of England, before the Norman invasion, at which time land was shared equally and hierarchy was non-existent. By envisioning this fantastical time period, the Diggers had a model by which to first practice in their minds and then physically produce.
Today, the imagination as a radical tool is being utilized as a way to reclaim public space and create new omphalic centers. Seeing the globe as a whole has reinvigorated the idea of the earth as a shared space, or rather has re-erected the urgent need to understand it as a limited system with a specific reproductive carrying capacity. Activist Vandana Shiva has been a vocal part of the "earth democracy" movement, which, amongst its tenets recognizes the land as commons: "All members of the earth community including all humans have the right to sustenance - to food and water, to a safe and clean habitat, to security of ecological space...These rights are natural rights...and are best protected through community rights and commons." The earth is envisioned as one active community, but one that is naturally and necessarily traversed and influenced at regional levels, thus the need for local economy, local knowledge, local understandings of self. This concept has become increasingly pervasive in any number of movements against Western economo-ideological influence. Whether in reaction to the privatization of centuries-old rice varieties in India, or to the neglect of land in England or the destruction of it on the Northwest coast of the U.S., organized groups are establishing autonomous zones for egalitarian and agrarian practice. In an era in which no call for "traditional" activity or ideology is untouched by modern influence, the degree to which these new spaces actually signify independence and resistance from oppressive spheres is questionable. The Burning Man Festival is an apt example. On its website, Burning Man's intention is stated as "to create radically-inclusive, self-supporting society that connects individuals to each other, civic life and the natural world." At the end of the week, participants ritually burn The Man, a wood model symbolizing society's oppressive ills.


The Man that resided over the 2008 event (pre-burn)


An altar at a Rainbow Gathering

While Burning Man hosts lectures on any number of social and environmental justice topics as well as practicing a "leave no trace" policy, a radically-inclusive society can only be so inclusive when it charges entrance fees upwards of hundreds of dollars. (phtotos from burning man) But what Burning Man and similar, if less capitalized festivals such as Rainbow Gathering are trying to feed are the desire for focused omphalic spiritual sites that produce fantastical landscapes to use as models for other parts of the world. The vision feeds the practice (for those who can afford it at least).
Recently the practice of autonomous space has been manifested in phenomena such as guerilla gardening. Identified by many as a revitalization of the Diggers movement, guerilla gardening is a new name for the centuries old yet increasingly important practice of populist land seizure. Individuals as well as organized teams of people choose derelict land, private and publicly owned and covertly and openly plant and tend decorative, herbal and food plants.


Guerilla gardening at night

Wider scale examples have been increasing in recent years due to the exacerbation of untenable living conditions and higher food prices. In 1995 Tacamiche banana plantation workers in Honduras illegally grew vegetables on abandoned plantation land rather than leave with the plantation's closure. In May 1996 activists affiliated with "The Land is Ours" occupied 13 acres of derelict land belonging to the Guinness Co. in the banks of River Thames in Wandsworth, South London. The action claimed to highlight what the occupiers described as "the appalling misuse of urban land, the lack of provisions for affordable housing and the deterioration of the urban environment." The community built there lasted for 5.5 months before being evicted. These acts are prompted out of desperation for survival, but on both a physical and psychic level, and imaginative practice is essential to the construction of these new environments. Through a gaze that subverts and disrupts our dominant financescapes, technoscapes and mediascapes the masked qualities of our land and our relationship to it are revealed. As post-modern subjects, we recognize everywhere as a potential site for central communal and spiritual exchange.