Michael Lissack immense collective act, rolling along, ceaselessly unrolling, without aggres- sion, without objectives - transferential sociality, doubtless the only kind in a hyperreal, technological, soft-mobile era, exhausting itself in surfaces, net- works, and soft technologies. No verticality or underground, no intimacy or sense of belonging, no streets or facades, no center or monuments: a fantastic space, a spectral and discontinuous succession of all the various functions, of all signs with no hierarchical ordering - an extravaganza of indifference, extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces - the power of pure open space, the kind you find in the deserts. The power of the desert form: it is the erasure of traces in the desert, of the signified of signs in the cities, of any psychology in bodies. An animal and metaphysical fascination - the direct fascination of space, the immanent fascination of dryness and sterility. Today the concept "landscape" is almost less likely to refer to a genre of painting than to a sociological image. When we hear people speak about the urban or the suburban landscape, we picture either the density of production and transportation in city life-human society swallowed up by skyscrapers, bridges, and freeways or small-scale outcropping in the hinterland of shop- ping malls, ranch houses, and office parks. Similarly, the smokestacks and red-brick chimneys of an earlier industrial landscape evoke a way of life, its rhythms, and-such is the power of this built environment-its abstract social controls. The struggle to impose the factory owners' idea of discipline cre- ated the familiar landscape of industrial capitalism, with the time-sheet, the timekeeper, the informers, and the fines. The postindustrial landscape in modem Vancouver or Silicon Valley is also evocative. Its image of ecology, leisure, and livability feeds off the consumption preferences of professionals in a service economy, even though those preferences conceal an underbelly of business and personal strain, female minority workers jammed into as- sembly jobs, and mounting suburban blight. Shopping centers have replaced political meetings and civic gatherings as arenas of public life. Despite private ownership and service to paying customers, they arc perceived as a fairly democratic form of development. Moreover, they are believed to open the downtown by creating a sense of place. Downtown developers derive a theme from former economic uses-the
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