On Tom Wolfe’s ‘Las Vegas (What?); Las Vegas (Cant hear you! Too Noisy); Las Vegas!!!’

Lights, casinos, naked girls, night, big limos, loads of booze and drugs, – these are the associative images popping up in my head, when I hear ‘Las Vegas’. So, schizophrenic ‘Hernias’ and ‘buttocks décolletage’ mixed up with handfuls of amphetamine and meprobamate drawn in the litters of alcohol in Wolfe’s piece didn’t surprise me, I have expected something like this. The place where everything is bright, loud and fairly straight forward not to complicate the process of ‘senses’ isolation’ undergone by some drug intoxicated individual experiencing ‘consciousness expansion’.

But ‘old babes’?!!! Old babes were a complete shock to the system! I rather conservatively visualise the granny (aka old babe :)): a) knitting, b)cosily watching some soap on TV, c) writing memoirs/novels/detectives, d) gardening, e)playing lotto/bingo, but not hanging out in Las Vegas maniacally pulling slot machines handles. Not LIVING in Las Vegas! This city, as I perceived it, could be a home, actually not even a home but a ‘temporary base’, only for some glamour girls, crazy musicians and casino stuff. I have never thought about Las Vegas’s residents (does such a term exist???). Well, clearly I was wrong: there IS life in Las Vegas! And ‘old babes playing the slot machines are part of its permanent landscape’.

There might be a zillion of reasons why Las Vegas is attracting ‘old babes’. Nostalgia, finally gained freedom from preconceptions, boredom or simple addiction, - I have no idea. However, the fact pictured by Wolfe in the 60s is still valid: majority of casino-goers and gamblers are in the ‘over-something’ age group. Well, at least some fun to look forward to :)

On Henri Lefebvre ‘The Production of Space. Chapter 2: Social Space’

I will start from saying this text, which I read and re-read number of times, made me think; made me think really, really hard. And I still don’t understand if I am thinking in the right direction, but at least I am thinking which is always a good sign for a blond girl ;).

Where are the limits of the ‘social space’ analysed by Lefebvre? How small is too small for ‘social space’? A city, as discussed, is a produced social space. What if the ‘macro-space’ level will be analysed not only in terms of social relationships which create an outline, a boundary for the space, but also in terms of ‘micro’ level elements such as ‘micro-spaces’? A tower block for instance. It certainly tick these boxes: ‘..any space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships – and this despite the fact that a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things (objects and products)’. On the basis of this quote I would argue that the tower block IS a social space. This social space is undoubtedly produced as it ‘is the result of repetitive actions’. However, on the ‘macro-space’ level the tower block is ‘a thing’, relationships of which with other ‘things’ make up the social space of the city. Lefebvre argues that ‘social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder’. My assumption of the duality of the tower block (being at once a social space and ‘a thing’) suggests that Lefebvre’s argument can be applied only when spaces on one level (‘macro-space’ or ‘micro-space’)are analysed. Perhaps not only ‘social reality is dual, multiple, plural’, but social relations are dual as well? Maybe space being a product of social relations of ‘things’, which according to Lefebvre ‘lie in order to conceal their origin’, lies as well, because relations of untruthful things must untruthful as well…

Ermmm, I think I got lost at this point. However, I liked the idea of duality of the space (being ‘a thing’ at one level and set of social relations on another). I am also interested in the question how far can I ‘unpack’ the space in order to find its true origins. Is my tiny room a social space and if it is, does it have any effect on the ‘macro-level’ space of the city? What are the smallest elements/social relations of the social space of the city? Are they the same as of space of the country??

Some quotes:

‘Itself the outcome of past actions, social space is what permits fresh actions to occur, while suggesting others and prohibiting yet others.’

‘Repetitious spaces are the outcome of repetitive gestures (those of the workers) associated with instruments which are both duplicable and designed to duplicate..’

‘Space used to be considered in emotional and religious manner’

‘It is in their nature as things and products co conceal that truth. Not they only don’t speak at all: they use their own language, the language of things and products, to tout the satisfaction they can supply and the needs they can meet; they use it too to lie, to dissimulate not only the amount of social labour that they can contain, not only the productive labour that they embody, but also the social relationships of exploitation and domination on which they are founded.’

‘Things lie, and when, having become commodities, they lie in order to conceal their origin, namely social labour, they tend to set themselves up as absolutes.’

‘So-called social reality is dual, multiple, plural.’

‘Knowledge emerged from a practice, and elaborated upon by means of formalization and the application of a logical order’

‘..any space implies, contains and dissimulates social relationships – and this despite the fact that a space is not a thing but rather a set of relations between things (objects and products). Might we say that it is or tends to become the absolute Thing? The answer must be affirmative to the extent that every thing which achieves autonomy through the process of exchange (i.e. attains the status of a commodity) tends to become absolute – a tendency, in fact, that Marx’s concept of fetishism (practical alienation under capitalism). The Thing, however, never quite becomes absolute, never quite emancipates itself from the activity, from use, from need, from ‘social being’. What are the implications of this for space?’

‘A further important aspect of spaces of this kind [produced] is their increasingly pounced visual character’.

‘…collectives still so close to nature that the concepts of production and product, and hence any idea of a ‘production of space’, are largely irrelevant to our understanding of them’

‘Thus space is undoubtedly produced even when the scale is not that of the major highways, airports or public works’.

“social space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather, it subsumes things produced and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity—their (relative) order and/or (relative) disorder”