In late 2009 Switzerland saw the close of a nationwide referendum on the construction of Islamic minarets. One BBC News article reported at the time that “no- one can quite understand how a proposal widely regarded even by its supporters as destined for failure at the ballot box actually came to be passed”. But though many Swiss were surely embarrassed by the ostensible bigotry of even the initial proposal, the referendum, which was backed by a strong campaign on the part of the right-wing Swiss People ́s Party, passed with more than 57.5% in favor of a ban.
We develop into the subjects of the narratives we construct, and this narratives are read on the panorama of our environment. The way we see the world around us involves a sense of place and narrative by which we translate our lives and our world from the present to the historical. However, being unable to see into the world ́s future, we are situated between the certainly told story and the impossibility of the horizon which, if captured, would be, as we see it from here, the end of the story. In this way, certain political imaginations may play themselves out in campaigns (in this case those of fear and xenophobia) that are projected onto the skyline.
The panoramic sight of a city, such as the skylines portrayed on post cards or the view from the CN Tower, contain an ongoingness towards their framed vanishing point. The frontal, two dimensional view is legible, but the end of this three-dimensional plane seems too hard or even impossible to reach, the distance unthinkable; the horizon is a place that is never arrived at. It is no place at all, a ‘no-place’. But upon the horizontal plane there is another, perpendicular axis: The skyline of a city contains narrative with plots and subplots. It reminds us of what is no longer visible, of things of inescapable visibility, and of things of which - precisely because of their scale and permanence - we need to be reminded. The components of a city’s skyline give us a deep, imaginary sense of place because they interrupt or even obstruct the horizon as vertical intercepts. In this sense the panoramic view of place is a naturally historical mode of representation and imagination; because of the viewer’s perspective, the horizontal dimension is collapsed and (as with a picture-postcard) and the skyline can be sequentially read from side to side. The horizon, however, signifies by way of our view point the future, drawing us forth, straight ahead, across its axis, non-conclusive in all of its imaginable dimensions. At any given time, one may read the city across its entire skyline, but such a mode of reading never ends.
It is in this operation that the significance of narrative in visual culture is found: to view all at once a space traversed over time, a place changed over time, provides a visual companion to our narratival notion of time and history. The skyline as a node, a striation upon an otherwise infinite horizon, represents the city as a unitary, singular place in our imaginations. A place, in being self-containing, contains its passage of time. As Michel de Certeau described it, narrative exists, at least conceptually, in space. In Roland Barthes ́ analysis of the Eiffel tower, he described a view from whichParis becomes a place as well as a landscape, and a view of a history of Paris to be assembled and “deciphered”.
The panoramic imagination increased around the 18th century in Europe by way of various developments – hot air balloons, trains, panoramas – and at the same time the horizon, which had been a limit, came to represent limitlessness (See Denise Oleksijczuk’s book The First Panoramas). For Louis Marin, the Sears Tower in Chicago is a “simulacrum of eternity”. This implies that the tower spans the past and the future: its size is so great that it towers over not only Chicago but over time – the tower is than 'larger than life'. The effect is that the structure radiates permanence: it is immovably great – indeed the tower has always been a thing of fantasy, as far back as the biblical story of Babel. From its top, one can observe the unreachability of the horizon. In 'Frontiers of Utopia' Marin can be read to suggest that the relationship between vision and the passage of time produces a corresponding narrative and destination, history and utopia. This is how the tower or minaret in its impossible way, as Barthes said of the Eiffel Tower, “means everything”.
Such structures, in collusion with the skyline and the horizon, relate to the development of our narratival view of the world. It is between the omnidirectional and inversely reciprocal panoramic viewpoint, and the inescapable visibility of the structures providing such a view that a sense of place and utopia is visually facilitated. The place in its imaginary existence contains its own ongoing narrative – inconclusive as its horizon. The tower is, by way of its broad presence, in a visual relationship with the viewer at ground level. It is this panoptic presence that gives figures on the skyline an intersubjective significance, a social significance in our visual culture. The towers that see us all in our separate positions, in a shared city, occupy space in our lives visa vis our imaginations.
The presentation of public space is an area of political engagement, and this is likely to be contextually significant. In Vancouver, Canada, a policy was adopted that all signs on the Granville street strip – the entertainment district – should be neon. This was not simply a preference for homogeneity, but an opting for a particular connotational signification. This was around the time of the 2010 Winter Olympics and was part of an effort to shape Vancouver as a “world class city.” Eight years earlier a similar authority was exercised when hundreds of people occupied and rallied around the old Woodwards building over the course of over 80 days, demanding social housing and an end to poverty. A banner was hung from the giant W – a feature of the Vancouver skyline – that sat atop the tower rising from the building ́s roof: “CAMPBELL ́S OLYMPIC SHAME”. The banner, which referenced the British Colombian Premier at the time, was photoshopped out of an image used in the Vancouver Sun newspaper as part of an news story. The point is that it was, as is typical, the tower that was wanted as an iconic image. These things are indicative of the political regulation of public space on a visual level. They are, like the Swiss minaret ban, part of the construction of political narrative; a particular memory of a particular building can be engineered.
The Swiss referendum, however, was not as logical and transparent: it was not about the obvious function of a public structure, but about its greater, deeper significance, its representational function. The ban focused on the sight of minarets, and this worked as an inadvertent expression of racism and xenophobia, indicating an emotional response to a changing skyline, the emotion being hatred. The politics of the debate are played out here visually, involving emotional responses. Affective, emotional responses and expressions are described by Katz as ̈formal evidence of what, in one ́s relation with others, speech cannot conceal ̈. This implies a non-reasonability - precisely that which is always part of a racist argument – such an argument requires a constant evasion of justification.
What is interesting about the ban is that it is a policy of symbols. The minarets can be
seen in this context as an assertion of identity and presence.
The possibility of what can be imagined is a corollary of the standards by which we view the world around us. Put simply, reality and imagination are in a mediated, dialectical correspondence. With the development of representational technologies there has been a gradual inversion of the arena as a mode of spectation. The view has become globular, the orbital view of earth is the inversion of the panorama; it is the ultimate panorama. This development coincides with the rise of transnational capitalism and the decreased relevance of the nation state in the global context. This degeneration has meant that nationality and place, since they no longer encompass or transcend the political contest and ideology contained within them, have become self- referentially ideological in themselves. So, this particular xenophobic reaction corresponds not to an invasion, but a gradual appearance of cultural difference – not to another world, but to a seemingly expanded world: ‘traditional’ Switzerland becomes the foreground to its own horizon.
The racism, xenophobia/ethnophobia of the ban is thus based on a perceived psychic, cultural, structural threat: the figures of the skyline stand between us and the horizon – between us and what limits our access to knowledge. If we proceed onward a step from Barthes suggestion that ̈in order for something to be known, it must be spoken, but also, as soon as it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true ̈, then it is no wonder that certain signs are banned from the skyline – from the place where things can be most broadly and clearly announced, where stories are told, and space is designated.
It is important to recognize how this is not directly a debate about individuals but rather about public objects that are experienced collectively, and yet it has at its heart an intersubjective issue, an issue of individuals and identities: minaret construction was opposed not because the structures do not represent a population in Switzerland, but because they do. The opposition was directed at a visual confirmation of the Other ́s presence in the Place. Exclusion from the skyline means omission from a place and a story - a way of antagonizing or invalidating a group ́s actual social presence. Maintaining the illusion of an impossible universality involves trying to make difference invisible.
Cities are characterized partly by a sense of change and growth. The Swiss fear is of a story betraying a reflection of the assumed subject positions – the assumed privilege – of those standing before it – a disruption of a symbolic order of cultural subjectivity and values, a disruption of privilege, dominance and supremacy. Racist nationalists do not want a swiss story told with foreign (Muslim) signifiers. The banning of certain signs from the skyline is the political regulation of visual culture: what is repressed from the skyline is repressed from our imagination, from our sense of place and narrative.
The possibility of what can be imagined is a corollary of the standards by which we view the world around us. Put simply, reality and imagination are in a mediated, dialectical correspondence. With the development of representational technologies there has been a gradual inversion of the arena as a mode of spectation. The view has become globular, the orbital view of earth is the inversion of the panorama; it is the ultimate panorama. This development coincides with the rise of transnational capitalism and the decreased relevance of the nation state in the global context. This degeneration has meant that nationality and place, since they no longer encompass or transcend the political contest and ideology contained within them, have become self- referentially ideological in themselves. So, this particular xenophobic reaction corresponds not to an invasion, but a gradual appearance of cultural difference – not to another world, but to a seemingly expanded world: ‘traditional’ Switzerland becomes the foreground to its own horizon.
The racism, xenophobia/ethnophobia of the ban is thus based on a perceived psychic, cultural, structural threat: the figures of the skyline stand between us and the horizon – between us and what limits our access to knowledge. If we proceed onward a step from Barthes suggestion that ̈in order for something to be known, it must be spoken, but also, as soon as it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true ̈, then it is no wonder that certain signs are banned from the skyline – from the place where things can be most broadly and clearly announced, where stories are told, and space is designated.
It is important to recognize how this is not directly a debate about individuals but rather about public objects that are experienced collectively, and yet it has at its heart an intersubjective issue, an issue of individuals and identities: minaret construction was opposed not because the structures do not represent a population in Switzerland, but because they do. The opposition was directed at a visual confirmation of the Other ́s presence in the Place. Exclusion from the skyline means omission from a place and a story - a way of antagonizing or invalidating a group ́s actual social presence. Maintaining the illusion of an impossible universality involves trying to make difference invisible.
Cities are characterized partly by a sense of change and growth. The Swiss fear is of a story betraying a reflection of the assumed subject positions – the assumed privilege – of those standing before it – a disruption of a symbolic order of cultural subjectivity and values, a disruption of privilege, dominance and supremacy. Racist nationalists do not want a swiss story told with foreign (Muslim) signifiers. The banning of certain signs from the skyline is the political regulation of visual culture: what is repressed from the skyline is repressed from our imagination, from our sense of place and narrative.
[1] Louis Marin, Frontiers of Utopia
