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“architecture and urbanity: theory, insight and inspiration”

14/08/2011 Home: Territory and Identity [J. MacGregor-Wise] | The Vietnam Veterans Memorial [A. Parr]

When you marry, marry a railroad man oh-ah

When you marry, marry a railroad man well now

Everyday Sunday, dollar in your hand oh-ah

Everyday Sunday, dollar in your hand well now

O Lord Berta Berta O Lord gal oh-ah

O Lord Berta Berta O Lord gal well

~ “Berta, Berta” (Gandy Dancers)

Resonating in my reading of MacGregor-Wise’s “Home: Territory and Identity” and Parr’s “Deleuze and Memorial Culture” was MacGregor-Wise’s discussion of sound and territory (building upon the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s song bird’s refrain) as well as the becoming subject which both M-W and Parr make mention of.

Reflecting on sound, habitual activity, body memory, the song bird’s refrain, M-W’s car-singing during his commute—all in the context of territory / home / space demarcation—I see the African work song tradition, transported to various colonies with the slave trade, being demonstrative of vocal enunciation in service of the becoming-home. M-W writes that “a refrain always carries earth with it” (M-W, 304) and indeed this song tradition carried home in its traditional expression (“call and answer” format and physical expression of rhythm in the execution of labour), but it also manifested in the becoming-home as well (new language, new subjects, new rhythms?). This new life develops as a “becoming within an always already territorialized space” (M-W, 300) and a new cultural expression is born… one that morphs, as all things do, in their interaction with other vibrating assemblages, ad infinitum.

Culture, as M-W argues, is one of the “ways one makes oneself at home” (M-W, 300). Created from habitual activity, “the creation and repetition of habit” (M-W, 304), culture is rhythmic and it is in the participation in this rhythm that we live, mark space as ours and leave traces of ourselves vibrating within even more encompassing territories. We are subjects of these rhythms “caught up in… [their] the becoming of that rhythm, the rhythm created by coming together of the pulses of territories and milieus” (304). In as much as we are subject to the vibrative activity of rhythms and their territories, we also react to these rhythms and create a plethora of new affects (influencing the development of new musical genres as in the case of the work song). Take for example the work parties / chain gangs / Gandy Dancers fixing or laying train tracks across the United States… subject to the rhythm of colonial / post-colonial territorial (home) expansion and nation-making, while also becoming within this milieu. This might not be celebrated by “majoritarian history” (Parr, 58)—except in February–but its rhythms have imbued the North American cultural milieu in the subterfuge of the becoming subject, an action not altogether distinct from Maya Ying Lin’s Veteran’s Memorial—affect, not monument, but nonetheless, “traces of movement that has passed” (M-W, 298).