In Search of Space

By H.E. Whitney

In Search of Space: Individual Claims of Public Space and Property in the University Library.
November 15, 2009

So I begin this short essay from the standpoint of a lowly staff assistant at a university library. The perks of the job are few but when I am free, I do manage to scour the internet for minutiae such as the latest football standings, the most recent Paul Krugman article, the newest row concerning Glen Beck’s antics, insect studies, or innovations in waste disposal. Occasionally I will peruse alternative media such as the Boston Phoenix or Alternet or high brow cultural magazines and journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, or the Journal of Postmodern Culture. Outside of these moments I lend study room keys to students, remove paper jams from the library printers, troubleshoot computer software problems, or help students research their papers. It is a thankless job, but since I am a graduate student, the librarians who hired me now have comfortable respites from these otherwise rote aspects of working in a college library. I’ve spent much of my life in the library so I probably know more about where things are than they do.

One of the most intriguing aspects of a college library environment is the quest for space. I don’t have to worry about finding a desk or table to perform my duties because one is already set aside for me to assist patrons. But the patron must find a table or chair to study or a workstation from which to scroll through Facebook pages or YouTube videos. (I think it is hilarious that there are signs on the workstations saying “These Computers Are Reserved fo Academic Research Only” when half of the monitors I see show the Facebook websites on any given day.) Yet what intrigues me about working in the library is the quest for space and the array of conventions used by students to establish personal territory.

Butted table-tops. (See first picture.) The circular or rectangular table-tops in my work area are about 3 ½ feet in diameter. Normally when I arrive to work, I will see two or three tables butted together but only one occupant. The occupant is sometimes waiting for two or three fellow students. Gender tends to play a role in this phenomenon, as women tend to study with other women while men tend to be solitary when they study. But since the tables are 3 ½feet in diameter, three “ordinary” sized people should be able to comfortably share a single table. (I know, I know: we are all fat Americans, right?) Yet two or three people using two tables is overkill. Which leads to. . .

Reserving chairs and tables simply by leaving personal effects on them. This occurrence is widespread. Visualize the following scenario. There is one table with three chairs. There is one student sitting in one of the three chairs.  Yet he or she has placed his or her laptop in one chair and a knapsack or book bag in the other. So three chairs at this table are presumably “occupied”, although there is only one human being using the table. For prospective library patrons looking for a study area, this particular table has been exclusively cordoned off by this one patron. (See second picture.)  In this picture, the woman’s purse also appears to be “studying”. While there is an empty chair across from the woman for another person to sit and share the table, she has made it clear that her bag will not defer its chair to a prospective human occupant. This isn’t bad in itself but when there are several other people at tables doing the same thing, demand for tables and chairs goes through the roof.

This scenario is laughable insofar as it expresses the vanity of claiming a public object for one’s self or for one’s property. The mind of the college student who perpetrates this act is sadly misinformed by our system of commodity and exchange, which seeks to place a value on everything, including abstractions such as “space”.  For the table hogger, he or she feels leaving belongings on the table constitutes the purchase of that table for his or her exclusive use. The problem is compounded when the occupant leaves the table for extended period of time, yet leaves his or her belongings at the table.

During peak periods when library traffic is high, a table that is being “used”, but with no human occupant, presents problems: for one, it inconveniences other patrons who need tables to attend to their studies. It is also a waste of resources from the library’s point of view: fewer individuals can use tables when a single individual has laid exclusive claim to them and fails to maximize the use of them from the community’s perspective. (See third picture.) In this picture the table (foreground) is “occupied” by a single individual: there is a single book bag on the table-top with a book and notepaper. In an attempt to preserve “ownership” of this table, the patron has left his or her stuff at the table. I see this very often, but I’ve also seen people leave valuables such as iPods, cell phones, laptops, and purses unattended for hours!

Nothing is more instinctive to the capitalist mind but to declare a thing “mine”: even when that thing is shared by all. Tables and chairs in libraries are publicly shared objects. Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that we perhaps need to get library patrons in general to understand knowledge as a communal endeavor instead of as an object to be individually possessed at all costs. Libraries exist to serve the needs of all knowledge seekers, so it should make sense that we can share library furniture as well as books, right?

H.E. Whitney, Jr. is a PhD student in history at Florida State University. H.E’s fields of study are the history of science, intellectual history, and technology and culture. H.E. is originally from Suffolk, Virginia but has called California, Ohio, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Florida home at some point. H.E. has taught philosophy and graphic design/multimedia studies at the college level and enjoy creating digital art when not pontificating on scientific, cultural, or historical matters.

The Good Quiz

The Good Quiz: How good are you?

Answer the following questions with absolute honesty and tally your number of yes answers and no answers to see how good you are.

Do you think that female humans are in any way inferior to male humans? Yes or No
Do you think that people who do not share your identical and exact religious views are inferior to you? Yes or No
Do you think that people of a certain ethnicity are in any way inferior to you and your own exact blend of ethnic backgrounds? Yes or No
Do you think that people who do not believe in God are in any way inferior to you or less good than you? Yes or No
Do you think that people who are attracted to their own gender are imperfect? Yes or No
Do you think that homosexual people are a potential dangerous threat to the safety and well-being of children? Yes or No
Do you think that female humans should be treated differently to male humans with regards to rights and freedoms?  Yes or No
Do you think that physically less able people are less important or of less value than the able? Yes or No
Do you think that “mentally unwell” people are less important than the “normal”? Yes or No
Do you think that people who have different moral standards with regards to sex and promiscuity are not as good as yourself? Yes or No
Do you think that gay people are not naturally so inclined? Yes or No
Do you think that governments and religions should prevent two people of the same gender from marrying each other? Yes or No
Do you think it is alright to put someone to death or imprison them for adultery or flirting? Yes or No
Do you think that the poor and/or homeless should be completely responsible for their current circumstances? Yes or No
Do you think that elderly people are less important or valuable than the young? Yes or No

Answers:

• If you answered with 15 NO answers, you are good.
• If you answered with 14 or less NO answers, you are not good, and you should seriously consider being less horrible.

Note, some contentious  issues, such as abortion, and euthanasia etc., have been deliberately omitted from the quiz, because everyone seems to think one camp is right and the other wrong, and few people ever change their mind. Among the truly objective, there may never be a general yes or no answer on such issues, but the truly objective are a rare minority.

How Art Almost Killed An Entire People

By Jeffrey the Barak

At times, we wander the galleries and see pieces of art that look as if they could hurt someone, or kill someone, but in a way this has actually happened.

I refer to a place commonly known as Easter Island. This is it’s modern name, given to the place by Christian explorers from Holland in 1722 when they happened to come across this land on their Easter Sunday.

For most of history, This place had no name, and no inhabitants, but at sometime between 400 and 600 C.E. a human civilisation, the Polynesians, found it, and it became known as Rapa Nui.

We know from the surviving Polynesian people here and across Oceana that for at least two thousand years, their relatively advanced society was capable of trans-oceanic explorations by canoe that no modern sailor in their right mind would dare attempt. By contrast, the people of the nations that would later become the world’s explorers, the Britons, the French, The Spanish, The Portuguese, The Dutch were by comparison, quite behind in terms of long-distance seafaring.

Even the Mediterranean traders of the day would have been amazed at the voyages back and forth that the ancient Polynesians embarked upon.

So art came to Rapa Nui with its first people. It is generally accepted that they came from either the Marquesas Islands or Mangareva, which like everywhere else, are very far indeed from Rapa Nui.

The oral history tells us they brought plants, food animals and tools and their mission was colonization. The climate on Rapa Nui was certainly not the tropical paradise they were used to so they had a lot of adaptation to do in order to survive and thrive.

Rapa Nui was covered in trees, palms and other types, and drinking water was naturally gathered in volcanic craters, despite the island’s absence of rivers or streams. The island also had obsidian, great for making cutting tools and weapons, and it had lot of special rock which we call lapilli tuff.

Some say the islanders employed slash and burn techniques to clear land for farming, and others say, they used up all the wood in order to make and transport the huge stone statues that Rapa Nui is now famous for.

With the forest cover gone, the rain and weather eroded the topsoil and famine ensued. But let’s take a step back and focus on the art.

The art of Rapa Nui is divided between two periods. The Moai period and the Birdman period. On other islands in Polynesia, there were statues, (Moai), atop shrines, (Ahu). which were representations of chiefs (living and dead) and the gods in which they believed.

Dead chiefs were sacred, and after their life passed, their representative Moa remained. Rapa Nui has around 900 such moai, either standing, toppled or partially completed, still in the quarry or partway to their final site. There are about 360 ahu. The moai did not look out to sea, as commonly assumed, but they faced away from the sea, towards the villages. Some completed and erected statues had white coral eyes and wore stone hats or top knots called pukao, carved from a rock that was more red (scoria).

There is much debate as to exactly how the heavy statues were moved, assembled, erected etc. They are so heavy, that engineering on a grand scale was definitely needed, but the methods used have passed from memory.

It seems clear that at some point, the statues were worshiped as gods, and were a means of control for the ruling society, called the “Long Ears”. Everyone else, lived as subjects of the ruling Long Ears. However they were not slaves, but simply lowly subjects of the rulers, who would eventually rebel aginst the Long Ears and topple the very statues that generations suffered to construct.

It is said that so much wood was expended on the statue making that the islanders could no longer build canoes, so they became unable to travel to and from other parts of Polynesia. However, it is possible that the forests were burned to clear land, without any understanding of the long term environmental consequences. Without canoes, there was little opportunity to fish offshore, and without the lush vegetation, farming was all that was left.

So in isolation, with the natural resources of the island being eroded, burned and used for making statues, the people sealed their fate. Numbering as high as seven thousand in it’s heyday, the society on Rapa Nui became unsustainable with the resources at hand, and they were unable to leave or go for help.

Eventually, out of this declining situation, a powerful warrior class emerged, called Matato’a. And a change of power and leadership ensued. This also heralded the second art movement. All of the statues were toppled, some face up, some face down, and a new, even sillier religion began to dominate.

This was the birdman cult, (Tangatamenu). Once a year on a small island off the coast of Rapa Nui, migrating birds laid eggs. It was a bountiful annual harvest. The young warriors would hold a swimming race across the rough, shark-infested straits between the main island and bird island. The first man back holding an intact egg became absolute ruler for exactly one year, until this was repeated.

In the time after the upright moai, the art consisted of carvings and drawings on rock, depicting a bird-man character. Again the sheer quantity of this art in the virtual absence of all other, shows us that life at the time was all about the birdman. And a new monotheism emerged, coincidentally featuring a single, creator god, not the Jewish-Christian-Moslem one, but one with the name Makemake.

If the Western sailing ships had never found Easter Island, the natives may or may not have survived to this day, but considering what the sailors did to them, it is amazing that any have survived. The so-called advanced civilizations from Europe murdered, enslaved, kidnapped and infected the people with diseases such as smallpox and syphilis, and those few who survived these horrors were later subjected to forced Christianization.

As a result of the missionary subjugation, at this point there was no more art for a long time. The island was culturally dead until relatively recently when inhabitants of Polynesian decent began to nurture their cultural heritage, which amazingly still has much in common with other far way parts of Polynesia. And so through dance, costume, cuisine and the tatoo, the art of the island survives, but this time it won’t kill them, it may save them, from us.