Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations is written by Elizabeth Freeman and was published in New Literary History, 2000, 31: 727–744.

„We are the living symbols of a world without frontiers, a world of freedom, without weapons, where each may travel without let or hindrance from the steppes of central Asia to the Atlantic Coast, from the high plateau of South Africa to the forests of Finland.“ (Vaida Voivod III, President of the World Community of Gypsies (quoted from an interview published by Amsterdam, 18 May 1963. Algemeen Handelsblad,)

Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping search for a new way of life is the only aspect still impassioning. Aesthetic and other disciplines have proved blatantly inadequate in this regard and merit the greatest detachment. We should therefore delineate some provisional terrains of observation, including the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets.

One of the basic situationist practices is the [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

A city, no matter how efficiently planned outor how beautiful, is rendered worthless without people. It cannot exist because it takes people to make a city. It is people who willtake the empty shells of buildings and make them function. It ispeople who take space and turn it into places. It is people who anchorthe city in time, even if only for a fleeting moment. If we examinede Certeau"s three requirements for the ideal or "concept" city, we find that it leaves us with a city without life or presence.

The need to build a large number of cities quickly, a need brought about as a result of the industrialization of underdeveloped countries and the acute housing shortage after the war, has made urbanism into one of today's key cultural problems. We would even go so far as to consider that no cultural development is possible without new conditions in our everyday surroundings.

Cut

By the word “cut” I mean to reference a prominent tactic in what James Snead has called a black cultural insistence on repetition. In a passage on musical form Snead writes: “The ‘cut’ overtly insists on the repetitive nature of the music, by abruptly skipping it back to another beginning which we have already heard.” (1) In “cut,” then, I reiterate the repetition in difference that is both “again,” or the same, and “an other” – “another beginning we have already heard.”
In an essay published in 1981, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Snead warns readers not to prop up the false divide that articulates white cultural forms as devoid of repetition and black cultural forms as redolent with the repetitive. Rather, Snead asks that we interrogate what is at stake in different cultural stances toward repetition and their relations to the issue of origin – that is, that we examine attitudes toward repetition and “originality” as those attitudes take diverse cultural forms. Is it possible that panic about the ideality of origin and the fear of potential debauchery in the mimetic has more valence in white cultural approaches to repetition than in other cultural modes? (2) If so, looking to black cultural heritage in the widespread embrace of repetition as a key quality of postmodern performance may raise further questions about the drive to “legitimacy” that results in the isolation of white “fathers” of performance art. (3)

Rebecca Schneider wrote this text for "Public Sentiments", a special double issue of S&F Online in Summer 2003. The online version is available at: The Scholar and Feminist Online, Published by The Barnard Center for Research on Women

Collectivity is something that takes place as we arbitrarily gather to take part in different forms of cultural activity such as looking at art. If we countenance that beyond all the roles that are allotted to us in culture --roles such as those of being viewers, listeners or audience members in one capacity or another -- there are other emergent possibilities for the exchange of shared perspectives or insights or subjectivities -- we allow for some form of emergent collectivity. Furthermore that performative collectivity , one that is produced in the very act of being together in the same space and compelled by similar edicts, might just alert us to a form of mutuality which cannot be recognised in the normative modes of shared beliefs, interests or kinship.

Perhaps one way to define modernity would be in terms of the spirit of criticism that animates it. To be modern is to be critical, and to be critical is to be modern. Criticism seems to the all-pervasive during modernity, the very engine of the modern project. Criticism presupposes questionalibility and a relentless quest for the conditions of emergence and existence of words ands things. It leaves nothing untouched by its spirit except for itself, since the spirit of criticism thrives on and presupposes its own unquestionability. Criticism questions, but cannot itself be questioned. Through such a denial of reflexivity by reflexivity, criticism can excercise and reinforce its own authority endlessly. Criticism forms an invisible empire to which everything that claims self-identity automatically becomes subject. There is no escape allowed, other than that which comes with the abnegation of all identity, which is exactly the prerogative claimed by criticism itself, which is faceless and omnipresent – as a possibility and as an activity. Criticism is to modernity what theology was to the Middle Ages: a concrete universality, without center or boundaries.