Narrative of Place
Ultimately, I want to argue that the epistemological conflict implied by lieux de memoire suggests the importance of a narrative of place in our understanding of urbanism as a complex cultural phenomenon. I am convinced that places operate like other objects of culture with which we are more accustomed to performing a kind of rhetorical analysis. Places are fundamentally material, physical objects that cannot operate as a vector of meaning if they do not carry with them a narrative. Whether the narrative mode is memory or history, it is the narrative of a place that allows us to understand it and make conclusions about its cultures of meaning. We might find that, without a story, there is no there there.
Thus there is an important sense in which we are compelled to read places. If there is a skill that Urban Imagination has promoted most significantly, it has been to learn to treat places as texts. Often, this has looked like analyzing the host of texts – films, literature, music, etc. – that are associated with a place and learning how to make meaning of a place through these texts. Sometimes, as in the exercise that I’ve performed here, this has looked like trying to read the narrative of a place itself.
Nora’s contribution causes us to focus on the potential complexities of a narrative of place. This idea of the struggle between memory and history in representing narratives of place compels us to read such narratives critically. In assessing the degree to which the fashions of the time have changed the nature of the narrative of place, we open our eyes to different styles of representation in place narratives. Because the narrative of place is so essential to our understanding of the urban and the urban’s understanding of itself, these narratives deserve a critical lens. As our relationship to the past continues to “accelerate” and becomes more fragmented, as Nora argues, and our modern intellectual tendencies – secularization, intellectualization, estrangement, rationalization – continue to dictate our understanding of the past, it seemingly becomes more and more important to understand the nature of the traditional forms of memory, such that we can see through and criticizes the potential incoherencies of history. As memory and history continue their struggle, I believe that we likely perceive the modes to be in a dialectical struggle and strong historians will find places of synthesis between the two, promoting altogether a more nuanced understanding of the urban.