Billboarding and Cardboarding the Urban Space in Fez

Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF

By Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF Billboarding and Cardboarding the Urban Space in Fez PAGE: 2 Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF

2007-01-02

Introduction

The main streets and sidewalks of Fez are hastily being transformed, as if by a miraculous touch of a magical wand, into fine-looking mosaics, and smoothly asphalted carpets, the footways, all of a sudden, growing verdure and massively built palm trees. Each major concourse claims now its own distinctive outline; construction workers, painters and gardeners are industriously weaving out the city’s glossy caftan. Billboards are sprouting far and wide to bestow the city its global trademarks and patches. During one of my mornings in Fez, two weeks or three prior to the celebrations of the new year 2007, I contemplated the city’s revolutionary conversions and speedy alterations, coming to the conclusion, upon the arrival of my university bus, that the post colonial city was under construction. No, it was forcefully dragged by a countdown to the new year. Not at all, it was prostituting its traditional body in global strings, creating visual pleasures and happy penetrations everywhere under the feverishly hallucinating reverie for a ten-million-tourists Morocco. But outspokenly publicized through the bus windowpanes, I caught a sight of the city’s flip face. Two skeletal, tiny little girls were adjusting their cradle on the bus station’s footpath, not so far away from my busy thoughts on globalization, the very entertained ramifications on the city’s radiantly lustrous makeovers. I rapidly rotated, immensely riveted by the scary scenery that stood in striking statements to the enunciations of modernity, to the touristic enterprise, to the year 2010, to the global trademarks and patches, to the city’s striptease of its locality, to everything and to nothing. In the soft morning luminosity, their clothing, ragged and disfigured, their warningly starving faces and the grimy ground they plastered fused into a ghastly excremental smudge on the city’s happy metamorphosis. Thick and carefully beaten down carton boxes were a bed to the city’s wretched, to its ‘disposable’ crust. The two girls were facing one another, eyes closed, ignorant of Stuart Hall’s verbose theories on globalization, of Said’s intricate discussions of western ideologies, of the country‘s touristic ambitions, of who they are, of where they are. An ugly face.

DATE: Jen. 1, 07 Billboarding and Cardboarding the Urban Space in Fez PAGE: 3 Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF

This article seeks to bring an assortment of contradictory interactions within the urban space in Fez into play. Being a space of encounter between global and local artifacts, being a kernel of innermost and peripheral social and cultural bodies of significance, being a showground to the unadorned and aesthetical aspirations of the population, being a palimpsest of silent and spoken traces, being a trajectory curve from moments of shallow docile tameness to instances, uptight, ambiguous, abrupt, of gritty resistance, the post-colonial city of Fez, given all its stirring, crisscrossing interfaces, makes a rich platform for litigious contests. It is a seat of fierce moves, a site of struggle. The local strikes back

In contrast to discourses of borderlessness, a pervasive trope within the visual rhetoric of globalization is the active reconstitution of location or locality. This decidedly nostalgic strategy turns on particular forms of aestheticization, reconfirming the familiar within the exotic. It is nostalgic in that it substitutes the perceptual enormity of the global with the imagined timelessness of "otherness." (Goldstein, and Schreiber)

This language rings the bells of the up-to-the-minute implications of modernity. It rebuffs the claims of borderlessness as resulting from processes of informational and communicational revolutions within the world systems of digital transmissions and entails that locality is drastically sponsored and deliberately invigorated, founded on what can be diversely depicted as a encirclement of locality against global flows. To put these words in writing is to overlook the injection of global meanings into the local script. The local is currently self-consciously giving a hurl to the organic community into the immediate clasp of global circulation. To stake such a claim is to rest at a remove from the already interwoven threads of globalization within the local cloth; it is to celebrate the myths of location against the practicality of deterritorialization; it is to discount the forces of worldwide blurredness of both the local and the global into a tantalizing glocalization trough processes of transregional transactions. 'Globalization' and 'localization' each derive their sense from the unholy alliance that, together, they form. They attain their meaning in circumstances that implicate both in contradictory, asymmetrical, yet at the same time mutually reinforcing ways (B. Clarke, 185). The local and the global are accordingly charged by get- togetherness, interconnectedness and reciprocal interplay in this age of unremitting consumption.

Movement along these interactions, however, is not smoothly processed. It is ‘always already’ pervaded with rupture, incongruities, and apprehensions that escort these connections to their ultimate breakdowns and absolute failures. David B. Clarke builds a discussion on modern malfunctions juxtaposing the self-proclaimed ease of living in a consumer culture with its patent ‘dis-ease’, giving attention mostly to the way in which the consumer is likely to twist consumerism into a way of life. Whilst Clarke was striving to bring this idea home, he was equally, yet perhaps unconsciously, having the post-modern city in mind. We would categorically be confusing patterns of thinking, should we lapse into his conceptual framework. I am set to dwell at his double-termed concept of ‘dis-ease’ to be able to draw a picture, clear as it is, of Fez as dropping anchors into the post-colonial terrain, thus resisting the pigeonholing of either post- modernism or its underlying tenets. The introductory anecdote on the two meager girls serves to make this idea clear by placing globalization ‘under erasure’, to use the words of Derrida, thus throwing its archetypal supremacy in the abyss of frenzy panic. To hence envisage the body of Fez as both pierced by glossy billboards as global adornments and tainted by the grubby cardboards is to keep Fez displaced in an interstice between ‘billboarding’ and ‘cardboarding’. Far from tumbling into Clarke’s footsteps by thinking that globalization structures a profile as an “untamed and untamable” power, at the rear of the budding impotence of modernity's “once- vaunted ordering capacity”, one can juxtaposedly declare it as dramatically domesticated by the ‘dreadful’ forces of locality. Globalization studies often take as a given the very conditions that are the premises for the resistance and rebellion of those who are most marginalized by the new capital flows. These conditions are the growing “deterritorialization” of peoples, products, and the production process itself, the “fragmentation” or atomization of personal relations and political units, the “homogenization” or “hybridization” of culture, and the “alienation” of people from community, kin groups, and even self (June C. Nash, Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization, Routledge, 2001, 303)

Nush’s statement throws light on the so called hushed voices within social orders and vividly pictures them in instances where they ferociously craft “counterplots” to the new world systems and organisms. Whether one is still unmindful about the convoluted workings of the media, or

DATE: Jen. 1, 07 Billboarding and Cardboarding the Urban Space in Fez PAGE: 5 Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF still as yet doubtful about the counter hegemonic mechanisms entwined by those made invisible in the hectic advances and parasitic intrusions of global blood into the veins of local vicinities, whether one is not well-positioned to see the side-lined margins creating upsetting, unsetting, and disconcerting cyclones from within the mainstream currents of globalization, one can still catch oneself aroused to potential substitutes to discursive creeds. Resistance to globalization knocks from underneath--formed within the local places whose significance to globalization has been taken too lightly (Sheppard, 2002). In their article The Alter-Globalization Movement and Sartre's Morality and History, Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone contended that while resistance to globalization can be sought by way of launching “punctual protests”, which embrace both solidarity-building gatherings such as the World Social Forums and massive protests held at meeting sites of the architects of globalization, such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, there are less detectable but more omnipresent resistance, direct as it is, to globalization, symptomized in the form of enduring struggles by those expelled from consumption. CASE STUDY: disciplining the ad This paper has sought to delineate a theory linked to the counter-hegemonic practices of the local with regard to its obvious, yet not always too overt, connections with and disentanglements from the global. By means of a case study we shall survey how a single ad can endorse the litigious debates herein contested, only when it submits itself to the perplexing and equally impulsively ‘hot-tempered’ readings of the ‘local outsiders’; that is, the most involuntarily deprived social forms, marginalized from and within consumption. Earlier in this paper, I related fairly two distinct faces of the urban space in Fez. At the present, we shall explore particularly the associations these social categories uphold in relation to the billboards that are being sexualizing their territorial globe within the city, together with the meanings affixed to those intended by the advertisers.

For the most part, this is an advertisement by Nivea, using a long-established and customary image of an elegant and enchantingly attractive woman in a radiant pink camisole, giving the camera one of those ‘I’m mysterious’ looks, while simultaneously, yet very tantalizingly, revealing her left neat armpit by gracefully stretching her arms with a soft touch on her fluid hair. A glossy image. This is an image that is constantly cyclical, though. See ( FIG 2) and (FIG:3).

FIG :2 FIG :3

The sexy stretching of the arms is meant to be alluring for three reasons. First, to sexualize the body. Second, to sell the product. Third, to make the armpit which is supposedly one of the various foul-smelling parts of the body aromatically pleasing, and as such linking the visual tidiness of the skin with the practical efficiency of the product. To put it crudely, the ad enhances the put-Nivea-if-you-stink sentiment through an aestheticized display of ‘confident armpits’.

It is crystal clear that the billboard does not yield the sense of tidiness perfectly, given the dwindling of the white skin under the urgent effect of the balls of mud it received by the felonious hands of the homeless, the delinquent, the angry. The bubbles of dirt have sweepingly disturbed not only the billboard’s polished surface, the body of the woman, but also the sentiment of perfumed comfort it is allegedly meant to transmit and that we are supposedly destined to enjoy.

The billboard surely acquires new meanings strange to itself under the sordidly vulgar lewdness of mud. More importantly, these ‘fresh’ meanings mud communicates gesture an abrupt unsettling of the seemingly orderly space of the city. The local hands contribute an innovatively connotative significance to the ad’s globally circulating message, the initial plot of which revolves around the Nivea lady, who, on the edge of ideal transformation of skin, contracts a blemishing ailment. Unable to follow the city’s new global orientations and rhythms, the city which formerly espoused their simple renditions of space and life, the on-the-streets community brings to the billboard, which is a symptom of intolerance, the filth it shuns. They spectacularly fling the city back to its scatological departing point, to its biological predicaments, to the muddy soil it enclosed under the smooth mosaics and , by the same token, away from the neatness the Nivea deodorant amuses. Psychologically speaking, the homeless are living through a moment of crisis. They are living through a moment of crisis because their ‘right for invisibility’ is crashed under the machinations of globalization. Ugly, muddy, and imperceptible, they are now turning, in the context of laborious sanitation campaigns, into an excremental stain in the city’s new cloth, visible, detectable, and easily targeted.

The relations between a subordinate and a dominant culture, wherever they fall within this spectrum, are always intensely active, always oppositional, in a structural sense (even when this opposition is latent, or experienced simply as the normal state of affairs —what Gouldner called “normalised repression”). Their outcome is not given but made. The subordinate class brings to this ‘theatre of struggle’ a repertoire of strategies and responses—ways of coping as well as of resisting. Each strategy in the repertoire mobilises certain real material and social elements: it constructs these into the supports for the different ways the class lives and resists its continuing subordination (John

Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, Routledge, 1993, 44,45).

From an other perspective, the transformations impinged on the billboard markedly suggest that there is actually no such philosophy as an organically unified self; in Derridian logic, the model comes to symbolically witness the revision of her body as purely the external symptom or worldly equivalent of the verity that the subject is fundamentally differed and correspondingly different from itself. The urban space, in this sense, does not confine itself to the embellishments of global streams and per se the transmutation of the billboard has also a communal correspondence: the alteration of the beautified city into a global, but all the same sullied and unruly municipal area. The woman’s body might thus be the embodiment of the whole city, which, regardless of its revolutionary transformations, is still distracted by its undefeatable locality. As hysterical constituents of a now incongruous city discoloration, the marginalized within the city, who might include the very ‘ladies’ I encountered at the bus station, inscribed their wrath on the novel trademarks that intensify their sense of estrangement within their once recognizable territory. This poignant drama fosters our critical perception of space, jointly with our discernment of change within it.

Interestingly, this artistic re-production of the ad is significant in more ways than one. In the first place, it evidently reveals that the billboard is something considerably identified and therefore recognized by both those capable of consumption and those who form awkwardly moving around the borders of the consumer culture. In the second place, this “positional significance of much subcultural bricolage” 1 is significant because it pictures one occasion whereby the periphery actively pushes into the center. In the third place, it is interesting because it is artistic, and it is artistic because it innovative.

The prevailing excrementation of the billboard inventively blurs the otherwise uncontaminated beauty landmarks of the picture into plain totality, and in so doing it implies a solemn philosophical importance in the text’s storyline. Scatologically, excrementation stands for everything that is gross and shameful about the human body in particular and about human reality

1 John Clarke, "Style," Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Routledge, 1993)

DATE: Jen. 1, 07 Billboarding and Cardboarding the Urban Space in Fez PAGE: 10 Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF in general. It frustrates any endeavor to look upon humans as entirely angelic as the ad tries to disclose or physically transcendent beings. Far from placing the woman on the humanist pedestal of the eighteenth century, far from cheerfully thinking of her as a gracious soul, the soaking balls of mud fetishize her as a body, earthy and polluted. Transformation and re-signification, to re- value life-styles previously disqualified, or to express class-conflict, can take place because messages of that order were already ‘written-in’ there, in those commodities: the original object- signs were posited upon a divided society, however much their preferred meanings attempted to mask that reality(Clarke 178).

The billboard, in its local outfit, hammers to excess the common rottenness of life, thus dealing a blow to the organic theory. In consequence, the woman finds herself up to her brow in a colorful mixture of filth, unconsciously reminding the various consumers within society that the human nature on the whole is foul and baser than we might want to think it is. With ”aggressive resistance to difference”2 with the stains scattered sickeningly on the women’s body, there is still the worrying possibility that, with rain, the whole silky-smooth billboard will live through the intact expansion of mud over the remainder of the body, endowing the overall image with perhaps more artistic touches other than the original style of the outrageous readers. The generation of subcultural styles, then, involves differential selection from within the matrix of the existent. What happens is not the creation of objects and meanings from nothing, but rather the transformation and rearrangement of what is given (and ‘borrowed’) into a pattern which carries a new meaning, its translation to a new context, and its adaption( Clarke 178). In the same way, the locals have indulged into the ‘politics of signification'(Hall, 138), thus contributing their own reading, no matter how wordly oppositional it is, to the overall construction of meaning., foregrounding a material criticism that is marked by immediacy, concreteness, and conclusiveness.

‘ Exclusion, inequality, and symbolic disadvantage’, to paraphrase Ronald N. Jacobs are not things that can be wiped out from the public sphere. They are anti-civil interruptions, subaltern counterpublics, and counterdiscourses which structure a vital part of any empirical civil society,

2 Stuart Hall, "What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture?," Social Justice 20.1-2 (1993)

DATE: Jen. 1, 07 Billboarding and Cardboarding the Urban Space in Fez PAGE: 11 Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF putting together oppositional understandings of their identities, interests, and desires. Put plainly, advertising strategies of trivialized groups cannot give attention to exclusively mainstream media and leading publics, but must also comprise dynamic partaking in, and cultivation of alternative public spheres. These unconventional publics proffer a site for offsetting the effects of hegemony, by assembling unconventional narratives which enclose unusual heroes and equally unusual plots3. The standpoints of cultural studies characterize the most complicated of existing approaches to the question of media power. The potency of these standpoints operates by enhancing our awareness of how the influence of billboards, for instance, functions to organize some ideological assumptions and structural readings above others. These marginal perceptions tell how oppositional counterplots disturb the dominant encodings, upsetting the attainment of supreme governance within collective arenas.

Conclusion

In addition to the product, billboarding in this postcolonial context provides a wide spectrum of readings not only to the billboard, but to the urbane space as well. Fez grow to be a text that bears the subjective scribblings of local and global negotiators. Fez, in the midst of this cross-cutting subjectivities, becomes a city with its own rhetorics. While Nivea grafts global features on the city’s face, the local hands distort these to create something new, neither local nor global. The local gesture implies a re-examination of global sovereignty, a re-publishment of the billboard. If the billboard is meant to fantasize a sexual mood, the most dissident among the local adopt a “promiscuous reading”, which is an act of sexual bliss and usufruct, by insinuating into the billboard ruses of pleasure and appropriation (Travis).

Portentously, the state is endorsing enterprises of commodification of the city’s urban space, which is exposed to transactional and transitional moves along touristic ambitions. The urban space is fiercely promoted and marketed to abide by the up-to-date aspirations and fantasies of tourism. Blomley contends in his Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property, that “although place promotion, has a long pedigree, the mobility of investment has encouraged many city governments to engage in more aggressive programs of place marketing, positioning

3 Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 28.

DATE: Jen. 1, 07 Billboarding and Cardboarding the Urban Space in Fez PAGE: 12 Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF themselves as platforms in an emergent economy of flows.” For him, More consumerist plans of urban supremacy, in which cities battle belligerently to magnetize capital, tourists, and government funds, have been recognized, with a subsequent move from a stress on ‘local livability’ and the life chances of local inhabitants to an outwardly logic of “the bottom line”. Fez is thus distinctively replete with its phenomenology, exhibiting its distinct psychogeography, to which local and global actants enact an assortment of performances and ambiances, vital, spontaneous, powerful. The psychogeography of Fez, in this sense, goes far beyond its ancient fortifications, the narrow alleys of the old medina, the fragranced shops, the jingling bells of the water sellers, the dim Quranic recitations from within the cracks of the antique wooden gates of Kairouyine mosque to put them on view as mere representations, slideshows, authenticized but hardly genuine. In addition to being a city under construction, in addition to being a body for global tattoos ( billboards), Fez is also a space for local swooshes (cardboards). The instantaneous fusion of these give rise to a direct spur of spatial parody.

Bibliography

Blomley, Nicholas. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge,

Clarke, John. "Subcultures, Cultures and Class." Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-

War Britain. Ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson. London: Routledge, 1993.

Goldstein, Alyosha, and Rebecca Schreiber. "Migrating Capital and the Optics of Place: Globalization

and Representation." Afterimage 25.4 (1998).

Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War

Britain. London: Routledge, 1993.

Hall, Stuart. "What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture?." Social Justice 20.1-2 (1993)

Jacobs, Ronald N. Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King.

Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Nash, June C. Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization. New York:

Routledge, 2001.

Sheppard, Eric. "The Spaces and Times of Globalization: Place, Scale, Networks, and Positionality."

Economic Geography 78.3 (2002)

Travis, Molly Abel. Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century.

Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998.

DATE: Jen. 1, 07 Moulay Driss EL MAAROUF