Implosive Multiculturalism: Staging of the Community in Bankstown,Sydney

Difference and Indifference

When asked to describe Bankstown, interviewees typically began by emphasizing the area’s “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” often linking their observations to what was observed and observable “on the street”:

Bankstown is like a cultural melting pot. There are so many cultures here, it’s really culturally diverse; . . . that’s a key part of Bankstown’s identity now. . . . Not every . . . city center has this many cultures living in such proximity with each other; at least, that’s the way it looks on the street. (I3)

Such statements were quickly qualified by the claim that there are two “dominant cultures” (I22), occupying different spatial territories within Bankstown’s city center, an understanding commonly attributed to “what the shops are”:

[Bankstown] is quite diverse. Broadly, . . . it is two halves. There is a Vietnamese half and a probably more Lebanese but Arabic half. There are many other variations within that, but it seems that’s what the shops are. Like, on one side of the railway line it’s more Asian, and the other side it’s more Middle Eastern. (I2)

There are regions that are identified with one culture more than the other . . . like the Vietnamese section; . . . also, kind of near Compass center a lot of African hair places and Africans hang around there; . . . near Titanic Café [in the southeast quadrant] there are Lebanese places. (I3)

Whereas there was consensus about the location of the Vietnamese “region” in Saigon Place, Lebanese regions were variously located on the north side of the railway cutting (as per the first quote here) or southeast of the railway station (as per the second quote). Figure 2 depicts the locations of shops with non-English signage, revealing a clear concentration of Vietnamese (and Chinese) signage in and around Saigon Place; Arabic signage is far more dispersed.

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Figure 2.

Non-English signage.

Participants, especially those who were Australian-born, tended to view clusters of immigrant traders as representing something “real,” particularly when contrasted with the perceived artifices of Bankstown Central and Bankstown Sports Club:

Bankstown is real, a place where real people are. Real culture . . . . We are in the real part of town [here in Saigon Place]. . . . It is what people are looking for; it’s where you see active, people-scaled space. (I17)

Yet this “reality” acquired an ambiguous status across the interviews. It was suggested, for example, that “there are many people who are disconnected from their culture” (I6), leading many of the cultures to present more of a semblance than a resemblance of an original, authentic reality. This was especially felt to be the case for first-generation migrants, who were construed as prone to preserving or perpetuating a reality that does not exist:

They remember their homeland as it was when they left. . . . When they come to Australia, they had this image of what Greece was like or what Lebanon was like or what Italy was like. . . . And because they really didn’t integrate . . . because they did not move with the times in their home country and they did not move with the times with Australia, . . . they were caught in this time bubble, which had an impact on the first generation that came out here. (I5)

Moreover, the reality in question is one that most of the interviewees viewed at arm’s length. Specifically, it was contended that there are minimal levels of interaction between different groups in Bankstown, an observation often linked to particular clusters of immigrant traders:

Ninety-nine percent of the ones who go to the Vietnamese shops are Vietnamese. (I27)

Bankstown is more like groups, groups, groups, Vietnamese with Vietnamese, Lebanese with Lebanese. (I23)

I think people stay within their culture. . . . As you see people walking around, they’re walking in their cultural group. . . . We actually divide our society up into ethnic cultural groups. (I4)

Reading the Community

Given these circumstances, the interviews revealed that the built environment and associated spatial practices function as a key medium through which understanding of “others” is acquired. Thus, for some, the shop face-ades of immigrant traders represent a set of visages or texts that might be read or interpreted to glean the “spirit” of a culture and to garner clues about cultural codes:

If I look at you, from looking at your face, I can see what spirit you have. Some people are very clever to hide all of that, but the first impression is “Oh, she is a lovely lady, or he is a lovely man.” You can build the trust. And the same thing with the shops—if you look at the place or products, look at the books example. I am a man that loves books. . . . You look at the attractive one [book]. When you go [to] the shops and you see the title and you don’t see the signs, you don’t feel like I want to be there. (I19)

Spatial practices of immigrant traders, especially those that involve modifications to the public—private interface, were invariably read as expressions of an underlying cultural identity:

It says something about where they’ve come from. Because that’s the way which they would operate their shops in their birth country. And so, I think they brought their culture into Bankstown. (I4)

More generally, observations made in the public realm provided a primary source of information about the community:

I notice that with a culturally diverse community . . . in Australia young and old people are not together. . . . But with Middle Easterners, and especially Asians, you can see that old people and young people are mixing and sitting together. (I13)

Arabs when [they] meet together is through shisha or coffee, but Vietnamese do it through food or coffee, and Africans sort of just hang out. (I22)

The Vietnamese girls would never go near the water [at the local swimming pool]. . . .They never learnt … they never know. . . . If you think of Vietnamese who came by boat, . . . they never learnt. . . . I was like, “What do you mean you can’t swim?” . . . That was so foreign. (I5)

Although the majority of these observations provided more or less trivial insights, it was not uncommon for them to be freighted with a somewhat incommensurate profundity:

We are [starting to introduce our cultures] through food. Cause I think now we are finding that different cultures like other people’s cultural food. I was out with a Chinese man the other day; he took me to a Japanese restaurant. Japanese and Chinese don’t get on. There is a history, a war, and a very severe war. (I4)

Tension and Welfare

The presumed existence of largely parallel universes within the community tended to elicit two broad responses from the interviewees. The first focused on a background ambience of potential tension:

I think people are stuck with their cultures big time in Bankstown. Sometimes it can become a bit bad. They are kind of like their traditions and cultures and it could affect other people’s lifestyle. Not precisely pointing out a race, all of them. We all live on the same platform, different people, but like let’s try to not be weirded out by each other, cause you feel a bit of tension. (I20)

This tension typically manifests in minor irritants, especially associated with adaptations to the built environment and other spatial practices.

They stop in front of you as you are walking, and you should maneuver around them to get around. . . . Everyone does that in Bankstown. It is so annoying. . . . They do their own thing. . . . It is the selfish area. . . . They do not think about if anyone is behind me. . . . They do not take notice. . . . It is selfish [to display products on footpaths], but at the same it is standard. . . . The council probably approved. . . . It will be selfish if the council did not approve it. . . . It is selfish that they applied for it . . . having more space for their shops. (I22)

Some people are not liking having more Middle Eastern people as they think they are hardworking people, but they do not look after the lawn. . . . I think it is a big stereotype, but I think they think they came from the desert or something. (I7)

The second broad response involved expressions of a desire for “people to get to know each other better” (I1, also I2, I3, I4, I9, I13, and I29), along with an associated desire to help others:

I think I would like to run activities that join cultures together. . . . Language is a barrier. . . . People stay in their own culture. . . . Some people are still very isolated with their own culture . . . something like a cooking class . . . something to open their world . . . getting people from different religions to get together. (I1)

Such desires are materially inscribed in the landscape in two primary forms. The first is a plethora of activities geared to welfare services, relating to everything from English language classes to financial support, temporary accommodation, and assistance with visa applications. Figure 3 plots the location of these welfare services alongside premises that are “ethnically marked” in some way, revealing that the Bankstown landscape is almost as much one of welfare as of ethnicity.

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Figure 3.

Welfare services and ethnic markers.

The second is Paul Keating Park (including the “Spirit of Volunteering” sculpture located there, its font inscription explaining that “this monument represents the great volunteer spirit in the City of Bankstown”). Despite its large size and prominent location, one interviewee was able to make the following statement:

I think we have got to create some biggish space which allows people how they want to be. . . . The old community village plazas have that, and you do not separate the community. . . . Now people are looking for difference all the time rather than something that brings us together. (I1)

That is to say, the park does not feature prominently in the day-to-day lives of most residents and is frequently all but empty. Instead, the park’s primary function is to play host to various cultural festivals throughout the year. Some of these are held annually, such as the Muslim festivals Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the Catholic Christmas Mass (in Vietnamese and in English), and the Multicultural Children’s Festival; some are more sporadic (e.g., Greek Festival, Bangladeshi Festival, World Village Festival) or designed to mark particular events, such as the 40th anniversary of the arrival of Vietnamese refugees in Australia.

Saigon Place

The part of Bankstown that attracted the most commentary from the interviewees was Saigon Place. Although this area was seen to be distinguished by the concentration of Vietnamese traders (Figure 2), it might also be noted that the area’s urban morphology is also distinctive: a highly permeable pedestrian network, a fine urban grain (Figure 4), a concentration of spillover displays and alfresco dining (“Pedestrian Setback” in Figure 5), and a concentration of food retailing and hospitality uses (Figure 6). Much of the participants’ discussion of Saigon Place centered on two issues, namely, the ways in which goods and services are displayed and “politics.”

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Figure 4.

Lot sizes.

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Figure 5.

Interface types after adaptation.

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Figure 6.

Selected land uses.

Displays of goods and services, especially where these spill over onto footpaths, elicited mixed responses:

I walk there. I feel like, “Yeah cool!”. . . It is like you are walking in Bankstown, and you take a step into Chinatown, and suddenly you do not feel like you are in Bankstown anymore. . . . You feel like you are in Vietnam . . . Vietnamese restaurants . . . Vietnamese groceries and fruit markets and cafés. . . . I know that I stand out because I am different. . . . I am fascinated. (I22)

When there are fruit on the footpath, and it is messy and you cannot walk, you will be upset because they are introducing something that is not nice. (I18)

It is crowded . . . shops on top of each other . . . not much space . . . it is probably good for them. . . . But for Australians it is foreign, dirty, crowded. . . . I heard people saying it is like going to another country. . . . They feel like they need their passport. (I2)

With respect to politics, participant discussion tended to focus on monuments and public art in Saigon Place, including the Vietnam Boat People Memorial, Dong Song Drum, and the “Faces of Bankstown” mural:

The politics behind [the Boat] is particularly interesting. . . . The politics of this whole place is very interesting; the fact that it is called Saigon Place was a sub to the South Vietnamese communities, and it was for the member to be elected. (I9)

Attitudes of Australian-born participants toward the Boat and Drum were mostly positive:

I like [the Boat]. . . . It reflects the contribution of Vietnamese people in the local community. (I6)

I like [the Drum] because I think it fits in with the general feel of the place. . . . It reflects the history of the place where it always has been predominately Vietnamese. . . . I think it fits to have a monument that reflects that history and that culture. (I27)

By contrast, some of the non-Vietnamese immigrants felt that the Boat and Drum monuments elevate one part of the community at the expense of others. As an Indian Australian interviewee suggested,

[The Boat’s] come from a big push from the Vietnamese businesses to tell their stories, which I think [is] fine, but it has to be speaking of a broader context as well. (I17)

I am a bit controversial here. . . . I do not think we should be labeling it any one community. . . . It did get called Saigon Place, and they have put an art work [the Drum], which is symbolizing one community, . . . but I want it to be a multicultural space. (I17)

One participant who was born in Vietnam expressed ambivalence:

[The Boat makes] no difference to me. In fact, it is a bit intimidating. It says we are all refugees, but we are not. (I30)

In many respects, issues of who should be represented in monuments and public art in Saigon Place came to a head in relation to the “Faces of Bankstown” mural. A collage of different faces, this mural was installed in 2006 in the middle of Saigon Place, looking down on a collection of tables where immigrant males from Vietnam socialize and engage in raucous games of Chinese chess. According to the minutes of a Bankstown City Council ordinary meeting on March 23, 2010, the mural was erected because:

the South Terrace/Chapel Road South precinct is predominantly but not exclusively Vietnamese owned and managed businesses. To this end, Council has opted not to market or brand the area as exclusively Vietnamese but to instead enhance the multi-cultural aspect of this unique precinct. An example that typifies this approach is the “Faces of Bankstown” photographic mural which is inclusive of a range of nationalities that make up the local population. (p. 17)

Despite this, in 2016 the mural was replaced by a gray wall; in parallel, the Dong Song Drum was installed. The rationale for the mural’s removal is unclear, but it appears to be at least partly linked to the effacement of one of the faces.

Simulation, Abstract Social Relations, and Implosion

The major interview themes elaborated above are at once banal and intriguing; though not exactly contradictory, they are not entirely consistent either. The participants celebrate the diversity in their community, yet this diversity is not much explored and is understood at arm’s length; it is at once a badge of honor and a source of indifference. The diversity is seen to be composed of “real people” and “real culture,” yet doubts are simultaneously expressed about its authenticity. Differences in the community are seen to underlie the tensions and annoyances, even as there is a desire “to get people to know one another better” and to assist one another. The most remarked-upon source of political drama centers on the existence of a mural and two monuments. The contention of this article is that much of this might be usefully analyzed via Baudrillard’s notion of simulation, indeed that much of this is entirely what might be expected in a society where social relations are increasingly simulated.

There is now a wealth of literature and critical commentary on Baudrillard’s understanding of simulation, the bulk of it perhaps produced in the 1980s and 1990s, when commentators were still feeling their way into Baudrillard’s oeuvre and contending with an erratic (i.e., out of sequence) translation of his works into English (Gane, 1993). Baudrillard’s scandalous examples are now legion: Disneyland is presented as imaginary to make us believe that the rest of America is real; everyone was concerned to conceal that Watergate was not a scandal; the Gulf War will not take place/is not taking place/did not take place, and so on. Meanwhile, introductions to Baudrillard’s take on simulation typically emphasize how it refers to a copy without an original, the “map” preceding the “territory,” the “precession” of models, and to the substitution of “signs” for “reality” (or the production of reality effects via signs and models). This will typically be accompanied by discussion of the three (or four) “orders” of simulation and/or, less frequently, the four successive phases of the image. All of this is quite correct and appropriate (though there are many other dimensions of Baudrillard’s arguments). However, for the present purposes, emphasis will be placed on two aspects of Baudrillar’s argument, namely, the associated abstraction of social relations and “implosion.”

With respect to his implicit arguments about the abstraction of social relations, Baudrillard’s starting point, as it were, is “symbolic exchange.” As Pawlett (2008) explains,

The most common example of symbolic exchange is the gift. The meaning of the act of giving a gift . . . is in no sense reducible to the object given, it depends on if and how it is accepted. The giving, receiving and reciprocating of gifts are intensely volatile relations, the meaning of the gift never settles into fixity or identity. The meaning of the gift can be transformed at any moment in the on-going relation between parties; indeed this relation is of the gift and the gift is of this relation: relation and gift flourish together, and die together. (para. 6)

Symbolic exchange concerns “singular” objects, experiences, and relationships in the sense of nonsubstitutable, incomparable, without equivalence; they are of the moment, reciprocal, and reversible. Baudrillard (1981) explains through the examples of a wedding ring and an ordinary ring:

The wedding ring: This is a unique object, symbol of the relationship of the couple. One would neither think of changing it (barring mishap) nor of wearing several. The symbolic object is made to last and to witness in its duration the permanence of the relationship. . . . The ordinary ring is quite different: it does not symbolize a relationship. It is a non-singular object, a personal gratification, a sign in the eyes of others. I can wear several of them. I can substitute them. (p. 66)

By point of contrast with the relationship associated with a wedding ring, consider Pawlett’s (2007) example of the “relationship” implicated in the consumption of a bottle of shampoo:

We do not really “consume” this individual object (plastic bottle with brightly coloured “funky” label with indeterminate chemical gunk); instead we consume the social relationship established between ourselves (as desirable, fashionable, etc) and others in society who will recognise us as such. This process positions us within the code, at the very least above those who do not use a designer shampoo. Signs exist only in relationships of coded connections to other signs: they operate in combinations or commutations, readily interchangeable precisely because they are arbitrary, abstract and plastic. (p. 174)

Here the relationship, such as it is, is abstract in the sense that it does not refer to an actual encounter where reciprocal relations of exchange might occur; it preempts any such encounter, staging it in advance. The relationship is “located” within a preexisting model (a play of signifiers); it comes prepackaged and precoded and needs only be chosen or enacted to be real-ized. It is as “imaginary” as it is “real”: We could never actually meet the countless others who have been hoisted lower down the social hierarchy by virtue of our purchase of this sign-object. In short, there is no possibility in this relationship for reciprocity and exchange, or scope for dialectical play between “self” and “other.”

Baudrillard frequently characterizes this abstraction of social relations in terms of implosion, a notion he appropriates from McLuhan, who used it to refer to “the pulling out of the spaces between components” (cited in Genosko, 1999, p. 94). For Baudrillard (1994), implosion above all refers to the erasure of relationships between the poles in bipolar structures, to “the abolution, pure and simple, of the relation” (p. 31). Or as he explains later,

Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the medium and the real—thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. (p. 83)

To return to the bottle of shampoo for illustrative purposes, the precoded relationship implicated in its consumption involves no direct opposition between self and other; these poles have collapsed into the model, requiring only their enactment, their “performance” (through consumption). Indeed, ultimately there is no relationship with the other at all, except one that is (pre-)enacted, (per)form(anc)ed, simulated; the reality of our self and of our relationships with others have collapsed inside, and follow from, precoded models. In the subsections that follow, additional dimensions of Baudrillard’s arguments will be developed in the context of specific interview themes.

Implosion I: Models of (Non)Communication

Communication and communication technologies are among the most taken-for-granted features of the contemporary era. Within the field of spatial planning, a large swathe of its theoretical armature has been preoccupied with questions of good communication and participation for many decades, especially influenced by Habermas’s communicative action theory. This ubiquity makes it all too easy to naturalize communication, along with allied concepts such as messages and information, to assume their universal applicability. Yet as Baudrillard (2009) wryly observes,

Whoever had the idea of “communicating” in ancient societies, in tribes, in villages, in families? Neither the word nor the concept existed, the question doesn’t make any sense. People don’t need to communicate, because they just speak to one another. Why communicate when it is so easy to speak to each other? (p. 16)

Charging that communication is a specifically modern phenomenon, Baudrillard poses it as a leading example of simulation. Here he makes his case (partly) via a critique of Jakobson’s model of communication, formalized as follows:

Baudrillard (1981) writes,

Each communication process is thus vectorized into a single meaning, from the transmitter to the receiver; the latter can become transmitter in its turn, and the same schema is reproduced. . . . [It is based upon] ideological categories that express a certain type of social relation, namely, in which one speaks and the other doesn’t, where one has the choice of the code, and the other only liberty to acquiesce or abstain. . . . There is neither reciprocal relation nor simultaneous mutual presence of the two terms, since each determines itself in relation to the message or code . . . at a distance from one another. . . . [It] is a simulation model of communication. It excludes from its inception, the reciprocity and antagonism of interlocutors, and the ambivalence of their exchange. (p. 179)

This model of communication is for Baudrillard (2009) a model of noncommunication: “We must never forget this when confronting the structure of communication: its very essence is non-communication” (p. 17). Communication represents an abstraction of social relationships since it forecloses reciprocity and exchange. It at once induces noncommunication and arises as a consequence of noncommunication:

When we speak of communication, it is because there is no communication any more. The social body is no longer conductive, relations are no longer regulated by informal consensus, the communion of meaning [le sens] is lost. That is why we must produce a formal apparatus, a collective artefact, a huge network of information that assumes the circulation of meaning. (pp. 16-17)

Moreover, it exists to conceal the fact that we are not communicating. From the telephone to email, to SMS messages, to a Facebook “like,” the quantum of communication appears to be increasing; we act as if we are in touch even as the distance and distancing effects increase.

The model of (non)communication Baudrillard critiques appears to precessionally, subconsciously inform much of the interview data. This is especially so concerning the role of built form that conforms to the model of encoder (immigrant trader)–message/medium (spatial practices)–decoder (interviewees, the person on the street). The urban landscape is rendered as something to be read, as composed of so many signs that require decoding to ascertain the messages that immigrants are conveying through their spatial practices, what they are saying about themselves. “This conforms to the global usage we have of the surrounding world of reading and selective decoding—we live less as users than as readers and selectors, reading cells” (Baudrillard, 1993a, p. 64). In so doing, the reality of the interviewees’ experiences of Bankstown is indistinguishable from—is embedded within, only comes about as a product of—the unilateral, vectorized model of communication Baudrillard associates with the media and with Jakobson. This is a model of a “certain type of social relation,” a model of noncommunication, one that separates and isolates: One side transmits an encoded message; the other side receives and decodes the message—as the interviewees put it, “groups, groups, groups,” “stuck with their culture,” traveling in parallel universes, “interacting” via the different signs they convey and receive. Or as Baudrillard (2008) puts it, “Everyone is moving in their own orbit, trapped in their own bubbles, like satellites. Strictly speaking, no one has a destiny any more, since there is destiny only where one intersects with others. Now, the trajectories do not intersect” (p. 144). Signs stand in for, or simulate, an actual relationship between parties: the “foreignness” of the Vietnamese who cannot swim (whereas Australians can), different generations of Middle Eastern and Asian immigrants mixing socially (whereas this is not the case for Australians), Arabs and Vietnamese meeting for coffee (whereas Africans “just hang out”), a meal as a sign of reconciliation between warring populations, all these function to differentiate one identity from another (one identity is placed or positioned in relation to another) but without the establishment of a reciprocal, reversible relationship of exchange. The relationship, such as it is, is inscribed in an underlying code; it is inscribed by an underlying code, emerging from a product of differential comparison—a sliding scale of same as/different from—rather than a singular, reciprocal encounter.

Implosion II: Staging the Absent Other

As discussed above, the implosion of relationships within pregiven models leads to a certain “staging” of relations with others. Signs and associated models position us “in relation” to others but without the necessity of us needing to forge an actual relationship with another person. The resultant relationship is as much a relationship with ourselves, with our own “image,” as anything else. Baudrillard (2008) contends that the underlying imperative to maintain (signs of) difference, both by persistently identifying differences and by manufacturing our own identities as “different,” breeds a simultaneous indifference:

Doomed to our own image, our own identity, our own “look,” and having become our own object of care, desire and suffering, we have grown indifferent to everything else. And secretly desperate at that indifference, and envious of every form of passion, originality or destiny. Any passion whatever is an affront to the general indifference. Anyone who, by his passion, unmasks how indifferent, pusillanimous or half-hearted you are, who, by the force of his presence or suffering, unmasks how little reality you have, must be exterminated. (p. 131)

Consistent with this argument, one interviewee describes Bankstown as “the selfish area”; many others recount numerous vexations linked to an apparent absence of respect or consideration for others. Although most of these are of the order of minor annoyances, there is also evidence to support Baudrillard’s argument that this indifference can quickly morph into an envious form of hatred. Although the interviewees describe how they “feel a bit of tension,” in 2005 this was experienced as something far worse when many residents of the Bankstown area found themselves at the center of Sydney’s infamous Cronulla race riots (see Evers, 2008).

Contrasting with claims that racism is founded on malicious processes of “othering,” for Baudrillard (2008) the indifference cum hatred he describes stems from an absence of otherness: “All forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection and out of a collective mourning for a dead otherness, set against a background of general indifference” (p. 132). Precessional models (e.g., of [non]communication) function to isolate and separate, foreclosing “reciprocal space[s] of a speech and a response,” “personal, mutual correlation[s] in exchange” (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 169). The implosions associated with simulation mark the absence of the “relationship,” in general, and of genuine (reciprocal, ambivalent) encounters and exchanges with an other who is not merely different. For Baudrillard (1993b), this prompts a kind of desperate invention and staging of otherness:

Otherness, like everything else, has fallen under the law of the market, the law of supply and demand. It has become a rare item—hence its immensely high value on the psychological stock exchange, on the structural stock exchange. Here too the intensity of the ubiquitous simulation of the Other. (p. 124)

This simulation of otherness might take a variety of forms. Paul Keating Park provides an obvious example: a large and, in terms of everyday life, largely vacant space whose primary purpose is to stage the community via various programmed cultural festivals, performances, and the like. Another example is furnished by interviewees’ statements concerning their desire to make people interact and socialize more frequently. As Baudrillard and Guillaume (2008) note,

All of the categories, instead of being categories of action become categories of operation. I use the term artificiality (facticité) because it implies the auxillary “to make” (faire): the auxillary comes before all of the categories; everything moves into artificiality. . . . This artificiality is the operationality of making (something) happen: making happen, making want, making orgasm. The effect of this artificiality, in this kind of closed operation, is to make the circle of action close. (p. 114)

Or as Baudrillard (2009) writes elsewhere, “What was an act has become an operation. Speech was an act, communication is an operation, and along with it goes the operation of social life” (p. 17).

Alternatively, the other might be staged via racism or, as the flipside, humanitarian aid and assistance:

The same indifference can give rise to exactly opposite behaviour. Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of an evil to be combated. The humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid. Idealization plays for better or for worse. The scapegoat is no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat (Baudrillard, 2008, p. 132)

In this context, Baudrillard (2008) unsentimentally suggests that the other-as-victim is the most straightforward form of staging or resurrecting otherness:

Victim society as the easiest, most trivial form of otherness. Resurrection of the Other as calamity, as victim as alibi . . . we explore the wretchedness of others to prove our existence a contrario. The new identity is the victim’s identity. Everything is organized around the deprived, frustrated, handicapped subject, and the victim strategy is that of his acknowledgement as such. Every difference is asserted in the victimal mode of recrimination (of the reparation of a crime); others are called on only for purposes of recognition. (p. 137)

Figure 3 highlights how, as well as being a landscape of ethnic identity, Bankstown is a landscape of “victimhood.”

Implosion III: The Medium Is the Message

As Trubody (2016) notes, Baudrillard’s argument about the “precession of models” entails that “we confuse ‘facts’ with the models that contextualize our ‘facts’, or ‘objectivity’ with the metaphysics that makes sense of objective statements.” For Baudrillard, this amounts to an implosion of medium and message or, as he puts it through his appropriation of McLuhan, the medium is the message. Here, Baudrillard (2001) emphasizes the form of the medium over the content: “The ‘message’ of TV is not in the images transmitted, it is the new modes of relation and perception that it imposes, and which change the traditional structures of the family” (p. 42). This point might be illustrated via reference to previous sections. Interviewee accounts of different facets of the Bankstown community conform to an intuitive, taken-for-granted model of (accessing) “reality,” the model of (non)communication, and are taken to be descriptions of something “real,” “real people,” “real culture”—this despite the doubts expressed about the actual, continued existence of this culture elsewhere. So long as experiences accord with the form of the model, the content is less consequential.

This implosion of medium and message leads to consideration of a second type of medium/message implosion that is evident across the interviews. This second type is not exactly the same as the first; it does not amount to a strict illustration of Baudrillard’s argument but might rather be construed as a by-product. Specifically, there is a tendency for interviewees to conflate the medium of built form with messages about ethnic identity. In so far as signs of difference are detected on the street, spatiality functions as a crucial nursemaid for perceptions of ethnic identity. Particular ethnic groups are identified with particular territories, and the differential qualities of the respective territories—whatever they may be and regardless of what occurs there—function to reinforce perceptions of distinct identities; formal features of the built environment coalesce with cultural differences to form bubbles of identity, as might be illustrated through a focus on Saigon Place.

Figures 2, 5, and 6 reveal that spatial associations between land use and adaptations are at least as strong as associations between signage and adaptations, and for good reasons. There are clear imperatives for all retail traders, regardless of their birthplace, to capture the attention of passing pedestrians (via window displays, spillovers, alfresco dining, etc.). These imperatives are weaker, and sometimes nonexistent, for many nonretail uses, such as commercial and medical services. Meanwhile, the lot-size map illustrates how, in the language of space syntax, the street network is “intensified” south of the railway station and into Saigon Place: Block sizes are comparatively smaller, and permeability increases. For pedestrians, this is especially apparent because of the full or partial bisection of blocks by arcades and pedestrian thoroughfares. (A similar situation exists to the north of the railway station, though there the blocks and lots are coupled to street-deadening commercial and medical clusters and their associated opaque public–private interfaces.) This contrasts strongly with the significant fragmentation found across large parts of the remainder of the town center. The contrast is heightened when Saigon Place is juxtaposed with its immediate surroundings. From the north/northeast, the approach to Saigon Place is an amorphous and pedestrian-unfriendly space, defined to the south by shops but ill defined to the north as a broad road carriageway melds into bus turning circles, orphaned patches of grass, and the railway cutting. Passing via the Boat People Memorial and entering into Saigon Place, the street narrows to one lane of traffic, the footpaths are double-width, and both sides of the street are flanked by shops. A similar experience occurs from the south, with the large-lump Sports Club development and car parking station providing a sharp juxtaposition with the fine-grained lot patterns in Saigon Place.

In other words, a panoply of formal and functional patterns work together to ensure that that part of Bankstown is always likely to stand out. The proximity to the railway station (but protection from the associated infrastructure clutter), the small block and lot sizes, the high levels of permeability, the arcades, the narrow road, the wide footpaths, the predominance of retail and hospitality functions, all are built environment features that make Saigon Place predisposed to high levels of vitality and intensity. For large parts of the rest of Bankstown, the fragmentation, the larger blocks, the lower levels of permeability, the stronger presence of transport infrastructure (railway cutting, bus turning circles, car parking stations), the larger lots (and predominance of commercial and medical uses and opaque interfaces where there are smaller lots), and the numerous large-lump developments are features that work to constrain vitality and intensity.

All this can be observed with nary a mention of ethnicity. In the end, the extent to which Saigon Place might be rightly construed as an expression of Vietnamese identity is unclear. A certain blurring of spatiality and sociality occurs that perhaps makes it more correct to suggest that Saigon Place is less about expressions of Vietnamese identity than it is about what enables identification, along at least two lines. First, formal and functional patterns interact to make the Saigon Place area predisposed to being perceived as different from the rest of Bankstown; adding a layer of Vietnamese-born traders to these physical underpinnings only offers scope to make it doubly different. And second, many of the qualities of Saigon Place that the interviewees identify as distinctly Vietnamese would likely exist there (and have done so historically) regardless of the birthplace of the traders, especially those qualities relating to the perceived hustle and bustle. As noted above, almost everything about the area’s formal qualities leaves it predisposed to hustle and bustle. It is difficult to disentangle experiences of Vietnamese culture per se and experiences of the built environment per se; it is not easy to know where the effects of Vietnamese culture and the effects of the built environment begin and end. Indeed, this entanglement and blurring of cultural and spatial effects makes it unclear whether it is even correct to speak of Saigon Place as having a “Vietnamese” character; perhaps it is more appropriate to describe it as “Vietnamesque.”

Implosion IV: The Dissolution of Power

For Baudrillard, the implosions that animate simulation imply significant consequences for power. Foucault’s (1991) diagram of power, modeled on the panopticon and regimes of surveillance, is underpinned by an oppositional relationship, namely, “to see without being seen’. Yet, as discussed above, Baudrillard argues that implosion undoes the very possibility of oppositional relationships (implosion is “the abolution, pure and simple, of the relation”; “the absorption of one pole into another”). Implosion, for Baudrillard (1994) marks the “end of the panoptic system,” the end of the conditions that might have enabled power relations of the kind envisaged by Foucault. That is to say, simulation threatens the very existence of power, the reality of power.

For power and for all those institutions that rely on power, including the power to discriminate truth and falsity, reality and appearance—science, law, medicine, and so on—the nonexistence of power is intolerable. By way of an example, Grace (2000) observes, “The master-narrative of ‘science’ (biomedical, physical or social) traditionally assumes a syntax of ‘subject knows object.’ . . . Simulation threatens the poles through which power secures its stakes” (p. 86). Faced with this threat, power no longer functions “ideologically” to conceal the reality of social relations but rather to conceal the fact that “power itself has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance,” that power is itself no longer “real”:

As long as the historical threat came at it from the real, power played at deterrence and simulation, disintegrating all the contradictions by dint of producing equivalent signs. Today when the danger comes at [power] from simulation (that of being dissolved in the play of signs), power plays at the real, plays at crisis, plays at remanufacturing artificial, social, economic, and political stakes. (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 22)

For Baudrillard, simulated power embodies a strategy of deterrence:

“Deterrence” is the term Baudrillard uses to connote a process ensuring that the fiction of political stakes continues to animate the social. Unlike surveillance, or ideology, deterrence is void of any notion of agent, class, manipulator, interest; it operates precisely to activate those concepts in simulated form to conjure their (apparent) reality (who can say they are not real when they are simulated?). (Grace, 2000, p. 87)

The collapse of power and the potential to question power’s existence are deterred by a lowering of stakes, if not the removal of stakes, along at least three lines. First, power and conflict are channeled into “signs” of power and conflict. Thus, in Saigon Place the removal of the mural and the erection of the Vietnamese Boat People Memorial and Dong Song Drum are construed by some interviewees as embodying the increased power of the Vietnamese community in local politics. Yet as per the coded relationship consumed in a sign-object, the power relationship here is an abstract one, as imaginary as real, a sign of power rather than anything that genuinely reconfigures the social field. In the second place, any challenge to the broader system is deterred by circumscribing stakes to a lower level. Focusing on the contest of who is represented in public art and in what way directs attention away from consideration of broader structural and systemic issues. For those who feel disenfranchised, the “solution” comes readymade, namely, vote for the other party; and so the system rolls on. Finally, stakes are lowered by virtue of the fact that “you” are already included in the model; the model is in you, and you are in the model:

A switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance . . . to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model or to the gaze. “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority.” . . . Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” (Baudrillard, 1994, p. 29)

What more could “you” ask for?