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Article Excerpt
Introduction: A Contentious Affair
Valentia is a small island off County Kerry, on the southwest coast of Ireland. A recent count for the island's permanent population is around 650. A ferry operates daily from 1 April to 30 September. However, should you visit outside this period, there is a bridge (the longest opening span bridge in Ireland). One may thus be pleased to note that all-season access to/from Valentia is available. Yet, bridge technology can also arouse passionate responses:
There are some who have swapped their birthright for a stretch of tar. A bridge that will allow their cars to link with roads that lace mainlanders together, permitting islands to become like a landlocked place. Surrendering their separateness to loop with these larger shores, becoming both part and prisoners of the whole. Bridge to Valentia, by Donald S. Murray (Murray 2003)
A bridge, a stretch of tar, is a contentious subject, especially for islands and islanders. Murray (2003) does not mince his words: the convenience of the bridge is obtained at too high a price, since it irrevocably transforms otherwise whole islands into mere parts, fractions of mainlands. Thus, the island not only loses its geographically, historically and culturally defining islandness; it also becomes a small and insignificant appendage of, and therefore hostage to, a much larger whole, for which the island is but a nondescript peninsula or cul-de-sac. The technology of the automobile conspires with that of the bridge in transforming local identities, and in privileging mobility above place. The outcome is one other example of 'space-time compression' (Harvey 1990, after Janelle 1969); 'the end of geography' (Virilio 1997, 17) and of a move towards a 'zero-friction society' (Flyvbjerg et al. 2003, 2).
This article seeks to deconstruct the concept of the bridge as more than just a value-free symbol of inexorable technological progress, and uses islands as the reference point to flesh out such an argument. Bridges impact on the subtle balance between the characteristic 'local-global' nature of an island identity; such an impact is multi-faceted, complex and case-specific.
Separated or Apart?
Social scientist Georg Simmel (1994, 10) observed that a human being is 'a connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating'. In connecting two objects, we simultaneously acknowledge and underscore what separates them; in separating two objects, we underline their connectedness. Thus, as Simmel argued, in the act of bridging two items, we actually underline their distinctiveness. Insularity and connectedness are but two sides of the same coin, their meanings forever entangled (Gillis 2004, 147).
Moreover, Simmel observes (1994, 6) that it is only human beings who differentiate between two objects--say, the opposite banks of a river--as either being apart or else as being separated. 'Apartness' is static, a non-relational statement of fact; in contrast, 'separation' is a dynamic condition that betrays a need for, or interest in, connection. Castells (Susser 2002, 359) goes further. He reminds us that apartness and separation are predicated on two different spatial logics. Apartness concerns locale-specific but scattered, segmented places, unrelated to each other, unable to share codes; their occupants proud in their defiant expressions of difference, of nationalism, of defining fundamentalism. Churches, resource-based communities (like hunting, fishing, mining) and monoethnic nations (like Iceland or Portugal) could be such places apart. In contrast, separateness concerns a networked and a-historical 'space of flows' (after Castells) or 'spaces of pause' (after Deleuze 1989): 'non-places' that exist as conduits, as sites of diverse people in transit. Escalators, streets, stations, airports, institutions, workplaces--as well as bridges, tunnels and causeways--could constitute such indeterminate spaces.
A bridge thus symbolizes either the connection between what is separated; and the separation between what is connected (van Houtum and Struver 2002, 145); but would be next to meaningless to two locations, which are merely apart. This observation is important because it presumes that a bridge or some other 'fixed link' is merely a next, and not the first, technological step in the evolution of the connectedness of two places. As my ancient English dictionary tells me (Webster's 1942, 126), a 'bridge' is a structure erected over an obstacle, and not just in and over uncompromised space. Bridges make sense in progressively reinforcing connections, in improving communications, but not in summarily establishing them.
Semiotics and Graphology
Such a nuance is not self-revealing. The metaphoric diversity in which the word bridge is nowadays used--in such phrases as 'building bridges'; 'not burning one's bridges'; or 'bridging the gap'--belies nevertheless a deeper commonality: the message is consistently and clearly in favour of either establishing or improving access by means of the bridge, without discriminating between one and the other. The difference, though subtle, is fundamental. One must not assume that any two places, any two people, are necessarily separated if they are apart. There is no inherent benefit, nor any obligation, in imposing connectivities. I will return to this idea later on.
The choice of stylized bridges to grace the obverse of the euro notes--now the currency of 400 million Europeans--should therefore not surprise us. The European Union is a grand project of connectivity (and therefore of separateness) but also of apartness. While there are strong movements in favour of a deepening and widening of European-wide initiatives, as is the very notion of a single European currency, the European Union remains at the same time a platform for the advancement, protection or trading of stubbornly national interests--and more evidently so with the stalling of the ratification of the European Constitution. The bridges epitomize the concept of the single market, of 'building Europe' (Sidaway 2001, 743); yet they remind us of the separate unities ('nation-states'?) that make the bridge and its bridging functions necessary. A bridge quintessentially speaks to a confederate polity, with multiple levels or layers of identity. In fact, while the euro notes are the same everywhere, the euro coins portray the national monuments and persons of each member state (Houtum and Struver 2002, 145).
How then do islands, in particular, become platforms of contestation in the 'great war of independence from space' (Bauman 1998)?
Rooted Identity, Nested Mobility
Islands suggest separation and aloofness; but, as Beer (2003, 33) reminds us, once islands are regularly inhabited, they are never enclosures only: they are crossroads, markets for exchange and open to the sea (King and Connell 1999). No island is insular, meaning 'entire unto itself': Donne (1624) got it all wrong in his oft-quoted statement. The fallacy recurs today among such eminent gurus as competition strategist Michael Porter who uses the term 'insular' to describe nations, which grow complacent, arrogant and inward looking in relation to the urge to remain competitive (Porter 1990, 171). Islands are connected to continents. Islands are part of the main. Islands are separated but rarely apart, and then only in an incestuous and unsustainable way. It is rather the mainlander view of the sea as dark and sinister (and therefore an obstacle) which is suspect and questionable. When an island is completely isolated, a world apart, it has no life, no present and no future: the tragic history of Easter Island is all about the non-viability of isolation (Bahn and Flenley 1992; Diamond 2005). Islands aren't really insular (Gosden and Pavlides 1994).
Thus, the topos of an island appropriately conveys the complex relations between a given identity and the estrangement from this same identity (Bongie 1998, 18). In its double identity of openness and closure, an island is on one hand rooted in tradition, isolation, culture and history; a place of refuge, engulfed in claustrophobia whose only escape is exile (ex-isle). Still, at the same rime, the island is well routed and connected to the world beyond via trade, migration, tourism, and biotic, cultural and material imports. Without these, the island and the life forms it bears, simply wouldn't survive (Clifford 1997; Baldacchino 2004). While an island's geography speaks severance, its history speaks contact, argue Warrington and Milne (2007). Much islander nervousness can be traced to this inescapable, difficult-to-admit dependency on an invisible but very real mainland. Islanders, even the most ardent champions of locality, must reconcile themselves to bearing 'glocal' identities (after Robertson 1995; also Courchene 1995).
Technology, improved mobility and ease of communication have...
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