Hence, the uncanny does not disappear, but becomes more condensed and potent in societies where there is little room apportioned for the public acceptance of the pre-logical strangeness of experience. The uncanny concerns a dislocation of time the resurfacing of intuitive misgivings into a space where there is no longer a clear language or psychological register within which they can be articulated. Things are are ambiguous where there is too much multivalent, ambient information coming in from all angles. As multinational corporations seek to comfort and disarm through their “commonplace” design, they also run the risk that such places become indirectly disturbing in their duplication.
Many of us may be struck by the uncanny compulsion to repeat in these self-same environments - to return in search of the small dissimilarity, the idosyncrasy that distinguishes the “here” from the “there.” Standing in the aisles of I/kea, frozen to the spot, you are seized by an alarming vision you are split prismatically, and somewhere else another you is holding another flat-packed E/ngan storage box in walnut. In other words, it is precisely because the local is “homely” that it is capable of being shot-through with the “unhomely.” The uncanny exists because there is an environment. The local is eerie on account of it being familiar. This doubling of place not only arouses the unnerving suspicious - “I’ve been here before,” and “am I here, or am I in fact elsewhere?” - but additionally reaffirms the underlying unnaturalness of all place-based experience. The uniform architecture and visual parroting of W/a/l/Marts, Apple/bees, Best/Buys, Starb/ucks and Borders. Modern shopping malls that replicate identical layouts, and retirement communities wherein every residential unit is built in the mirror-image of the unit opposite – right down to the pearly patina of the laminex on the bench-tops. Unlike the sublime, with its axiomatic relationship with nature and its place in a history of “the outdoors,” the uncanny is more readily associated with anti-natural concerns - degrees of deadness animated corpses, ghosts, and artificial beings dolls, automatons, and doubles. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in - and this inverts the schema of the panopticon. There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different. Objects and words also have hollow places in which a past sleeps, as in the everyday acts of walking, eating, going to bed, in which ancient revolutions slumber. Their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a “suspended symbolic order.” The habitable city is thereby annulled. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. Ultimately, since proper names are already “local authorities”, they are replaced by numbers: the telephone number. roper names carve out pockets of hidden and familiar meaning. Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness.