One type of postcard I particularly enjoy is the street view. Unlike a postcard of a skyline or an aerial view of a city, the street view is intimate and personal. I get the sense of what it would be like to walk around in the place depicted on the card. It's interesting to me to see what the everyday spaces of people's lives look like and a shot of a street does that much better than a picture of a famous landmark. In addition to streets, I also like alleys, pictures of stores and restaurants, and public transportation. While the the onion domes of Russia and Ukraine are beautiful (and I have many postcards of that theme which I love), there is something about a more generic street or house that really appeals to me.

Perhaps this is because the card is a synecdoche and, according to Michel de Certeau, synecdoche "expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of 'more' (a totality) and take its place (the bicycle or the piece of furniture in a store window stands for the whole street or neighborhood;" likewise, it "amplifies detail and miniaturizes the whole" (101). The street view takes a small part of a place and amplifies it, taking the viewer on a miniaturized tour.

Some people find this type of card boring. I have even had people apologize for sending me such a "boring" card even though I make it clear that I really like cards that show everyday scenes. While a postcard of the Eiffel Tower is exciting to receive, I already know what the Eiffel Tower looks like. I do not know what a narrow cobblestone street in a tucked-away corner of the Czech Republic looks like. These are the things that are interesting to me--much more so than an image I can easily bring up with a simple Google search.

Through these swellings, shrinkings, and fragmentations, that is, through these rhetorical operations a spatial phrasing of an analogical (composed of juxtaposed citations) and elliptical (made of gaps, lapses, and allusions) type is created. (de Certeau 101)

Every postcard is a rhetorical operation. A photographer chooses the subject matter, frames the photo, and takes the picture. He or she then perhaps spends some time editing: cropping, correcting light and shadow, changing hue and color saturation. Then, the image is sold and a company that prints postcards chooses to use the image. Sometimes, as in the above image, the location is not disclosed (this one is Cuba), but more often than not, the place is identified. It is sold as a representation of a particular place. A person buys the postcard because they either like the image or agree with the rhetorical representation. Then, they send the postcard to someone they think will like the image.

The card is certainly a shrinking, or a fragmentation. It does not and cannot give an image that encompasses everything about a place. Through the fragment, however, the receiver of the card reads the "spatial phrasing" in order to get a sense of what life is like in a certain place.One house stands for a multitude of houses of its type. The blue truck stands for the whole street. The street stands for Havana. Havana stands for Cuba. A postcard is a series of synecdoches, each fragment expanding and amplifying detail, composing a rhetorical whole.

Works Cited

Certeau, Michel de. "Walking in the City." The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Amazon Kindle Edition. 

I have been thinking a lot about maps recently. Maps provide instruction (how to get from Point A to Point B) and information (how far Location A is from Location B).One of the first things I do on a road trip is set the trip meter; I want to know exactly how far I've traveled. In Angels' Town, Ralph Cintron writes:

This map is a kind of text or, better yet, a good example of the discourses of measurement. Measurement, of course, is central to a map since everything is drawn to scale. A certain length of real space becomes one inch of map space. With this reduction, then, we understand a whole system of reductions: for instance, on this map height and depth disappear and become flat; details of the terrain--trees, alleys, sidewalks, houses--disappear, and the ways to traverse a city become prominent. In a sense, numerous locales are washed of their reality, and what is left is their abstractness held in relationship to each other. (17; my italics)

As one might expect, maps play a role in a project like Postcrossing. Every person's profile on the site has a graphic like this, that pinpoints the location of their mailbox. The mailbox in this case serves as synecdoche for the user: my mailbox is here, therefore I am here.

Of course, the map is interactive and the user can zoom in to a more exact approximation of the location. 

This is as close as a casual browser of a profile can get. Once a user has an address, however, the address can be easily searched on Google maps. If someone gets my address and is curious, they can see what my house looks like or, more accurately, what it looked like the day Google recorded it. 

Cintron notes: "In a sense, numerous locales are washed of their reality, and what is left is their abstractness held in relationship to each other." Postcrossing flips this idea in a couple of ways. Because it is reliant upon both digital media and a tangible object, locales that would normally be abstract become more real. The act of sending or receiving the tangible object (the postcard) mitigates abstraction. The text of the map is superimposed on and melded with the text of the postcard. The text of the postcard can be broken down into several subtexts: the image, the handwritten message, the stamps, and any decoration the sender might use.

This card is for a Round Robin I participate in frequently. It's based on the alphabet, so the card must match the given letter in some way. The little rat drawing is there because this member collects rats drawn by fellow Postcrossers. If a map is a discourse of measurement, as Cintron contends, then a postcard traversing that distance closes the distance gap. If I can hold an object in my hand and read what the sender has to say about the image or what they did that day or, if they've bought the card while on vacation, what their trip was like, I no longer view the country of origin as an abstract. For example, Ukraine and Malaysia are in the news quite a lot recently. In the past, I may or may not have paid much attention to what was happening there depending on my level of interest in the place or events. Now, I "know" people who live in those countries. I wonder if the people I've met are affected. Although the postcard image is as flat and two-dimensional as a map, it is made much richer, much more tangible, with the inclusion of the personal touch of the sender. 

Works Cited

Cintron, Ralph. Angels' Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of the Everyday. Boston: Beacon, 1997. Print.