Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban 9780773590380

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Urban Cartographies
LEGIBILITY
1 Metaphor City
2 The Virtuality of Urban Culture: Blanks, Dark Moments, and Blind Fields
3 Serendipitous City: In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism
4 The Cartographatron – Between Media and Architecture: McLuhan, Giedion, Tyrwhitt, and Doxiadis
5 The Artist as Urban Researcher: Research, Representation, and Image-Relations in the City
NAVIGATION
6 Where Are We? Who Am I? Self-Identification with(in) the City
7 The City as Gamespace: Alternate Reality Games and Other Fictions
8 Remapping the Space Between: Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation in Rio de Janeiro
9 The Urban Night
LOCALE
10 “The Company of Strangers”: Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections in Twentieth-Century Popular Fiction and Cinema
11 Mapping the Spatial Practices of the Cinema and Protest: Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo
12 Cinematic Border Spaces: Translocality and the Moving Image
13 Art and the Post-Urban Condition
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Citation preview

CARTOGRAPHIES OF PLACE

ii

preface

t he c ul ture o f c i ti e s s e ri e s e di to r s : k i e r a n b o nn e r a n d w i l l s t raw Cities have long been a key focus of innovative work in the humanities and social sciences. In recent years, the city has assumed new importance for scholars working on cultural issues across a wide range of disciplines. Sociologists, anthropologists, media specialists, and scholars of literature, art, and cinema have come to emphasize the distinctly urban character of many of their objects of study. Those who study processes of globalization are drawn to analyzing cities as the places in which these processes are most deeply felt or where they are most strongly resisted. The Culture of Cities series has its roots in an international research project of the same name, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada during the period 2000–05. The series includes books based in the work of that project as well as other volumes that reflect the project’s spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry. Case studies, comparative analyses, and theoretical accounts of city life offer tools and insights for understanding urban cultures as they confront the forces acting upon them in the contemporary world. The Culture of Cities series is aimed at scholars and interested readers from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The Imaginative Structure of the City Alan Blum Urban Enigmas Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities Edited by Johanne Sloan Circulation and the City Essays on Urban Culture Edited by Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw Cartographies of Place Navigating the Urban Edited by Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault

preface

Cartographies of Place Navigating the Urban

E D I TE D BY

Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

iii

iv

preface

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2014 isbn 978-0-7735-4302-7 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-4303-4 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-9038-0 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-9039-7 (epub) Legal deposit first quarter 2014 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Cartographies of place : navigating the urban / edited by Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-4302-7 (bound). -- isbn 978-0-7735-4303-4 (pbk.). -isbn 978-0-7735-9038-0 (epdf). -- isbn 978-0-7735-9039-7 (epub) 1. Cities and towns -- Effect of technological innovations on. 2. Cities and towns in mass media. 3. Mass media -- Social aspects. 4. Technology -- Social aspects. I. Darroch, Michael, 1975–, writer of introduction, editor of compilation II. Marchessault, Janine, writer of introduction, editor of compilation ht119.c37 2014

307.76

c2013-907315-9 c2013-907316-7

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

preface

Contents

Figures and Tables

vii

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Urban Cartographies Michael Darroch and Janine Marchessault 3 LEGIBILIT Y

1 Metaphor City Ben Highmore 25 2 The Virtuality of Urban Culture: Blanks, Dark Moments, and Blind Fields Rob Shields 41 3 Serendipitous City: In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism Mervyn Horgan 55 4 The Cartographatron – Between Media and Architecture: McLuhan, Giedion, Tyrwhitt, and Doxiadis Stephan Kowal 77 5 The Artist as Urban Researcher: Research, Representation, and Image-Relations in the City Saara Liinamaa 92 N AV I G AT I O N

6 Where Are We? Who Am I? Self-Identification with(in) the City Jean-François Côté and Marie-Laurence Bordeleau-Payer 117

v

vi

Contents

7 The City as Gamespace: Alternate Reality Games and Other Fictions Olivier Asselin 141 8 Remapping the Space Between: Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation in Rio de Janeiro Justin Read 157 9 The Urban Night Will Straw 185 LO CA L E

10 “The Company of Strangers”: Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections in Twentieth-Century Popular Fiction and Cinema Markus Reisenleitner 203 11 Mapping the Spatial Practices of the Cinema and Protest: Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo Sharon Hayashi 217 12 Cinematic Border Spaces: Translocality and the Moving Image Ian Robinson 238 13 Art and the Post-Urban Condition Lee Rodney 253 Bibliography

271

Contributors 295 Index 299

preface

vii

Figures and Tables

FIGURES

4.1 Four cartographatrons of automobile trips 84 4.2 The cartographatron as “a combination of an electronic computer, a television picture tube, and a camera” 86 4.3 Cartographatron as map of desire lines, or a sum of lines connecting origins and destinations 87 11.1 Fox News map of Japan’s nuclear power plants 218 11.2 Map of 11 June 2011 No Nukes demonstration route through Shinjuku, Tokyo 220 11.3 Protesters leading the 11 June 2011 No Nukes demonstration in Shinjuku 221 11.4 “Over 20,000 Gather in Shinjuku No Nukes Square” 223 11.5 Flyer for 22 February 2004 anti-Iraq War Shibuya demonstration 225 11.6 Occupation Not Election flyer 228 11.7 11 June 2011 Demo Sound Truck inserted in Google Street View 234 13.1 The Border Bookmobile at the Imagination Station, Detroit 256 13.2 The Border Bookmobile at the Detroit Figment Festival, Belle Isle, Detroit 257 TA B L E S

2.1 Tetrology 50 3.1 Summary of differences between the representational modes of the city of birds and the city of worms 69

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

A great many people and institutions have contributed to this volume. First and foremost, we wish to thank our contributors for their patience and commitment as this collection was developed. Very special thanks go to the many graduate student researchers who contributed to the production of this volume and kept us diligently on track in organizing and producing the book at different stages: at York University, Ya-Yin Ko, Kate Wells, Sara Udow, and Mark Barbe; and at the University of Windsor, Evelina Baczewska. We thank the Culture of Cities series editors Kieran Bonner and Will Straw for their encouragement and we are especially indebted to Jonathan Crago, our editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, whose intelligent insights and sage suggestions guided this book forward. Research for our introduction derives in part from a Standard Research Grant, The Culture and Communications Seminar and Explorations Journal: Interdisciplinary Collaborations and Contributions to Media Studies (1953–59), provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. York University and the University of Windsor each provided invaluable research time and support. We owe special gratitude to Joanne Muzak for her diligence and patience in copyediting the manuscript and index; and to Jessica Howarth, assistant managing editor at mqup and Ryan Van Huijstee, managing editor at mqup – their work was truly appreciated by all of the contributors.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

CARTOGRAPHIES OF PLACE

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Urban Cartographies MICH AEL DARRO CH A ND JA NINE MARCHE S S AULT

Media are connected to our physical environments more dramatically than ever before – literally opening up new spaces of interactivity and connection that transform the experience of being in the city, its forms of public gathering and movement, the democratic ideals of civitas of which we think the city capable. Urban screens, mobile media, new digital mappings, ambient and pervasive media of all kinds create ecologies in which entire communities dwell or in which singular entities take refuge. How do we analyze these new spaces? Recognition of the mutual histories and research programs of urban and media studies is only just beginning. Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban seeks to develop new vocabularies and methodologies for engaging with the distinctive situations and experiences created by media technologies that are reshaping, augmenting, and expanding urban spaces. The book builds upon the rich traditions and insights of a postwar generation of humanist scholars, media theorists, and urban planners. Authors situate different historical and contemporary currents in urban studies that share a common concern for media forms, either as research tool or as the means for discerning the expressive nature of city spaces around the world. All of the media considered in this book are not simply “free floating,” but are embedded in the geopolitical, economic, and material contexts in which they are used. Cities are not images but living entities deeply connected to and fabricated through collective memories, social relations, and built structures expressed in material culture. But even though cities are not images, they are images before they are cities – they are imagined, dreamed, and planned. While such imaginings can be understood

4

Introduction

through and clarified by the aesthetic systems/experiments of art making, they exceed art. They belong to a network of discourses and epistemologies, hierarchies and power relations that are both structured and unpredictable. Photographic and digital images, for example, are not simply representations of imagined spaces; nor are they empirical records of moments past. Rather, they are integrally tied to the very enactment of urban space, to the creative intersubjective performance of urbanity. The authors we have brought together in this volume seek to understand the urban in and through its complex mediations, its cultural cartographies that “activate” the layers of reality in each environment. We have called our collection Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban to express the notion that media both anchor and complicate what it means to be located in the world today. With the exception of two chapters by two of the leading researchers in the field of urban cultural studies (Highmore and Shields), the essays in this book are the result of many years of collaboration amongst the authors on various urban research projects. In addition to collaborations (Coté, Darroch, Horgan, Liinamaa, Marchessault, and Straw) initiated during the Culture of Cities Project 2000–2005,1 the majority of the contributors to Cartographies of Place participated in two symposia coordinated by the editors: the Urban Research Methodologies Symposium held at the Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in Toronto in April 2007; and the Urban Mediations Symposium held at ArtCite in Windsor, Ontario in May 2009. Initial versions of their chapters were presented at these two symposia, and we believe that this gives the collection a strong cohesion and shared purpose. The impetus behind these meetings was the potential implications we saw for developing innovative methodologies in urban research – whether it be new forms of citizenship tied to social media, new cultural formations in urban contexts, or “artistic research” that redefines the very parameters and meanings of existing knowledge. Participants focused on cultural spaces, visual fabric, and the mediated character of cities. In particular, we were concerned with research methods that cross the humanities and fine arts such as innovative forms of ethnographic inquiry, object-oriented ontologies, comparative archeologies, artistic projects, and interventions in urban space. These origins, and the concerns to develop innovative interdisciplinary methodologies that bring together urban and media studies, are reflected in this book’s intellectual breadth. Our contributors strive to

Urban Cartographies

5

bridge modernist and contemporary perspectives of the cartographic, proposing a central understanding of “navigation” as a changing phenomenon within a digital urban environment. Navigation encapsulates the tension between maps as representations of territory, and maps as interfaces with routes and routines of city life. The way in which the cartographic has moved beyond two-dimensional representations is theorized by different authors in this volume who analyze how these technologies have influenced our experience of place, transformed everyday activities or enabled political actions. The collection thus positions “navigation” as a central form of mediation between the spaces, tempos, and experiences of the city. Drawing upon modernist paradigms for thinking through contemporary imaginaries, the authors engage with phenomena in contemporary cities around the world. Cartographies of Place offers original methodologies that are vital for understanding the ecological, social, and cultural spheres that define twenty-first-century urban spaces – both designed and unplanned. Across the book’s three-part structure, the contributions evolve from broadly stated metaphors and theories (“Legibility”), to studies that examine how specific spaces and times of the city are activated and negotiated (“Navigation”), to case studies of places and acts of place making (“Locale”). Before getting into more detail about the contributions, we would like to turn to some of the early considerations of media and environment that underpin how this book has evolved. M EDI A A N D E N V IRO N M E N T

We do not see experience and mediation in terms of a philosophical divide, an either/or situation, since experience of/in the modern city is one of mediation. This insight comes to us from many places, but we may point to the French Symbolists in the nineteenth century (Mallarmé, Baudelaire) who began to incorporate media forms into their art works as they produced documentation (paintings, poems) of their everyday perceptions in the city. This is an insight that has been adopted by many modern philosophers and artists, from the Bauhaus artists, to Giedion, to Innis and McLuhan, and to more contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze and Agamben, all of whom are represented in our book. Indeed, their approaches are both phenomenological and articulated through differentiated forms of mediation.

6

Introduction

Kevin Lynch and György Kepes helped to open this relationship as an area of study using insights from art history, anthropology, and psychology in the early 1950s. In their project on the “look of cities,” they sought to develop a new approach for analyzing and renovating the visual design of cities. Concerned with understanding the total urban environment, Lynch was focused on place making in terms of the environment’s capacity to communicate. The city is not a “thing in itself” but a product of “being perceived by its inhabitants” (Lynch 1960, 3). It was while collaborating with Kepes in 1954 that Lynch broadened his interest beyond the ways in which city dwellers merely orient themselves in a metropolitan region, to undertake studies of our perceptions of daily experience in terms of “imageability: that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image in any given observer” (Lynch 1960, 9). As he wrote in the “Visual Shape of the Shapeless Metropolis,” the perceptual form of the city needs to be “an imageable region, composed of vivid differentiated elements, legibly organized” (Lynch 1990, 67).2 The structured image of the city ought to be extensible, legible at general and detailed levels, and yet it should be an image that could unfold in various ways according to the observer’s desires and knowledge. In keeping with a modernist postwar universalism, Kepes was deeply committed to crossing interdisciplinary boundaries. In The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), the concerns that animated his collaboration with Lynch emerge as a plea to rethink urban space according to human sensibilities and the technical achievements of the day: “Architects design buildings in which exterior and interior space flow together, opening up the prison cells to which we have condemned ourselves. Painters and sculptors have absorbed new values: the speed and precision of machines, the energy of a dynamic society, the new range of space opened by science and technique” (Kepes 1956, 70). To restore balance between scientific knowledge and our emotional and psychological state, Kepes argued, we need new symbols for creating order – a sentiment similarly reflected in the writings of his mentor, László Moholy-Nagy, and their collaborator, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion. The search for a dynamic equilibrium was to be accomplished by identifying a “new poetry of images, latent in the new landscape” (Kepes 1956, 74). The notion of a “new landscape” was a strong inspiration for the interdisciplinary Explorations Group (1953–59) at the University of Toronto, led by Marshall McLuhan and the radical anthropologist

Urban Cartographies

7

Edmund Carpenter, alongside psychologist D.C. Williams, political economist Tom Easterbrook, and the modernist town planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. Tyrwhitt, originally a horticulturalist and long-time associate of Giedion, had arrived with affiliations with the Bauhaus and the mars Group, the UK wing of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (ciam, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture). She brought a keen understanding of studies of the environment and urban ecologies across time.3 Just prior to her arrival in Toronto, in 1951, Tyrwhitt had initiated a vision of the city as an interconnected combination of media and architecture through the concept of “live architecture” in a Bauhaus-inspired exhibition on town planning that she helped to coordinate at the Festival of Britain. The same year, she also helped to organize ciam 8 as its acting secretary. ciam 8 took as its theme “The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanization of Urban Life.” According to Eric Mumford, ciam 8 “can be seen as a reference point for the new forms of public space, including shopping malls, renewed downtowns, and theme parks, that came to characterize urbanism in the rapidly decentralizing cities of the 1950s and later” (2002, 215). In the published proceedings of ciam 8, Giedion summarized the new problematic central to postwar urban planning in terms of the need to create a new kind of spectator citizen: “The thing that is needed today to turn people back from passive spectators to active participants is an emotional experience which can reawaken their apparently lost powers of spontaneity” (Giedion 1952, 161). At the Festival of Britain, the South Bank exhibition represented architecture in practice, while a Live Architecture exhibition in the Lansbury neighbourhood of the Poplar-Stepney district in London’s East End would “demonstrate the possibilities inherent in good town planning, architecture and building by putting on show part of a replanned, living community in the process of going about its daily life” (Guide to Architecture 1951, 7). The exhibition consisted of a crosssection of a residential neighbourhood containing houses, flats, shops, primary, secondary, and nursery schools, street furniture and open spaces, light industry, a church, and several pubs, alongside a Building Science Pavilion and a Town Planning Pavilion. It aimed to illustrate the visual and practical advantages of postwar town planning, to make intelligible the latest advances in building techniques with some of the structures left in various stages of completion with sections exposed to illustrate structural techniques. After the festival, these structures were completed and the entire neighbourhood was

8

Introduction

handed over to the city. It was the relationship of individuals to the community that predominated as the core concerns of the Town Planning exhibition: “The many and sometimes conflicting needs of people of different callings have to be provided for …. The lives of a baby, a schoolchild, a teen-ager, a single worker, a married woman with a job, a mother and an elderly person are very different, but all have to live together as one community” (Guide to Architecture 1951, 38). For Tyrwhitt, these spectator ideal types reflected ciam 8’s focus on the heart of the city, where once again the “spectator citizen” was invited to imagine the city of the future: “Representative buildings of entertainment, evening education and civil administration should be visible. A major stream of traffic should also be seen, skirting the area. Trees and sculptures should be in evidence – possibly also water and perhaps grass. Visitors should receive an impression of freedom of movement; ease of choice of activity; of places where informal crowds can gather, places where one can ‘promenade’ and places where one can rest.”4 Tyrwhitt was later concerned that Lynch’s renowned The Image of the City – in many ways the fruits of his collaboration with Kepes – still presented the notion of image as a static and atemporal conception of urban life and space. Such a static image failed to consider architecture’s ability to delight. In a review of Lynch, she admitted that placing too much emphasis on delight may be a “slippery slope,” but argued that it should nevertheless be addressed as essential to urban experience: “‘A clear and comprehensive image of the entire metropolitan region is a fundamental requirement for the future,’ states Kevin Lynch (1960, 110). But is this so? A graphic and pleasurable image of one’s immediate environment (one’s habitat); a clear knowledge of one’s regular areas to which one is going; these are certainly acceptable desiderata. But what can be the advantage of carrying around a mental map of the entire metropolitan region?”5 As we have traced in previous research (Darroch and Marchessault 2009), Tyrwhitt adopted Giedion’s approach to time and histories of material culture, suggesting that Henri Bergson’s notion of duration be conceived as an alternative to Lynch’s legible city maps: It is just possible that an alternative, and conceivably more valid hypothesis for organising an image of the city might be Henri Bergson’s original notion of “duration,” or some of its later derivatives. This notion made a distinction between time and duration

Urban Cartographies

9

– which might, also perhaps be interpreted as impact. Thus, the mental impact entering into an urban space arousing an emotional response could seem to occupy a fuller amount of time – duration – than the time occupied in driving along several nondescript streets. Such a hypothesis could make allowances for the necessary psychological process of periods of rest – pauses – between moments of great visual awareness. It is only the complete stranger or mentally insane who make any attempt to give equal attention to everything they pass by.6 Tyrwhitt’s interpretation of Giedion’s studies of space-time (in Space, Time, and Architecture, 1941) permitted her to treat the city as a continually mediated sphere of cultural life. In Tyrwhitt’s hands, cities must be studied in terms of a phenomenology: urban space is active, constantly shifting and changing. She proposed studying the experience of living in cities and not simply “the city” as means to develop new forms of urban design that were devoid of bodies and subjectivities. As a major inspiration for McLuhan’s many reflections on the mediated environments of cities as classrooms, Tyrwhitt was constantly attentive to the effects cities and their environments have on the human sensorium: what are our emotional responses to specific locations and events? The 1951 Live Architecture exhibition is exemplary of this focus. In a later collaboration with psychologist D.C. Williams, she carried out a study for Explorations that developed her own theories of the relationship between urban space and memory (a project with which Lynch would later compare his own “Walk around the Block” [1956] studies of perception in Boston in correspondence with her). The Explorations Group conducted surveys with students of Toronto’s then Ryerson Institute, probing into their capacities to remember their urban environment (focusing on elements such as architecture, advertising, street furniture, and physical layout). Published as “The City Unseen” in Explorations 5 (June 1955) and elsewhere, Tyrwhitt’s analysis promoted an understanding of the interrelationship between imagination and memory in the process of perception and recollection as an essential component of town planning research. Whereas the Explorations researchers set out to diagnose the effects of the media on language and human behaviour, Tyrwhitt arrived in Toronto with an interest in diagnosing the effects of the city on the human senses. Aiming always to design better cities on a human scale, Tyrwhitt’s vision of the city included an understanding that all urban media existed in a

10

Introduction

relationship to each other. Experiencing place involves complex interrelations between the built environment, imagination, and individual memory. Writing about the Ryerson experiment while teaching at Harvard, Tyrwhitt seems almost apologetic for her focus on such minute elements of human memory and the built environment: “Much of this article must seem very obvious, but the fact is that we really know very little about how to design so as to rekindle the interest of the public in their visual environment” (Tyrwhitt 1957, 11). The human mind does not simply recollect (using Lynch’s terms) the daily pathways and nodes of urban space as a sequence of cinematic images. On the contrary, she argues, “imaginative vision” leaps “ahead of actuality” (Tyrwhitt 1957, 11). Just as films can present events and places of the city as simultaneous occurrences, so is our mind “living in its own world quite removed from the scene around us, and our vision has been set for our destination. Our eyes are therefore alerted for the signals that guide us along the Paths and will herald the appearance of the Node. In effect we see it before it appears – we anticipate it” (Tyrwhitt 1964, 16). This energy of imagination and anticipation should not overwhelm the phenomenological experience of the city. Tyrwhitt is concerned that citizens have lost interest in the places in which they dwell. For city dwellers to engage and have a stake in the materiality and design of urban space, they must be encouraged to care about the design of their cities through better education, to be sure, but also through new kinds of designed spaces that encourage an interactive relation between environments and people. In his essay for this collection, “Metaphor City,” Ben Highmore argues that “cultural workers (academics working on urban cultural matters, cultural critics, cultural producers and so on) might find the work that they can most productively contribute to the future of cities is not to borrow the garb of urban planners but to work to find new, more productive metaphoric systems both for the city and within the city. Indeed, it might well be that the most exciting cultural work on the city is to be found precisely here at the level of supplying different representational systems for the city.” Kepes, Lynch, Giedion, and Tyrwhitt put forward this very idea: that being good urban planners means understanding the experience of the city, which includes its different forms of media and images. To stage an exhibition of Live Architecture in today’s urban landscape would require recognizing the extent to which technologies and images themselves are embedded in and take shape through the environment and its citizens.

Urban Cartographies

11

The Explorations Group influenced numerous urban planners; among them was the Greek architect Constantinos Apostolos Doxiadis with whom both Tyrwhitt and McLuhan collaborated. Doxiadis established Ekistics, the journal based on the science of human settlement (which Tyrwhitt edited for many years) and was interested in mapping, creating grids, and using film to represent the increasing complexities of cities in terms of networks. Doxiadis, a long-time urban planner and architect, was recognized in 2006 with a major international exhibition of his drawings, maps, and films along with a major symposium on his ideas. This helps to redress the fact that Doxiadis along with Tyrwhitt have been underexamined figures in urban and media studies. Indeed, as Stephan Kowal uncovers in his essay on Doxiadis, we can learn much from his work about the possible applications of digital media to the study of urban spaces.7 Henri Lefebvre provides another approach to mapping urban space, one that several chapters in our book discuss. From The Urban Revolution, The Production of Space, The Critique of Everyday Life, Volumes 1 to 3, and the writings collected in Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre’s philosophy has sought to integrate temporality into an analysis of urban space. While he remained critical of Henri Bergson throughout his life, it is not difficult to see how their approaches to time and duration share much in common (Fraser 2011). Like Tyrwhitt, Lefebvre suggests a number of methodologies for studying urban space based on the rhythms of machines and the rhythms of human bodies. If Doxiadis presents us with grids and maps, layers of empirical information, Lefebvre’s approach is stubbornly phenomenological, impressionistic, and poetic. Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis might help us to understand urban life precisely because there is, as with Tyrwhitt’s urban experiments, a mixture of the human and non-human elements in the analysis of rhythms. The traffic light, the sewage system, the seasons of the year are all interconnected and yet highly differentiated in his poetic methodology. In Mediterranean cities, for instance, Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier notice that “the citizen resists the State by a particular use of time. A struggle therefore unfolds for appropriation in which rhythms play a major role. Through them social, therefore, civil time, seeks and manages to shield itself from State, linear, unirhythmical measured and measuring time. Thus the public space, space of representation, ‘spontaneously’ becomes [a] place of promenades, encounters, intrigues, diplomacy, trade and negotiations, theatricalizing itself. Time is hence linked to space and to the rhythms of the people who occupy this space” (1996, 237).

12

Introduction

Lefebvre is interested in the street party as a radical form of appropriation, transforming exchange value back into a useful economy. Yet, fundamentally, he is also interested in human plurality and difference. This is no doubt one of the strengths of his approach to the urban environment – city spaces are highly differentiated. There are currently several architectural projects underway at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Faculty of Architecture eth Zurich that have been designed to experiment with empirical applications of Lefebvre’s ideas. Ongoing international and interdisciplinary annual conferences in cooperation with the Delft School of Design and the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht) have sought to develop new approaches to cartography (shared and iterative) and design spatial tools for the analysis of contemporary manifestations of urbanization. This turn to space is not new. As Nigel Thrift underlines, “I think of Gabriel Tarde’s micrometaphysics, Pitirim Sorokin’s forays into sociocultural causality, Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geography, or Anthony Giddens’s expeditions around social theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s” (2006, 139). But in the twenty-first century, the study of space has been pursued with renewed vigor and creativity primarily because the interpenetration of spaces, especially via globalization, have made it impossible to avoid. Researchers “must necessarily emphasize the materiality of thinking and include the study of material culture, the sociology of science, performance studies from dance to poetry, sitebased art and architecture, various aspects of archaeology and museum studies, some of the excursions into interaction design, as well as various developments in cultural geography like non-representational theory” (Thrift 2006, 140). Thrift suggests an interdisciplinary framework for studying the character of these new spaces and experiences, as well as one that crosses research and creation, both traditional modes of social science research along with new aesthetic methodologies developed in the fine arts. Ash Amin has noted there is also a pressing necessity to consider the ethical dimension that underscores questions of design and urban public space (2008). Concerned with the relation between public space, civic politics, and democracy, he argues for the continued importance of shared public environments as a catalyst for political participation, for demos. However, his approach to thinking about the public is conceived from a post-humanist perspective. He is less concerned with the classical idea of the public sphere as a place where

Urban Cartographies

13

strangers encounter one another than he is with “the entanglement between people, and material and visual culture of public space” (8). In a formulation that is reminiscent of Giedion’s call for an active citizen and Tyrwhitt’s interest in spaces that delight, Amin offers four keywords for analyzing the vitality of public space. The first is “multiplicity,” which refers to the extent to which the space is open to the plurality and diversity of the world as well as an openness to the mixed use of space. It refers to “urban inclusion” and “the right of the many to public space” (15). The second is “symbolic solidarity,” which addresses the manner in which space is open to the symbolic projections not of the powerful (advertising etc.) but of the marginal, that which speaks to tolerance (16). Third, “conviviality” refers not to pleasant social interactions but “the shared experience of the well stocked and sage park or street and community centre or library.” It is a “brush with multiplicity,” not simply based “on interest in the possibilities of serendipity and chance” that is an intrinsic aspect of multiplicity but of “the gains to be had from access to collective resources, the knowledge that more does not become less through usage, the assurance of belonging to a larger fabric of urban life” (19). Finally, there is “technological maintenance,” which reminds us of Lefebvre’s urban rhythms – these refer to the fact that the city is a machine that regulates and orders the life world: from “postcodes, pipes and cables, satellites, commuting patterns, computers, telephones, software, databases,” all “regulate urban provisioning by setting the delivery systems, internet protocols, rituals of civic and public conduct, family routines and cultures of workplace and residence” (19). Citizens only notice these structures when they break down, but within them, Amin argues, we can detect the manner in which certain people and things are valued and serviced above others. These are a “technological unconscious,” to borrow Thrift’s neologism (2004), and they are laced with “identities, supply and functionality” (Amin 2008, 20). Cities have come to be defined through cataclysmic ecological events, instances of militarized space, or extreme acts of violence. These events provide a historical framework that allows us to discern the nature of such events. One of the influential aspects of Stephen Graham’s landmark book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (2011) is precisely its focus on “urbanized militarism” – militarized urban space that is facilitated by the development of sophisticated tracking and surveillance technologies. Yet this phenomenon of tracking and surveillance, of the “e-border” is also a highly elaborate

14

Introduction

fantasy of Western supremacy that depends on the opposition between the “capitalist heartland” of the Global North and the “colonial peripheries,” and often articulated by an opposition between cities. Yet, as Graham argues, such oppositions are being completely undone by investment and migration. This interconnection between cities is examined in many of the essays in this book. Drawing upon the rich interdisciplinary insights of urban sociology, many of the authors seek to engage with phenomena (from the favelas to Google Maps) in contemporary cities around the world. While Cartographies of Place examines some capitals of modernity like London and Paris, these cities are analyzed in terms of global encounters and diasporas. In his essay, Markus Reisenleitner, for example, may well write about London, but it is London’s Chinatown marked by the “historical forces of movement and contamination” that occupies him. As he writes, “My particular interest is in London’s imaginary negotiation of the British Empire’s connection to China, which imprinted itself on the Docklands/Lime House district.” It is precisely powerful popular narratives marked by cultural trade, diasporas, and military conflict that are traced in numerous essays in the book devoted to case studies of localities in both heavily industrialized and developing countries. Justin Read’s essay on Rio de Janeiro is based on an “imitative modernity that was intended to ‘cleanse’ the city hygienically of its tropical maladies.” Ian Robinson’s selection of “world cinema” films in this collection is concerned with migration in the city of Fengjie, and the war-torn borders of Nazareth and the West Bank. Robinson suggests how these places are formed through labour and militarization. Sharon Hayashi’s essay deals with contemporary forms of anti-nuclear protest in the present reality of post 3.11 Japan “as the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown.” Her essay traces new approaches to mapping collective actions by artists groups in Tokyo against the militarization supported by the right-wing governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro. C A RTO G R A P H I E S

The notion of “cartographies” recalls the writings of David Harvey and Doreen Massey whose work in critical geography is central to the project of this book. According to Harvey, cartography “imposes spatial order on phenomena” and “in its contemporary manifestation …

Urban Cartographies

15

depends heavily upon a Cartesian logic in which res extensa are presumed to be quite separate from the realms of mind and thought and capable of full depiction within some set of coordinates” (Harvey 2001, 220). Yet Harvey argues eloquently for a new “cartographic consciousness,” traces of which are “writ large” in poetry and literature from Shakespeare to Defoe. Reading such literature allows us to “see ourselves in a different positionality, within a different map of the world” (221). From this understanding of cartography, “how urban life is experienced and practiced … has much to do with how we form and reform mental maps of the city” (221). The emergent field of enquiry he envisages, which links geography with culture and media studies, is a point of departure for our book. Massey has equally challenged conventional notions of cartography as a purely spatial category. Maps are not simply representations of space but of space and time (Massey 2005, 108). Cartographic representations for Massey are thus connected to “space as a sphere of dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore always undetermined) by the construction of new relations” (107). The objective of our collection is to bridge modernist and contemporary perspectives of the cartographic and “navigating the urban,” especially the realm of navigation in a digital environment. Thus, our contributors ground and substantiate terms like “cartography” and “mapping” in specific practices. As Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner, and Bruno Latour have argued, “the common experience of using digital maps on the screen, and no longer on paper, has vastly extended the meaning of the word navigation” (2010, 586). Indeed, these authors provide us with a definition of the new cartographic environments and differentiate between mimetic and navigational systems, offering an explanation for why the cartographic is (and has always been) such an important term for sense making in the city. The ways in which the cartographic has moved beyond mere two-dimensional representations are well theorized by our contributors who offer multiple case studies of the ways in which maps guide our knowledge of what constitutes urban territories and places as much as our everyday activities or political action. Olivier Asselin, for example, engages directly with the theme of navigation via the interplay between digital media and real locations, exemplified by alternate reality games (args). As args unfold in both mediated and

16

Introduction

physical contexts, they expand the so-called “magic circle” of gameplay through spatial, temporal, social, and technological frameworks. args are thus involved with a contemporary transformation of our notion of “play” in terms of labour as well as strategies for revitalizing everyday life. Jean-François Côté and Marie-Laurence Bordeleau-Payer in particular challenge the belief that mapping merely defines the capacity to delimit specific territories. Rather, they stress, “it has never been as clear as it has now become that [mapping] was done for (and by) someone, or in other words, that ‘mapping’ always referred at the same time to the drawing of both a subject and an object.” As they describe three different levels of localization (universal forms of urbanity; the particular – one city among other possible cities; and singular or specific places within a city), they note that “drawing cartographies of each of these levels, from a person’s point of view, would certainly give way to quite different types of ‘maps’” that “would change from one individual to another.” They do not conceive of territories as static, immobile spaces, but as dynamic interactions between space and time; a territory is “a space that moves through time because of the places that constitute it,” a “mixture of places.” Localizing the self within these urban territories is about navigating the tension between the many “topologies” of the individual subject and the many “topographies” of the urban environment. According to Côté and Bordeleau-Payer, “mapping, even though it is still a cognitive/normative/expressive process, has henceforth less to do with representing a localization (which can no longer be considered static) than with giving significance to a spacetime experience (internally, locally or globally produced).” There are excellent books on the city, excellent books on media, but few that effectively bring these together. Works by urbanists often treat representation quite superficially, using films and other media as simply illustrative. Film and media books on the city often consider media representations as narratives without offering insights into the complexity of the interface, without recourse to the actual environment. Scott McQuire’s book The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (2009) was among the first to address the manner in which contemporary media and all variety of screen technologies (mobile, instantaneous, and pervasive) have transformed the distinct articulation and experience of urban space. His book is exemplary of a new direction in interdisciplinary scholarship and has provided an

Urban Cartographies

17

important starting point for the present collection. Cartographies of Place actively engages with the relation between image and place as an opportunity to get at the complexity and plurality of urban life. We have assembled authors with different approaches to the integral relation between media (print, photography, radio, film, performance, and mobile/pervasive media) and the urban, so as to capture the heterogeneity of cities. The book is organized around three conceptual nodes that encompass the image in terms of its capacity to create forms of “legibility,” “navigation” and “locale.” LEGIBILIT Y

The first section on legibility is very much inspired by Kevin Lynch’s The Image and The City in terms of how cities appear to us. Working with the idea of the mental image, legibility has both subjective aspects informed by personal memories and experiences and more general characteristics – how they are designed, the kinds of common sensations they impart. This section provides frameworks and vocabularies through which to perceive and analyze urban environments. These perspectives map not only a range of urban experiences, but also research strategies: these are methods to orient the researcher and reader both in making sense of the urban and in carrying out urban research. Highmore’s notion that “the most exciting cultural work on the city is to be found precisely … at the level of supplying different representational systems for the city” serves to anchor the project of the book. This notion is explored through distinct metaphorical systems, from the medical understanding of the city to the suggestive rythmanalytics of Lefebvre. Rob Shields also focuses on the work of Lefebvre as a way of distinguishing between the urban and the city – the urban is a “diagram of forces” that are informatic, environmental, and economic. The urban is the shadow of the city not as adjective but as “a term tightly associated with the physical fabric of the city.” Thus, the first two essays in the book offer a vocabulary through which to begin to discern certain aspects of place – that is, aspects centrally concerned with the relation between “fact and fantasy,” “the real and the possible.” Mervyn Horgan examines another methodological tradition in urban studies that comes to us from the ethnographic work of the Chicago School. He argues that the central though unacknowledged methodological principle that animated Chicago School work was

18

Introduction

serendipity. Drawing on figures both marginal and central to this tradition, he demonstrates how their use of multiple methodologies for understanding people and places as diverse as bohemia, juvenile delinquency, community conflict, and the immigrant experience are derived in large part from serendipitous and random encounters with the objects of everyday life. Stephan Kowal takes a phenomenological tradition found in the work of Giedion and Tyrwhitt and extends it to the invention of a new medium in the early 1960s, the cartographatron. The cartographatron was a hybrid machine that combined film and video to create instantaneous maps of confluent movements inside urban spaces. Doxiadis used this new medium in his architectural and planning designs, and developed discussions of this new medium in the pages of his journal Ekistics as a means to understand contemporary space in terms of overlapping networks and “lines of desire.” Such an approach to mapping grew out of the studies on perception of the urban environment that critiqued static and atemporal urban planning theories. As we noted earlier, Tyrwhitt, a long time editor of Ekistics, promoted an understanding of the dynamic mobility and flux of urban spatial experience, which itself anticipated the rhythmanalytics of Lefebvre and other twentieth-century thinkers. Finally, Saara Liinamaa seeks to map new ways of carrying out urban research, which she finds in contemporary art practices. In her chapter, Liinamaa identifies four different “creative urban research types”: the flâneur, the ethnographer, the doctor, and the collector. Such types take shape as artists work to document, experience, heal, and archive the ever-changing terrain of the contemporary city. Thus, each of the essays in this section help to provide a vocabulary and consider different methodologies for studying and understanding the new landscape of the postwar city in Europe and the United States. This new heterogeneous landscape led to a sense of space, which was unbound, porous, complex, changing, and defined through a multiplicity of media and forms of human interaction. N AV I G AT I O N

The second section consists of concrete manifestations of navigating different urban experiences, temporalities, geographies, and subjectivities. The writers in this section consider navigation through a variety of technologies, including Google Maps, photography, cinema, alternate reality games, social media, fiction, and poetics. “Navigation”

Urban Cartographies

19

builds on the notion of “Legibility.” Jean-Luc Nancy in Le sens du monde (1993) (The sense of the world) reminds us of the twin significations of the word sens, which means both direction and the human senses. This phenomenological and sensual aspect of navigation is inherent to the chapters gathered in this section. Côté and BordeleauPayer’s chapter considers the complex relations between individual subjects and city life in terms of the capacity of virtual and actual actors to map their own self-identification. They question how the contemporary city, through its many reflective surfaces and spaces, both actual and virtual, has become an environment in which selfobservation increasingly structures personal identity. Asselin’s chapter examines how such settings are the means through which alternate reality narratives and psychogeographic games are played out. These new forms of cinematic writing are no longer contained in the movie house or in living rooms but unfold and are performed in situ, in actual urban spaces through the use of mobile, gps, and other networked media. Justin Read also explores the creation of worlds and specifically the image of the so-called developing world in Latin American cities. Read takes Rio de Janeiro as a site of global power and traces the spread of globalization and concomitant spread of poverty in this region through contested media spaces. Read examines the ways in which images of police raids and attempts to consolidate state control in the Complexo do Alemão have rendered this complex of favelas into spaces of both intensely local and global representational force. Perceptions of identity and citizenship are contested across multiple and often conflicting media representations at the intersection of state sources, media conglomerates, and popular cultural sources such as the Voz da comunidade, a favela-based community newspaper that quickly embraced social media platforms. Focusing on a variety of textual materials from novels to works of urban sociology and policy documents, Will Straw’s chapter takes the urban night as its subject matter. With particular attention paid to the temporal fabric of everyday life, he examines the ways that distinctions between night and day are imagined in terms of “regions” or “worlds” within urban settings. LO CA L E

The final section of the book is devoted to the theme of “Locale” where the different elements of legibility and navigation are drawn

20

Introduction

together to explore how cities are both differentiated from one another and share common attributes. Logics of comparison and new kinds of epistemologies and cultures that arise from the encounters and crossings between cities by way of certain media (old and new) in transnational and translocal arenas inform this section. Authors examine the cultural circuits, collective imaginaries, and technological infrastructures that connect cities. Markus Reisenleitner excavates concrete histories of places that are connected through a shared history of colonialism. Calling upon a variety of materials from Hong Kong, Darwin, and London that imagine encounters with strangers, Reisenleitner’s chapter shows how the interconnectedness of these cities is revealed in the way encounters with strangers are imagined in literary texts and popular culture. Sharon Hayashi’s contribution explores the cultures of protest in Japan taking as her focus a collective of young artists and students whose experiments with new modes of address and distribution (from cell phones to YouTube) expand the concept of citizenship beyond the national. These new performative practices of street protest reimagine the body politic to encompass both site specificity and other cities across East Asia to create “translocal imaginaries.” In his contribution, Ian Robinson argues that the cinematic border should be read as both a paradigmatic site of contemporary globalization and a critical site for the re-articulation of place as a dynamic and relational expression of identity. The border remains a highly unstable and porous space whose contingency is manifested in its identity as a site of strict regulation and control. Through an exploration of the analogous forms of contingency found in geopolitical border spaces and the space of moving images as indices of the world, this chapter challenges the notion that places are fixed, static forms and that images are empty vehicles for representation. In grasping both the cinematic image and the spatiality of place as relational entities, new possibilities for living in a globalized world emerge. Close readings of Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River (2008) and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002) propose a critical methodology for deciphering the politics of place in contemporary world cinema. Focusing her study on Detroit and its twin border city Windsor, Lee Rodney shows how many artists, designers, and architects have explored Detroit as an “urban experiment” rather than simply a failed utopia. As curator of the Border Bookmobile, a “travelling exhibition” about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region housed in a 1993 Chrysler Minivan, Rodney investigates the industrialized border

Urban Cartographies

21

region as a site of competing forces of globalization. Rodney’s Bookmobile is both witness to and participant in transforming the images of these cities. Cartographies of Place foregrounds the important shift in representational paradigms from a framework based on mimesis to one based on navigation. The collection initiates interdisciplinary conversations and research directions at this juncture where the image is actively transforming the geography of cities. A new grammar will help us to begin to unravel these cartographies and come to terms with the ephemeralities and complexities of place.

NOTES

1 The Culture of Cities Project 2000–05 is a Major Collaborative Research Initiative located at York University to compare the urban cultures of four second tier cities: Dublin, Berlin, Toronto, and Montreal. 2 See also Lynch 1990, 65–86. 3 See Darroch 2008; Darroch and Marchessault 2009. 4 “Script for the Town Planning Exhibition March 1950,” Papers of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Royal Institute of British Architects, TYJ\14\7, riba British Architectural Library Drawings and Archives Collection, London, UK. 5 Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, 1960, Review of “The Image of the City, by Kevin Lynch,” unpublished manuscript version, MG 31 D 156, vol. 39, file 59, p. 2, Marshall McLuhan Fonds, Ottawa. 6 Ibid., 3. 7 An extensive archive of Doxiadis’s architectural and urban planning research of since the sixties is available online at http://www.doxiadis.org/ as well as through the Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives in Athens, Greece.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Legibility

This page intentionally left blank

1 Metaphor City BEN HIGHMORE

To enter metaphor city is not to leave some putatively real city behind. It is not to swap the hard actuality of paving stones and glass for the imaginary meanderings of poets and dreamers. The city, as we most intimately know it, is made up of asphalt and anxiety, bricks and beliefs, concrete and confusion – an endless list of facts and fantasy and everything else in between. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz presents us with a formula for this actuality that is so staggeringly simple that it still has the power to shock: “rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other – they are things of this world” (Geertz 1993, 10). To see cities in this way is to operate with an all-inclusive understanding of culture, one that sees the particularity of culture as its complex orchestration of diverse elements. It is to operate with a sense that materialism must include the materiality of language and images, for instance, as much as the brute materiality of a wall or a roadblock or a truncheon. Such an understanding is useful if our task is to attempt to register what the city feels like from the inside, so to speak. But we should note at the outset that such a project blunts some powerful critical tools: it doesn’t, for instance, immediately lend itself to certain forms of critical discrimination, of sorting out truths from falsehoods, or deliberating on the inaccuracy of ideologies. The job of critical discrimination has often, and necessarily, had to operate precisely by sorting out the facts from the fictions, of being able to claim that a representation is, in fact, a misrepresentation of a more fundamental reality. In purposefully remaining shy about such sorting, and by actively maintaining the blurred actuality of fact and fantasy, a more anthropological approach to culture seems to lend itself to description rather more than prescription. It might turn out, though,

26

Legibility

that such a position ends up providing new critical tools for thinking and acting in the city. This, at any rate, is the wager that this chapter stakes. To start with then I want to offer two propositions. The first is that if the term “the city” is going to remain meaningful as a way of describing aspects of our urban life, then it will need to include representations of urbanism as an internal and material feature of the city. In other words, I want to suggest (and there is nothing new in this) that it is not particularly productive – not, at least, if it is the complexity of urban experience that you are after – to separate the physical presence of the city from all those metaphors, tropes, and complexes of representation through which the city is lived. This is not to claim that books about the city are indistinguishable from those cities that these books are about, but that the city is simultaneously a textual and geographical actuality and that to experience the city can sometimes just require immersion in textual materials. To extricate yourself entirely from urban life today would be something of a feat: it would not only require physical isolation from the city, its environs, and products, but would also mean severely controlling the pervasive flow of urban information and urban imagery (think how many TV shows or popular songs would have to be censored). The city as a real-and-imagined place, a place that exists through the work of metaphor, through the work of representation, is not confined to the world of books, films, and songs. Urban space itself is screaming with rhetorical figuration. Monuments and advertising are only the most obviously textual and tropic realms; more ubiquitous is the designed environment as a whole, which would include every architectural aspect, every piece of urban planning, and every element of the various circulation systems at work. So to make a claim for the importance of the imagination in understanding the city is immediately to recognize cities as the concrete articulations of particular imaginations. Because we live in a time of sprawling, ceaseless urbanism – a postSecond World War period that Guy Debord and others have suggested collapsed distinctions between country and city as the suburban and the urban took on a more general amorphousness (see Debord [1967] 1995, 124) – it might well turn out that “the city” most properly exists as a “representation,” a representation that has very real consequences. When we ask about the exact location of a city, about its limits and spread, about its heart and peripheries, we are faced with a

Metaphor City

27

variety of representations: legal ones, economic ones, postal ones (zip code geography), artistic ones, personal ones, and so on. The historical expansion of cities (brought about by those ruptures that instigated massive migrations towards urban centres from the mid-nineteenth century on) produced physical changes in the city and its environs that in turn altered the legal limits of the city. Changing the legal borders of cities (which often meant that the defensive, medieval city walls became the quaint markings of “the old city”) was often done to increase tax revenue. But the sense of living “in” a place is never constituted solely by financial, legal, or governmental zoning; neighbourhood atmosphere, so hard to gage, has little to do with the proximity to some putative centre. The differences between representational regimes animate the contradictions and conflicts that relate to the interests and experiences of the various groups doing the representing. Yet one of the elements that might seem to cross this conflictual arena (while, perhaps, having its part to play in the maintenance of conflict) is the metaphorics being deployed – for instance, the very idea of there being a “heart” to the city. What I want to explore here is the metaphorics of the city, not as a poetic substitute to a more fundamental reality, or a veil of symbolism that we can poke through to get to a real reality behind it, but as part of the material stuff constituting the real city. The second proposition, which follows on from the first, is that cultural workers (academics working on urban cultural matters, cultural critics, cultural producers, and so on) might find the work that they can most productively contribute to the future of cities is not to borrow the garb of urban planners but to work to find new, more productive metaphoric systems both for the city and within the city. Indeed, it might well be that the most exciting cultural work on the city is to be found precisely here at the level of supplying different representational systems for the city. So the longer term goal of the project, a goal I can only gesture towards in this chapter, is not to produce just another representation of the city but to produce another way of representing the city – a project that has been at the heart of many aspects of modern art’s relationship to the city (in Surrealism, for instance). One of the problems that interest me here is in how we might go about evaluating and discriminating between various metaphorics of the city. What will we take as a mark of value? Should judgments be based on the liberatory potential of one metaphorics over another? Or more modestly (or maybe more ambitiously),

28

Legibility

should we judge the potential of a metaphor or metaphoric system to lie in its ability to adequately register the plurality, the connectivity, and the complexity of urban life? Or again, it might be that the value is precisely in a metaphor’s ability to invent and fabricate an actuality of the city that is simply new, a metaphorics that can’t be judged for its effectivity because it has yet to do its job of generating an actuality?1 But before I can start the work of imagining, or re-imagining a metaphorics for the city I need to quickly revisit some urban metaphors to ascertain the effects and affects of their circulation. First, then, I want to explore one of the most dominant metaphors for thinking and experiencing the city – the body. Although the body is one of the most tenacious analogies for the city, it hasn’t provided a stable representational system: we need to ask questions about what kind of body is being imagined and what body parts are being privileged. What I want to argue is that there have been two major bodycity analogies that have, within recent history, run along together. One of these can be characterized as a relatively closed system that has foregrounded internal relations (within the city organism, so to speak). The other is a relatively open system that has emphasized connective relations (between city organisms, say). C LO S ED SYSTEM S A N D O P E N SYSTE M S

As Richard Sennett (1994) has shown in his book Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, the discovery of the blood system had important effects on thinking about the urban environment. William Harvey’s publication of his findings in 1628 fundamentally changed the way the body was understood. Prior to this, blood was thought to flow around the body propelled by its own heat – now blood was recognized as being pumped. So rather than movement being a property of the material (blood), it was seen as dependant on mechanical operations (the heart’s). This gave a new impetus to urban planners: “The words ‘artery’ and ‘veins’ [were] applied to city streets in the eighteenth century by designers who sought to model traffic systems on the blood system of the body. French urbanists like Christian Patte used the imagery of arteries and veins to justify the principle of one-way streets” (Sennett 1994, 264). Streets pulsing with lifeblood, parks as urban lungs, sewers as the final exit of the

Metaphor City

29

alimentary canal, and so on, were, and still are, the stock-in-trade analogies for thinking and experiencing the city. This body-city analogy is directed at the city as a relatively closed or discrete system or circuit and seems to favour a description of the body that privileges the cardiovascular system and the alimentary canal (intestines, stomach, etc.). While this social imagination is attendant to the input and output of the city, it is the city-as-a-body with a definite and definable semi-permeable membrane that is the key. Here the body-city of lungs and hearts, of stomachs and bowels, figures the city as internally coherent and self-sustaining (if in a healthy state). An example of the persistence of this analogy is vividly offered with Harry Granick’s 1947 book on the infrastructure of New York: There is the City, we think, a grand stirring spectacle! There it is spread out below us, every bit of it! Every bit of it? Of course not! For even as your brain, nerves, heart, lungs and stomach are hidden from view, so it is with the City. Its nervous system, the vital organs which provide it with heat, water, light and air, its intestines, which like yours, eliminate its wastes, its great arteries of rapid transit, which like yours carries its stream of life to all ends of its body, all these and more that make it possible for eight million people to live together, are out of sight under the pavements and the waterways. (Granick 1991, 4) Although this quotation mentions brains and nerves, it is mainly concerned with blood and guts. While Granick’s book is concerned with circulatory systems that exist on a larger scale than the city (for instance, water and telephones), he is preoccupied with these systems as they exist within the city as a closed network. Granick’s example is, of course, hardly an isolated instance of thinking about the city in relationship to the body, but it is perhaps one of the more insistent examples. It is worth remembering how surreptitious such a metaphoric system is and has been, and how when planners talk about impoverished areas of the city (especially in the nineteenth-century) they are often imagining a limb where the blood no longer flows, where putrefaction has set in, and where radical surgery is the only option. The more open system, on the other hand, has favoured a meta-

30

Legibility

phorics that has privileged the nervous system over the alimentary and the cardiovascular. Instead of concentrating on the circulation of physical bodies and things, the emphasis has been on the circulation of information, on communication. In her book Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, Laura Otis suggests that “if the railways offered nineteenth-century societies a circulatory system, the telegraph offered them nerves” (Otis 2001, 9). This shift in description, though, might suggest much more of a separation between the two systems then there actually was, and the physical symbiosis of railways and telegraphy (early telegraphy used the railways for their communication lines) also points to a metaphorical and material symbiosis where nerves and blood vessels, for instance, can be used to some degree interchangeably. Yet the neural analogy has always had the potential to resonate with a much more disparate and virtual sense of the urban. Writing in 1966, Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, founder of the Metabolist group, remarked, We have begun to create a new nervous system in society using the advanced communication technology that will enable the social brain to function more effectively. In large contemporary urban complexes, communication networks twist and interlink into a complex which must be something like the nervous system of the brain … whirling around in these brains are the people and the information. The citizens are like electrons flowing in an electronic brain. (qtd. in Wigley 2001, 104) It is precisely in attempting to register the centrifugal vastness and complexity of the modern urban geography that the neural metaphor comes most vividly into play. To understand the gradual groundswell that seems to promote the more open system, we should think of a number of historical shifts in metropolitan urban culture. Otis (2001), for instance, alerts us to the emergence of a communication technology, and it is hard not to look at alterations in urban metaphorics through such an optic: telegraph, telephones, radio, TV, cable systems, satellite systems, and on to the Internet seem to suggest a neural metaphorics. Compared to the almost instantaneous exchange of messages performed by telephony, the train would appear sluggish; the former is also materially analogous to the forms of communication found in the nervous system (neural firing), while the latter is

Metaphor City

31

more closely aligned to the mechanical and servo-mechanical form of the cardiovascular system. But, important as these elements obviously are, we also need to factor in other events. Taking the United States as an example, we might want to point out the moment when manufacturing gave way to service provision as a major employer during the 1950s and ’60s. French geographer, Jean Gottmann, writing in 1961, claimed that the northeastern seaboard of the United States had become one continuous urbanized megalopolis. From Philadelphia, through New York and New Haven, and on to Boston was an expanse of almost continuous urbanization, with a population (in 1960) of thirty-eight million people (Gottman 1964). We might want to suggest that the neural analogy seems somehow to fit an urban condition that is more decentred, more centrifugal, where service industries take precedence over heavy industry, and where information industries are the fastest growing sector of the economy, and where vast tracts of suburbanization have filled in most of the space between urban centers. We might also want to note how this has coincided with a shift in the gendering of the city, particularly in terms of how the male worker is represented (more Jack Lemmon in The Apartment than Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront or Streetcar Named Desire). One recent filmic example of these systems working in tandem is the film The Matrix with its “fake reality” (known as The Matrix) made up entirely of machine code and communication systems (open, neural), versus a real reality of sewers and human egg farms (closed, alimentary, and ovarian). In The Matrix, I think we get a sense of how these two analogies work in extremis, as the film provides a symptomatic picture of the underlying cultural and social differences between the two metaphoric tendencies. The real reality is positioned as a sort of lost embodiment of physical presence, where food has a concreteness that has been lost, and where the world of digital communications witnesses endless possibilities at the cost of an ever deepening sense of loss. The Matrix can be used then to point to the limitations of thinking the city (however virtual that city might be) in terms of body analogies and how its endless recycling of tragic nostalgia and pessimistic futurology (solved by a quasi-Christ figure) points to an ultimately conservative cultural politics. Both these analogies (and whatever hybrid combinations are possible) need to be assessed within both a medical and utopian understanding of their limits and potential. The closed system still continues today: for instance, downtown greenery is often analo-

32

Legibility

gized in relation to urban lungs; and the way we talk about the “cancer” of crime or drugs is dependent on how we think of urban citizens in relation to a body politic. It is not hard, though, to see that we are living in a moment when this open system has been foregrounded and where a closed-system analogy is somewhat in decline. The utopian aspect of this cardiovascular and alimentary analogy has an interesting and complex history. Most directly, it relates to an idea of health (fresh air, open roads, etc.). One particularly vivid example might be Baron Haussmann’s refiguring of Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century where ad hoc urbanism with narrow walkways and antiquated plumbing were redesigned with wide boulevards and up-to-date plumbing. The idea of ceaseless circulation has its sine qua non in the circulation of money: slowness, stagnation, and recycling become associated with illness only in a system that equates health with profitable growth and the chaos of the market. So, in some ways this is a utopian system geared to free circulation of bodies and commodities, the expulsion of waste, and so on. We need to recognize what all this means, and I think only a dialectical assessment will do. On the one hand, the redesign of Paris did attend to cholera epidemics by providing cleaner drinking water and a more sanitary disposal of human and animal waste. It also allowed planners to think about actually solving social deprivation through ideas like slum clearance and the production of social housing. The other side of these changes includes the wholesale reordering of the city to the demands of commerce and the aggressive surgical planning without any regard for the poorer inhabitants of the city apart from as a problem to be dealt with.2 The utopianism of neural urbanism is one of freedom and access (of commerce, if nothing else) and of uninterrupted flows of information. It immediately suggests forms of globalization: but here we should be wary of any necessary criticism of globalization – after all, globalization could well be a utopian goal if it didn’t always already articulate the asymmetry of global power relations. Its utopian promise would entail the overcoming of such asymmetry, or more dialogically, the tactical reordering of the present geography of power. Again though we also have to note that emphasis and value is placed on the speed of flow – its quickness and velocity. In its relation to closed-system analogies, neural urbanism is less likely to give rise to surgical solutions (though in recent times the description of military attacks as surgical

Metaphor City

33

air strikes might mean that we would need to recognize an older metaphorics working in the geographical imagination of politicians like George W. Bush and Tony Blair). While the closed system was aligned to the possibility of solutions, the open system is one that is often only spoken about in terms of meta-human systems, where people are facilitators or enablers or their opposites but never actors. If the cardiovascular suggested an economy of illness and cure, or surgery, the neural suggests an economy of therapy, amelioration, and self-help manuals. R H Y TH M C I T Y

One direction to pursue for a new metaphorics of the city might be to swap analogies of the body for analogies more equipped to negotiate the antagonisms, differences, massive pluralities, and the general unmanageability of the city. The history of musical and rhythmic analogies offers a viable alternative to those of the body-as-a-circuitas-a-city: music, performance, harmony, orchestration, and dissonance seem able to connect (potentially at least) to the conflictual and harmonic multiplicity of the urban.3 This history is also more attuned to a descriptive register than a prescriptive register: it is difficult, for instance, to imagine the perfect piece of music in the way you can imagine the perfect body. And this signals a sense of modesty and a refusal, I think, of some of the more problematic aspects of utopianism. Rhythmanalysis is what many kinds of cultural work do by dint of their orientation to the flows and movements of urban life. In the arts, a tendency towards rhythmanalysis has been associated with a modernist perspective. Modernism, in some of its most characteristic forms, is a kind of rhythmanalysis: it is keen to tune into the pulse of the modern city, to catch the tempo of urban life. The visual arts have supplied a number of rhythm-oriented approaches, with Italian Futurism being, perhaps, the most obvious.4 Yet here there is a difficulty: modernism, as practiced by Futurism, has a tendency to see urban rhythmicity only in terms of the frantic speeding up of modern life. If Futurism figures this frenetic rhythmicity as its overriding characteristic, other forms of modernism might still be seen to overprivilege the sense of the modern city as a perpetual acceleration. A somewhat more measured sense of the modern city is offered in

34

Legibility

Robert Musil’s epic and unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities. The novel begins with a rhythmanalytic description of a street scene in Vienna: “Motor-cars came shooting out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark patches of pedestrian bustle formed into cloudy streams. Where stronger lines of speed transacted their loose-woven hurrying, they clotted up – only to trickle on all the faster then and after a few ripples regain their regular pulse-beat. Hundreds of sounds were intertwined into a coil of wiry noise, with single barbs projecting, sharp edges running along it and submerging again, and clear notes splintering off – flying and scattering” (Musil [1930] 1995, 3). This busy street scene presents a cacophony of noises and moving objects that are described in terms of competing force fields of energy. The description pictures the city as a frenetic space of activities. This capturing of the city as a frantic mélange of movement is tempered somewhat a few paragraphs later: “Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between, of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole resembled a seething, bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of the solid material of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions” (Musil [1930] 1995, 4). Musil’s Vienna is made up of plural rhythms: the rhythmic throb of the inhabitants and the sedentary pace of its heritage (its laws and traditions, for instance). And between frenetic activity and the stasis of law is, presumably, an entire range of pace. But even here the emphasis is clearly on the frenzy of movement rather than the stasis represented by the solidity of the buildings. Tradition is merely the container of a sort of chronic restlessness. Surrealism might offer, at first glance, unproductive ground for chasing a modernist heritage of rhythm-oriented representations of the city. Yet, if we see rhythm as something more that the throb of activity, surrealism accesses a pulse of city life that is attuned to a slower duration, stretching well beyond the twenty-four hour day.5 This is a durational sensitivity that is historical (attentive to recent history – the most easily forgotten), one that takes its pulse from the tempo of fashion. In this it is attentive to the much slower, quasi-archaeological rhythms of urban change. Walter Benjamin, for instance, recognized in surrealism an attention to the obsolete and the remaindered. Such

Metaphor City

35

a concern with a residual culture, of the past existing in the present, is, for Benjamin and others, a protection against the false continuity of the present. It protects against the naturalism of the present (“it’s just the way things are”) by reminding us of the unfulfilled dreams of the most recent past: “[Surrealism] was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded,’ in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them” (Benjamin 1979b, 229). Surrealism then offers a form of rhythmanalysis through its attentiveness to the plural durations and temporalities that are present in the contemporary moment (residual, outmoded, emergent, forgotten) and isn’t caught in the rhetorical headlights of the present. In this it is an antidote to the advertising industry that wants to insist that what is new is all that there is to the contemporary. It is this attentiveness to a plural history – history striating the present – that animates surrealism and suggests its continued potential for registering the modern city as a complex orchestration of different temporal beats and pauses. Its primary form is collage, which is both a representational form for presenting multiple timescapes and an analytic method for recognizing the connections and disconnections across distinct temporal registers. Its shock of juxtaposition (a locomotive covered in ivy, for instance) is the interruption of any single tempo by plural rhythms. The inverse shock of surrealism can be found in the work of philosopher and architect Paul Virilio who, since the 1970s, has been exploring both the actuality and the heuristic possibilities of treating acceleration as the central force of urban modernization. In his pyrotechnic writing, Virilio endlessly equates urban space (which for him includes the tent cities of refugees) with a number of effects and affects that are driven by a relentless and reckless acceleration of information, images, bodies, and architectural growth. In his 1977 Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, perhaps his most thorough account of the rhythms of acceleration on the city, he equates circulatory speeds and their management (through the policing of mobs to the building of motorways) with “revolutionary” political forms such as Nazism and what we now call neoliberalism (Virilio 1986). The effects and affects of such acceleration include new forms of visibility and invisibility and the growing importance of virtual forces in the

36

Legibility

city. In his characteristically bombastic and playful prose, Virilio can claim that historical time collapses into a new synchronic instantaneity that is galvanized through urban advertising, electronic communication, and through the ceaseless movement of bodies: “Ubiquity, instantaneity, and the populating of time supplant the populating of space. The durable management of continents has given way to the generalized incontinence of transfers and transmissions” (Virilio 1991, 119). Virilio’s project of “dromology” (the study of pace) is clearly one form of rhythmanalysis, even if it is in the end seduced by and concentrated on one specific rhythmic perspective. The most elaborated theoretical discussion of rhythmanalysis is to be found in the posthumously published writing of the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre.6 Rhythmanalysis was for Lefebvre a form of social phenomenology. Doing rhythmanalysis, according to Lefebvre, is as much about listening as seeing, as much about immersion as gaining epistemological distance. Its analytic potential is not provided by a methodology: “to capture a rhythm one needs to have been captured by it. One has to let go, give and abandon oneself to its duration” (Lefebvre 1996, 219). Rhythmanalysis is an orientation towards the multiple rhythms of modernity: the various speeds of circulation, the different spacings of movement, and the varied directions of flows. Its ultimate potential (like most of Lefebvre’s writing) is to achieve a complex orchestration of the totality, one that doesn’t subsume variety and contradiction in its wake. The project of rhythmanalysis is endlessly ambitious: the view from his apartment window allows him to consider not just the rhythms of pedestrians and traffic, but also the rhythms of street entertainers, the rhythms of the body, the rhythms of plants, the cyclical rhythms of the seasons, of night and day, the rhythms of international finance, of laws, and so on. As Lefebvre and his collaborator Catherine Régulier put it, rhythmanalysis concerns itself with everything “from particles to galaxies” (Lefebvre 1996, 219). Yet to invoke rhythm as a more fruitful tropic arena than the body is not to evacuate the body as a central concern for the city. Indeed, the body is the basic ingredient in Lefebvre’s notion of rhythmanalysis. For Lefebvre, the body’s role is both as a receiver of rhythmic stimulants (often a subjugating, regular, and regulated tempo) as well as a producer of rhythmicity (through the body’s own orchestrations). The crucial difference between Lefebvre’s use of the body and the analogy of the body-as-a-circuit-as-a-city is most precisely seen in

Metaphor City

37

Lefebvre’s refusal to take the body as a mechanical or cybernetic model. For Lefebvre, what makes the body a crucial arena for thinking and living the modern city is that it is at once both subject and object, both agent and vehicle, both transmitter and receiver. According to Lefebvre, social and cultural practices are the result of a rhythmic assemblage, often enormously dissonant and contradictory, that is formed out of the interaction between dressage (Lefebvre’s term for the rhythmic subjugation of the body), cultural diversity, and our material biology and nature. The body though isn’t offered as an essential biological given, it is rather always simultaneously biological and cultural. It can never be a construction (how could it be?) however much it is continually being trained and however much that training is effective in prescribing and proscribing forms of action. The body, then, is the initial site for recognizing the plural rhythms that we live by: The living body can and should be seen in terms of the interaction of the organs within it, each one having their rhythms but subject to a spatio-temporal whole. Furthermore, this human body is the locus and seat of interaction between the biological, the physiological (nature) and the social (often called the “cultural”) and each of these areas, each of these dimensions, has its own specificity, and thus its space-time: its rhythm. Hence the inevitable shocks (stresses), disorders and disturbances within this whole, whose stability is never absolutely guaranteed. (Lefebvre and Régulier 2003, 196) This insistence on plural rhythms is crucial to the rhythmanalytical project. It is only when two different rhythms intersect that a rhythm can be recognized at all: “We know that a rhythm is slow or lively only in relation to other rhythms (often our own: those of our walking, our breathing, our heart). This is the case even though each rhythm has its own specific measure: speed, frequency, consistency. Spontaneously, each of us has our preferences, references, frequencies; each must appreciate rhythms by referring them to oneself, one’s heart or breathing, but also to one’s hours of work, of rest, of waking and of sleep” (Lefebvre 2004, 10). The very possibility of measuring rhythms (in the loose way that Lefebvre seems to envisage) is premised on the differences between two or more rhythms. For Lefebvre, then, rhythmanalysis is always concerned with the interplay of plural rhythms and its critical power

38

Legibility

is based partly on the bodily experience of the city. For rhythmanalysis, the body’s ease or dis-ease within the city can be a crucial indication of the clashing rhythms between urban capitalism and the body’s own rhythmic propensities, resulting in the production of bodily dissonance. As such, our sensual experience of the city (in both physical and textual forums) is a key element for launching an assessment of modern urban culture. Since the 2004 publication of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis in English (the original French publication came out in 1992, the year after Lefebvre died) a number of studies have engaged directly with the potential of rhythmanalysis for the study of urban space.7 Edited collections such as Alexandra Boutros’s and Will Straw’s Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture and Tim Edensor’s Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies, both from 2010, are inspiring invitations to attend to urban space through the prism of rhythmanalysis. But perhaps as importantly, Lefebvre’s work alerts us to the way that rhythmanalysis was already a crucial and endlessly productive way of approaching urban space. One symptom of this has been the way that authors and filmmakers have deliberately chosen a specific rhythm for navigating the modern city. This ranges from Reyner Banham’s decision to learn to drive, not so as to be able to get around Los Angeles, but for the express purpose of being able to “read” that urban sprawl, to a host of slower, peripatetic negotiations of urban space. This has established a psychogeographical genre, particularly in England, where writers such as Iain Sinclair and Will Self, and filmmakers such as Patrick Keiller, have traipsed the city in order to find accounts of urban space that are rhythmically at odds with the selfpresentation of urban space.8 In Iain Sinclair’s (2002) London Orbital, he reads the city by the seemingly perverse act of walking Britain’s busiest motorway: the M25 ring-road that is a garrotte around outer London and has produced an urban corridor of low density housing and endless signs of contemporary capitalist uneven urbanization. The potential of rhythmanalysis though is not simply to produce more “comfortable” spaces and a slower-pace to urban life (it is hard to imagine anything much slower than rush hour): if it were to help in reformatting how we think about the city and how we experience the city, then it will need to provide a more ambitiously totalizing approach to the city (everything from particles to galaxies). It would have to carry on the task of generating innovative forms, of developing the avant-gardist directions of modernism as evidenced by

Metaphor City

39

surrealism’s rhythm-oriented approach. It would also need to turn its attention, not simply to the politics of pace, but to the rhythmic ecology of the city, to the directions of movement, to the re-use of things and culture. Lastly, and most importantly, it would have to continually reassert the multiplicity of rhythms – the multicultural rhythmicity – of the body’s rhythms and the city’s.

NOTES

1 We might want to suggest that what this reimagining entails for cultural studies (my field of operations) is to place less value on our abilities to critique and more value on our potential to invent, to create. Or rather (and this would be my position) that we rethink the relationship between critique and invention in cultural studies. Our work may be structurally dependent on our critical abilities but this shouldn’t necessarily be our goal – or if it is, we are already limiting ourselves and necessarily limiting our role in the wider world. In the light of this, our goal might be rethought as one of invention, of creating new possible ways of registering the cultural. 2 For a thorough account of the transformations of Paris at this time, see Harvey (2003). 3 See Coyne (2010) for a coupling of the analogy of “tuning” to a form of spatial production and practice characterized by pervasive and mobile media. 4 The most incisive account of Futurism is probably Perloff (1986). 5 The twenty-four hour day is the ur-form for many rhythm-oriented modernist experiments. I’m thinking most particularly of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1928), but James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) might be worth revisiting as a complex rhythmanalytical project. 6 For an interview that describes Paul Virilio’s debt to Lefebvre as well as the antagonisms between the two see Virilio, Lotringer, and Taormina (2001). 7 I should perhaps mention my own book here – Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (2005) – which is an attempt to do a rhythmanalytical cultural history of urban space. 8 Will Self’s psychogeographical journalism is collected in Psychogeography (2007), but for a quick snapshot, see his “Diary” (2011), where, with his son, he walks from his inner London home to Heathrow Airport. Patrick Keiller’s trilogy of “Robinson” films includes London (1994); Robinson in Space (1997); and Robinson in Ruins (2010). Outside of the United Kingdom,

40

Legibility

mention should be made of Rebecca Solnit’s (2001) Wanderlust: A History of Walking and her A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006). In France, Maspero’s (1994) Roissy Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs and Jean-François Augoyard’s (2007) Step by Step: Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project are crucial works. Much of this work is sympathetically informed by Lefebvre, but even where it is not, there is clearly a shared rhythmic sensitivity.

2 The Virtuality of Urban Culture: Blanks, Dark Moments, and Blind Fields RO B SH I E L DS

What is the urban as an object of research? We tend to conflate the city and the urban, but by differentiating these two terms we are able to distinguish between the actual, material “city” and other aspects such as its character and its immanent and virtual quality of “urbanity.” If the city is the tangible “thing” and the urban refers to its intangible qualities, these two terms are in a close relationship. We often assume that a densely constructed, extensive, and diverse settlement (“the city”) is a prerequisite for an urban character to emerge. In use, the terms have acquired a reversibility, which adds to the confusion between the two. Thus, “The City” might refer to an abstract model or “ideal-type” of the city (Weber 1966) while one often refers to “urban planning” or “urban form” in such a way that “urban” is less an adjective than a term tightly associated with the physical fabric of the city. Cities are similarly understood as an abstract totality that is more asserted than experienced empirically all at once as a whole unless, for example, it is viewed from a great height. This turns the city into a mere diagram of itself.2 Extending the work of Henri Lefebvre, the urban will be argued to be the capacity to have a set of urban effects that are social, economic, and psychological. Differentiating the city from the urban is essential today, when Internet and other communication technologies lead us to realize that the extent of urban life reaches far into the surrounding hinterlands of major metropolises. Geographers and planners have long been aware of the close relationship between cities and their surrounding hinterlands. Thus, in contrast to city life, life in the countryside, to

42

Legibility

be truly rural (that is, non-urban) is often to also be on a distant periphery, a frontier null point of sociability that is increasingly difficult to locate in geographical space. This is especially true of Europe but also of the United States and Canada. However, the dualism of the rural and the urban now maps unevenly onto the binary division of the countryside and the city with pockets of rurality and peripherality surrounded by the landscape of commuter “belts” while, within the same region, affluent bedroom communities may punctuate disadvantaged and underserviced rural areas. Some cities have also developed in patterns that seem more rural than suburban – as treed lowrise “campuses” of offices, malls, and clusters of box stores are interspersed with natural areas. Stitching together the elements of this patchwork landscape, motorways define and link developments (for example, the Charlotte-Raleigh-Durham triangle of North Carolina). While older service centres do remain, overall these are more excentric than concentric network cities. Honoring this shift, the US Census now defines urban and rural census areas based on population density: abandoned parts of downtown Detroit are thus “rural” by this definition. However, the urban and “urbanity” are too complex and culturally important to reduce to quantitative descriptors of density alone. The difference between the noun “city” and the adjective “urban” points to a historicity of the urban that is quite separate from the history of cities’ physical development. We usually think of the city as a material context, but of course there is more to it than that. For example, some urban centres are said to be “more like a city” than others; to what does such a comment refer? Aristotle is said to have noted, “A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” The tradition of research on urban form also recognizes that many morphologies can support a particular type of urbanity. But it has equally often been the case that the city and the urban are read together. The size of an agglomeration is thus taken as an indicator of its urban status, even if size and position in an urban hierarchy is not a direct determinant of the urbanity of a city, only its necessary precondition. SEEI N G T H E U RBAN

We might approach the distinction between the city and the urban by developing a few insightful comments originally made in Lefebvre’s 1970 work, The Urban Revolution (2003). He begins with a discussion of necessary concepts for theorizing the city. Lefebvre constructs a

The Virtuality of Urban Culture

43

sociological and philosophical object of research, “the urban” (2003, 58). The significance of the urban is that it unites the dispersed elements that take place, colloquially, “in the city.” Lefebvre refers to this diversity as “isotopia.” Rather than the city as an agglomeration and collocation of activities and social processes, the urban provides a synthetic framework that is independent of the literal materiality of place and of a given city. Lefebvre appears to have understood the urban as a diagram of forces.3 These forces are more than simply social. They are informational, environmental, and economic. This abstraction is not concerned with power as relations of domination as much as with relations of expropriation embedded in capitalism as a social form. It allows him to discern moments of resistance and emancipation as part of a dialectic of inequality rather than a one-way imposition of control. Lefebvre isn’t the “inventor” of the urban, but, unlike Chicago School and ecological approaches, he clearly differentiates the urban from the physical form of the city in such a way as to give the urban a status independent from the city. Classically, the urban refers merely to a site and condition in which activity takes place. In the Chicago tradition, it is the city that is an expression of the collective behaviour and the equilibrium of social structure, “the vast casual and mobile aggregations which constitute our urban populations … in a state of perpetual agitation, swept by every new wind of doctrine, subject to constant alarms and in consequence … in a chronic condition of crisis” (Park 1925, 22). In a classic sociological conceit, social structure and its equilibrium, not the urban, is the “truth” of the city and its form. The urban is defined by its isotopic character – a term used not only in its geographic sense but borrowed from the linguist Algridas Julien Greimas (1966) to capture the differential combination of both utopia and dystopia as well as critically encompass Foucault’s notion of heterotopia (Foucault 1984). The form of the city is an articulation of the city and countryside, never a pure space of one kind or another. Heterotopias are both excluded and interwoven in the urban: ordered times and spaces are separated by crossroads, neutral spaces, freeways, revolutions, and liminal moments. The isotopic designates the articulation of heterogeneous elements together with the linkages between homogeneous elements across distances. Unlike heterotopia, isotopia is a critical concept that includes not only place but also its context, what I would term its

44

Legibility

spatialisation (Shields 1991; 1998; 2013). Differential space-time, which became the preferred term in Lefebvre’s widely read La production de l’espace (Lefebvre 1974) transcends the spatial distinction of the near and far, allowing the urban – and by extension the city – to function as a site of exchange between different parties, forces, and elements in an ongoing dialectic. Different networks are thus juxtaposed and superimposed (Lefebvre 2003, 121) such that cities are “informed” and formed by difference (Lefebvre 2003, 133). Lefebvre’s theory of the urban makes this urban time-space an object of knowledge and opens up the historicity of the urban to investigation. As always, “time-space” for Lefebvre is a code for a particular balance of social and economic relations in which a specific form of rationality governing duration predominates. Anticipating a social constructionist and also the governmental point of view, this critical approach to duration is also at the heart of his critique of Bergson (Bergson 1988) and thus his antipathy to Deleuze’s neo-Bergsonian approach (Deleuze 1988). He sees these as ignoring the historical specificity of the tempo, rhythm, and understanding of both the experience of passing time, its measurement and form (whether cyclical, seasonal, or linear). Elsewhere, he develops a prospective-retrospective method for critique based on the malleability of temporal vantage points on a given phenomenon that are available to the critical imagination. Essentially, this involves projecting trends to explore hypotheses as far as possible (where does this lead us?) then applying the insights gained to the historical conditions or antecedents (what were the historical preconditions or latent capacities?) of a given phenomenon or form. The urban as a space-time also allows Lefebvre to critically discuss the changes in the countryside by which the material order of the landscape is reorganized according to a differential order or urban timespace. Other analysts, such as John Pløger, have developed analyses in this direction also, contrasting the city as spatialisation with events as moments within an ongoing temporalization (Pløger 2010). BL A N KS , DA R K M O M E N TS , AN D B LIN D F IELDS

Lefebvre emphasizes the overlooked status of the urban. For him, it is a shadow of the city but one that informs city life. The relationship between the urban and the city is outlined as an example of a dialectical relationship, but the analysis is not further developed through a

The Virtuality of Urban Culture

45

social science method, which would include, for example, a systematic discussion of indicators of the urban. Lefebvre is writing a political tract for the public, as much as for academics, whom he knows can find deeper layers of meaning to any text. Trevor Hogan comments perceptively in a review of a recent translation: Lefebvre as writer … seems to be the lecturer and political pamphleteer who publishes as he speaks. Perhaps this is a function of an era when the public intellectual was to be seen and heard in real time and not just on the screen and the page. The result in words is that the whole is not greater than the parts, but some of the parts are worth cherishing, when digested in a pragmatic fashion … Lefebvre is like a latter day William Morris, and this in part suggests why his name is invoked more often than his arguments used by contemporary cultural, urban and sociological theorists. (2002, 107–8) How we “get at” the urban is left much where Joyce’s Ulysses leaves us (Joyce [1922] 1997). A Harold Bloom wanders through the city and, in a surrealistic and idiosyncratic “over-dimensioned” glance, elaborates and amplifies all of the immaterial, intangible, and symbolic aspects of the everyday operations of the city. In Lefebvre’s romantic parlance, urban society is a “virtual” object that might be approached but not known through the city as a material environment. Even though he doesn’t define this virtuality, he comments that the urban itself is a “blank … a dark moment … a blind field” (2003, 26). In Lefebvre’s discussion, a “blank” is a rupture or paradox in the banal field of everyday, material order. “Dark moments” are, for example, “black boxes,” gaps in the understanding of critical processes. We are blinded by ideologically luminous sources of knowledge. “Blind fields” lie between disciplines or institutionalized fields of knowledge. They are unseen and unknowable. Lefebvre writes, Between fields, which are regions of force and conflict, there are blind fields. These are not merely dark and uncertain, poorly explored, but blind in the sense that there is a blindspot on the retina ... The centre of vision doesn’t see and doesn’t know it is blind ... The urban ... remains unseen. We still don’t see it. Is it simply that our eye has been shaped (mis-shaped) by the earlier

46

Legibility

landscape so it can no longer see a new space? ... It’s not just a question of lack of education but of occlusion. We see things incompletely (2003, 29, italics in original). Blindness is one of Lefebvre’s frequent appeals to the body as a resistant entity that limits the perfection of capitalism as an economic form that has been abstracted from needs and use-values to privilege exchange and profit. Under this regime, and from the twenty-first-century perspective, it is clear that cities become not so much dwelling places as real estate and infrastructural investment, the land circuit of accumulation. But the reference to blindness suggests that an urban spatialisation is a sensorium that serves the human inadequately. The comment that the urban is a virtual image to the concreteness of the city is felicitous. He notes also the importance of abstraction and its realization and the actualization of the urban as a given city: “Our tendency is to think of space as an abstract, with [concrete] physical contexts, as the container [chora] for our lives rather than the structures we helped create … But the analysis of social space, far from being reactionary or technocratic, is rather a symptom of strategic thought … that poses space as the terrain of political practice. An awareness of social space … always entails an encounter with history of – or better, a choice of histories” (Ross 1988 qtd. in Gregory 1994, 348). Lefebvre (1974, 402) argues that space must not be thought of as an abstraction but as intangible, filled with concrete contents: “Space qualifies as a ‘thing/not thing,’ for it is neither a substantial reality nor a mental reality, it cannot be resolved into abstractions … it has an actuality other than that of the abstract sign and real things which it includes” (Lefebvre 1974, 402; see also Rogers 2000; Aarseth 1998; Shields 2013). In his earlier text, which could be read as a political warm up for the later and much longer text on the Production of Space, Lefebvre places the urban on the same analytical level as space. He directly states, and, in my opinion, accurately identifies the urban as an intangible but real virtuality: The urban is a highly complex field of tensions, a virtuality, a possible-impossible that attracts the accomplished, an ever-renewed and always demanding presence-absence. Blindness consists in the fact that we cannot see the shape of the urban, the vectors and tensions inherent in this field, its logic and dialectic movement, its

The Virtuality of Urban Culture

47

immanent demands. We see only things, operations, objects … With respect to the urban, there is a twofold blindness, whose emptiness and virtuality are masked by plenitude. The fact that this plenitude is called urbanism only serves to more cruelly illuminate the blind. Moreover, this plenitude borrows the objects and products, the industrial operations and technologies of the previous epoch of industrialization. The urban is veiled; it flees thought, which blinds itself and becomes fixated only on a clarity that is in retreat from the actual. (Lefebvre 2003, 40–1) Like words and language, a city, as “the actual manifestation … has as a precondition the existence of the system, its virtual existence … Couldn’t the urban be conceived along these lines? Couldn’t it be considered a virtuality, a presence-absence?” (Lefebvre 2003, 51–2). Presence and absence is a key thematic in Lefebvre’s later philosophical work because this contrast is a fundamental reservoir of difference and thus diversity and freedom (Lefebvre 1980). The status of the urban is not merely an idealization, a theory, but a logic that is both temporal and spatial. The rules of private property and surplus value are integral to it, but the urban is not reducible solely to them; its sociality exceeds these economic and political processes. Lefebvre thereby initiates a debate joined by Manuel Castells and later writers on the powers and utility of the urban as a problematique (Castells 1977, Saunders 1981). In the city, several spatial processes meet head on: consumption, the state, production, and the residuum of everyday life. This isotopia produces the historical, and one should add cultural, form of the city. The urban designates this “differential” space: each place or locale exists only within the whole through contrasts and oppositions that connect and distinguish it: “Superficially it may appear that I have been describing and analyzing the genesis of the city as an object … But my initial concern has been with a virtual object that I have used to describe a space-time axis. The further it illuminates the past, the virtual allows us to examine and situate the realized. The complexity of the urban phenomenon is not that of an ‘object’ … presented as real prior to any examination … Rather than being an object that can be examined through contemplation [i.e., abstractly] the reality of the urban phenomenon would be a virtual object. If there is a sociological concept, it is that of ‘urban society’” (Lefebvre 2003, 23, 57, 58, italics in original).

48

Legibility

T H E V I RT UA L I T Y O F TH E U R B A N

Such language uncannily anticipates the more rigorous treatment of the virtual provided by poststructural philosophers since the 1970s. Unfortunately, Lefebvre also elides the concrete (city) and the virtual (urban) when he discusses tangible and intangible aspects of the city. Drawing on a more rigorous approach that sees the virtual as intangible yet real and the actual as its concrete but performative materialization, it is possible to sort through Lefebvre’s evocative text to distill a more structured critical approach. In his later masterpiece, Production of Space, Lefebvre notes that for Marx, the “virtual” may guide our knowledge of the real allowing us to push thought to its limits, not through an extrapolation of surface trends but by a consideration of the underlying history of the necessary preconditions. The virtual points us to the history of accumulation in cities as opposed to commodities or technologies. It suggests that “production, at the limit, today, is no longer a matter of producing this or that, things or works [oeuvres] but of producing space” (Lefebvre 1974, 253, author’s translation). This space is not a simple container but a complex spatialisation that “contains virtualities [virtualités], of the work [oeuvre] and of reappropriation under the banner of art and above all according to the demands of the body ‘deported’ outside itself, which, by being resistant, inaugurates the project of a different space (whether a countercultural space, a counter-space, or, above all, a utopian alternative to actually existing ‘real’ space) (Lefebvre 1974, 403, author’s translation, added italics; cf. Lefebvre 1991, 349). I stress the ontological tetrad of the concrete, the abstract, the virtual, and the probable as a way of sorting through and teasing out Lefebvre’s mixture of concept and affect in his writing. The first two terms are familiar and privileged in the Western academy under the rubrics of materialism and idealism. The fourth is central to social science thought, but the third – the virtual – has attracted the systematic attention of philosophers only in the last century. The contribution of poststructuralist is to have established the importance of the virtual. Deleuze and Guattari’s specific contribution to this is to show that objects are always simultaneously virtual and concrete and thus always becoming or changing from what they are empirically at a specific instant. By virtual, I mean the Proustian insight that intangible “things” like memories as “ideal but not abstract, real but not actual” (Proust 2003

The Virtuality of Urban Culture

49

6: 264; see also Shields 2003). That is, there is a class of object counterposed to the “possible” or non-existing but that are nonetheless not material “things.” What is the “it- ness” of a memory? Is it simply the same as a fictional fantasy? No, for it is a memory of an event that happened in a given place, which once existed but no longer does except as a remembrance of a real event. The status of the past is virtual and continues to affect us in a manner that mere ideas do not. Memory is, of course, a material process of neurochemistry, involving the “actualization” of these virtualities. Proust is the point of origin for Bergson and later Deleuze’s reflections on the virtual (Deleuze and Guattari 1994; Deleuze 2000). Richard Doyle describes the distinction between the concretely real and the virtual as the sheer contingency of an un-actualized event, a program that may be successfully run. Real but not actualized, the virtual is a consistency such as a configuration of code or a spore that remains to be executed. The virtual is not, therefore, “unreal.” Nor does it lack actuality [or reality in my terminology] such a description would depend on an abduction of the future, a retroactive understanding of the virtual in terms of its instantiation as actual. Nor is the virtual without the resistances and finitudes we often attribute to the real. It bears its own constraints, the capacity to be rendered into a virtual substrate of code, the materiality of its substrate, and perhaps most strangely, the capability of encountering the difference of the future, to negotiate the catastrophic change in kind that is the movement from the virtual to the actual, program to instantiation. (Doyle 2003, 30–31) Elsewhere, Lefebvre shows that dialectical materialism can rival Proust: “No camera, no image … can grasp these rhythms. One needs equally attentive eyes and ears, a head, a memory a heart. A memory? Yes, to grasp this present other than in the immediate, restitute it in its moments … The remembrance of other moments and of all the hours is essential … so as not to isolate this present and live it in its diversity … of subjective states and objective figures … The observer at the window knows that he takes as first reference his time, but that the first impression displaces itself” (Lefebvre 1995, 227, italics in original). The city is lived as a concrete and everyday performance of material necessity (as most people make a living on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis). Actualization is a matter of performativity.

50 Table 2.1

ideal actual

Legibility Tetrology Real

Possible

virtual (ideally-real) concrete (actually-real)

abstract (possible-ideal) probable (actual-possible)

But Lefebvre understands this as dialectical: a passage from ideal to actual and back again, or in his language, “opposites find and recognize each other, in a unity both more real and more ideal, more complex than its elements already accounted for. Which actualizes and clarifies the concept of dialectical thought that does not cease to fill these pages” (Lefebvre 1986, 227). The virtual has also been described as a code, a program; in sociological terms, it has affinities to Pierre Bourdieu’s still-too-structuralism development of the habitus (Bourdieu 1972). Judith Butler and others refer to the citational quality of these performances and embodiments (Butler 1993). In the same sense that a play may be performed differently by different companies of actors, so the gaze is always a performance that selectively actualizes and may even contribute to a script or place image that itself is more a virtuality. The virtual (virtus) is what is known, not directly, but by its effects. The virtual is not simply an idea (abstract representation) but the “thing” we think we see instead of the naked object being perceived. Abstractions, by contrast, do not have an ontological existence other than as representations (signs) and are unconstrained by questions of possibility. They are ideal, like virtualities such as memories, but do not take on an existence unless “realized” (a telling term used in everyday life) for example through a process of constructing something or building a model that conveys the idea. In addition, it is important to acknowledge the “actual-possible” – in short, the “probable.” These non-real actualities are generally understood in the language of probability; an example would be a risk or threat. These categories can be summarized as a table (Table 2.1) – in effect, as a four-part ontology. The significance of each ontological category is that it contributes to the social construction of reality as a complex whole. Our world is neither materialist nor idealist but a dynamic blend of fact, the virtually-so, the imagined and risky guesses. Whether in rigorous debate or everyday speech, the status of objects – the city – is shifted around and these categories are blended and juggled to capture the complexity of

The Virtuality of Urban Culture

51

social totality. Governing this process are methodological strictures, rituals, and cultural codings of the real. Where we want to get is to the realization that any object is understood both in terms of the real and the possible. The contribution social science can make is to add to philosophy’s ontological understanding of objects as both material and virtual. In social terms then, entities such as the urban are epistemologically also abstract and probable – a move that requires the ethical and political dimensions of social dynamics and the lifecycles of objects. In a sense, Lefebvre is thus justified in sliding between the tangible and the intangible as he tries to construct a non-fragmenting and nontrivializing approach to the urban. In effect, the reality of the city is two-fold, both concrete and virtual. The urban is the virtuality of the city. It allows us to theorize its becoming and understand it diagrammatically as an unfolding scenario of forces in play and “players,” if you will, thrown into this milieu. It is not merely the idea of the city, but the naming and characterization of the world as a space of significant objects and processes. It is a non- place space of utopia and dystopia – paradise and hell. To the extent that we understand them as real, these are virtualities and not abstractions. Thus, when Paris is characterized as romantic or Euro-Americans understand classical Athens as a diagram of the polis and a metaphor of democracy, they engage with a virtuality that is as much imagined as it is lived and institutionalized in our societies. When Dickens characterized nineteenth-century Manchester as a living hell, he similarly produced a virtuality that impacted how people lived in the city and how it developed in response to urban hygiene and other political initiatives of the time. This virtuality was quite independent of empirical measures of the number of days of sunshine in the city. This socially constructed, virtual aspect is a major element of the city. At the macro level it may be significant as an urban image, but, at a more human scale and in the context of everyday life, we are bathed in virtualities that are hardly abstraction. In the revitalization of city districts, advertising campaigns, and community events are also an important part of changing the image of an area. Collective memory – Proust’s original virtual – informs our actions. Community is lived as a reality as much as it is actualized performatively in social interaction and embodied in a visceral sense of belonging (Cohen 1982). When concepts are given an ontological reality, such as in the case of race or gender distinct from the skin colour or physical sex of

52

Legibility

bodies, respectively, then we are dealing not just with abstractions but also with virtualities that are always creatively enacted and embodied – that is, welded to material bodies through socialization, ritual forms, moral governance, and the restraint and policing of deviation. The virtuality of gender allows it to function as a medium connecting diverse bodies despite their dissimilarity in body type and size, behaviour and sexual and physical form. Public spaces governed in the first instance by moral norms and cultural standards of conduct also need to be understood as the nexus of not just legal systems, land, and property but a complex calculus of ontological modes – virtual, material, abstract, and probable. Thus, for example, users’ habitus and the understanding of the publicness of a place are virtualities actualized in a given “public space,” perhaps a park. Despite the importance of legal codes and posted rules, sociological abstraction and theorizations of the “public sphere” have demonstrated its collective and normative qualities. Where these fail, when the virtual and the ritual and moral mechanisms developed around it fail, the affordances (Gibson 1984) of the place might be physically restricted to structure behaviour (such as the erection of fences or placing bollards to prevent automobile access). While linguistic and social constructionist approaches specify the categorical and epistemological technologies by which social groups interact with the virtual, the performance and embodiment of virtualities is more an ethnographic matter of ritual and the domain of distinctly social mechanisms of collective action and control (Taussig 1998, 226). The urban is often overlooked because of its intangibility. Yet our encounter with it is anything but intangible. The significance of the urban is that it represents the coordinated intersectionality of many virtual objects as well as the codified apparatus relating these to other ontological forms. There is a two-way process of abstraction and realization as well as a process of actualization or materialization and revirtualization. The urban is a medium of interconnection that allows unlike, dissimilar objects to be coordinated into a whole – a city. This is not just a matter of zoning, space planning, or ergonomics but of ethical and aesthetic balances and tensions. The urban as an encounter of virtualities is precisely the intersection of gender, race, and class with community, the public and the civic. These terms are themselves dynamic: they must be enacted and embodied, and these performative citations are also creatively virtualized in return.

The Virtuality of Urban Culture

53

The urban is thus intensely ethical and political, a contest of social constructions of the city and civic behaviour. Unlike the concrete physicality of the city, the intangibility of the virtual makes it a domain open to intervention, métissage, and experimentation by those with less power and resources, despite being resistant to immediate change through merely material interventions. Thus, spaces may be appropriated and events hijacked for new ends. Hence the interest of Lefebvre and others such as Michel de Certeau in the potential to refigure the way cities function through simple interventions in ways of occupying space and spending time, such as walking (Sheringham 2000) or feminist activists’ campaigns in the 1980s to “take back the streets” against violence and harassment of women. The complexity of race and gender in post-heterosexual, multicultural public spaces has been too hastily reduced to questions of concrete behaviour such as harassment and physical affordances of built environments. While it was a good strategic response, this blurs our understanding and grasp of the role played by virtualities including the social construction of images of areas (safe, risky, pleasurable) and the interaction of these together (consider the encounter of genders and bodies on street prostitution “strips” and corners) and with the material, abstract, and probable, which tend to be dismissed as mere abstractions. CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Returning to Lefebvre’s blanks, dark moments, and blind fields, “blanks” are paradoxes. Rather than moving in the direction of the urban as an abstract diagram or code to the city, he renders the city enigmatic and excessive, something that is not unknowable but that cannot be fully known at any point and from any one perspective. The virtuality of the city, its urbanity, has been obscured by a nominalism that admits only the actual, whether material or probable. “Dark moments” arise when idealities (virtual and abstract) are misunderstood as actualities (material or probable). While the temptation is to make the urban a new “field,” we need to acknowledge its virtuality and not just reduce it to a static object of knowledge. It could be argued that later 1980s research on localities (Cooke 1989) foundered on precisely this point when it came to define localities in a geographical or economic manner, such as in terms of commuter areas. Oil resource workers in Aberdeen were found to have huge travel-to-work areas as they worked intensively for a period

54

Legibility

and then went home to families all over the United Kingdom. The strength of locale as a sense-making term was lost when it was limited to a material definition. This issue also confronts current research and policy making on innovation “clusters” and “learning regions” that also rely on the proximity of economic enterprises to define the clusters. These very material parameters of research take physical location as a universal indicator of interaction and synergy. They also tend to overlook non-local patterns of causality, so central to geographers’ interests in sophisticated spatial modeling (Waters 2001). We must demand precision and differentiate the meaning of terms such as the urban and the city. Acknowledging the urban as the virtual aspect of the concrete city opens up the intangible to social science analysis. This is not a question of abstraction but of breaking with the dualism pitting materialism against idealism to recognize the virtuality of every object. Understanding the urban as the virtual aspect of the concrete city allows analysis to work with the material and encourages us to better theorize once intractable but crucial aspects of the city, such as community and the relationship between publics, public spheres, and public spaces. Lefebvre reminds us that we need to look again at the city and search for methods for approaching the urban as well as the city.

NOTES

1 A previous version of this chapter appears in Social Welt 16: Die Wirklichkeit der Städte, 2005, Baden-Baden Germany: Nomos Verlagsgesselschaft. 2 Cf. de Certeau 1985. 3 Although they drop his emphasis on the agonistic, on the contest of wills, powers, and forces that shape the city, Deleuze and Guattari also adopt the diagram as a way of theorizing the distinction between theoretical concepts and features immanent to a milieu, an object, or to the object of philosophical thought (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 39–40).

3 Serendipitous City: In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism M E RV Y N H O RG A N

INTRODUCTION : L E G E N DA RY G A R B AG E

In a story, a legend perhaps, that is often retold but that has never quite been verified, it is said that the American sociologist William Isaac Thomas (1863–1947) was out walking alone in the rain through a Polish area of Chicago’s west side sometime in the early 1900s when he made what has subsequently come to be viewed as one of the most significant discoveries in early American urban sociology. Walking down a back alley, he tripped over a bundle of garbage, and from the bundle spilled dozens of letters, handwritten in Polish. He picked them up, and with his partial command of the language, started reading. These were letters from rural Poland written to relatives who had immigrated to Chicago. At that time, Thomas was already interested in immigrant life, and because of this incident, his interest in Poles intensified. This serendipitous find was the beginning of a study that would take over a decade to complete –The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, coauthored with Polish philosopher Florian Znaniecki and published in five volumes, over 2,200 pages in total, widely considered to be the first “classic” of American urban sociology. In this study, the authors gather hundreds of letters between Polish immigrants to Chicago and their families in Poland, using them to analyze and understand the specificities of the immigrant experience. The letters that formed the bases for The Polish Peasant were gathered more formally and systematically, but were it not for Thomas’s initial serendipitous find in that alleyway, this study would likely never have been conducted.

56

Legibility

The story of Thomas and the garbage has acquired much status in the discipline, yet the origins of this story remain very hazy. It is less a story than a legend. There is a single record of Thomas’s own version of the story, and even that is minimal. In the late 1920s, in a still unpublished note, Thomas recounted the story of “a long letter picked up on a rainy day in the alley behind my house, a letter from a girl … to her father … It occurred to me at that time that one would learn a great deal if one had a great many letters of this kind” (qtd. in Bennett 1988, 123). This fragment is all we have of the origins of the story. Nonetheless, the story is recounted in countless introductory textbooks,1 and, of course, appears in the Wikipedia entry for Thomas. The only other version that bears any resemblance to an authoritative account comes to us third-hand, where Morris Janowitz (1966, xxiv) recounts the story as told to him by his teacher at the University of Chicago, Ernest Burgess, who was Thomas’s colleague. Thomas’s story, or more precisely, others’ retelling of the story, have added some detail and excised others. The point though is that all versions highlight the haphazard, unplanned, and serendipitous way that Thomas came upon the letters that would constitute the single most important moment in the development of this much celebrated study. Regardless of the vagueness of the accounts and the obscure details we can glean from them, it is “the core of serendipity” (Bennett 1988, 123) that all retellings of the legend retain. Despite the fact that this event is now a century old, the idea of a chance find that could bring new research projects into being hardly seems to be a mere historical curiosity: the serendipitous retains its mysterious allure, but this is not to say that it is simply timeless. Rather, the serendipitous is deeply tied to context, and as this chapter demonstrates, the contemporary city provides for the expansion of the possibilities of the serendipitous, both as a methodological principle to be invoked and an element of urban experience to be theorized. In this chapter, I will first outline some of the ways the term is used in the natural sciences, and then turn to its use in the social sciences. I will then examine two dominant modes of representing the urban and move towards connecting the serendipitous and the city. Next, I outline an alternative logic of discovery more amenable to what I call aleatory urbanism. I conclude with some thoughts on how an aleatory urbanism might harness the serendipitous to produce novel insights on cities.

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

57

SYSTE M , S ERE N D IP IT Y , AND SCIENCE

Serendipity, the unexplainable encounter with something unexpected, throws open research questions – or in Thomas’s case, entire projects – that might not otherwise have been considered. Academic treatment of serendipity has focused primarily on the serendipitous discovery, the chance observation or fluky occurrence, often in a laboratory, that leads to a significant advance in scientific knowledge. The standard bearer in this respect is the story of penicillin’s discovery, where a petri dish in Alexander Fleming’s laboratory became contaminated with a previously unclassified bacterium – a kind of microscopic garbage, perhaps – while he was on vacation. He subsequently discovered that the strange growth on the petri dish had important medicinal uses; this accidental occurrence led to the discovery of antibiotics, followed by a revolution in the treatment of bacterial infections (Kantorovich 1993). One of the messages of this well-known story is that chance occurrences can trump even the most rigorous scientific methods in generating new discoveries and producing new knowledge about the natural world. If one of the most celebrated breakthroughs in modern medicine was little more than a fluke, then serendipity poses a conceptual quandary: method implies systematicity and replicability, while serendipity is neither systematic nor replicable. Consequently, serendipity maintains an undertheorized, random, and infrequent role in scientific discovery. Serendipity is a “contrived, odd-sounding and useful word” (Merton and Barber 2006, 92) and any discussion could quickly digress into endless speculation as to its etymology.2 Better for our purposes here is to examine how the term and the phenomenon it purportedly describes have been used in both natural scientific and social research. Focused studies of the phenomenon tend to read serendipity as a moment of luck that leads to a breakthrough in the natural sciences (Austin 1978; Roberts 1989). In these studies, discussions of serendipity tend towards the descriptive – a mere recounting of events – or the transcendent, where the phenomenon is treated as a case of divine intervention. While work of this kind may draw upon serendipitous events, research conducted about serendipity in science is relatively sparse. Very few studies explore the social texture of serendipity, with most instead examining the social organization of scientific discovery (Campanario 1996), the connections between

58

Legibility

Kuhnian “normal science” and serendipitous discovery (Dean 1977), or the place of chance in the philosophy of science (Kantorovich and Ne’eman 1989). In the natural sciences then, serendipity is less a rational scientific principle than something that happens along the way, something that may ultimately lead to an important breakthrough. Thus, it exceeds the principles of rational empirical investigation by resisting systematization. This is not to say that nobody has tried. Diaconis and Mosteller (1989), for example, attempt to use the tools of applied mathematics to construct statistical models for predicting the occurrence of coincidences. They begin by working through a range of mathematical analytic techniques and probabilistic modeling, but end up with one conclusion that sees them reaching to Carl Jung, who is not generally thought of as the first choice scientist for hard-nosed empiricists. Another of their conclusions points to the “law of truly large numbers, which says that when enormous numbers of people and events and their interactions cumulate over time, almost any outrageous event is bound to occur” (Diaconis and Mosteller 1989, 860). By the same principle, predicting such events proves to be impossible. By its very nature, then, serendipity can be neither planned nor wholly accounted for via scientific formulae, though it has a central place in some scientific discoveries. Whether serendipity is then method, anti-method, or non-method is an open question. In the social sciences, serendipity has received somewhat better but overall patchy treatment. Stories about serendipity abound, yet there is little by way of serious treatment of serendipity as a social phenomenon in particular. This may be, in part, because not long after Thomas stumbled upon the garbage in that early twentieth-century Chicago alleyway, quantitative methods went into the ascendancy in North American social science (Platt 1998). Subsequently, the spirit of openness and discovery that permits and thrives on serendipity was increasingly marginalized in North American social science. This still holds true today, where quantitative sociologists, for example, are very much concerned with instituting correct procedures for obtaining sufficiently representative selections of people, events, places, phenomena, so that chance might be minimized – perhaps even eliminated – and generalizations about entire populations might be made. As part of this social scientific methodology, representative sampling, if not seeking to eliminate the random, at the very least seeks to minimize the impact of the unforeseen. Such a method involves the

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

59

systematic removal of the unpredictable and so, by definition, is closed to serendipity. For this reason, the relatively fixed procedures favoured in quantitative analysis, or in heavily proscribed statistical methods, invariably falter in their encounter with the serendipitous. Such events might be treated as outliers, not part of a regular dataset. Thus, the scientific method – whether used in the natural or social sciences – has a demonstrated incapacity to deal with serendipity.3 S O C IA L I ZIN G SE RE N D IP IT Y

Despite its apparent unwieldiness, how have qualitatively and theoretically minded social scientists treated serendipity as a social phenomenon? In sociology, there is one book-length study dedicated to the subject, a book written in the 1950s but only published, by chance of course, in 2004.4 This book stands as the only comprehensive attempt to codify and analyze how serendipity works as a social phenomenon, without regress to mathematical modelling or mere descriptive reporting. Elsewhere, one of the authors of the single book-length social scientific study of serendipity describes the characteristics of what he calls the “serendipity pattern” (Merton 1948). Focusing specifically on the relationship between data collection and theory construction, Merton suggests that for a piece of data to be both serendipitous and theoretically useful it must be “unanticipated, anomalous and strategic” (506). For data to be serendipitous, it must breach expectations (“unanticipated”), it must be out of pattern with the prevailing order of events and phenomena (“anomalous”), and it must be something that advances subsequent activity in a positive direction (“strategic”). Merton offers a parsimonious and thoughtful rendering of serendipity, though as is often the case with the conceptual clarification of unwieldy objects, it does not quite capture the spirit of serendipity. As something out of our control, initially at least, serendipity evades conceptual capture by some of the staples of the social scientific theoretical diet. For example, it bears neither the discernable patterns and relative predictability of “structure” nor the willfully and voluntarily constructed activity we associate with “agency.” Resistant as serendipity is to systematization, scholars have found it easier to describe instances and to recount serendipitous encounters rather than provide deep contextualization or thick description (Geertz 1973) – never mind explanation – of serendipitous phenomenon. Instead, authors tend to construct vignettes aimed at depicting those

60

Legibility

“you-wouldn’t-believe-it-but” moments when serendipity strikes. It is sometimes discussed in this way by scholars who employ qualitative methods, though mostly only in passing as something that happens when “wasting time” within an otherwise formally proscribed set of tasks, where something outside of regular methodological procedures (such as interviews, surveys, and naturalistic observation) insinuates itself into the research situation (Knapp 1997). Needless to say, not everything that occurs outside of the formal procedures of the research process is serendipitous. Some also recognize that these are often the “a-ha” moments when a research project begins to cohere, where new linkages between seemingly disparate datum become evident, what Denzin calls “moments of sudden awakening” (1994, 504). Otherwise, the term does not generally appear in literature on social research methods, save for as a mode of explanation sometimes offered by research participants (Lieblich, Zilber, and Tuval-Mashiach 2008). Beyond Merton and Barber’s (2004) sprawling study, there are two other contributions worth noting. Through a reflexive discussion of a series of chance events in his life, Becker (1994, 185) develops a “phenomenology of coincidence” to demonstrate how scientific method in search of causality hunts for objects that it has likely anticipated. As a consequence, Becker argues, scientific method misses much else. For Becker, serendipity disrupts causality; it either throws alternative and unanticipated causes into the mix, or acts against the very idea of direct causality. Going somewhat deeper, Fine and Deegan (1996) review the role of serendipity in ethnographic fieldwork and find that serendipity does not merely happen; it requires both chance and insight, a “combination of accident and sagacity … intellectual readiness, coupled with exposure to a wide range of experience” (434, 445). We will return to this peculiar combination of thoughtfulness and flukiness characteristic of serendipity later in our discussion of aleatory urbanism. Here I wish to simply point out that critical or analytic scrutiny of something so central to many advances in the natural and social sciences is underformulated, fragmentary, and fleeting. This, I believe, is testament to serendipity’s unwieldy nature and the difficulty that comes with trying to think or write about it systematically. For the most part, the phenomenon is either victim to interpretive torpidity (with a few exceptions touched upon above), or ignored. And so, like Merton, I seek to rescue the term from its “inept usages” (2006, 289).

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

61

FR A M I N G T H E SE RE N D IP ITO US CIT Y

Chance encounters can be formulated a little more strongly than they are in the range of works dealt with above. To begin the rescue effort and to enliven the concept of serendipity, I will work through some of the specific conditions that make possible its emergence by turning to a site where serendipitous encounters happen with frequency and intensity: the city. Tracing the contours that connect serendipity and the city, we are brought beyond relatively straightforward accounts of the phenomenon as a product of the laboratory experiment gone awry (à la Fleming). It is clear that by virtue of the experiential excesses promulgated by the basic facts of density and heterogeneity (Wirth 1938), the city permits and makes available serendipity. While these broad sociospatial characteristics of the city lend it to serendipitous encounters, we must delve quite a bit deeper to ask, how do we theorize such encounters? How do we formulate those experiential excesses embodied in serendipitous urban encounters and from which they derive? In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings on cities, the serendipitous and the fragment were seen as more or less equivalent. Think, for example, of the ways in which our understanding of urban life is deepened through the collection of fragments based on chance finds and unexpected encounters in the works of modernist writers like Baudelaire (1970, 1989) and Benjamin (1968, 1979; Frisby 1988). Work in the modernist tradition provides a vivid portrait of the variety and texture of urban experience, where the city is to be interpreted and understood through the fragmentary experiences that it harbours. It is no coincidence that chance encounters and unexpected finds figure prominently and are treated as key to understanding the urban in modernist work. Where modernity is characterized by the rationalization of time and space (Simmel 1971), and where the city is the centre of modernity, then the serendipitous encounter figures as the fleeting moment where rationality’s hold on time and space is exceeded, its grip loosened. Serendipity’s role here is as a spark for the individual creative impulse. The accumulation, layering, and juxtaposition of diverse experiences provide a ground for critique of the existing order. And so, in the modernist mould, accretion and montage motion towards the existing social totality, while simultaneously giving glimpses, if only fleeting, at possibilities for its transcendence. While modernist conceptions of the city treat seriously the fleeting

62

Legibility

and the fragmentary, this should not be confused with sustained analytic attention to the serendipitous. In a Benjaminian mode, Thomas’s alleyway discovery might have been part of a collection of other kinds of garbage, juxtaposed in a montage to produce critical reflection on some element of modern capitalist existence. Here it is the collision of disparate fragments that produce some sense of the whole. While Benjamin and Baudelaire, for example, treat the serendipitous as both productive and symptomatic of the fragmentary nature of modern urban existence, the form of analysis that I advocate for here treats the serendipitous as more than fragmentary, asking instead how the serendipitous might fit with a more fully integrated urban methodology and urban theory. Treating Thomas’ serendipitous discovery in the garbage as proto-typical in this respect, we find that the serendipitous has a whole other theoretical and methodological life, where it becomes the starting point for sustained analysis of a particular phenomenon, a particular group and a particular set of experiences. In the modernist mould, the serendipitous figures as a fragment; it is one among many, treated as both sign and symptom of modern urban experience. Beyond this modernist fascination with the fragment lies an aleatory urbanism, where the serendipitous fragment is not a means to an end, but rather a beginning, a kick start for new syntheses and a driver of theoretical innovation. Before I more fully flesh out the central place of the serendipitous in an aleatory urbanism, the ways in which the city and the serendipitous are intertwined must first be addressed more comprehensively. The experiential and narrative products emanating from the various tensions that the city sustains provide us with an opportunity for thinking anew about serendipity. This is not to say that I seek to “tame” serendipity or to make it predictable: after all, this would be antithetical to what serendipity does. As demonstrated above, predictability is the very thing that serendipity resists, and it is this resistance to systematization that both gives it its allure and makes it so challenging to theorize. In spite of this challenge, we can glance against serendipity’s contours – as shifting and undulating as they must be – so as to understand how and where serendipity emerges and how it can become useful in theory production. In so doing we assert the place of serendipity as the shifting centre of the iterative process of urban research production, moving between urban methodology and urban theory. Hence, I treat the city as a site of serendipitous encounters. If the city is the site of serendipitous encoun-

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

63

ters, and if urban research requires at least some specifically urban theories and methods, then the serendipitous can certainly figure as a potential means for the production of new and innovative theories and methods. Moving forward then, we are concerned less with theorizing the serendipitous in general than with theorizing the serendipitous as a springboard for theorizing the city. In treating the city as a site of serendipitous encounters, we must ask how the city creates “a context of discovery” (Konecki 2008, 171). What is specific to or special about the city that it lends itself to serendipity? Clearly, density is a basic physical reality, a characteristic of the urban, and an undeniable force in making serendipity more or less likely. While we can recognize that density and serendipity are in some way correlated, serendipity cannot be reduced to a mere function of density. We must take it as a given that serendipity is threaded through the city’s social fabric and seek to highlight the ways that key tensions animating urban life make serendipitous encounters possible, and provide us with opportunities for advancing urban research. In what follows, then, we will begin to develop a conceptualization of serendipity that moves beyond seeing it as simply a function of density and difference, and towards an understanding of the constraints on and possibilities of an aleatory urbanism. BIRDS AND WORMS : T WO WAYS OF REPRESENTING THE URBAN

In order to develop an understanding of the intertwining of the urban and the serendipitous that is neither reductive nor infinitely expansive, it is useful to separate out ways of representing the urban as an object of research. I discern two modes of representing the urban in the social sciences and humanities, modes that organize and orient the theories and methods used in existing urban research. These representations are inevitably intertwined in practice, and the majority of contemporary urban research certainly recognizes this. Nonetheless, for the sake of analysis, broad characterizations of work that operates in each of these two modes are useful for extracting what is distinctive about the visions of the city that each posits. For ease of use I term these two representational modes the city of birds and the city of worms. This relatively simple distinction permits me to gather the array of traditions and orientations that coalesce around each representational mode. Below I outline the distinct traditions and research orientations that they gather, touching in particular on the constella-

64

Legibility

tions of disciplines that are characteristic of these modes and the theories and methods to which they lend themselves. A table summarizing the key differences between these representational modes can be found at the end of this section. Following from this, I will reconstruct a composite of the city of birds and the city of worms that rests on both types but exceeds the grasp of either. This is what I term aleatory urbanism, and with it I demonstrate how serious treatment of the serendipitous might inform and enhance urban research. City of Birds In the city of birds, the urban is treated as an object to be described and known through accurate and complete description of what is objectively available and analyzable. This city is rooted in a realist orientation. By discerning some key properties of the city of birds we can probe its far reaches. Its orientation to city dwellers is objective, its meaning frame is externalist, and the form of consciousness it operates is over and above the space of the city. The city of birds favours an objectivist lens, an Archimedean point outside of and disembedded from space as it is experienced in the quotidian round of life. At its most basic, the city of birds could be thought of as, for example, the object of demography, where the urban is represented as an object to be known through the practice of counting and taxonomical organization (Foucault 2001). Demography’s units of analysis are aggregations of individual data points; it involves a representational mode that treats the city as “populated” by bearers of varying collections of “variables” (Blumer 1969). As I will suggest below, the connotative life of the term “population” suggests that this representational mode differs greatly from one that treats the city as “peopled.” The city of birds does not begin and end with demography’s descriptive statistics. This representational mode characterizes modernist planning, for example, where city space is treated instrumentally, where planners’ activities are organized around the designation and specification of functions and uses (the strongest example here is the famed treatment of urban space as machine-like by Le Corbusier). Thus, planning orients to the city as an aggregation of functions and uses, viewed from a position that is at some distance from the lived experience of urbanity. The city here is a physical structure, an environment in the sense of functioning habitat, amenable not only to quantification, but also to manipulation and perhaps control. I do not

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

65

want to overstate the point, but there is some merit in focusing on and magnifying the ontological and epistemological foundations of this representational mode to ascertain its effects and outcomes in the production of urban research. In some iterations, the city of birds may have an affinity with the radical behaviourism of B.F. Skinner in psychology, which revolves around a physiological model of human action, relying less on affect or cognition than on the more deterministic logic of stimulus-response. Analogously disembedded, traditional cartography is to the space of the city of birds what demography is to its inhabitants. Like the populations quantified by demography, traditional cartography renders space as a purely physical entity independently influencing and organizing urban populations. As a specific instantiation of this, let us take the example of civil engineering, and in particular that concerned with the regulation of flows of pedestrian traffic in dense urban environments. As legal geographer Nicholas Blomley (2010, 29–56) has demonstrated, civil engineers who design and construct sidewalks view their role as essential to the organization of the movement through space of those who populate the city. Here, users of sidewalks are conceived of as ambulatory units whose trajectories are to be orchestrated through the manipulation of various design elements and static objects on the sidewalk. Interestingly, amongst civil engineers, pedestrians are referred to as “peds” and, as Blomley has clearly shown, “peds” are not conceived or treated as reflexive agents engaged in peripatetic practices.5 Though the point should not be overstated, we must be mindful that while a cartographic sensibility can be used to facilitate movement and interaction, it also risks operating within a behaviourist model of human activity that delimits the spheres of human consciousness, affect, and collectivity. Harvey notes that “cartography is about locating, identifying and bounding phenomena and thereby situating events, processes and things within a coherent spatial frame” (2001, 220), but these events, processes, and things cannot be confused with the frame itself. The synthesis between demography and cartography, between counting and mapping, might tend towards reducing the collective to a mere aggregation of individuals, a simple sum of parts. This focus on technical orchestration pays scant attention to the relative autonomy of collective life from the individuals that constitute it (Durkheim, 1974, 1995), and sets aside entirely the subjectively meaningful affective relations between persons. It focuses instead on

66

Legibility

the objectively observable sociospatial coordinates of individuals. In short, the city of birds leans towards an atomistic, asocial, and perhaps overdetermined conception of human action. The most well-known reading and criticism of the city of birds comes to us in de Certeau’s rendering of Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre where we have the sense of what de Certeau calls “seeing the whole … totalizing … looking down like a God” (1984, 92). De Certeau’s critique emphasizes that physical removal from the city’s experiential excesses is required to sustain the distance that permits the viewer to treat the city as if it were transparent, as if it were knowable. Thus, as its name suggests, the city of birds privileges verticality. Those who operate within this representational mode argue that this sense of distance is essential to their craft, and this is certainly true where the development of the hard physical infrastructure of the city requires an engineer’s capacity to think first and foremost in terms of structure and organization. By necessity, the city of birds is governed by an instrumental logic in search of predictability. What is at stake for us here in linking this representational mode to serendipity? How would serendipity appear to one beholden to the city of birds? When all approaches to the urban are judged according to the empiricist benchmark, is the serendipitous undermined, or worse, ignored? Perhaps thinking back to the story of W.I. Thomas and the garbage with which I opened this chapter will help. As noted above, the specification of functions and uses is central to the city of birds. Networks of garbage collection and disposal, the differentiation of primary, secondary, and tertiary use – main streets, side streets, and alleyways – were all essential to Thomas making his serendipitous discovery. While we can recognize that physical infrastructure and municipal waste management policy were key to his discovery, it would be absurd to maintain that they determined it. The city of birds aims at the coordination of means and ends, and so provides an infrastructure that creates the means of the sort necessary for the serendipitous discovery. This is the case whether or not these are ends that planners and civil engineers, for example, had in mind. The objectivist lens of the city of birds does not help us to understand what I earlier called the spirit of serendipity, where serendipity appears not as a disembodied fact that can be counted, but rather as something that is lived through and reflected upon. Thus, we now turn to an alternative representational mode.

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

67

City of Worms In the city of worms, the urban is treated as a subject to be interpreted and understood. This connects with a hermeneutic orientation, where the city is understood through the reconstruction of experiences, and the imaginative development of intersecting narratives and stories. While some strains of social science have certainly been implicated in the instrumental and management-oriented approaches to the urban characteristic of the city of birds, many approaches in the interpretive social sciences are more properly aligned with the city of worms. Rather than treating the city as a container of individual and collective behaviours to be observed and managed, the city of worms is instead an experiential domain in which to be immersed. Most significantly, to be experienced the city must be lived in and through, and so this representational mode emphasizes everyday urban life as embodied. Where the city of birds is populated, the city of worms is peopled. Thus, accounts of the city of worms require a literary bent that lends itself to the interpretive, the meaningful, the affective, the emotional. It is the subject of the best kinds of ethnography – “peopled ethnography” (Fine 2003) – aimed at developing deep understanding of urban living from specific points and places embedded in the world. Thus, it attends first and foremost to lifeworlds as opposed to the externalities that organize them. Because of this it is characterized by self-consciousness, self-awareness, and reflexivity, where the interpreter provides accounts of his or her own experiences, situating them in time and space, building with and from them to develop a broader understanding of urban life. It is only descriptive insofar as description aids in the development of understanding. Based as it is on experience, it does not seek to proscribe action. Rather, the city of worms seeks to offer meaningful interpretations of action in its context. In this sense, it is phenomenological, concerned as much with the quotidian and recursive as with the exceptional and anomalous. The city of worms sets out from the standpoint of individual activity. It is less about the flow of populations and aggregates than it is with the flow of individual experience. It seeks the communicative tools with which to articulate resonant meaning-filled accounts of the flow of urban experience. It orients to this flow as continuous and sequential, but sustains the possibility that this continuity might be ruptured, the expected sequence might be breached. For any event to

68

Legibility

be taken as serendipitous it must be narratively reconstructed as such. Thus, in the city of worms the cartographic is not just augmented; it is superseded by the ethnographic. Here, the rational control of space is less significant than the affectivity of involvement in its rhythms, and the affective dimensions of urban life are given primacy over the structure and organization of physical space. The city of worms is always and everywhere fully embodied, located in the lived body but reaching towards the imaginary to develop the means for articulating experience, for making experience socially intelligible. The city of worms grounds itself in an altogether different orientation to space than the city of birds. It seeks the integration of city space and the individual moving through it in a flow, of sorts, that is given being through the individual’s capacity to engage in ongoing interpretation of and reaction to her environment. The only aggregation is the accumulation of moments in time, of experiences that are made to cohere in stories and narratives, or more profoundly, in the life of an individual (Simmel 2010b). This flow, of course, may be ruptured – the shock of serendipity perhaps – but, most of the time, it is experienced as relatively continuous (Schutz 1967). By beginning with a concept of individuals as thinking – if not always entirely rational – actors, engaged in ongoing meaning-filled interactions with others, the city of worms places actively interpreting and reflexive persons at its centre. It concerns itself most broadly with the ways that we engage, negotiate, navigate, and interpret the city’s experiential excesses, examining and seeking to understand how these experiences are recounted and narrated in ways that feed into the broader collective experience of cities. Where the city of birds is concerned with the aggregation of individual behaviours, the city of worms attends to the experience of the city as greater than the sum of individual actions and accounts. It is grounded in a phenomenology of everyday life and as such is concerned with integration over aggregation. Where the city of birds privileges the vertical as a means for producing objective distance, the city of worms is thoroughly horizontal, concerned with producing proximity and grounded in the flow of everyday sensuous experience. Encounters are not to be mapped, planned, or predicted, as is the case with the city of birds. Rather, they are treated as those moments of engagement in which meaning is negotiated and produced. Reflexive engagement is given primacy over the aggregation effects that make up the city of birds. The city then appears as an intersubjective

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

69

Table 3.1 Summary of differences between the representational modes of the city of birds and the city of worms City of Birds

City of Worms

key disciplines and subfields

planning, law, demography, ethnography, literature, poetry, empirical social science interpretive social science

methodological orientation

objective behavioural (stimulusresponse) non-reflexive atomistic

subjective experiential (expressive)

descriptive

interpretive (“thick” description) hermeneutic inductive

analytic mode

proscriptive deductive

reflexive integrative

orientation to individuals aggregated

encountered

orientation to collective orchestration

immersion

orientation to “flow”

spatiotemporal frame of lived experience

aggregation of spatial trajectories to be managed

creation, produced out of what happens between people rather than treating the material fact of their proximity as primary. Here the city is to be simultaneously experienced and understood, lived in, talked about, recounted, and interpreted – acts that are all fundamentally dialogical. Consequently, the intersubjective construction and elaboration of a world held in common is made manifest through the city of worms. By way of summarizing the distinctive characteristics of these two representational modes, Table 3.1 outlines some key differences between the city of birds and the city of worms. The axes along which they are distinguished serve to highlight the manifold ways that the city appears in the constellations of disciplines organized around each representational mode. Putting these two representational modes into tabular form emphasizes their differences. Nonetheless, these representational modes can and do address the same physical places; any single street, neighbourhood, or city is represented in these two ways. Lest it appear that I am positing one representational mode as favourable to the other, it is important to appreciate that both representational modes are key to thinking through an aleatory urbanism. Grounded social research has the capacity to draw on and build upon the flotsam that comes to

70

Legibility

surface where the tidelands of the city of birds and the city of worms meet. In taking serendipity seriously as a fundamentally social phenomenon, we can examine the productive tension and tenuous integration of these two representational modes. E V ERYDAY L I F E IN THE SE RE N D IP ITO US CIT Y

What the map cuts up, the story cuts across. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

Serendipity does not dwell exclusively in the city of birds or in the city of worms. It is only practically and analytically available in navigating both cities simultaneously. Thus, aleatory urbanism – alive to and driven by the serendipitous – operates and can be unpacked at the points of intersection between both cities. The serendipitous is equally a product of number, of density, of intersecting spatial trajectories, as it is a product of the way in which an encounter is recounted, the disruption of the flow of everyday experience, the tethering of movement through space to immediate affect and subsequent reflection. Serendipity, then, derives from the recursive and the anomalous simultaneously. Everyday life in the city, as elsewhere, involves habituation and routine, but is by no means governed by a linear logic or a pure automatism; this would make serendipity impossible. Conversely, serendipity is not just raw experience or the unmediated flow of everyday life; this would undo any distinction between the truly serendipitous and the absolutely random, the purely chaotic. Encounters – serendipitous or otherwise – are produced in the city of birds, but are made serendipitous in the city of worms. To be clear, this is not to give primacy to the objectivist city of birds by asserting a unilinear chain of causality of the kind found in the numbing realism of sciences that cannot attend to experience. While the behavioural order privileged in the city of birds may be foundational for everyday urbanism, this does not mean that the city of worms is determined by some overarching causal force to be located by the city of birds. While the city of worms is spatiotemporally contained within the city of birds, the experience of urban life itself is not reducible to the spatiotemporal coordinates of any particular encounter. The raw materials out of which serendipity is made are housed in the city of birds and, thus,

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

71

can only be observed behaviourally. But it must also be experienced; its textures must be lived through and with in order to be made meaningful. Thus, serendipity is shaped by the city of birds, but enlivened in the city of worms. The serendipitous encounter must be conceived of both spatially and temporally. The spatial trajectories of actors can and do intersect and collide, and this is accentuated in conditions of high population density. Accordingly, certain spatial patterns and distributions may lend themselves to a higher probability of serendipitous encounters. Stopping here would reduce our treatment of serendipity to a phenomenon to be quantified. Instead, we understand that the quantification of serendipity is somewhat absurd, as the phenomenon itself exceeds the predictable. Intersections, crossings, and collisions must not be physical/ spatial alone; they must also have a quality that makes them amenable to narrative, and those that experience them must have the insight to make them serendipitous. Thus, the ways that encounters are accounted for, narrated, recounted, the way they are formulated by way of a backward glance makes them serendipitous. As a spatial phenomenon any serendipitous encounter is non-reflexive; as a temporal one it is nothing but reflexive. The city of birds and the city of worms then are thoroughly intertwined, layered on top of one another in ways that makes them largely indistinguishable in the flow of everyday life, but distinct in the orientations to urban research to which they lend themselves. With the city of birds, spontaneous encounters might be “designed in” or made more possible,6 but chance occurrences in themselves are not necessarily serendipitous; they lack meaning until they are lived through, described, and abstracted from. While planning might aim to cultivate random encounters between “peds” by organizing spaces in ways that are likely to mix trajectories and speeds, it cannot legislate the contents of such encounters, much less how those contents are reformulated and narrated by those experiencing them. At the same time, in order to be abstracted from, a serendipitous experience needs to make reference to the structure of space, the organization of physical movement, and the spatiotemporal coordination of action. Thus, serendipity equals physical encounter in space plus techniques of narrativizing, of making what might be otherwise uneventful into something with an event-like character. As the city of birds binds topography to telos, the city of worms connects persons to poiesis.

72

Legibility

In light of this elaboration of the ways that the serendipitous illuminates the tensions between the city of birds and the city of worms – between the descriptive and the interpretive, the observational and the experiential, the deductive and the inductive – some questions remain around how the serendipitous is to be harnessed to advance our understanding of the urban. Principally, we need to ask what sort of analytic orientation is required, and how can it be mobilized to develop our analysis of the contemporary moment. AL EATO RY UR BAN ISM AN D A BD UCTIO N

Every encounter is aleatory, not only in its origins (nothing ever guarantees an encounter), but also in its effects. In other words, every encounter might not have taken place, although it did take place; but its possible nonexistence sheds light on the meaning of its aleatory being. And every encounter is aleatory in its effects, in that nothing in the elements of the encounter prefigures, before the actual encounter, the contours of the being that will emerge from it. Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87

The serendipitous city appears as an amalgam, simultaneously physical, experiential, and recounted. Serendipity cuts across the representational modes we use to access and analyze the mysteries of urban life. One of the tasks for urban research must be to harness the potential of the serendipitous by simultaneously working within the two dominant representational modes but affording primacy to neither. Thus, understanding the serendipitous city requires what I call aleatory urbanism. Serendipity commands some sort of symmetry of the material and the imagined, the ascribed and the contingent, and an aleatory urbanism tasks itself with forcing us to think together about and beyond the city of birds and the city of worms. The simultaneity of a multiplicity of urbanisms as they appear in these representational modes must be retained as the city cannot be reduced to any analytic bifurcation. Contradictory forces inhere in the spatiotemporally located serendipitous encounter, so that, with a backward glance, the designation “serendipitous” compresses the analytic distance between behaviour and experience, and out of this compression produces something reducible to neither representational form. Aleatory urbanism is founded on recognition of the imbrica-

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

73

tions of the city of birds and the city of worms – the behavioural and the experiential – foregrounding their complementarity and coexistence but pushing too beyond them. The fusing of the horizons of both the city of worms and the city of birds is not a problem consciously or explicitly available to or addressed in the flow of everyday life. Rather, their integration occurs in a seamless way in urban lives as lived in everyday ways. The flow of urban experience – and in particular its habitual and habituating character – are central to the serendipitous encounter. One must be absorbed in order to be jolted. It is habituation that makes possible the momentary arrest – or rupture – of experiential flow that is essential to the serendipitous. It is in this rupture that I locate aleatory urbanism. Clearly, serendipity is not mere luck; it does not simply happen. It is only possible under conditions of openness. This openness derives in large part from the conditions of ordinary everyday urban life. As Bauman notes, cities are places where we have a range of encounters without a past and without a future (2012, 95), and a key component of contemporary existence is developing the capacity – both individual and collective – to dwell in such conditions. Everyday life in the serendipitous city, then, involves the sustenance of an ethicopolitical orientation characterized by radical openness. The analysis of everyday life in the serendipitous city demands a desire to formulate a range of responses to and consequences of that openness. This is less a cataloguing of effects (as in the case of the modernist orientation of Baudelaire, for example) than it is a necessary analytic adaptation to the contradictory conditions of habituation and ambiguity, of routine and ambivalence that everyday urban life fosters (Highmore 2004). Formulating – rather than engineering, expecting, or ignoring – these encounters precipitates discovery. Thus, the analytic mode to be privileged in the serendipitous city is neither inductive (as in the city of worms), nor deductive (as in the city of birds), but rather, abductive. Abduction is inferential, it is a leap of faith based on thoughtfulness, and so is foundational to an aleatory urbanism. Like abduction, aleatory urbanism is unbound by the limits of existing understandings of any given phenomenon, but this is not to say that it ignores existing theories and accounts. Abduction produces a third thing that is neither transparent knowledge nor deep understanding, but that depends on both. In popular usage, abduction has something of a negative connotation, associated as it is with removing someone from

74

Legibility

their proper place, concealing them, taking them elsewhere, but as Timmermans and Tavory point out, the term refers more simply to “leading away.” Further, “in the context of research, abduction refers to an inferential creative process of producing new hypotheses and theories based on surprising research evidence. A researcher is led away from old to new theoretical insights” (2012, 170). Thus, while systematicity and structure are essential to analysis of the serendipitous, so too is intuition. Aleatory urbanism, then, forces with relative ease a bridging and transcendence of otherwise opposed orientations. It rests upon everyday abduction, and draws much of its analytic power from the fact that it emerges in part out of the flow of everyday experience. The habituation and repetition that give structure to everyday life also provide the foundation for the novel and the anomalous. Thus, habituation cannot be totalizing in urban life: repetition without difference runs counter to the contingent character of urban experience. It is analytic attention to this difference that can fuel innovation and critique. Urban life is both recursive and ambiguous, it might always be other than what it is. The serendipitous makes available the noninevitable and shows that within the “is” there exists something utterly different than what “is.” Aleatory urbanism widens the capacity for conceptual innovation, as it treats the serendipitous encounter, the confrontation with the unexpected, as an intervention producing new data and offering new possibilities. With an aleatory urbanism, the city is conceived first and foremost as an experimental social form, whose propensity for the endless production of ambiguity gives life – though not yet form – to the new. Aleatory urbanism retains at its core a place for the serendipitous from which critique can emerge, and towards which critical urban scholarship can reach for the production of novel insights (Timmermans and Tavory 2012, 168). The urban is never fully rationalized. There is always an excess that outstrips analysis. The serendipitous is that which, at least initially, exceeds our grasp. Chance occurrences are, in their own way, inevitable. Chance appears to the modern mind as arbitrary, as unjust, or more simply, as a thing out of place. It is worth remembering that chance was once treated as the intervention and reflection of divine will.7 Perhaps we could excavate the supernatural causation implied by divine intervention, and develop instead some comfort with the inscrutability and relative opacity of the serendipitous. This is not to

In Search of an Aleatory Urbanism

75

say though that the serendipitous is purely spontaneous, since specific conditions make unexpected encounters more or less likely. At the same time, moulding spaces in ways that seek to guarantee serendipitous encounters is an unsustainable paradox; to expect serendipity is to erase its possibility. Serendipity is the very fact of not expecting; for it to occur requires an ambiguous orientation between fixity and mobility, between focused attention and momentary distraction, between order and unexpected rupture. Serendipity, then, is a moment of collision between divergent forces, intensified and magnified in the city. The serendipitous dwells simultaneously in two times – now and then – and in two spaces – physical and imaginative. The movement between these times and spaces constitutes the restless life of aleatory urbanism. An aleatory urbanism inhabits the moment and place where opposed forces of social life glance against one another and in their meeting, however fleeting, produce what is good about the city as a space – both physical and imaginative – of innovation and critique. In early twentieth-century Chicago, W.I. Thomas was simply walking when he made his discovery. A discovery based not just on observation, not just on experience, but also on happenstance, the unlikely occurrence within the flow of everyday urban life, the moment, later recollected, where something or someone stepped into and out of rhythm with this flow.

NOTES

1 See, for example, Andersen and Taylor 2008, 18. 2 See Goodman 1961. 3 While debates internal to sociology on the epistemology and logic of social scientific inquiry are a little too internecine to be fully elaborated here, it is worth noting, if only as a word of caution, that some recent publications appear to implicitly suggest that scholars in the humanities ought also to turn towards statistical evidence for the basis of literary analysis (see, for example, Moretti 2011). If any lesson is to be learned from sociology, it is that such a move is likely to threaten the generally more open methodological approaches of humanities scholars with the sort of closures that have marred sociology – particularly in North America – since the mid-twentieth century.

76

Legibility

4 See Merton and Barber 2006. 5 The root word “ped-” means “foot” in Latin and “child” in Greek. This is, if not coincidental, perhaps serendipitous. 6 This is a particular focus of emerging geomapping and mobile technologies. See, for example, Hampton and Gupta 2008; Humphreys 2010; ThomSantelli, 2007. 7 See Girard 1979, 311–15,

4 The Cartographatron – Between Media and Architecture: McLuhan, Giedion, Tyrwhitt, and Doxiadis STE PH A N KOWA L

Cartograph
a
tron: a neologism created around 1959, composed of the term cartograph, from cartography, meaning the art of making maps or charts, followed by the prefix a-, usually placed before an element of Greek origin, and -tron, a suffix predominantly used in the formation of nomenclature designating electronic instruments. Cartographatron: an electronic instrument used for map making.

In order to consider the significance of the cartographatron, I have structured this chapter in two parts: the first focuses on Marshall McLuhan’s interest in architecture by examining his relationships with art historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion, architect Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, and architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis within the context of the first Delos Symposium, held in Greece in 1963. In the second part, I explore the emergence of a new medium, the cartographatron, and its implications for architecture, which were elucidated by Doxiadis in the same era. My treatment of the device itself as a technological innovation will, in some measure, demystify the strange images it produces by relating it to the theories of Giedion, McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, and Doxiadis. I contend that the cartographatron was a precursor to video; it presented a new medium capable of mapping an image of motion and the flux of information. I hope to shed some light on our current fascination with the use of new media and multiple digital maps in

78

Legibility

architecture, thereby clarifying the transition from traditional notions of “representation” to alternative means of “presenting” information. M EDIA A N D A RCHITE CTURE : D I A LO G U E B E T WE E N M C LU H A N A N D GI EDI O N (1941–1963)

Giedion influences me profoundly. Space, Time and Architecture was one of the great events of my lifetime. Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan

My research into the cartographatron began with the work of Marshall McLuhan, which I was studying within the framework of a comparative literature seminar on intermediality at Université de Montréal.1 I was interested in investigating a possible relationship between McLuhan’s media theory and architecture. I am certainly not the first to suggest such a relationship, but in the course of my research I discovered a whole series of terms and ideas stemming from media theory and historiography that could equally be applied to architecture, principally by means of the cartographatron. Following the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964, Marshall McLuhan, professor and founder of the Toronto School of Communications, became a celebrity and media guru. It was McLuhan who gave us the concepts of “hot” and “cold” media, the notion that technology is always an extension of the body, and that “the medium is the message.” A professor of literature, he was fascinated with media and communication, and influenced by, among others, his senior colleague at the University of Toronto, Harold A. Innis, a professor of political economy who, towards the end of his career, was similarly interested in media and communication. McLuhan was also strongly influenced by art historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion. In his pioneering work The Gutenberg Galaxy, published in 1962, McLuhan referred to Giedion’s writings, but the collection of his published letters reveals that he had admired Giedion since the 1940s. McLuhan’s first recorded reference to Giedion appears in a letter to British painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, written 18 August 1943. However, as the excerpt suggests, McLuhan had by then been corresponding with Giedion for some time: “Sigfried Giedion wrote to me recently that the Oxford Press rep. in New York had besought him for a book on art which would interest the public … Apropos of S.G.’s book Space Time and Architec-

The Cartographatron

79

ture, you might very well be interested in his fine section on American architecture” (McLuhan 1987, 132). In this note, McLuhan referred both to Space, Time and Architecture, which Giedion had published two years earlier (in 1941), and to Giedion’s forthcoming book, Mechanization Takes Command, which was published in 1948. Several months later, McLuhan wrote again to Lewis about Giedion. In this letter, dated 26 October 1943, he wrote, “You asked me some time ago about Siegfried [sic] Giedion. He comes to mind now because of his conscious exploitation of ‘Space-Time’ metaphors in his exposition of architectural history. It is astonishing how helpful and how crippling a big unconscious metaphor can be in directing the thoughts of whole periods of history” (McLuhan 1987, 135). It seems that McLuhan did indeed have a passion for architecture. In fact, it was Giedion’s approach, which proposed reading history from the perspective of the new notion of spacetime in relation to architecture and its representation that would influence McLuhan. Giedion’s approach to history facilitated an interpretation of contemporary architecture. In Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion ([1941] 2008, 14) explained that history is not static but dynamic, and should be considered as a process, as a “pattern of living and changing attitudes and interpretations” (5). He supported his argument by noting that the mathematician Hermann Minkowski had already, in 1918, conceived of a world in four dimensions, in which space and time together form an indivisible continuum. Giedion named this new conception of space, which was evolving in the arts around 1910, the “optical revolution” ([1941] 2008, xxxiii). For Giedion, it was cubism that offered a method for simultaneously presenting multiple spatial relationships that led to the principles of the new conception of space (434), thereby producing a rupture with Renaissance perspective (436). He explained that, before the Renaissance, culture had been two-dimensional, and that the three-dimensional concept of space introduced in the Renaissance was the space of Euclidian geometry (435). Thus, for Giedion, contemporary space was “many-sided,” possessing infinite potential for possible relationships (435). The idea of presenting an object from several points of view was intimately bound up with the simultaneity of modern life (436). Spacetime representation was achieved through the plane (437) and planes could be accentuated to appeal to the “tactile sense” (438).

80

Legibility

In Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion developed the idea of anonymous history. Henceforth, history would be understood as never static, as perpetual movement; its totality would never be embraced because history only reveals itself “in facets, which fluctuate with the vantage point of the observer.” The meaning of history thus lies in the discovery of relationships, which vary with shifting points of view, as in the “constellations of stars” (Giedion 1969, 2). Ideally, for Giedion, anonymous history permitted these diverse facets to be seen simultaneously (4). Following Giedion, McLuhan would adopt a similar methodological approach. In 1951, McLuhan wrote the introduction to Harold Innis’s The Bias of Communication; Giedion’s influence on both Innis and McLuhan is evident in the latter’s explanation of Innis’s historiographic approach. McLuhan explained that Innis, without the benefit of having studied modern art or poetry, had nonetheless discovered a means of organizing his “insights” into “patterns” that closely resembled the art forms of the time, which he linked with the “mosaic structure” of seemingly unrelated and disproportioned phrases and aphorisms. McLuhan explained how Innis changed the procedure of research from that of working with a “point of view” (a term linked to perspective) to an approach that generates “insights” by a method of “interface.” McLuhan explained this as a “paratactic” procedure of juxtaposition without connectives, as in the natural structure of conversation or dialogue. In writing, there is a tendency to isolate certain aspects of a matter, but it is the interplay of multiple aspects of dialogue that generates insights and discovery (qtd. in Innis 1951, viii). Roughly ten years later, McLuhan stated in the note preceding the prologue to The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) that his book employed a “mosaic or field approach” to its subject; referring to the methodologies of both Innis and Giedion, it presented a “galaxy or constellation of events,” and “a mosaic of perpetually interacting forms.” Here again, McLuhan expressed his opposition to the “historical point of view” as a closed system (1962, 6). MEETING JAQ UELINE T YRWHITT AND C . A . DOXIADIS ( T H E DELO S SYM P O SIUM )

My object is to learn the grammar and general language of twenty major fields in order to help on an orchestra among the arts. Cf. S. Giedion’s Mech-

The Cartographatron

81

anization Takes Command as sample of how I should like to set up a school of literary studies. Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan

Established in the early 1950s, the school that would become known as the Toronto School of Communication, principally founded on the research of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, brought together professors of political science, psychology, anthropology, medicine, engineering, design, and architecture. It was at that time that McLuhan met Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, an architect who, having graduated from London’s Architectural Association, specialized in town planning. A friend of Sigfried Giedion, she became affiliated with the Graduate School of the University of Toronto in July 1951. In a letter to his mother, Elsie, in November 1952, McLuhan (1987, 233) wrote, “Tonight we are having Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, visiting professor of Town Planning in the School of Architecture. Siegfried [sic] Giedion wrote me about her when thanking me for the book.” Tyrwhitt joined the architecture school’s planning department where she often met with McLuhan. She became the associate editor of the journal Explorations (McLuhan 1987, 277), published from 1953 to 1959. In 1960, a selection of twenty-four essays from the journal was published under the title Explorations in Communication; the anthology included five articles by McLuhan as well as writings by Giedion and Tyrwhitt. The close collaboration between the three is evident in their respective articles. Similar in subject, each of their respective articles proposed alternatives to the perspectivist point of view. The article “Acoustic Space,” co-authored by McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter, who also co-edited the anthology, advocated an auditory space with no “point of favored focus,” a space neither pictorial nor “boxed in,” but rather “dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions … There is nothing in auditory space corresponding to the vanishing point in visual perspective” (Carpenter and McLuhan 1960, 67–8). As if engaged in a dialogue with McLuhan, in “Space Conception in Prehistoric Art,” Giedion explored the idea of multiform surface in primitive art, which facilitated directional liberty and perpetual change. He explained how prehistoric man captured objects in their entirety without organizing them according to a static viewpoint, as, for example, in the case of the Lascaux caves in France (82). So, too, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt discussed the movement of the eye in her article “The Moving Eye.” She focused on the town of Fatehpur

82

Legibility

Sikri in India, a town with no fixed centre – “nowhere a point from which the observer can dominate the whole” (90). She explained the difficulty of distancing oneself from the principles of Western thought, which has been dominated by the single viewpoint for five hundred years. She emphasized the importance of rediscovering vision in motion (94), which would offer the possibility of resolving contemporary urban planning issues (the organization of buildings, movement through space, etc.) that were rooted in the “static single viewpoint based on the limited optical science of the Renaissance” (95). In this article, Tyrwhitt also mentioned the work of C.A. Doxiadis, who represented the eye’s field of vision as an equilateral triangle “with the eye and not the vanishing point as the apex” (93). It was Tyrwhitt who introduced McLuhan to Doxiadis, whom she had met in 1954. Constantinos Doxiadis was a Greek architect and town planner who had developed the idea of Ekistics, a new science aimed at studying human settlement from a multidisciplinary perspective. His research was published in the monthly journal Ekistics: Review on the Problems and Science of Human Settlements, which would later be edited by Tyrwhitt (McLuhan 1987, 277). The fundaments of Doxiadis’s approach would be given concrete expression at the first Delos Symposium in 1963, which was attended by several influential figures, including architect Buckminster Fuller, economist Barbara Ward Jackson, and anthropologist Margaret Mead. Giedion, who had been the secretarygeneral of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (ciam) from 1928 to 1956, and Tyrwhitt, a congress participant, collaborated closely to establish the Delos Symposium, which was held annually between 1963 and 1972. On 20 May 1963, McLuhan received an invitation from Doxiadis and the Athens Technological Institute to the first symposium, which took place from 6 to 13 July on Doxiadis’s yacht, New Hellas, on the Aegean Sea (289). In a letter to Stewart Bates,2 McLuhan cited the invitation to Delos, in which Doxiadis had written, “I have just finished reading your wonderful book ‘Gutenberg Galaxy,’ in which I found so many of the things that we also believe in and so many of the ideas which I think are relevant and essential to human settlements and their problems” (289). McLuhan also mentioned the degree to which this invitation came at a crucial time for his own research. Understanding Media would be published on 26 May 1964 (299), just ten months after the symposium.

The Cartographatron

83

In fact, it was this book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, that would make McLuhan famous, but several of its themes had appeared earlier in The Gutenberg Galaxy, which had so impressed Doxiadis. Unlike Understanding Media, The Gutenberg Galaxy contained numerous citations of authors who had influenced McLuhan’s thinking. There, he had already spoken of the electronic age (McLuhan 1962, 3), which led him to the ideas of a single tribal base and the “global village” (31). Asserting that “tribalism is our only resource since the electro-magnetic discovery” (219), he declared that “the world has become a computer, an electronic brain” (32),3 with new technology extending one or more of our senses (41), including tactility (81). The events of the symposium’s inaugural voyage are related in the Doxiadis Associates Newsletter of July 1963. The symposium’s final report was the subject of the entire October 1963 edition of the journal Ekistics. T H E CA RTO G R A P H AT RO N (1959–63)

In 2001, historian and architecture theorist Mark Wigley published “Network Fever,” an ambitious article in which he depicted the relationships between the participants of the Delos Symposium – McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, and Doxiadis, among others – and elaborated his notion of networks. Wigley notes that, in 1958, Doxiadis had founded the Athens Technological Institute, a research centre and architecture school based on the notion of global statistics. Wigley suggests that the institute was founded on the idea that “if the data could be controlled, cities could be controlled … Spatial patterns would follow from detecting patterns in the flow of information” (2001, 87). His article also includes several images of maps and tables that Doxiadis had drawn by hand. But it is two other maps, produced electronically, that merit particular attention: Doxiadis’s “Electromagnetic Map” and the “Cartographatron.” Wigley explains that Doxiadis “represents the evolution of cities with sequences of ‘electromagnetic maps’ and computerized ‘cartographatrons’” (86–7). Although he affirms that Doxiadis worked with cartographatrons, Wigley did not mention their importance – their unique possibilities as a new medium. Although Wigley deals only briefly with these two images, I would like to examine one of them – the cartographatron – in more detail.

84

Legibility

Figure 4.1 Four cartographatrons of automobile trips. (Top left) less than three miles long; (top right) three to six miles long; (bottom left) six to ten miles long; (bottom right) ten miles and longer. Reproduced from Ekistics, 1963, 15 (88): 161.

It seems appropriate to contemplate the appearance and nature of this new medium in the context of the 1963 Delos Symposium and in terms of the shared interests and approaches of Giedion, McLuhan, Tyrwhitt, and Doxiadis, all of whom, in varying ways, seemed to reject the notion of perspective and a single fixed viewpoint. The advent of electricity and the electronic era, the encounter between historians,

The Cartographatron

85

architecture theorists, and media converged at a precise moment, a moment that needed a new medium that would be relevant to an age in which the sheer quantity of information available rendered traditional media ineffective. The expression of these shared interests coincided with the development of the cartographatron. The cartographatron images appear in the March 1963 edition of Ekistics, published three months before the Delos Symposium. The accompanying article identifies the cartographatrons as part of the Chicago Area Transportation Study (cats) and summarizes the results of the study published in the American Society of Planning Officials Newsletter of November 1962. The Ekistics article indicates that the aim of the original research was “forecasting population, economic activity, land use, and traffic generation.” The key to the four cartographatrons suggests that they were used by the Chicago Area Transportation Study to map short-distance car journeys (Ekistics 1963, 161). The Ekistics article describes the cartographatron as an apparatus that “projects regional trip desires on an X-ray type screen, thus enabling ready identification of urban nucleation and trip demand concentrations … High speed computers that calculated multiple zonal trip assignments [made] possible simulated flow traffic assignments over an entire large-scale expressway-arterial road network” (162). The cats cartographatron, entitled “Photo Map Shows Traffic Flow,” had also been published several years earlier in the February 1961 edition of Popular Mechanics.4 An accompanying paragraph explained that engineers at the Illinois Institute of Technology had constructed an apparatus capable of visualizing the flux of traffic in the form of a map. In the final three-volume report of the Chicago Area Transportation Study, which took place over a period of three years, from 1959 to 1962, the Armour Research Foundation of Chicago is identified as having designed and constructed the device that automatically produced the maps (Chicago Area Transportation Study 1959–62, 97). The cats describes the cartographatron simply as “a combination of an electronic computer, a television picture tube, and a camera” (97). The cartographatron converts “numerical data on the tape into voltages which then generate a blip of light on the face of the cathode ray tube, moving it precisely at the correct angle from the trip’s origin to its destination” (98). Thus, twenty thousand trajectories could be traced in seven minutes (99), and a map could be generated in four hours (39). A camera pointed towards the picture tube recorded the accumulated “desire lines” one by one on a continuously exposed negative (39).

86

Legibility

Figure 4.2 The cartographatron as “a combination of an electronic computer, a television picture tube, and a camera.” Chicago Area Transportation Study, Final Report in Three Parts, (Chicago: Chicago Area Transportation Study 1959–1962), 98.

A “desire line” represented the shortest distance between origin and destination, and thus expressed the most efficient route a person would wish to take (39). Producing a desire-line map that presented the sum of all the lines connecting the origins and destinations of all trips was intended to assist with the urban planning of the region. The trajectory data from all of the transport surveys required more than 378,000 punched cards (99). Given the expanse of the area, the vast quantity of information, the laborious and time-consuming nature of drafting, as well as the probability that the final images would have been illegible, it would have been impractical to draw the maps by hand (97).

The Cartographatron

87

Figure 4.3 Cartographatron as map of desire lines, or a sum of lines connecting origins and destinations. Chicago Area Transportation Study, 40.

The cats final report explained that it was not the details of particular trips that mattered, but the accumulation of information, which emphasized major patterns – “how the thousands of individual desire lines combine[d] to form a distinct over-all pattern of travel” (41). For the Chicago study, the movement of vehicles was regarded as synonymous with human activity on the land (56). The cartographatron itself presented “the movement (trip) between two points” (96). In this manner, the new medium (actually a combination of three media) of the cartographatron shifted between a magnetic tape containing data, instantaneous electric traces in motion on a cathode ray tube, and a complete image archived on a photographic support; in other words, it shifted between a quantity of information and the con-

88

Legibility

trolled but indiscernible images of a single viewpoint on the cathode ray tube, reconfiguring them into a tactile, aerial image on the photographic plate. Surpassing traditional cartography with its complicated systems of annotations, keys, and projections based on observation, the cartographatron traced pure vectors of movement – flux. Between the computer and the cathode ray tube (a precursor of video) and the mechanical eye of the camera (whose shutter remained open), the traces of light were in perpetual motion between two interfaces. To take up Giedion’s terms, the cartographatron produced a “manysided” image of contemporary space, revealing an infinite number of possible relationships and presenting an object from various viewpoints. With each point of origin and destination creating a desire line, the final accumulations focused on the general constellations, presenting an impression of the simultaneity of modern life, a spacetime. The cartographatron’s final images show anonymous trajectories, presented simultaneously, recalling Giedion’s notion of anonymous history, and revealing various facets of modern life. In Innis’s and McLuhan’s terms, the desire lines represent the “insights” that are organized into “patterns,” or, perhaps, even seemingly unrelated or disproportioned graphic aphorisms, which, subjected to a “paratactic” procedure of juxtaposition without connectives, become “mosaics.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan (1962, 42) writes, “The ‘two-dimensional’ mosaic or painting is the mode in which there is muting of the visual as such, in order that there may be a maximal interplay among all the senses.” And, further, “The method of the twentieth century is to use not single but multiple models for exploration – the technique of the suspended judgement” (71).5 In Understanding Media, McLuhan declared that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” ([1964] 1994, 8). The cartographatron contained at least three media: magnetic tape (to support the data), the cathode ray tube, and the camera plate (to support the images). But there was a fourth: electric light. In 1964, McLuhan (8) qualified electric light: “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.” For him, this fact characterized all media. McLuhan cites Kenneth Boulding from Boulding’s work, The Image: “The meaning of the message is the change which it produces in the image.” McLuhan adds, “concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total

The Cartographatron

89

situation, and not a single level of information movement” (26, italics in original). T H E L E G AC Y O F TH E C A RTO G R A P H ATRO N A N D DES I R E L IN E S

In the years to follow, desire lines reappeared in a number of planning studies. For example, in 1966, they are mentioned in relation to the massive data stemming from research on land use, economic data, and travel habits in the Journal of Marketing in an article by Henry K. Evans called “A Vast New Storehouse of Transportation and Marketing Data.” A few years later, in 1969, desire lines are linked to the term “corridor,” pertaining to linear urban space systems and transportation in a paper by C.F.J. Whebell of the University of Western Ontario in Canada. The next year, the article “Transportations Studies and British Planning Practice,” published in The Town Planning Review and written by William Solesbury and Alan Townsend (1970), emphasizes the importance for desire-line diagrams to be related to physical structures. Desire lines were helping to trace the location of expressways. In 1973, desire lines were even used to show patterns of social contact networks in an article by Frederick P. Stutz titled “Distance and Network Effects on Urban Social Travel Fields” published in Economic Geography. At first, data was collected in the form of interviews. To obtain desire lines, interview data was compiled onto punch cards, entered manually and traced individually. Of course, such systems were soon superseded by other methods of acquiring and compiling data. The contemporary computer integrates, in one apparently seamless device, centralized databases such as geographical information systems (gis) that can aggregate data acquired from remote sensing equipment, satellites, and information coming from global positioning systems (gps) that often fit in the palm of a hand. For example, a recent study called The Development and Deployment of gis Tools to Facilitate Transit Network Design and Operational (2011) demonstrates how gis is now used in transit planning in the regional municipality of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada to identify travel patterns in a system that is “automated to scan a series of origins and destinations” and “formalizes the so-called ‘desire line’ method – matching transportation facilities to existing or predicted major demand corridors” (Simard, Springate, and Casello 2011, 41).

90

Legibility

In a way, desire lines are now traced each time we query an itinerary on an online map or a gps in the car or on a smartphone. The desire lines instantaneously provide new ways of navigating “digitally” through the city. In 1995, British urban researcher Sarah Chaplin wrote Desire Lines and Mercurial Tendencies: Resisting and Embracing the Possibilities for Digital Architecture, where she linked the term desire lines to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically to their take on the productivity of desire as either “a predetermined set of either/or options” in an “‘arborescent’ model or striated space” or “allowing random desire lines and multiple connections” in a “‘rhizomatic’ or smooth space,” to investigate spatial practices where “operations map out particular desires lines in real time and space” (Chaplin 1995, 411). A recent publication in architecture and urban studies Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (2006) features, for example, the work of Australian researchers Wayne Piekarski and Bruce Thomas who developed wearable computing systems “as potential tools for city planning” in 2001 (Abrams and Hall 2006, 123). Else/Where also explores the work of Esther Polak and the Waag Society in 2002, where participants wore gps tracking devices to “contribute their ‘personal’ map … to an overall map,” brightening lines of most frequent destinations and traveled routes through the city of Amsterdam (188). In the same line of idea, the research undertaken at the senseable City Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studies “digital desire lines, which embody peoples’s paths through the city” using time and location stamps of photos to reconstruct the photographers’ movements and then aggregates the individual paths to generate desire lines “that capture the sequential preferences of visitors”(Girardin et al. 2008, 38, italics in original). They use geographically referenced digital footprints “to reveal patterns of mobility” (40). Today, digital footprints can be found following the trace of any smartphone. The act of linking these traces calls to mind the efforts surrounding the development of the cartographatron. In fact, the cartographatron and associated desire lines seem encompassed in contemporary, fully integrated mobile devices and remote databases. Furthermore, reading contemporary media through the cartographatron reminds us of the path we have taken since the last midcentury: the progressive abandonment of traditional representation, the static view of a perspective image based on a single eye in favour of other modes of visualization that take into account the vast quantities of information that reflect the complexities and dynamic realities of the world, often in

The Cartographatron

91

the form of a map. In a certain manner, the cartographatron even marks a shift in our thinking, distancing ourselves from the perspectival points of view to an apprehension in terms of accumulation of information and pattern recognition in numerous forms of cartographies.

NOTES

1 Portions of this chapter, which was developed within the framework of a seminar directed by Professor Philippe Despoix, are part of my doctoral research, under the direction of Professor Alessandra Ponte at Université de Montréal’s School of Architecture, on the relationship between architecture and cartography at the dawn of the digital era. Parts of this chapter were previously presented in French at the “in situ / de visu / in motu” seminar held in Montreal on 23 and 24 September 2011 and were translated from French to English by Louise Ashcroft. 2 Stewart Bates was the president of the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation of Canada. He was also invited to Delos. 3 See also pages 174, 179 in The Gutenberg Galaxy. 4 See “Photo Map Shows Traffic Flow,” Popular Mechanics 115 (2) (February 1961), 134. 5 See also McLuhan 1962, 276.

92

Legibility

5 The Artist as Urban Researcher: Research, Representation, and ImageRelations in the City SAAR A L IINAMA A

Robert Park’s classic essay “The City” describes the city as the foremost “laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied” (1969, 130). The city consistently solicits such research metaphors, but if the city is a laboratory, then who is conducting the experiments? This chapter examines how contemporary artists are actively researching different dimensions of urban life – its forms, inhabitants, events, histories, and interactions – using both conventional and eclectic strategies. In light of a recent intensification of practices that take the city as an object of research in contemporary art, the concept of the artist as urban researcher demands serious attention. The artist as urban researcher points to alternative models for approaching the complexities of urban life and also highlights an aesthetics of everyday life that is central to both early and late modernity. To make sense of the different practices artists are applying to the study of the city, this chapter argues that we must return to past examples that demonstrate the challenge of drawing on aesthetic strategies for urban research. In this respect, I am gathering contemporary art’s diverse urban research activities according to four different urban research types – witness, stranger, doctor, and collector – that emerge out of the work of Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, respectively. My return to these now canonical thinkers is not intended to trumpet traditions of urban thought. Instead, I maintain

The Artist as Urban Researcher

93

that we must recognize how these writers acutely identify a set of challenges in urban research that remains, unresolved and certainly expanded, in the present and as part of an ambivalent modernity. I argue that the witness, stranger, doctor, and collector – as research types – represent the conflicts, questions, and localities that arise as contemporary artists work to document, experience, heal, and archive the ever-changing terrain of the city. Through this model, I will argue that contemporary art’s emphasis on the interplay between urban research and representation accents the contributions of the artist as urban researcher as an orchestrator of image-relations in the city. R EPR ES EN TATIO N TO RE SE ARCH : CO N T EM PO R ARY ART A N D THE CIT Y

Artists have long commented on the nature of urban life and social relations, focusing on a variety of urban processes and practices in light of the growth of the modern metropolis. There is nothing new to the recognition that “the city is art’s habitat” (Rosler 1991, 32), but interest in unpacking the mutually constituting relationship between art and the city has grown in various directions. Within the visual arts, we can discern a number of ways that the city is surfacing as an object of critical attention through different types of collaboration and organization, from urban-themed exhibitions and curatorial mandates to collectives that draw on urban experiences and resources to animate their art to artists’ networks that build tools and interdisciplinary knowledge in the interest of urban transformations. Within this wealth of activities, I am arguing for the significance of a particular shift within art–city intersections: artists are not merely representing the city, but actively researching the city within their production of art works. We need to carve out a stronger version of the contemporary artist as urban researcher, one that takes as its starting place the interplay between urban representations – the dynamics of urban images that ground how we come to know the city – and urban research – research that draws on the multidimensionality of images and ways of documenting urban life as a guide. To this end, the artist as urban researcher becomes a way of dissecting the implications of both urban image and research, one that speaks to what is specific to art (images) and to our cultural moment that is witness to the dramatic intensification of urbanization (and where the urban poses unique research questions).

94

Legibility

For example, Shaina Anand’s (2006), Khirkeeyaan intervenes in the Khirkee Extension, New Delhi with simple yet effective open circuit television technology to facilitate communication amongst the area’s inhabitants. The project offers a study of the social dynamics, experiences, and particularities of a neighbourhood by staging a range of opportunities for dialogue and exchange between residents. The technology also serves to archive these exchanges, and the project documents and highlights various social affinities and tensions in an area symbolically and physically at the urban fringe. This project accentuates multiple dimensions of urban experience and sociability, and the communication opportunities the installations afford also temporarily transform the city and create a unique testimony of everyday life. To cite another example, Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrč’s initiation of the installation of two dry toilets in an outlying area of the city of Caracas touches on the dynamics of urban experience in a different way. Research in this project is directed toward collective urban problem solving. This process involved collaboration with a neighbourhood association, an urban think tank, and two architects. The project responds to particular conditions of inequality in cities that are blatantly evident through the absence of basic services such as running water. Through dialogue and collaboration, it develops a solution to this problem, and, as such, represents a small act of transformation. Discussing this project in particular, Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga refer to the alliance of artists and non-artists committed to social change as the formation of “experimental communities.” Works of this type become a means of “inventing devices and providing resources for dialogues in which forms of knowledge, imaginaries, and social relations can be clarified, enhanced, and developed” (Basualdo and Laddaga 2009, 21). What results for exhibition and circulation is the process of dialogue and collective action. With this approach to problem solving, they argue that, “a problem is seen both as an obstacle to be overcome and as the occasion for an interrogation of social relations and the subsequent elaboration of alternative forms of sociality. During this process, the artist and the newly-formed community create archives that can be circulated outside the site of their original production, whose function is to memorialize and publicize the model” (22). Basualdo and Laddaga’s model is useful because it accents the movements between production and reception, dialogue and documentation – that is, the multiple layers and types of mediation that

The Artist as Urban Researcher

95

art’s urban research relies upon. Both Anand and Potrč demonstrate the process of urban research as a relay between different types of research and modes of representation, where contemporary art is especially equipped to draw attention to the relationship between the process of research and the representation of research. Or, to put it slightly differently, the city as an ever-changing relational and mediated environment grounds this research from the start. Urban images in this sense become crucial to disentangling different versions of and variations on the contemporary city. In many respects, the concept of the artist as urban researcher testifies to the disguises, performances, and ever-expanding roles, as well as expectations, the figure of the artist assumes within contemporary culture. As Miwon Kwon argues, the artist often acts as an administrator, facilitator, consultant, and/or labourer within cultural institutions (2002, 51). The artist as urban researcher becomes a way to collect the different impulses behind a variety of recent designations, from Lacy’s emphasis on the artist as activist (1995, 171–88),1 to Papastergiadis’s conception of the artist as mediator (2009, 35), or, Kester’s description of the artist as “context shifter” (2004, 1). I maintain that the artist as urban researcher is a way of gathering these variously ascribed roles, a way to make sense of art’s interventions into urban life and frameworks of knowledge. Certainly, the turn to city forms, social worlds, and urban citizens is part of the heightened interest in social and participatory art and its mixed history of community-based and avant-garde influences. Many of the contemporary debates surrounding these specific practices are of interest here (Bourriaud 2002; Bishop 2004, 2006; Foster 2006; Kester 2004; Lind 2007; Möntmann 2009; Papastergiadis 2007, 2009), and I present the artist as urban researcher as a rhetorical figure, one that draws on a lineage that refutes an easy characterization of the relationship between art and research; the artist as urban researcher is a double-edged pursuit. On the one hand, the artist as urban researcher takes seriously the role of the aesthetic and its contribution to urban research, stressing a complexity of insight around ways of inhabiting and acting in the city. On the other side, artists can compile research practices and draw on social and participatory strategies with impunity, assuming new centrality as the arbiters of (urban) knowledge. Thus, the challenge is to actively pursue the former without eschewing the latter. For example, contemporary art’s urban social experimentation turns to the liberations of play, but play can be as socially confining as it is radical; it can

96

Legibility

be destructive as well as constructive. Or, art’s social work strategies target art as a forum for urban education, activism and action, yet it must be wary of acting as heavy-handed social reform. Similarly, art’s explorations in urban memory are both socially and politically imperative, but the complications of memory are such that the urban archive can become too easily meaningless in its expansiveness or malicious in it selectivity. In general, one central way that the contemporary artist as researcher has been debated is in the form of the artist as ethnographer (Foster 1996; Coles 2000; Schneider and Wright 2006). For example, Hal Foster’s “The Artist as Ethnographer” (1996) interrogates the reigning assumptions that the intersection of art and ethnographic practices rely on. Foster makes a lengthy argument critical of the ethnographic turn in art, demonstrating how it ensures the status of the artist and validates the institution while obscuring how these practices rely on “realist assumptions” (174) as well as “primitivist fantasy” (175). While he recognizes the merit of some of these ethnographic approaches, such as exploring repressed histories, he is vigilant about the risks and implications of drawing on anthropology as “the compromise discourse of choice” (183). Yet the relationship between art and ethnography, however problematic, starts with an expanded acknowledgment of the intersection of art and research and the precarious dynamics of being both inside and outside of the subject under investigation. At core, as James Clifford argues, the ethnographic stance is a negotiation of the “dialectic of experience and interpretation” (1988, 34), which points to a range of possible practices that take seriously diverse articulations of subjectivity and the aesthetics of social interactions. And while this interpretation of ethnography has become a grounding part of recent practices, the challenge is also to adopt a self-reflexive relationship to the authority that always accompanies investigation. This dilemma is what Foster (1996, 203) terms in his discussion of the artist as ethnographer as “parallactic work,” which is, “work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other. This is one way to negotiate the contradictory status of otherness as given and constructed, real and fantasmic” (1996, 203). Or, in Kwon’s discussion of artists and communitybased art, she designates “collective artistic praxis” as a way of working that “involves a provisional group, produced as a function of specific circumstances instigated by an artist and/or cultural institution, aware of the effects of these circumstances on the very conditions of the

The Artist as Urban Researcher

97

interaction, performing its own coming together and coming apart as a necessarily incomplete modelling or working-out of a collective process” (2004, 154). Thus, to insist on art’s significance to urban research is to consider the function of the artist as urban researcher and accompanying questions of official and institutional discourses as well as the possibility of creative agency and critique – that is, the critical content of art in terms of a larger system of cultural production. If we unthinkingly accept the role of the artist as urban researcher, we risk championing an urban exotic with the artist-as-explorer enacting a thoroughly modern urban primitivist fantasy. It reminds of a history of aesthetic validation premised on the centrality of the artist to meaning and intention, and the artist can become a backdoor way of promoting the ends of new urban economies of flexibility and cultural commodification, and often through the appearance of acting in the interests of urban betterment, neighbourhoods, and communities. In this respect, I am charting a distinction between art as urban research and the figure of the artist as urban researcher. The concept of the artist as urban researcher acutely points to the problem of how to assess art as urban research caught at the intersection of debates regarding structure and agency, between challenging urban knowledge and reproducing the social order and injustices of the city.2 The figure of the artist as urban researcher is a way to measure as well as problematize what are diverse methods of urban engagement. Importantly, Foster’s essay reminds that aesthetic methods are not neutral, but emerge out of different contexts and histories of practices. To this end, to make sense of the artist as urban researcher in the present, I suggest that we need to return to the past. But, in this case I am not charting a history of examples of art as urban research; instead, I will demonstrate the centrality of the city as a challenge to research and suggest how this has shaped practices of aesthetic investigation in the present. THE WITNESS , THE STRANGER , THE DOCTOR , THE COLLECTOR : PO S IT IO N I N G THE AE STHE TIC D IM E N SIONS O F U RBAN R E S E A RC H

The ensuing discussion will focus on four key figures – Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin – and outline how each responds to urban contexts and conditions in a manner that carves out a place for the aesthetic as tool for the analysis

98

Legibility

of urban life. Each of these thinkers points to a restructuring of urban research through formal devices and issues that prefigure contemporary art’s methods of engagement with the city. Aesthetic strategies can be defined in this context as ways of organizing material according to certain devices that establish tensions around particular aspects of urban experience and direct and raise questions about urban research. Aesthetics, to borrow Rancière’s deceptively concise definition, most simply refers to “ways of doing and making” (Rancière 2006, 10).3 For my purposes, aesthetics speaks to ways of doing and making the city, ways of researching the city, with the urban image as a means of apprehending the aesthetic. In this regard, Baudelaire, Simmel, and Freud treat witnessing, collectivism, and space, respectively, as aesthetic and urban issues. Accordingly, each grants particular attention to different characteristics of the city: Baudelaire the contradictory nature of experience, Simmel the demands of sociability, and Freud the dilemmas of psychical life. As such, these perspectives establish a range of conflicting images, where the city is one of pleasure and promise, vibrancy, and hospitality as well as loss, conflict, isolation, and alienation. Benjamin brings together strands from the others with consummate attention to the work of history and provides a flexible template for the analysis of urban configurations. In this sense, with Benjamin we are able to discern a fully developed aesthetic research methodology. His aesthetic perspective animates his urban perspective and translates into distinct sets of urban images (autobiographical, allegorical, surrealist, dialectical) that importantly, unlike the others, both guide his approach to urban research but also work to create an alternative practice of urban research. He offers a model that specifically regards images as urban relations that are inseparable from methods of urban research and analysis. A principal aspect of my argument is that each thinker represents a different type of urban researcher: the witness, the stranger, the doctor, and the collector, each drawing on particular practices and impulses. Baudelaire’s witness testifies to the expansiveness of urban life and experience from a position of engaged observation that is produced out of an aesthetic orientation of proximity and distance. For Simmel’s stranger, observation requires objectivity that depends on distance as a critical stance; the stranger uses the poles of belonging and estrangement to generate insights into urban life. Freud’s doctor searches for both symptom and remedy, and diagnosis depends on the blurring of boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Benjamin’s collector

The Artist as Urban Researcher

99

gathers and redeems urban objects, practices, and experience such that collecting reorganizes our knowledge of the city by asserting new and forgotten relations and orientations to the city. As I put forth these positions, as I play with different guises of urban research, I am in part working within a long-standing sociological tradition of Weber’s “ideal-type.” The ideal-type does not exist in the world as such, but every object under investigation is also the product of a necessary abstraction, an extraction of characteristics to build up a sense of a phenomenon (Weber 1968, 17–19). As Côté argues, “it is ‘ideal’ … only in the way that it embodies the relation that we have, and develop conceptually, to our object … The ‘ideal-type’ cannot be said to be simply ‘invented’ but is part of a larger process of interpretation that instead recalls, because it is rooted in concrete experience and conceptual reflection, an hermeneutic process of a dialectical kind” (2007, 85n20). While the ideal type is open to much criticism and skepticism as part of a restrictive tradition in the social sciences, I feel compelled to argue that positioning ideal urban research types is a part of the process of excavating urban alternatives, of recovering the importance of experimental methodologies and different urban ideals. Certainly, to turn to the type as a way of thinking about urban dynamics represents a tradition of urban thought. The ideal-type was essential to Weber’s urban studies and its particular lineage of urban (see Côté 2007, 64–8). To be sure, the literature of modernity is littered with types, figures within the urban landscape, and this is true to the theorists under discussion, from Baudelaire’s dandy to Simmel’s stranger to Benjamin’s rag picker. As Frisby reminds us, “social theories of modernity have often had recourse to real and metaphorical figures in order to illuminate their methodology and substantive theories” (2001, 7). Frisby argues that consideration of the figures who inhabit the city spaces of social theory sheds light on the cityscapes and ambiguities of modernity (12). However, instead of studying the employment of types within these works, I am treating the theorists themselves as representative of a type of experimental urban researcher that illuminates the complexities of urban research. In this sense, these figures become a way to access – but importantly, not to resolve – the terrain of contradictions that accompany urban research as an aesthetic practice. In the section below, I will outline the dilemmas that shadow each theorist’s urban aesthetic method. Benjamin’s collector, as a combination and extension of the other figures, establishes the breadth of insights that aesthetic perspectives bring to urban research.

100

Legibility

Drawing on such, I will argue that Benjamin underscores imagerelations as a critical concept, one that is central to positioning the work of the artist as urban researcher in the contemporary moment. The Witness: Charles Baudelaire In his salon review of 1846, Baudelaire declares, “Parisian life is rich in poetic and wonderful subjects. The marvellous envelops and saturates us like the atmosphere; but we fail to see it” (1972, 107). His later work seeks to remedy this failure of observation by placing the uncertain project of capturing urban experience at the centre of an aesthetics of witnessing. Baudelaire’s now canonical articulation of modernity in “The Painter of Modern Life” delineates a city of chance, fashion, and flux – a vibrant city that requires an equally vibrant artist to capture its fleeting particularity. The contrasts in the text, the energy and irony, the incomplete and unresolved aspects of the artist’s relation to contemporary life, form a rich treatise on the new role of the artist within the urban environment as “impassioned observer” (Baudelaire 1972, 399). Impassioned observation, the artist as “archivist of life” (410), defines Baudelaire’s urban approach, yet, as Ulrich Baer contends, this is an, “ambiguous quest for his personal yet paradoxically unavailable experience” (Baer 2000, 5). Baudelaire makes witnessing under modernity most difficult and proper to modernity. As such, it is possible to expand upon considerations of indulgence and ardour, or the irony and contradictions of flânerie, and turn to the conditions of urban witnessing – related yet different – that Baudelaire represents.4 Moving through the city, becoming immersed in both one’s mind and the urban setting, forms a new type of urban testimony. As a way of accessing the city, Baudelaire attests to the instability and necessity of witnessing in ways that are not restricted to urban realism but solicited and structured by the city nonetheless, yet without the reformist impulses of, for example, Jacob Riis’s urban exploits or the political mandate of Engels’s study of urban working classes. Baudelaire did not draw on the details of urban life as setting, but rather “used the city as a stimulus and point of departure” (Thum 1994, 22). His poetry, as such, is not one of urban vignettes per se but an embedded urbanism. His “emancipation from isolated experiences” (Benjamin 2006, 318) carves out a uniquely precarious position for witnessing the multifarious pleasures of urban life as well as the city’s malfeasance, banality, and squalor. Baudelaire’s

The Artist as Urban Researcher

101

conjoining of passion to observation is a pursuit unavailable to the neutrality demanded of a formal researcher. This challenge to neutral observation is ripe with difficulties and must reckon with the contradictions of passionate involvement and detachment, of proximity and distance and its intersection with social, structural, and spatial demands. As a way of structuring the study of urban life, urban testimony in this version attends to the difficulty and uncertainty that both inform the experience of the city and derive from its structure; it allows for attention to defining moments as well as the unimportant and insignificant. Baudelaire struggles with inhabiting the contemporary city, and while this can be used to establish the primacy of artistic privilege and insights (as with the flâneur), it also makes clear the demands the city makes on citizens, the ways it invariably places you in the world, in the city. The urban witness is charged with the task of how to represent experience, how to capture the image of urban life without becoming overburdened by the inheritance of forms and conventions of perceptions. Baudelaire illustrates how witnessing is a specific type of aesthetic relation, one attuned to contemporaneity, mobility, cosmopolitanism, and committed observation in the city. The Stranger: George Simmel Simmel was drawn to philosophical abstractions, social fragments, and paradox. His writing was stubbornly essayistic, and his approach to understanding social interaction notably aesthetic. While often this aestheticism has been a point of critique and dismissal,5 it distinguishes Simmel’s approach to the city and makes him a key thinker to the development of urban aesthetic methodologies. Frisby (1981) and Hirsch (2004) make a case for Simmel’s relevance to artistic movements and representations (Impressionism and Symbolism, respectively). Frisby terms Simmel’s approach to sociology as “sociological impressionism,” a distinct way of “distancing from reality, an aestheticization of reality that is worthy of study” (1981, 10). This “impressionism” is key to an approach to the city that depends on the productive oscillation between belonging and estrangement and the aestheticization of social life. Simmel describes being in the world as the experience of being “at every moment between two boundaries” (1971, 353). His sense of both the finite points and the “infinite space of our worlds” (353) is part of his conception of the city. As he

102

Legibility

explains, “a city consists of its total effects which extend beyond its immediate confines” (419). The trick of the urban researcher is to treat the city as specific, permeable, and outward looking. The trick of the urban researcher is to position oneself as a stranger in order to access the density, anonymity, and diversity of the city. The urban stranger is the synthesis of two unlikely properties: wandering and attachment. With the growth of the city, a new type of stranger emerges, one “who comes today and stays tomorrow” (1971, 143), leading to a curious anomaly: “the distance within the relation indicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near” (143). Thus, the stranger comes from a position of “nearness and remoteness” (145). The stranger has only the most general qualities in common. A sense of attachment and commonality has to do with not just what is common to a group or type but also the “specific and incomparable” (146). The stranger has a different view of the group and its dynamics, he enjoys a more “objective attitude” (145), which adds indifference and involvement to the dynamic of remote and near. Objectivity is a “positive and definite kind of participation” (145), which is to say that “objectivity can also be defined as freedom” (146). The objective person has more freedom from assessment and prejudice and is not “confined by custom, piety or precedent.” To approach the study of the city as stranger, then, offers freedom to a researcher, an expanse of knowledge and possible areas of study. The stranger also speaks to the dynamics of collective orientation, where collectivism is formed out of tension and ambivalence, where “factors of repulsion and distance work to create a form of being together, a form of union based on interaction” (144). In this sense, the stranger places the tensions of difference at the centre of urban life. Certainly, the trope of the stranger is not unproblematic, but open to charges of masculinist privilege and apolitical indifference; however, the stranger also points to the development of a social theory that recognizes the exclusion and indifference that animates social life. I would argue that Simmel’s stranger, while inadequate in itself, points to the challenge of how to study urban difference. Simmel concludes his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” with the reminder that it is the researcher’s task “not to complain or to condone but only to understand” (1971, 339). With this position, understanding (rather than changing) the city becomes the researcher’s charge. Unlike Baudelaire, Simmel’s perspective calls for an impartial engagement with urban life; however, similar to Baudelaire, he draws

The Artist as Urban Researcher

103

on the dialectic of proximity and distance as a necessity for research, but one paired with the pull of belonging and estrangement. This, as an aesthetic orientation, positions distance toward the object of study as a means for critical insight and freedom of perspective; it makes the seemingly incompatible stance of being both close and far, of attached and detached, central to the research process. He puts forth a method of analysis that is attuned to the dynamic aesthetics of urban life and attentive to varied social forms and interactions that articulate the conflicts at the core of sociability and the work of living together that the city demands. The Doctor: Sigmund Freud The inclusion of Freud within this framework may seem anachronistic because he is not foremost regarded as an urban theorist, even though the links between the psychoanalytic model and psychical interiority to the shock, alienation, and displacements of the modern city are widely recognized. Freud, “made a virtue of what the critics of metropolitan life most feared: the indifference, the transience, the confusion and the profusion, the ugly, the trivial, the eccentric and the strange” (Wilson 1991, 86). To state that psychoanalysis as a discipline was indelibly influence by modernity and the growth of the city is an uncontroversial statement, but my argument, following from a body of work attuned to Freud’s urban dimensions (Benjamin 2006; Deutsche 1996; Donald 1999; Pile 1996, 2005; Vidler 1994; Wilson 1991), maintains that psychoanalysis represents a distinctly urban method. It is not just that Freud incorporates some of the most notable characteristics of urban experience into his analysis of the unconscious, but that the unconscious, I would insist, is the city. By validating the world of the unconscious, Freud connects the life of the mind to the life of the city, and this spatialization of the psyche is a significant aesthetic move. Freud, as a pioneering researcher of spatial dynamics, of boundaries and borders, represents the first doctor of urban life, providing a model for diagnosing, if not healing, the city that remains a key imperative of artists in the present. One essential feature of Freud’s urban method is the significance he granted to everyday life. For example, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1976) and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1978) indicate Freud’s early interest in the intensity of meaning behind seemingly insignificant actions and interactions. Another key aspect is his

104

Legibility

regard for memory as a spatial process. His later work increasingly turns to the spaces of the psyche as he strives to capture the dynamic topography of the mind (1990, 1991), which culminates in an explicit comparison between the city and the mind (2002). Ultimately, the city as a model of the unconscious represents the double-edged work of memory and loss. For Freud, the modern city is animated by psychical and physical displacement and the ambivalence of desire. Freud’s treatment of the uncanny articulates a distinctly modern sense of displacement, where the security and belonging of place and home have come unbound. The uncanny is frightening “precisely because it is not known and familiar” (1990, 341), stranded from the conscious mind through the process of repression; Freud himself makes this point clear by relaying his own game of lost and found along the streets of an unknown town, where he keeps wandering back to the same place of “painted women” he is trying to avoid; even the small town becomes a mazelike threat, an external mapping of the mind that is a laden territory of desire.6 The ancient city – either the ruined city of Pompeii or the venerable city of Rome – appears in Freud’s work more than once. In his early analysis “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva,’” Freud quotes Jensen’s description of Gradiva as a “Pompeian phantasy” (1990, 36) and takes this as a cue to use Pompeii as an apt landscape for studying the intricacies of the mind. The historical city is left to the vivid recreation of the writer; the writer uses the city as a metaphor of loss as well as regeneration – both of art (the writing of the text) and memory (the author’s subject of concern). In both Freud’s and Jensen’s texts, the ancient city blurs into the contemporary day, and this past destruction looms for Freud as a metaphor for memory and repression. At one point, he maintains of the psychical process, “there is, in fact, no better analogy for repression … than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more” (65). The city can live again; the city can return in unexpected forms and contexts. In his most targeted comparison between the unconscious and the city, in Civilization and its Discontents Freud compares the structure of the mind to that of the city of Rome with is buried histories, changing boundaries, and perpetual transformations. He uses this analogy to account for the indestructible character of memory traces; we are reminded at the start of his discussion, “in mental life, nothing that

The Artist as Urban Researcher

105

has once taken shape can be lost” (2002, 7). The city, a product of accumulation and fragmentation, is synonymous with the psyche. He imagines that past and present coexist with the image of either becoming possible depending on the position of the gaze (8). But with a characteristic Freudian rhetorical trope, he establishes his tentative trajectory of thought only to dismiss it as “unimaginable, indeed absurd” (9). Freud is resisting a static interpretation of the mind; he believes that his analogy fails, and he abandons the city as an appropriate comparison but only because he cannot maintain a sense of dynamic urban history. As an urban aesthetic method, Freud spatializes the psyche; landscapes in both mind and world are a collage of experience, memory, desire, repression; the everyday and visible are but traces of the invisible, unknowable. Drawing on Freud, we have a method for approaching the city as if it were a mind, which opens up the city to different lines of questioning and forms of interrogation that must work with the ambiguous and uncertain, the detours of desire and phantasy and the meeting of individual and collective (un)consciousness. And yet, as a research type, the doctor assumes a burden of responsibility and care regarding the treatment of others nonetheless, but the doctor must always negotiate questions of authority and responsible practice. The Collector: Walter Benjamin Collecting is a primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge. Benjamin 2002a, 210

For Benjamin, collecting is an imperative strategy capable of subversive twists and important revelations. It is a “passion” that unavoidably “borders on the chaos of memories” (2005b, 486). Collecting guards against the forceful loses of history and forgetfulness. We are well reminded that “even the dead will not be safe” (2006, 391, italics in original) if history is written only by victors. In his essay “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian” Benjamin deems Fuchs “a pioneer” of collecting, and this innovation is at home within the activity of collecting itself. As he proclaims, “because he was a pioneer, Fuchs became a collector” (2002b, 261). Benjamin is a widely acknowledged forerunner of contemporary critical, aesthetic, and urban thought, and his own pioneering nature

106

Legibility

made him a consummate collector of objects, images, and ideas. The collector can reorganize knowledge by collecting and ordering the world in different ways, through diverse practices. Thinking of Benjamin as the urban collector makes every street a potential archive, and Benjamin’s complex approach to the study of urban life incorporates all three trajectories from the thinkers discussed above. Benjamin develops a theory of collective life and urban historical processes through an aesthetic perspective that collects a number of different types of images – the autobiographical, the allegorical, the surrealist, the phantasmagorical, and, at core, the dialectical. As an amalgam of the research stances and aesthetic strategies above, Benjamin’s approach to the city points to a multifaceted means of conceptualizing the material and immaterial dimensions of urban life and develops a distinct (which is not to say systematic) urban aesthetic method that testifies to the latent yet radical potential of the image and imagerelations as a means of inquiry. Benjamin’s autobiographical image emphasizes experience and memory as one aspect of critical urban insight. Benjamin is not concerned with the traditional contours of autobiography. As he explains in “Berlin Chronicle,” “for autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities” (2005b, 612). Through his autobiographical experiments, such as “Berlin Chronicle” (2005a), “Berlin Childhood Around 1900” (2002b), as well as diary writing (e.g., Moscow Diary, 1986) and other short texts, Benjamin proposes the possibility of redeeming both time and the city through collecting and contrasting the objects and spaces of the everyday. Benjamin’s autobiographical childhood texts form an intricate treatise on the relationship between psyche and city, one deeply related to Proust’s memoire involontaire he so valued (2005b, 238). The child, appropriately, is the foremost collector and redeemer of lost objects in the city, the “urban archaeologist par excellence” (Gilloch 1996, 89). While labyrinths, interiors, city scenes as well as new technologies inform the very particular moment of Benjamin’s childhood, his memory work is part of his theory of historical change. Benjamin’s attentiveness to objects, which, in this case, are redeemed from his own past, may be recontextualized to critical ends. And beyond the indulgence of nostalgia or the small sorrows of the past, there is more at stake: “the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of performing later historical experience” (2002b,

The Artist as Urban Researcher

107

344). Recalling his memories provides a form of “inoculation” against homesickness; he recalls them so longing is not overwhelming, but this also involves the task of disengagement for critical reanimation. As he writes in “One-Way Street,” “only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present” (2004, 467). Benjamin’s urban autobiographical image transfigures and collapses so that the city may be encountered anew. Benjamin’s allegorical image is an emblem of time and of historical despair. His first major text, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, is an intricate and daunting study that strives to redeem the forgotten, devalued genre of German Baroque mourning plays through an intricate theory of allegory. With allegory, “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (1998, 175). The objects of allegory must always be deciphered, and the very gaps between object and subject become the site of intense contemplation. To create allegory is to submit the object to a temporary, arbitrary control that erupts with meanings, where “all of the things which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things … Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is both elevated and devalued” (175). Benjamin’s concern with allegory transfers to his urban investigations, with his arcades study serving as an elaborate allegory of modernity’s city. In one respect, the pathos of the allegorical image in his earlier work transforms into the rich potential of the surrealist image. For the Surrealists, “the city of Paris itself” is the “most dreamed-of of their objects” (Benjamin 2005a, 230); the city erupts with the surreal: “And no face is surrealistic in the same degree as the true face of a city” (230). While Benjamin argues for the ultimate failure of the Baroque allegorist’s redemptive turn (Benjamin 1998, 232–3), with Surrealism, Benjamin turns to the radical potential of the, “image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us” (2005a, 217), a construction resonant with his later formulation of the dialectical image; in each case the interplay of subject and image informs the possibility of collective awakening. However, we are well reminded that, “profane illumination did not always find the Surrealists equal to it, or to themselves” (209). This task of equalling the demands of profane illumination becomes Benjamin’s on-going chore in his arcades work.

108

Legibility

In the Arcades Project Benjamin embraces montage for it imagistic powers of juxtaposition. As he claims, “I needn’t say anything. Merely show” (2002a, 460). As Buck-Morss (1989) argues of the arcades, Benjamin’s project is a philosophical inquiry premised upon the “dialectics of seeing.” Similarly, Sigrid Weigel argues that Benjamin’s first and foremost capacity, “thinking-in-images” (Bilddenken), has been circumscribed to more attention to thought-images (Denkbilder, used to describe his short cityscapes and other texts), yet his thinking-inimages is what constitutes “the specificity of Benjaminian theory” (1996, x). For the purposes of this chapter, this specificity is acutely aligned with his urban research practices. The arcades were once the height of fashion and new cultures of consumption and leisure in the city. For Benjamin, their rapid obsolescence becomes emblematic of capitalism’s parading of novelty and myth of progress. The arcades that Benjamin encounters are a curiosity of the past, the ruins and dreams of the nineteenth-century with a latent radical potential for igniting the still unrealized utopian impulses of the past; his study of the arcades grounds his theory of the dialectical image. The dialectical image is essential to Benjamin’s philosophy of history and materialist dialectics, but the explication of such relies on a number of conceptual motions. First, “every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it,” which demands a “now” of a “particular recognizability” (2002a, 463). In each moment of acknowledgment, “truth is charged to the bursting point with time.” But, we must be wary of imputing a direct reciprocity between a view from the past and a view from the present because “it is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past.” What is crucial, what produces the image, is as follows: “image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (463). But this image is necessarily ambiguous where “ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill” (10); it is the mixing of dream mystification and truth content, but this dream is very much essential to awakening. But despite and even because of this ambiguity, “the realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian” (4). Benjamin’s recurring invocation of awakening is related but not opposite to dreaming; the ambiguity of this position is such that the dream image can be delusion as well as possibility. Following from this, the concept of phantasmagoria

The Artist as Urban Researcher

109

captures the complications of the urban dream found in the arcades. As Benjamin claims, “the world dominated by its phantasmagorias … is ‘modernity’” (26). Turning to the city as phantasmagoria highlights the city’s dream-like quality, and phantasmagoria in this respect is a model of analysis that identifies the city as an image experience and acknowledges the hidden social processes at stake in this presentation. For Benjamin, this means to recollect – memorialize even – the dream that phantasmagoria encapsulates. As he reveals, “the new dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which the dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!” (389). The phantasmagorical is a key dimension of the urban imagination, and the unravelling of such within a dialectical, imagistic framework becomes a foundation for rethinking urban knowledge. Benjamin’s primary research method to establish vital urban connections and juxtapositions becomes collecting – the collecting of images, experiences, objects, and ideas. Of the arcades work, Benjamin writes, “here, the Paris arcades are examined as though they were properties in the hand of a collector” (205). In the same passage, he continues to elaborate upon the relationship between collecting and dreaming, collecting and creative enervation: “At bottom, we may say, the collector lives a piece of dream life. For in the dream, too, the rhythm of perception and experience is altered in such a way that everything – even the seemingly most neutral – comes to strike us; everything concerns us. In order to understand the arcades from the ground up, we sink them into the deepest stratum of the dream; we speak of them as though they had struck us” (205–6). Within Benjamin’s conception, the collector can enter the city as a dream and bridge the gap between passive, urban slumber and a rich, potentially libratory urban image-imagination of the city. Benjamin’s visual methodologies have become an increasingly recognized aspect of his work. As Buck-Morss articulates, “the struggle of trying to interpret Benjamin’s arcades project leads to the development of a visual methodology” where we can learn from him “a visual method of theorizing” with the possibility of re-enacting the methodological insights of his work (2002, 328). By collecting the city, Benjamin develops a means of knowing the city through, “images, wherever they lodge” (2005a, 264) and thinking the city as an image through a multiplicity of experiential, social, psychical, and historical

110

Legibility

forms. With Benjamin, there emerges for the first time an identifiable theory of urban image-relations, one that is uniquely propelled by the conditions of urban life, its density, energy, dreams, and estrangements. Image-relations recognizes the city as a relation, but, furthermore, it emphasizes how the image mediates urban relations – collective and individual, public and private, social and political. As a critical concept, image-relations recognizes how images can direct urban research as well as emerge out of urban research that is attentive to understanding the city through alternative images, connections, and relations. For example, Benjamin’s dialectical image is an example of how imagerelations works to inscribe an alternative to cycles of social and historical catastrophe in the city. Thus, image-relations acts as a sort of thought constellation for urban research, and to think about imagerelations as a crucial component of aesthetic urban research highlights the co-determining nature of the process of research and acts of representation. Research develops out of a multifold relationship between researcher and subjects of research, between articulations of knowledge and the experience and the interpretation of the world that is the city. CONCLUSION : TRANSLATION A ND ETHICS I N A E STH E T I C UR B A N R E S E A RC H

This chapter started by outlining the burgeoning field of contemporary art’s urban practices and pointed to the need to account for the status of the artist as urban researcher. However, for the purposes of this chapter, rather than outline the roles and guises of artistic urban research in the contemporary moment, I have stressed a history of strategies that underscore figures of research as ideal types (the witness, the collector, the doctor, the collector) that ground the challenges accompanying aesthetic urban research in the present. Baudelaire, Simmel, Freud, and Benjamin each register an identifiable ambivalence about the city, a familiar motif within the writings of modernity, where the city facilitates as much as it isolates. This ambivalence in Benjamin translates into, on the one side, a poignant demonstration of the city as the concentration of social and historical tragedy, as well as, on the other side, a testimony to the city’s potential to guide the work of collective transformation. This ambivalence contributes to how we should understand the work of both urban images as well as urban research because both are invariably, at core, caught in the

The Artist as Urban Researcher

111

opposition between the recognition that the city intensifies and highlights the failures and injustices of contemporary life and that the city itself provides insight into how to address these dilemmas of collective inhabitation. The mutability of the city poses a problem for research, but each position stresses the necessity of treating the city itself as a relation; we are confronted with what aesthetic perspectives bring to the study of urban life as well as the contradictions and challenges that cannot be divorced from the process of research, which are significant for understanding the implications of contemporary art as urban research. For example, while Baudelaire’s witness makes a claim for “impassioned observation” as a way to ground the specificity of the experience of the city that in so many ways resists communicability, Baudelaire’s insights for urban research raise questions regarding the role of artists and the privilege of distance as well as the dynamics of inequality and difference to which urban testimony as research should attend. Simmel’s stranger highlights how the aestheticization of urban life is a virtue for analysis; the dialectic of estrangement and belonging that defines the experience of the city is a way to access the interconnectedness of social forms without dismissing the social world as one of both conflict and concession. Yet this aestheticization of urban relations establishes the stranger as researcher, and this requires a neutrality and distance from urban research that risks minimizing the investments of the researcher and foreclosing on the possibilities of research as a collective and participatory process. Freud’s doctor allows the city to exist in the world and in the mind such that boundaries between time and space – that is, here and there, then and now – become permeable, open to re-inscription and insight. As a researcher, the doctor works with and not against fantasy, desire, ambivalence, and uncertainty, but it is a position that is wrought with questions regarding the role of responsible practice. In this case, aesthetic practices must take seriously the care and attention required to diagnose the maladies of the city, and, further, consider the relationship between diagnosis and cure – the possibility of urban change. As an aesthetic position, Benjamin’s collector incorporates aspects of the above but through careful attention to historical processes as the binding forms that animate or discard facets of urban knowledge. Benjamin connects the complexities and contradictions of urban research, but his approach is torn between the weight of history, the city as despair given the impossibility of realigning urban configurations, and the flashes of change and resistance that research can activate.

112

Legibility

Collected together, there are two common themes that develop out of these research positions and issues: (1) the ethics of urban research and the production of urban knowledge – that is, how do we account for the social, political, and aesthetic responsibility of experimental art practices as research? (2) the translation of urban experience to artistic practices and the navigation of divergent perspectives and identities, which is to say, how do we account for particularity and difference as well as shared experiences and commonalities? These themes must navigate between different roles and purposes of aesthetic research, which surface within the above discussion according to the following tensions: the place of neutrality within research versus the importance of engagement and investment; the process of investigation in research versus its translation or representation; and, the conflict between knowledge and action, or, more acutely, urban analysis versus urban transformation as an intended outcome of investigation. As an example of a fully developed aesthetic method for urban studies, Benjamin’s influence and methodological relevance to urban issues and aesthetic practices indicates the multidimensional aspects of contemporary art’s cultivation of urban knowledge. The historical dilemmas of aesthetic research that I have outlined above continue to apply to contemporary art’s urban investigations. Benjamin does not promise an answer, just a stronger method that accents the interplay between urban research and representation as constellations of image-relations.

NOTES

1 Specifically in terms of urban practices, the artist as urban activist is a familiar figure, and yet the artist as urban researcher is different from the artist as urban activist. Lacy’s (1995, 171–88) formulation of artist roles (experiencer, reporter, analyst, activist) in light of the growing field of critical public art practices places the artist as activist at the top of the scale. The artist as urban researcher includes activism as one key vein, but cannot be equal to it. Instead, the concept of the artist as urban researcher is intended to address some of the entanglements of research as a process that help to animate questions that relate to but are not equal to activist platforms. 2 For example, with questions of participation that emerge out of so much of contemporary art’s urban strategies, there are two dimensions. First, where, how, and by whom is contemporary art accessed? It still remains a fairly

The Artist as Urban Researcher

3

4

5

6

113

restricted realm, where the decision to participate, the sense of belonging and right to participate is often grounded in one’s access to cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984). While turning to the city has expanded and challenged much of the elitism surrounding both art’s objects and exhibitions, this does not remove the importance of questioning the dynamics of identification and exclusion and the presumption of an “ideal” subject at work within many contemporary’s art urban practices. Second, for those who do participate, what sort of experience does the work of art structure? What do we concede or relinquish to create or maintain a collective sensibility? What tensions or conflicts are cast aside in order to participate? The full quotation describes aesthetics as “a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationship” (Rancière 2006, 10). I am making a distinction between the flâneur and witness, and I have chosen to emphasize the latter, despite and in light of the wealth of literature on this point. The witness is the general category, while flânerie refers to a more specific set of practices of witnessing. For example, one contemporaneous reviewer of the The Philosophy of Money quibbles, “behind Simmel’s whole work there stands not the ethical but the aesthetic ideal” (qtd. in Frisby 1983, 85). And the complications of desire must always be kept in mind. Certainly, Freud’s spatial imagination has also been linked to a colonial logic structured on the disavowal of racial and sexual difference.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Navigation

This page intentionally left blank

6 Where Are We? Who Am I?: Self-Identification with(in) the City J E A N - FR ANÇOIS CÔT É A N D MA R I E - L AU R E N C E B O R D E L E AU - PAYE R

One of the main aspects of city life for individual subjects in the twenty-first century might well be lodged in the simple capacity of, or for, recognition. That is to say that our existence has now mainly to do with the possibility of recognizing where one is, together with who one is. On the one hand, this double-edged situation refers to the position of both the presence of the “subject” and of the “space of localization”; on the other hand, it refers to the identity of the same “subject” and of the same “space of localization.” The capacity of/for recognition, then, addresses at least four different types of relations according to which the individual subject is in relation to city life, and it requires a mapping that is apt to describe/inscribe these types in an adequate fashion. To say that contemporary cartography has evolved from its two-dimensional figures to figures of triple or quadruple dimensions (in adding depth and time, for example, to the traditionally included height and width of planar representation) only points to the most obvious and perhaps nonetheless highly significant understanding of what is at stake in being able to recognize where we are today in terms of the significance of experiencing the city.1 And this goes with the complex problems of considering the individual subject as a “person,” that is to say, as a universal political or legal category virtually able to act in a specific situation, and then requiring a precise location, and the city as a universal phenomenon that has lost its particular anchoring in a typical physical referent – opening up multiple possibilities of relations for individual subjects to experience the city: as an actual resident of one particular place, or as an actual

118

Navigation

visitor of a virtual space, or again as a virtual visitor of a particular actual place or a virtual resident of a virtual space. These are some of the possible typical displays of relations to a city, and they all point to the same idea: whereas “mapping” always defines a capacity for drawing the limits of a certain territory, it has never been as clear as it is now that it was done for (and by) someone, or, in other words, that “mapping” always referred at the same time to the drawing of both a subject and an object. In what follows, we would like to reflect on various issues coming out of this assumption by putting together some theoretical considerations about the analytical capacities that should ensue from the various possibilities of interpreting the relations of individual subjects to city life in terms of their own “mapping.” Before turning our attention to the specific concerns related to contemporary “mapping,” let us illustrate some of the questions that are at stake in so doing by situating the general relations of the self and the city. In their recent contribution to the debate about the global political critique of neoliberalism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009) consider that the “multitude” – the undetermined mass of individuals – has to be defined according to its localization in the metropolitan setting. Given that the majority of the population on earth is now “urbanized,” it is only a matter of fact to deal with environments such as the city as the first condition for the recognition of this fundamental characteristic of the new political subject(s). They write, The metropolis might be considered first the skeleton and spinal cord of the multitude, that is, the built environment that supports its activity, and the social environment that constitutes a repository and skill set of affects, social relations, habits, desires, knowledges, and cultural circuits. The metropolis not only inscribes and reactivates the multitude’s past – its subordinations, suffering, and struggle – but also poses the conditions, positive and negative, for its future … We understand the metropolis … as the inorganic body, that is, the body without organs of the multitude … In the era of biopolitical production the metropolis increasingly fulfills this role as the inorganic body of the multitude. (Hardt and Negri, 2009, 249) For Negri and Hardt, and in addition to this characterization stipulating that “the production of the common is becoming nothing but the life of the city itself,” the second main characterization of the

Self-Identification with(in) the City

119

situation of city life is seen through the “unpredictable, aleatory encounter, or, rather, the encounter with alterity” (252), in a general acceptance of the cosmopolitan condition reached by the majority of the world population. This new condition is condensed in city life in such a way that its negative side (through possibilities of domination and alienation) allows the emergence of its positive side (through possibilities of liberation and emancipation), in what turns out to be a new form of cosmopolitanism, although not of a type found in its modern and bourgeois definition, reaching instead some “biopolitical” (in reference to Foucault) and “inorganic body” (in reference to Deleuze and Guattari) horizons.2 Reflecting on the positioning of people and places in such a context becomes a little difficult, though; there are good reasons to agree with Hardt and Negri about the diffusion of the urban situation around the world, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but that diffusion poses two questions: “where” precisely has this phenomenon taken place (or not), and “who” exactly has been reached (or not) by the phenomenon?3 By answering “everywhere” and “everyone,” as we can assume they do in addressing the “metropolitan multitude,” Hardt and Negri only point to the difficulty of localizing the specific “sites” where the events situating the political subjects that are so crucial for their own claims of liberation and emancipation can be recognized. In other words, they point to the virtual possibility of an event, waiting to be actualized. Skepticism about these claims leads David Harvey (2009), for one, to criticize this new definition of cosmopolitanism, from the point of view of an analysis that tries to deepen the significance of “space” in its relation to time and to contemporary subjectivity in general in his own search for an urban geography that would enhance the capacity for self-identification. He writes, Put simply, walls, doors, and bridges matter, and how they are configured makes a lot of difference to how we live our lives. While “urbanization without cities” (to cite a Murray Bookchin title) may sound a good idea as a counter to the alienation of contemporary capitalist urbanization, it does not resolve the problem of how to make tangible the urban geography of our emancipatory dreams. Furthermore, to be dismissive of all forms of organization, institutionalization and territorialisation (including the much maligned state as a specific but distinctly malleable kind of

120

Navigation

geographic construction) as somehow either irrelevant or inherently repressive is to cut off the routes to any kind of ameliorative, let alone revolutionary, political practice. (Harvey 2009, 282) This shift requires turning our attention to the social character of the urban with respect to relation to the experience of the types of relations to which we referred earlier. DISLOCATION OF THE CIT Y AND OF THE SUBJECT: LOCALIZATION , DELOCALIZATION , AND TRANSLOCALIZATION OF THE URBAN

Henri Lefebvre was probably one of the first theorists to insist on the radical distinction between the “city” and the “urban.” He saw that the decentralizing process that accompanied the movement of suburbanization and the formation of “megalopolis” not only dissolved traditional and even modern conceptions that we had had of the city up to the twentieth century, but equally that this movement also created a new condition that generalized the urban, for this diffuse situation does not need the centrality of the city any more (Lefebvre 1972, 76–7). In this movement, the center is everywhere, and the periphery nowhere in particular, a situation that annihilates the use of any “vector” capable of identifying a core to the intense circulation of the various elements (products, individuals, signs, and symbols) that are to be found within it.4 Anticipating much more recent theoretical definitions of the city that associate it with either a “territory” of national proportions, or even with some kind of “hypercity” (in reference to the notion of “hypertext”),5 Lefebvre goes as far as assimilating the urban, as a form that it retains nevertheless, with the social production of space – where the only limits to its configuration seem to belong to the capacity of the “social” to delineate them. In defining the urban space as this pure virtual capacity of the social to produce it in time, Lefebvre opens up the theoretical horizon to consideration of the modulation of some of the dimensions implied in the relationship of the subject to the city. It is here that we can understand some kinds of mapping involved in the actual/virtual relations to urban life by virtual/actual actors and see how these orient self-identifications. The urban experience, as we have come to acknowledge, is something that fuses (if not confuses) many levels of localization. Anyone can live in a “neighbourhood” that seems to encapsulate most of his or her own existence, as if this specific place would stand for a whole

Self-Identification with(in) the City

121

city (as if, for instance, the usual sentence “I live in Montreal” would indicate precisely and immediately that this metonymic identification with one of the neighbourhoods or places of/in the city would stand as the entire territory covered by the city). And yet even this first level of the (con)fusion of urban experience does not exhaust the possibilities opened up by “urbanity” as such, since as we assume with contemporary literature on city life, urbanity defines an even more general condition that possibly points to an almost universal human condition. As such, the urban experience refers then to three different levels of localization: the universal (or the general environment of “urbanity”), the particular (one “city” among other possible cities), and the singular (this specific “place” in the city).6 Drawing cartographies of each of these levels, from a person’s point of view, would certainly give way to quite different types of “maps.” And sometimes, we can assume that these maps would change from one individual to another. Even though there would probably be some general resemblances between some of them, they could also be totally incompatible representations of the same places or of the same city. Let’s say that this situation, of the diffusion and diffraction of urban experience through personal experience, is common enough to engage a general recognition of the difficulty of localizing, if not the pure “where” of a place, at least the significance that this place reflects in a personal mapping of it (as “mine,” that is, as reflecting my own personal experience, if not my own individuality, in terms of bio-graphical experience). One need not make reference to the radical character of the contemporary odyssey of Joyce’s Ulysses in Dublin to figure out what that means: even the quite current situation of the diasporic existences that, given historical circumstances, coalesce into “Indian,” “Italian,” “Portuguese,” or “Mexican” neighbourhoods of various cities around the globe shows that localization has much to do, nowadays, with “delocalization.” That is, it deals with a “space” that does not have a simple homogenous content in terms of its meaning for personal or even community experiences in a specific place. But this of course bears broader consequences. Delocalization can be understood through a social experience that is diffused in spacetime, to a point that makes mapping an interesting exercise in some kind of mixed geography, suffused with mixed historical experiences. It is as if a “territory,” seen from the point of view of a “place,” could only be determined by crossing the “places” that it contains, or better perhaps, by the circulation of the “places” that

122

Navigation

it allows. Territory is not so much an immobile space, as it is usually conceived, but rather a space that moves through time because of the places that constitute it. This seems a kind of truism when one reflects on the gradual composition of national territories throughout the recent history of the last centuries, but not quite so much if one thinks about the whole idea of modern geography and the huge cartographical efforts that have been displayed accordingly in order to get a general and fixed two-dimensional representation of the world in which we live. Localization in its modern sense adopted the figure of a two-dimensional geographical representation fusing – if not confusing – “space” and “territory,” particularly because the latter’s association with its national definition could apparently congeal the rationalization of space into a political/legal acceptance of the physical limits of a specific national jurisdiction, the latter being apparently established “once and for all” in time. But as it has been said, contemporary localization de-places or dis-locates this definition, and contemporary delocalization presents the characteristics of a pervasive urban territory that cuts across national and international (if not global) spaces, creating possible representations of an unlimited urban territory that has internalized time in its own movement of self-creation. It is perhaps “translocalization,” that is, location produced through any kind of spatial/temporal social representation while expressing the tension between localization and delocalization, that comes to characterize this contemporary situation. But then, where are we? If, following Lefebvre, the urban can be apprehended as a form based on a social production of space that emerges from the virtual capacity of the social, we can therefore begin to see how city and virtuality are merging in a development of forms and practices which reinscribe/re-describe urban life in a context where different modalities of reflexivity have to be internalized by the individual subject, which becomes a point of reference of actual translocalizations. In fact, selfreflexivity by means of self-observation is increasingly the mode of recognition that structures personal identity, and the mirrored surfaces by which the formation and solidification of individual subjectivity is captured are more and more ubiquitous even though they are constantly changing forms following technological – and virtual – developments. This will appear clearly when we look more closely at the relation of personal identity in cyberspace later in this chapter, but meanwhile we can already notice how this mode of reflexivity is also

Self-Identification with(in) the City

123

more than ever actualized and materialized in physical referents where reflective surfaces can be observed throughout the urban environment. Indeed, the pervasive use of chrome and glass mirrors in modern architecture gives evidence of the specular relationship involved between who we are and where we are (with)in the city by pointing to the narcissistic satisfaction one gets at grasping a selfimage within a self-localization. Recognizing where one is together with who one is gives the position of a singular individual in a particular city, and this inscription/description, instead of generating a form of “depersonalisation by assimilation to space,” actually channels the urban personality into its “own” trajectory and self-distinction.7 Henceforth, capturing the flux of urban life has less to do with the movement of things than with new ways of occupying the city’s territory through the significance of the personal experiences that both map and interact with the actual and the virtual. The virtual dimension of city life generated by its social production operates through a new logic of personal spatial appropriation where social mobility no longer depends on spatial mobility alone. The alignment of the actual city with the virtual city of cyberspace via technological accomplishments really displaces Lefebvre’s conception of simultaneity in favour of instantaneity, increasing then both its precision and its spacetime constriction, and this has enormous impacts on how the city and individuals occupy a place and channel their respective movements as well as their mutual influences. The real difficulty of separating actual (physical) space from virtual space with a clear-cut delimitation blurs what it usually means to occupy a place, although without signifying an entire liberation from actual space – even if the latter is now self-reflected, to the point, as we will see, of concentrating all attention on the body as the specific locus of attention. Cyberspace is not strictly “utopian” (that is, a non-place), for it offers a place for actual self-encounters, most of which are not simply fantasmatic projections of personal bodies but create new potentialities for performing connections between mobility and circulation of individuals in their own personal translocalizations. These virtual possibilities bring us back to the translocalization process of the city and the generalization of urban life, which can no longer simply be thought of in terms of a single and simple territory, but rather as a mixture of places. The openness of the boundaries of the city (or its unlimited extension), which is engendered by many factors such as suburbanization and even more so by the Web, is

124

Navigation

directly linked with the development of a “peripherical” body, which takes the form of an extension by an ever-growing prosthetic life. The unlimited diffusion of spacetime relationships to urban life, even though it does not possess a center any longer, nevertheless provides the individual with a peripherical position because there is no personal identity that can pretend to locate any centre – if not for the individual who positions himself or herself in relation to his or her own particular or even singular social/urban condition (again, a decentralization of modern self-centered subjectivity that equals or parallels the movement of the dislocation of the state’s territory). The dislocation of territory has also had the effect of dislocating the individual self, with respect to its multiple possibilities of self-identification in social/urban spacetime experiences. Here, one’s transnational identity only mirrors a more general condition that goes with the universal urban condition – to the extent that the latter reflects the recognition of the rights of the person (as does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a legal document that designates all human beings, and hence “any body” on earth, as an actual “person”). But how is it that one reaches this universal condition and reflects it into/onto himself or herself, if not through the actualization of the prosthetics that the urban environment provides? The social production of space, movement, and bodies mediated by the instantaneity and accomplished by virtual means offers an empirical anchoring for the imaginary city. As Elizabeth Grosz remarks, “Cities have always represented and projected images and fantasies of bodies, whether individual, collective, or political. In this sense, the city can be seen as a (collective) body-prosthesis or boundary that enframes, protects, and houses while at the same time taking its own forms and functions from the (imaginary) bodies it constitutes” (2001, 48). A striking illustration of such a form of the collective body is given by the photographic projects of Spencer Tunick, who tours metropolitan settings around the world to capture artistically the naked individual bodies assembled en masse, in a movement of urban identification with a city that becomes a flashing event of self-exposure. The interesting thing about Tunick’s artistic project is that it shows through rhetorical evidence the uniformity of urban individual subjects in their bland sameness – erasing, by the force of the “massification” into which they are put, their individual differences while exposing the relative homogeneity of the forms of various city environments. That this artistic vision provides in itself the prosthetic means by which we can access

Self-Identification with(in) the City

125

such “evidence” of the intimate relationship between individuals and cities stimulates reflection on how contemporary urban mores in general have evolved, since it shows that personal nudity belongs to the social body, even before belonging to the individual’s own decision to publicly disclose his or her own personal intimacy (which is, by the way, annihilated in its individual significance because it is outnumbered by all the other individuals also present). But this has a broader scope than just aesthetic representations, reaching the normative or moral order of life in cities. Referring to the transformation of “intimate” practices according to the extension of urban life, Gabriel Tarde (2008) had already noticed, in the early twentieth century, how much sexual mores were somehow “loosened” (compared at least to their Victorian tightness) or redirected in the context of metropolitan settings, pointing out both the individualistic and international dimensions of this phenomenon, which belongs to the expansion of the social production of space and time.8 And this brings us to another very interesting phenomenon that requires special attention: the transformation of the city through the generalization of the urban condition, especially in its virtual dimension, which is accompanied by an exacerbated attention to the body, as if the experience of this carnal part of existence was becoming the locus of the translocalization of personal experience.9 It is to these attempts at attaining a certain correspondence between the body’s internal topology and the external topography of the urban that representations of the relations of the self and the city are translated that we now turn to further understand what is at stake in contemporary mappings of the urban condition. TO PO LO GY – TO PO G R A PH Y : T H E SO CIA L E XP E RIE N CE A S

“ INSIDE

OUT

/

OUTSIDE IN ”

The first thing that should be said about the personal experience of individual subjects is that it has followed more or less the same development path as the one borrowed by the city, in its being reconfigured entirely as a social production. While keeping this in mind, we can further add that this dislocation of subjectivity that decenters the self-reflective model of the modern bourgeois self (not to mention any “traditional” model of self-reflexivity) requires the mapping of the “new territory” of personal experience, with equal attention paid to both “environment” and “place” as distinct areas in relation to which

126

Navigation

self-identity is defined.10 We can situate this as the relation between the “topology” of the individual subject and the “topography” of its inscription/description of his or her urban environment. As a dialectical relation roughly apprehended as the internal (for topology) and external (for topography) faces of the social process in which individual subjects are caught, this distinction allows us to delineate the many aspects of translocalization as a subjective experience that engages not only cognitive, but also normative and expressive facets as well. If mapping was once an exercise of a rational endeavour only (or primarily), as the drawing of national territories made clear in its mathematical and geodesic measures of space and territories, the contemporary situation has opened up the possibilities of normative and expressive mappings that sometimes go with, but sometimes against, strictly speaking cognitive (or rational) mappings. Not that the national territory as defined by traditional geography never attracted or aroused normative or expressive possibilities of self-identification (quite the contrary of course), but rather that it is now according to the requirements of these expressive and normative bases that contemporary mappings of self-identification with the urban condition can be developed. An interesting example of that has been recently developed by Christian Nold and the raqs Media Collective in experiments made in what is called “emotional cartographies,” where individual subjects are plugged and wired to electronic devices (gps, data logger, etc.) in order to record their physiological responses to urban environments, providing information that, once processed and compiled, develops into charts and maps representing their “emotional” relations to specific places – turning the representations of these places into calibrated pictures of various states of arousal (Nold n.d.).11 These new forms of cartographies, in adding some new data and figures to established regular maps, do not go so far as to entirely redraw the geographical representations, though. For such redrawing, we must look in different directions. As it has been established in both Freudian psychoanalysis and Simmelian sociology (although in different terms), the internal representation of the external world, which involves both conscious and unconscious mechanisms, is formatted by the mental organization of ever-changing information perceived by the subject in relation to the everyday urban environment with which he or she identifies. The inscription/description of personal trajectory that constantly leads to psychological transformation is a result of the social production of

Self-Identification with(in) the City

127

spacetime always inscribed in our own individual geographical-historical moment. This can stimulate a personal identification of tremendous magnitude (leading to important reconfigurations of the self), as in Jack Kerouac’s first novel The Town and the City. The central character, Kerouac’s autobiographic character Peter Martin, identifies himself so much with the core of New York city life that the core of the city presents itself “as though it were some great rail-yard of his soul” (Kerouac 1950, 362; Côté 2011, 152), for it allows the crisscrossing of multiple individuals who metonymically reflect, in the character’s eyes, the experience of the entire world in the dense concentration of Times Square. Kerouac’s own form of cosmopolitanism, which he will spread “on the road” across various parts of North America during his incessant travels, from Montreal to Mexico City and through Denver and San Francisco, will then realize in his own journey the urban experience of the world’s metropolis that New York City comes to represent in the mid-twentieth century – as a vibrant symbol of a life experience devoted to the joint (re)discovery of his own self and of the continental territory.12 Here, as salient examples of the mutual transformations of the subject – object cartographic relation, the mapping of urban experience links together a deep personal experience and an almost unlimited urban continental territory (re)defined as a specific place bearing expressive and normative undertones, into which aesthetic emotions and marginal contestations of the social order coalesce into forms of literary representation. Turning the external urban experience outside in, and the internal personal experience inside out, Kerouac’s novels reveal the self-positioning of the contemporary subject with respect to a spacetime relationship that reinvents the possibilities of locating oneself in the world through a translocalization that reshapes both individual identity and the transnational territory. Bio-graphical experience, here, shows the extension of a “biopolitical subject” who displays its “body without organs,” or its inorganic body that reaches new territorial limits through the embodiment of a translocalization odyssey. Of course, such possibilities of self-inscription/description through contemporary mappings are not limited to literary forms, though, or rather, these literary forms nowadays have digital extensions that make the translocalization experience widely and extensively available by making it “easier” and more “user friendly,” so to speak, in their simplified expressions and forms (although these forms, formatted for “mass usage,” become then perhaps more “conformist”). Therefore,

128

Navigation

and according to actual omnipresence of the cybernetic world, the relation of the self to the diffused city through urban experience emerges from different types of interactions that are more than ever based on instantaneity, that is, the here and now of immediate perception mediated by technological tools that offer the possibility of accessing immediate lived experience, and this even though the experience does not coincide with the actual place in which it happens. The connexion between virtual places in this way becomes the result of a cognitive/normative/expressive circulation through a positioning of the self in relation to spacetime discontinuities. In other words, the subjectivities channel themselves through their circulation with(in) information traffic that gets sedimented to create a “vertical layout” of the environment, as Grosz (1992) has described it, a reality leading to other consequences in terms of possible mappings. As she writes, “The subject’s body will no longer be disjointedly connected to random others and objects according to the city’s spatio-temporal layout. The city network – now vertical more than horizontal in layout – will be modeled on and ordered by telecommunications. The city and body will interface with the computer, forming part of an information machine in which the body’s limbs and organs will become interchangeable parts with the computer and with the technologization of production” (Grosz 1992, 252). The global impacts of virtual and technological developments upon city life and individualities go far beyond the scope of this chapter, but we can still point to a few horizons where computing shapes contexts of interaction by displacing the dialectic between the local and the global onto a reconfiguration of social traffic that can be apprehended in terms of symbolic encounters (through a marking of one’s own personal trajectory) where the technological virtual interacts with the real. A very good example of this is lodged in the effervescent usage of Facebook. This social network raises the question of a tribune, of a social spacetime of the urban experience of diffused cities, or indeed of a place of expression, as it offers a platform for community interactions (some possibility of fraternity) that creates a sense of “we” – intrinsic to a sense of “I” – in a safe “specific” spacetime or place, while providing new modalities for freedom of association. The form of “get together” that this network renders possible illustrates clearly how the identity of individuals stands in relation to the community experience through an actualization of self-recognition. As a matter of fact, virtual communities and networks do not create new structures of identity; they

Self-Identification with(in) the City

129

simply provide new places within which new modalities of self-identity and group expression are experienced and performed, and those places do away with geography per se – even if, as we know, the concentration of the uses of Facebook (and the Internet in general) is still geographically concentrated in “rich” countries and highly populated cities, and in this way, remains segregated. Nevertheless, free association between members, to be sure, is erected on the sharing of a community of ideal or material interests, for example according to commonalities on the level of professional duties or of lifestyle, and are therefore indicators of a common culture, but the association is also based on a common objective to the members of the group, arising in the form of a desire to increase the numbers of encounters between singularities, leading to the growth of a personal network.13 This objective bears the hallmark of a fundamental postmodern social belief, that is, the idea that cultivating the widest possible network of contacts constitutes a social capital of incontestable value – a progression that is showed in the “network mapping” produced. This idea, in fact manifestly a belief, involves a normative process that is very highly mobilized by the Facebook social network, since it emphatically reinforces this “value” by means of a propagation that takes its cue from the principle of imitation. To say this differently, by building its own structure on a belief henceforth normalized and based on the principle of reciprocity between individuals, which is transmitted most notably by the imitation of a belief, this technological system contains the key to propagating its own usage to an unlimited but structured number of adherents, creating “maps of interaction” delimited as networks that shift the usual localization process according to the requirements of the diffused urban experience across a virtual space of infinite magnitude. By all appearances, suggestive imitation, constituting the primary form of reciprocity, serves to transmit a culture and to communicate the group as an entity to individuals in order to bridge the general with the singular. The imitative process is therefore among the most important, as it induces new dispositions within the individual and, above all, finds expression of itself in the principle of identity through a process of self-positioning in a context of multiple possibilities of self-identification in social/urban spacetime experience. Self-identification becomes this possibility of mirroring “myself” within the mapped social network that configures a social spacetime susceptible to becoming the confirmation of “my place” in this world – a world that has been constituted by people like “me.”

130

Navigation

The astonishing growth of Facebook, a network that, as of October 2012, reached a population of one billion active members spread over five continents and cutting across multiple countries, can, without doubt, be attributed to propagation by means of imitation, that is, through the imitative adherence to a belief in the social ideal that Facebook brings to bear, which is the importance of cultivating the widest network of contacts possible. Moreover, this social ideal brings to the forefront a common ideal belonging to the development of the individual subjectivity of each and every person: that of “becoming one” with a community while at the same time keeping one’s individuality distinct. In fact, the need to belong is one of the most powerful wellsprings of individual action, involving as it does reciprocal identification. But its opposite also resides in this need, that is, the ever-rising need for self-definition through differentiation. And it is exactly in the capacity to respond to this double need, as accomplished by fashion (which always found its roots and most impressive deployment in an urban point of anchoring), that the genius of Facebook seems to be defined, that is, in the possibility that it offers to push both individualism and subjectivism to the extreme, all the while conserving the sense of an overarching unity that relies on the group and is elaborated also through smaller groupings following members’ specific interests.14 The more the circle within which the individual is engaged widens, the more it offers a space for the deployment of individuality, although the specific characteristics of the individual will dissolve into elements within the whole. Therefore, in addition to articulating its social force through its capacity to create a structure of/for recognition by responding to this double need for integration and differentiation, as all fashion phenomena do, Facebook allows the creation of cohesion within a heterogeneous, non-anonymous group, such that it can weave links between people far away from each other, and who may indeed be complete strangers, and among whom a sense of community is knotted together through virtual encounters based on self-exposure.15 By knowing where we are on the Facebook social map, one can assume who she or he is. In a funny way, Facebook provides a sort of inverted version of the gps: it is not by asking a technological device “where am I” on the planet that I find my precise location, but it is through my own self-inscription/description that I tell “everyone” on that specific spacetime who I am. With the gps, the “environment” is locating “me,” as this translocalization of my body turned outside in; whereas, with Facebook, “I” position myself in an

Self-Identification with(in) the City

131

environment, as this personal inside out movement. Cellular and smartphones, on the other hand, play out these possibilities of interconnection to the extreme by literally annihilating the temporal and spatial distance of putting persons in contact immediately anywhere on earth. And the conversation almost always begins with, “Where are you?” This inscription/description bears the marks of self-recognition and mutual recognition to the point of becoming a new universal situation that signals a reconfiguration of spacetime relationships reflecting an ontological condition.16 As Bernard Stiegler (2012, 13–36) argues, a technological device such as Facebook can shed light on the social networks within which we are imbricated – sometimes without even fully or consciously acknowledging it – and produce a “transindividual” definition of singular subjects, according to which we appear to be what we are through the specific rules of the network.17 Such an interface generates a kind of organogram through which the social position of each member is explicitly revealed in such a way that this digital representation becomes a localization “mirror,” on both a micro- and macrosociological scale. While simultaneously describing ourselves through these network relations, both to ourselves and others, there appears a formalization of relational fluxes that embody our social position (localization). Ultimately, at stake in Stiegler’s point of view is the subject’s passage from a networking process to the possibility of forming a genuine world of philia (i.e., friendship in its Aristotelian sense) and citizenship, that is, going beyond the mere technical and technological levels of existence towards the construction of and inclusion in a full political community. Bearing in mind these social and technological considerations of urban mapping that define personal subjectivities – the coupling of “Where are we?” with “Who am I?” – we can now turn to more general issues concerning the conceptualization of spacetime in our contemporary situation. GLO C A L I ZATIO N A S SUP E RIM P O SITIO N OF POLITIC AL MASK S : T H E DIA L ECTIC O F SPACE TIM E CHARAC TERS A ND C H A R ACT E R I STI C S

Exploring the relationship between the body and the city in Western history, Richard Sennett (1994) commented that contemporary metropolises would lack this vital civic attachment that had characterized cities of the past. For him, this degradation of the intimate

132

Navigation

connexion between the subject and its urban environment is nowhere more palpable than in the general indifference that proliferates in places such as Greenwich Village in New York City, which has turned into a vague space of strangers devoid of any care for each other (Sennett 1994). Sennett’s argument is fallacious, though, for it supposes a definition of the self’s relation to his or her own body that is dependent on a civic engagement which would be of an “immediate” nature only,18 denying the much wider and deeper definition of social experience that has come to situate both the self and the city in their translocalized versions. Bio-graphical experience, as we saw earlier, means something that positions the “biopolitical subject” in its “inorganic body” in a way that embodies unlimited translocatizations. We should see then that the “immediacy” of city life is entirely mediated by the social character of an urban experience that is no longer limited by the structures and delimitations of the city as such, and allows a general environment of both actual and virtual possibilities for the subjects that it reaches – even though the city bears the marks of deep social divisions that add up to the building of walls (as in gated communities), the formation of enclaves or ghettos, or the development of favelas. But these are phenomena that strike our attention precisely because they go against the grain of the universal validity of an equal recognition of the individual subjects of the urban territory. The generalization of this condition of equality/inequality has been fundamentally determined by the political recognition of the person as its principal actor. Over the course of the development of mass democracies, its universal diffusion is now predominant in the context of an urban experience that constantly expands and deepens its own possibilities – and individual subjects interact in this situation as the self-reflective benefactors of the ways in which they express themselves, elaborate common norms, and develop new cognitive and logical concepts and tools for self-recognition. Whereas Sennett ([1974] 1978, 313–36) only finds in this development of the last two centuries the gradual decline of the modern subject, a constantly degrading actor more and more “deprived of his art,” he can hardly understand how the person has come to stand symbolically as the primal and universal condition that makes possible all other kinds of civic self-recognition, and all of the paths taken to be located as this specific incarnation of the acting subject, now ready to use any technological device to outstretch his or her own relation to the world. It is in this respect that cosmopolitanism, understood as the capacity to be located anywhere on earth according to the laws of universal hospitality

Self-Identification with(in) the City

133

(according to Kant’s definition), has taken up new figures and created new requirements for mapping collective localization and singular positioning. While it is certainly true that “the dialectic between flexibility and indifference” characterizes capitalist globalization, to the point of annihilating the relation of transnational corporate people to their urban point of anchoring, as Sennett argues, it is also certainly true that these constitute only one aspect of the urban phenomenon conceived in its wider and deeper sense of redefining the conditions of self-recognition.19 That the individual subjects can nowadays produce forms of self-recognition that match their own identities with an urban experience of global proportions, mirroring their own selves in the universal looking glass of the persons they embody, as the masks they wear when they act in any spacetime localization into which they inscribe/describe their own biographical settings bear the mark of a new condition. The internal topology of the desire to be recognized as “someone,” as “somebody,” stretches now to an external topography of unlimited proportions. And each bio-graphical experience reveals a translocalized version of the superpositioning of the various masks that symbolize a body that turns into its virtual incarnations. The possibilities of self-recognition do not depend anymore on the usual geographical limits of a cityscape (as they did in a typical modern bourgeois society, which remains the type to which Sennett mostly refers in his characterization of its ideal subject), but rest entirely on the social experience that positions both the internal topology of a singular subject and the external topography of its universal inscription/description as a person. The universality of the urban experience produces a redefinition of individuals as embodied persons. One important dimension of this redefinition has to do with the porosity between private and public that now characterizes the social production of urban space. As a typical distinction produced by modern bourgeois society, the opposition between private and public has been extremely active in forging the spacetime of modern cities – as this specific urban site where the public space (and public buildings) gradually eroded the predominantly private domain of aristocratic power to give way to the bourgeois reign that insisted, in theory if not always in practice, on keeping private interests apart from public interests (the two being mediated by the democratic political power granted first to the bourgeois citizens). But the transformations effecting modern bourgeois society from the middle of the nineteenth century on came to gradually dismantle this categorical opposition, inasmuch as they dislocated

134

Navigation

cities and individual subjects through the movements of diffusion and diffraction propelled by its social impetus. Nowadays, not only public spaces can be privatized, as anyone can see in the corporate ownership of malls and other venues, but the reverse is also true: private spaces are publicized in the exposure of individuals’ characters through various devices or possibilities of self-expression. If the spatial limits that used to keep private life apart from public life are not exactly totally erased in this process, they are at least reconfigured to allow a much more intense interpenetration of both spheres in terms of the kinds of localizations that each requires. And the political sphere has been stretched to cover the extremes that it once protected from one another, allowing transnational capitalist corporations to spread their influence over the world markets, on the one hand (as they do with the electronic and digital devices that they put on the market) while, on the other hand, devoting some of its preoccupations to cover social issues such as health, education, and general welfare (and responding also to immigrants’ and refugees’ claims). The body politic has then been diffused and diffracted accordingly, to the extent that it openly covers the field of “biopolitics” in its most singular if not intimate localizations, while channelling it to the horizons of “cosmopolitics” in its most universal significance. If the famous Warholian formula, “In the future, everybody will be world famous, for fifteen seconds” applies in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way to this situation, Gabriel Tarde was much ahead of his time in relating this phenomenon of instant and ephemeral glory to the generalization of conformism in contemporary civilization that pushed everyone to want to be like anyone else, while engaging anyone to become someone else.20 This is the reason why invoking the “encounter with alterity or otherness” that is at the center of reflections such as those found in Sennett or Negri and Hardt remains insufficient: they position “alterity” as if it would be something found only outside of the individual subject, or as if that subject would not be a “stranger” to himself or herself and ready to discover who she or he is in the development of his or her own “alterity” – that is, by “altering” their own person, their own body, in becoming who they are, in other words, in becoming somebody. And that is being realized through the various masks that localize their own personalities. When the community gives itself a universal definition, as it tends to do in the social production of the urban condition in contemporary society, belonging to that community for the self becomes a matter of performing a self-localization within it. And

Self-Identification with(in) the City

135

the self can do so by inscribing/describing his or her own translocalization through the mediation of diverse means by which he/she situates him/herself. Only through this process of self-recognition, which is always realized with respect to mutual recognition (even when technological apparatuses substitute themselves for actual – and prefab – forms of otherness), can we come to acknowledge the political character of an urban experience that redefines space and time in such a way as to require new cartographies and new tools for traveling with/ through them, to find ourselves in the world. Localizing “one-self” then has to do as much with the internal as with the external faces of an individual’s journey where the navigation between psychic and urban structures is intrinsic to social organization and recognition. Despite the ever-necessary mutual recognition of the subject and the object, the border between the two is being more and more blurred to leave an interstitial space where the core and the peripherical meet and, on that ground, create an instantaneous gathering of experiences that point to multiple directions simultaneously, while testifying to the subject’s “inside” heterogeneity reflecting its “outside” environment. The search for boundaries through personal experiences and fixed representations of the self becomes therefore independent from a localization thought in terms of objectified spacetimes. Personal trajectories through the city are experienced via unlimited urban territories, an unlimited motion of the self, and an unlimited representation of virtual space – all of which give rise to a social production that belongs to everyone in general and to no one in particular. To put it differently, we could argue that the core of urban individual subjectivity is the internalization of the peripherical body characterized by its absence of boundaries, its future – virtual – potentialities, and its collectiveness through prosthetic use of virtual – real – space. As a result, the encounter between the city and the self increasingly includes everyone, while allowing for a singular positioning that bridges the internal and the external territories, giving recognition to the I by the we and the who by the where. In addition, the new kinds of civics of selfrecognition depend on a vertical layout of the environment and on a superposition (instead of a juxtaposition) of identities generated by simultaneity. The re-appropriation of the built environment by the virtual and of the virtual by the body in fact show clearly how mapping, even though it is still a cognitive/normative/expressive process, has henceforth less to do with representing a localization (which can

136

Navigation

no longer be considered static) than with giving significance to a spacetime experience (internally, locally, or globally produced). The proliferation of individualized heterogeneous urban experiences becomes the vectors by which power circulates and generates (self) recognition inherent to (self) identification with(in) the city of the multitude. Translocalization appears as an act of self-localization with endless ramifications between levels of self-appropriation (through social masks) that articulate the relation between the “topology” of the individual subject and the “topography” of the urban environment. The specular relation of the two clearly highlights the fact that mapping interactions between the self and the city has become a mode of embodying these relations, as an incorporation of urbanity through significance of social experiences.

NOTES

1 As Ole Bouman writes, “Topographical maps are still handy for visualizing relationships between regions, people, goods – in short, everything that depends on spatial relationships that have begun to dominate our world: the interactions between knowledge, power, capital, intelligence, technology. In a society in which the cultural core consists of things that are constantly on the move – where motion itself has become the core, where mutations of certain processes are the rule rather than the exception, where that motion is unencumbered by the slowness of matter – maps that impose spatial order on the world are increasingly irrelevant. The new reality calls for maps, diagrams, search engines, animations. They still help you find your way but also help you understand the world a little better” (2006, 54). 2 We “translate” here the notion of “body without organs” into “inorganic body” to emphasize the symbolic dimension of its technical definition. 3 Reflecting on the relationship between the growth of the urban phenomenon and the spread of democratic regimes in the twentieth century around the world, James Holston (2001, 325–48) remarks that there are still some very significant heterogeneous spaces that counter these apparently convergent homogenizing movements, in relation to the violation of civil rights and the exercise of substantive (instead of only formal) rights. 4 Lefebvre writes, “[L’urbain] c’est plutôt une forme, celle de la rencontre et du rassemblement de tous les éléments de la vie sociale, depuis les fruits de la terre (trivialement: les produits agricoles) jusqu’aux symboles et aux œuvres dites culturelles. L’urbain se manifeste au sein même du processus

Self-Identification with(in) the City

5

6

7

8

137

négatif de la dispersion, de la ségrégation, comme exigence de rencontre, de rassemblement, d’information. En tant que forme, l’urbain porte un nom: c’est la simultanéité. Cette forme prend place parmi les formes que l’on peut étudier en les discernant de leur contenu. Ce que la forme urbaine rassemble et rend simultané peut être très divers. Ce sont tantôt des choses, tantôt des gens, tantôt des signes ; l’essentiel, c’est le rassemblement et la simultanéité. En ce sens on peut dire que le “vecteur nul” est essentiel à la définition de l’urbain” (1972, 206). Lefebvre seems to understand “vector” here in the narrow sense of a line uniting a center to an element of its periphery, whereas the geometrical and mathematical definitions of the term allow broader considerations about the union of two points in space, wherever they are both located. On these more recent attempts at theorizing the new forms of the city according to the notions of “city-territory” (a city that covers an entire national territory – that is, an entire national territory, like Switzerland, that possesses urban characteristics), and “hypercity” (i.e., a city that, like a hypertext, a non-linear configuration, points to multiple directions simultaneously), see André Corboz 2009, 133–8. We are using David Harvey’s distinction between “environment,” “territory,” and “place.” See Harvey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (2009), although with a different definition of the notion of “environment” that refers not so much to its “objective spatiality” but rather to its “social objectivity.” Roger Caillois (1984) demonstrates the danger of psychasthenia, referring to an assimilation into space that is created by the confusion between the self and its surroundings, that is, a reciprocal topography pushed to an extreme achieved by morphological mimicry in certain animal species and by a decline in the feelings of personality and life in individual subjects. However, even though the boundaries between the organism and its milieu are increasingly blurring, a disturbed relation between personality and space leading to psychasthenia is still a specific pathology that is far from being generalized. In addition, new modes of personalization independent of identification with space in terms of objectified circumscribed territory are subject to further development. Tarde writes, “les capitales des divers États, c’est-à-dire les lieux où les influences transformatrices se font le plus fortement sentir, tendent à se ressembler de plus en plus par leur moralité sexuelle et familiale. Paris, Londres, Berlin, Vienne, Saint-Pétersbourg, Rome, ont la même tendance manifeste à l’établissement d’une nouvelle morale, qui est destinée à devenir la même pour ces capitales d’abord et pour toutes les hautes classes de ces

138

9

10

11

12 13

Navigation

nations, quelle que soit la diversité de leurs races. Cette nouvelle morale se caractérise par une liberté sexuelle absolue laissée aux relations des deux sexes en dehors du mariage, sans nul déshonneur pour les jeunes filles pas plus que pour les garçons – et, au sein du mariage même, devenu très proche voisin de l’union libre, par le changement total de point de vue à l’égard de l’adultère qui perd tout caractère délictueux et n’est plus justifiable que du divorce” ([1992] 2008, 47–8). On this carnal experience, Marcel Hénaff writes, “Percevoir le mouvement qui, sous nos yeux, va du monumental au virtuel dans la ville qui vient, ce serait sans doute comprendre une des transformations majeures de notre temps. Mais peut-être, plus essentiellement, ce que nous devons apprendre ou réapprendre, c’est le mouvement qui va du virtuel au corporel. Jamais une image de synthèse n’abolira un corps de chair. Jamais un réseau de relations ne se substituera à la parole que j’adresse à l’être qui m’est le plus proche non moins qu’au premier venu” (2008, 218–19, emphasis in original). David Riesman’s classic work The Lonely Crowd (1950) comes easily to mind here as one of the first to give an ideal-typical presentation of the “mass individual” produced in this context, the one he called “other-directed” (in contrast to the modern “inner-directed” individual and “tradition directed” types). But Riesman was writing a sociological account of a displacement in the individual subject’s structure of reflexivity that had begun much earlier, in Simmel’s sociology, for instance, or again, in Freud’s psychoanalysis, which will be for us here the main reference (together with his follower, Lacan) for describing the new topological description of the structure of reflexivity of individual subjectivity. Christian Nold’s Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self, which contains essays and pictures of the project’s realizations, is available for free download at www.emotionalcartography.net. The definition of the “emotional” dimension by the authors seem to us to be somewhat reductive, relying on physiological responses that do not take into account the differences between those “sensations” and the “affects” generated by the situations into which different subjects react with respect to their own expressive attitudes. On this perspective, see Côté 2011, 133–48. The authority inherent in this social system does not rely on any mechanistic determinism, but rather on the adherence of members to an ideal erected by a belief that acts as a “social glue.” That which constitutes the unity of the Facebook crowd manifests, therefore, in terms of psychic interactions; it is the psychic relations rather than the spatial relations of individuals that

Self-Identification with(in) the City

14

15

16 17

18

139

form the essential component of this crowd unity, leading to a sense of diffused common identity without any core. This, moreover, is an example of the dialectic that Simmel had already demonstrated clearly a century ago: “L’association moderne, constituée pour une finalité, ne rapproche au contraires ses membres et ne leur impose des similitudes que dans la mesure où la finalité strictement définie le réclame, et leur laisse par ailleurs une complète liberté, tolère toute l’individualité et l’hétérogénéité de leur personnalité prise dans son ensemble.” ([1908] 2010a, 690). Facebook presents itself manifestly as a “space” where indiscretions are valourized and, indeed, normalized. The normativity that belongs to the type of voyeurism (in response to members’ exposure) that it permits generates a power that proves itself highly valuable in a context of individualization, as it permits the creation of a corporeal protective distance sheltered from personal involvement. The social lens that Facebook provides allows one to watch without being watched in turn and to avoid any “direct” interaction; in this way, the observer informs himself about his environment without any personal implication. The generalized attitude of the spectator without investment or involvement common to the urban personality thus finds its full realization in the observation that this social system renders possible. Building on Robert Park’s (1972, xi) characterization of crowds as groups with neither past nor future, without traditions, and residing in the gaps of normative order, we might argue that the Facebook crowd comes to occupy an interstitial territory characterized by a porous border between the self and the group, in such a way that space redefines the interior-exterior relationship and, above all, a collectivization of personal space. See Maurizio Ferraris 2006. See also the more developed argument in Stiegler’s Technics and Time, vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus 1998; vol. 2, Disorientation 2009; vol. 3, Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise 2011. An “immediacy” of nature contains religious significance, as we can assume by reading in the conclusion of Sennett’s book: “Lurking in the civic problems of a multi-cultural city is the moral difficulty of arousing sympathy of those who are Other. And this can only occur, I believe, by understanding why bodily pain requires a place in which it can be acknowledged, and in which its transcendent origins become visible. Such pain has a trajectory in human experience. It disorients and makes complete the self, defeats the desire for coherence; the body accepting pain is ready to become a civic body, sensible to the pain of another person, pains present together on the

140

Navigation

street, at last endurable – even though, in a diverse world, each person cannot explain what he or she is feeling, who he or she is, to the other. But the body can follow this civic trajectory only if it acknowledges that there is no remedy for its sufferings in the contriving of society, that its unhappiness has come from elsewhere, that its pain derives from God’s command to live together as exiles” (Sennett 1994, 376). 19 Sennett makes the argument that the rigidity/alterity dialectic that characterized earlier forms of cosmopolitanism in the industrial era at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has now yielded way to the opposite dialectic of flexibility/indifference. See Sennett 2002, 42–7. 20 Tarde ([1902] 2008, 7) wrote, “Ce qui distingue, entre autres caractères, les progrès de notre civilisation, c’est la tendance manifeste à la multiplication des gloires, des célébrités, de moins en moins durable, à la vérité, mais de plus en plus étendues et rapides, en tout ordre de faits, et à ce phénomène que le passé ne connaissait pas, la glorification instantanée et universelle d’un homme, hier très obscur, destiné à retomber demain dans son obscurité première” (qtd. in André Béjin, “Préface. La sexualité et l’amour selon Tarde,” in Tarde, La morale sexuelle, 7).

7 The City as Gamespace: Alternate Reality Games and Other Fictions OL IVIER A SSELIN

The introduction of mobile platforms with wireless and locative technologies has led to a radical transformation of the public space, ensuring a perpetual linkage between city and Internet, between objects of the physical world and the virtual database, between local communities and virtual social networks.1 On the one hand, real-world data are now often located on the Internet, notably through mapping software and interfaces, producing a kind of augmented virtuality; on the other hand, virtual data are now often located in real space, notably through augmented reality applications. The potential of this new hybrid public space, this mixed-reality city, has been used for various ends, often commercial. But artistic and ludic initiatives continue to develop. In these forms of navigation, the augmented city is transformed into a vast fictional playground in which the map meets the gameboard and narrative. To better understand the modus operandi and implications of these practices, I would like to examine, through one example, the case of alternate reality games (args). With their extraordinary urban and global proliferation, they are undoubtedly one of the most radical manifestations of the fictivization of the city. U R B A N PH A N TA S M AG O R I A S

Walter Benjamin’s hypotheses on the modern city, inspired by Georg Simmel’s analyses, are well-known. The large industrial and postindustrial city, dominated by the free market and regulated by a

142

Navigation

constant exchange of goods and messages, is essentially fragmented. The urban flâneur is subjected to an uninterrupted flow of impressions and stimulations, which can be swift, violent, disparate, and unprecedented.2 Benjamin compares the spectacle to the musical form of the rhapsody (from the Greek rhaptein, to sew), a patchwork of melodies, or better still, to the film genre, whose rapid cuts and shifts in time and space prevent one’s gaze from resting on any one thing.3 But the pedestrian cannot easily integrate, physically or psychologically, all of these stimulations: each time, they create a shock, a kind of trauma. The city makes it difficult to form any kind of synthesis, be it sensory or intellectual. The subject is unable to take everything in: the sensations, shapes, images, and messages are generated non-stop, and he or she has trouble giving them an order, a structure, a narrative frame, a referent, a meaning, a purpose. To shield himself from the repeated shocks and the cognitive and subjective scattering that results, the flâneur has to react in some way. According to Simmel, one of the most common reactions to this bombardment is insensitivity, a kind of anaesthesia: the city produces the “blasé man.” This sensory assault is not filtered through his emotions but rather his reason, “that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depths of the personality” (Simmel [1903] 1950, 411). And to protect himself even more, he develops a certain “reserve,” “a slight aversion,” “a strangeness and repulsion” towards his fellow creatures, however close they may be (415–16). But there are other defence mechanisms at play here. One of them is what Benjamin calls transfiguration, the imaginary transformation of an unacceptable reality into one that is more acceptable and even desirable, an aestheticization and fictivization of the city through an invented phantasmagoria (Benjamin 1999, 14–15, 21–22). If s/he is poetically inclined, with a bit of imagination, the urban flâneur can transform the modern city into another world, a past or faraway world, a frozen, deserted or ruined world, or into a natural world, silent yet alive, or into a vast text such as an allegory, which may be as senseless as the city itself, but which at the very least seems to make sense. And the time of the city – divided up and counted out ad infinitum, passing relentlessly and irreversibly – is thereby transformed into an eternity: a geological, prehistoric, ancient, or purely textual eternity. The flâneur thus tends to aestheticize this city that excludes him (as he aestheticizes his own marginality). He fetishizes the commodities

The City as Gamespace

143

around him to give them a use value, even though they will only ever have an exchange value; he transubstantiates them into heavenly signs to deny their absolute insignificance. He imagines the city as a temple, or better still, as an ordered natural world, a forest of symbols, to forget that it is nothing more than a vast department store in which all things and beings are exchanged. He assigns transcendent ends to history, despite the fact that it is subject only to the blind forces of the market economy in which myriad diverging interests clash, which no “invisible hand” will ever be able to bring together. Or else he identifies himself with the commodity, attributing a soul to inanimate objects, the better to forget the widespread transformation of people into commodities. In this way, the entire city becomes his inner space, his very own dream.4 With his interest in phantasmagoria, however, Benjamin neglected other essential forms of the city’s imaginary transformation, of its fictivization, that are perhaps even more central: narrativization and gamification.5 De Certeau had already stressed the importance of narrative – and the game – in the way we experience the city (de Certeau 1990, 115–30). Despite his essentially pragmatic and rhetorical model (which emphasizes speech acts and figurative operations), he demonstrated that one of the ways to appropriate the city is to incorporate, while in the very act of walking, the spatial syntax into a narrative structure.6 This is how the Surrealists, in their illustrated tales, were able to transform their urban wanderings into initiatory journeys, and to regard all fortuitous encounters as signs – signs not projected by the subject into the object, but conveyed to the subject by some mysterious providence, through “objective chance,” “the encounter of an external causality with an internal necessity” (Breton [1937] 1987, 21).7 And it allowed the Situationists, often with shifted or altered geographical maps, to transform their urban dérives into subversive games that changed the city’s “psychogeography.”8 Today, however, the narrativization and gamification of the city is expanding in a way that is unprecedented. The ubiquity of portable audio players has played a role in this expansion. As Michael Bull (2000, 2007) has shown, many of the users of these devices – Walkmans, Discmans, iPods, etc. – consider the music they play to be a soundtrack that allows them to transform their everyday experiences into cinematic experiences: the city into sets, passers-by into characters and extras, themselves into heroes, their lives into films. And the

144

Navigation

development of mobile platforms, with wireless and locative technologies, have given this fictivization of the city a new and even stronger impetus. A N E X PA N D E D N A R R AT I V E

The Beast (2001) was among the first, and most popular, alternate reality games. It was designed by a small team at Microsoft’s Entertainment Division to promote the launch of Stephen Spielberg’s film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, produced by Warner Brothers.9 The game had three narrative hooks (“trailheads” or “rabbitholes” as they are known, which enable players to discover a way into the game) planted in the real world, in the film’s trailer, and certain posters.10 The first was embedded in the inscription “summer 2001,” the movie’s release date: the number of notches on each letter and number formed a telephone number: (503) 321–5122, at which a rather poetic vocal message invited the caller to visit a website and send an email to a mysterious character named Mother. The reply was swift: “Jeanine was the key. You’ve seen her name before. But you’ve probably forgotten.” The second trailhead was an oddity in the credits: “Sentient Machine Therapist: Jeanine Salla.” Finally, certain letters of the posters were marked on the reverse side with gold squares and silver circles, which formed a message: “Evan Chan was murdered. Jeanine was the key.” Players who Googled Jeanine Salla would find several relevant websites, in particular that of Bangalore World University – New York City Campus, where she teaches, and the Salla family’s website, designed by Jeanine’s daughter, Laia Joanna, which in turn led to the site of her friends Evan and Nancy Chan. The website also contained the phone number of Jeanine herself. At this number, a message revealed that Evan Chan died accidentally on his “intelligent” robot boat The Cloudmaker. But several clues led one to believe that this official version was false and that Chan had been murdered. From there, the game unfolded like a collective investigation, with links to follow, information to find and puzzles to solve, allowing players to gradually piece together the story and its chronology. The plot is complex, with numerous characters and reversals, and is not easily summarized, but the broad outlines can be sketched. The story is set in 2142. The ecosystem has been damaged by global warming, the world is peopled by humans and robots, the latter belonging to

The City as Gamespace

145

the humans as slaves, births are limited and authorized only under a national lottery. When the story begins, a referendum on a controversial law is announced, one which grants robots the same rights as humans. Jeanine Salla, Professor of A.I. Studies, is perfecting a new generation of sentient robots with the support of the Cybertronics Company. Her friend, Evan Chan, is a specialist in “biothermic imagery” at DonuTech, an environmental assessment firm. He has an adulterous relationship with a robot named Venus, designed by the sexbot company Belladorma but owned by a rich businessman named Enrico Basta. In revenge, Basta asks an expert in artificial intelligence, Kataka Nei, to reprogram Venus to kill Evan. The robot does so and flees. But Belladorma wants to recover Venus, so it hires a hunter of delinquent robots, Diane Fletcher, who pursues the robot, catches her, and hands her over to the Sentient Property Crime Bureau. Venus is to be interrogated then destroyed, but, with the help of a hacker named Red King, she manages to escape. From there, the story proceeds with romance, sex, crime, and a gallery of characters: innovative researchers, unscrupulous industrialists, police investigators, headhunters, hackers, sentient robots, artificial intelligences that haunt the datasphere and smarthouses that end up murdered, etc. Everything is set against the backdrop of industrial, social, political, and religious conflict, opposing university research and technological conglomerates, the abolitionist Coalition for Robot Freedom, and the somewhat obscurantist Anti-Robot Militia, etc. The game is obviously linked to the film, which was originally developed by Stanley Kubrick (based on a short story by Brian Aldiss, “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long”) but eventually entrusted to Steven Spielberg. The context is similar: a future society with a weakened ecosystem, strictly limited births and mass-produced robots. Certain characters from the film reappear in the game, including the Swinton brothers – the human Martin, who here becomes an architect, and the sentient robot David – as well as their mother Monica and Professor Hobby, the creator of these super-robots, along with the company that makes them, Cybertronics, and the anti-robot militias. But the game is set a few years later – as a “sequel” released before the film – and these characters are relegated to secondary roles, while others who were not in the film are introduced and become the main protagonists, including Jeanine Salla and Evan Chan. With regard to

146

Navigation

genre, the game obviously derives from the detective novel but also from science fiction, in particular the subgenre of cyberpunk introduced by William Gibson in Neuromancer and his entire Sprawl Trilogy (which in turn owes much to Philip K. Dick). But the game’s originality lies in the fact that it was playable not only on the Internet but in other media, and even in real space through email exchanges with such characters as Laia, the daughter of Jeanine; phone conversations with other characters, including the security guard at the Statue of Liberty (an actor hired by the company); trailers screened at movie theatres or on television; posters in public places; and through such real events as the anti-robot militia demonstrations organized in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. There was nothing to suggest, it is important to note, that the story was untrue. On the contrary, everything was set in motion to give it credence, at least at the outset. The game’s credo, as its designers constantly reiterated, was “This is not a game.” And it would hold millions of players in its thrall (three million altogether, according to its designers) in a dozen countries, for nearly three months (11 April 2001 to 24 July 2001), until the puzzle was solved. In 2004, the same company, 42 Entertainment, created I Love Bees, part of a viral marketing campaign for the Xbox game Halo 2. This alternate reality game had a double hook: a jar of honey mailed to various arg enthusiasts and a subliminal message embedded in the trailer of the video game Halo 2, both of which led to an odd website: that of an amateur beekeeper named Dana. But the site, obviously spurious, appeared to have been hacked, and the webmaster was asking for the help of Internet users. From there, the game developed along the lines of The Beast, as a treasure hunt, collective and multiplatformed, the primary goal of which was the reconstruction of a complex story, not unlike a serialized novel. At certain times, for example, players found a series of codes, which turned out to be gps coordinates (longitude, latitude, altitude, and time) pinpointing telephone booths and the time at which the phone would ring to deliver other pieces of information. The plotlines are once again complex: a military spaceship has crashed on Earth and the artificial intelligence system controlling it, “Operator” Melissa, has been damaged. But Melissa manages to set up on a server somewhere in San Francisco and takes control of the site of the amateur beekeeper in an attempt to establish communication, obviously encrypted, with other intelligent programs and rebuild their networks and systems. A struggle ensues

The City as Gamespace

147

between Melissa and Dana, who try to enlist the help of Internet users. Other “characters” emerge to complicate the story, including an intelligent program named Spider and a Trojan horse, The Pious Flea. The story culminates with an invasion of Earth by the Covenant, a religious and warlike community of extraterrestrials, whose goal is nothing less than to exterminate humankind. This ending is the only explicit link between the alternate reality game and the video game it was designed to promote. Since then, the company has created many other alternate reality games to launch diverse products, including msn’s new search engine, the video game Gun, the Xbox 360, the Disney film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, the multiplatform novel Cathy’s Book, Windows Vista, an album by Nine Inch Nails, and Christopher Nolan’s film The Dark Night.11 B EYO N D T H E MAG IC CIRCLE

Alternate reality games are not entirely new. Obviously, they are part of the long tradition of games in real space, which have developed in all cultures throughout history, but in particular in modern times, with religious ritual, street theatre, and role playing games, children’s games and treasure hunts, artistic performances and political demonstrations, historical reconstructions and guided tours, and all practices involving strolling through private and public spaces, salons and institutions, gardens, parks and countryside, amusement parks, public squares, streets and throughout the city.12 But today, with the development of mobile platforms and locative technologies, coupled with the expansion of ludic culture, these games in real space have proliferated. In fact, they are so numerous and assume so many forms that producers and consumers, critics and theoreticians have trouble naming or classifying them with any consistency or stability. The list of labels continues to grow: urban gaming, street games, live-action role-playing games, alternate reality games, pervasive games, augmented-reality games, mixed-reality games, ubiquitous games, location-based games, trans-reality games, etc. These terms are less synonymous than kindred: the games they describe are not identical, but they all have an unprecedented extension. Markus Montola, a noted pervasive games theorist, rightly observes that args can be distinguished from other games by the way in which they expand the “magic circle,” that is, the spatial, temporal, and social

148

Navigation

frame within which play can occur (2009). Their territorial range is greater – a city, a country, the entire globe. Unlike traditional games, which have a clearly demarcated playing field – a frame, a stage with a fourth wall, a room or building, a gameboard, a table or playground, an on-screen virtual world – the borders of these alternate reality games are porous, even wide-open and potentially infinite. They blur the boundaries between the represented space and the space of the viewer, between the space of the game and that of real life. Similarly, these games unfold over a longer period of time: they can have several months’ “persistence.” As opposed to traditional games, which have a limited duration (a period of play and a clearly defined end), args are open-ended here too, and potentially infinite. They obscure the boundaries between the represented time and the player’s time, between the duration of play and that of daily life, between leisure time and work time. Socially, args embrace a larger, often international, community. As opposed to traditional games, which involve a limited number of players – one, two, or a few more – in the same space, these games can involve an unlimited, often delocalized, number of participants. And they require a collaborative approach from the players that can change not only the course and outcome of the game but also its rules, and not only the story but also the narrative framework. Alternate reality games spontaneously give rise to blogs and discussion groups in which the players are able to exchange, hour by hour, key information to further the investigation. But their role in the game is not limited to the gradual discovery of a story that has already been written. The games’ designers create the narrative canvas and main components before the game has begun, but they do not stop following its development. They reveal pertinent information bit by bit, sometimes at a fixed time (especially Tuesdays in the case of The Beast, both to maintain suspense and allow players to catch their breath). They may also communicate with the players through the characters, even correcting or amending the scenario in real time, depending on the reaction of the players, an activity known by initiates as “live puppetmastering.” In this sense, it can be described as an emergent narrative, 13 and to some extent as collaborative storytelling. It is interesting to note that for args to run smoothly, they require the presence of ghost players, moles who intervene in the group discussions whenever the game is at a standstill, setting the other players back on the right track.

The City as Gamespace

149

But beyond their broad spatial, temporal, and social extension, these games have a technological extension in several media and platforms, in diverse networks and spaces: not only online, in the virtual space of media, but also off-line in physical space, both public and private; not only on the Internet, on numerous sites, in group discussions, blogs, and electronic mail, but also by telephone and fax, on radio and television, in newspapers and magazines, in movie theatres and on the street, in cities and in the middle of nowhere. And this is perhaps one of the reasons that alternate reality games are of such interest to marketers: they would seem to embody, more than any other game, both the ideal technological convergence – central to the production and consumption of technology – and ideal convergence of audiences. This convergence, however, is oriented. The trailheads are placed in more traditional media space – physical space, movie theatres, television – less to reach a broader public (the products target a young audience) than to have a more controlled visibility (the Internet, being chaotic, is still unable to offer advertisers captive audiences). While the games unfold in more recent media spaces for an initiated public, largely on the Internet, they remain in a constant dialogue with the physical space, and often end there, since it is there that the “effect of reality” is strongest and most surprising. The genre still depends on visibility in the traditional media, and it is there that its commercial impact can best be measured. Last but not least, these games often have an unprecedented narrative extension. They deploy polyphonic, sometimes even labyrinthine, plotlines with several protagonists, multiple perspectives and voices, numerous sites and times, a diegetic world of great complexity.14 The model for these narratives is not tragedy but the epic, not theatre but the novel (especially the serialized novel), and perhaps less films and video games than television series. As we have seen, with regard to genre, it is modelled on the detective novel or on science fiction, for obvious reasons: the game ascribes a central role to technology and casts the players as investigators who must reconstruct, from scattered fragments and narrative scraps, a story whose central episode has already taken place; the detective and science fiction genres allow these elements to be fictivized.

150

Navigation

T H E A RT O F M E TA LE P SIS

But as their name suggests, alternate reality games blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. The actual and the virtual, the real and the fictional are interdependent, both spatially and temporally, they are synchronous and syntopic:15 many narrative events take place in real time, live, both here, in situ, where the players are situated, and elsewhere, in the public space, as well as in a virtual global network, within the real fragmented crowd and in a virtual alternate community – they take place in mixed spacetimes, cities, and communities. And the most crucial moments of the game occur precisely when the two worlds, actual and virtual, real and fictional, suddenly communicate with each other, when the player intervenes in the diegetic world as if he were a character among others, when he discovers, in his physical surroundings or on the Internet, fictional clues, when he receives within his private space an email from one of the gamemasters, when he hears on his voicemail a recording from a character in the story, when he talks on the phone with a fictional being in real time, in vivo, as if he were a real being. The result is always the same: the effect of the real, the staging of a real presence – but which is always pervaded by absence. One of the best ways of establishing communication between the two worlds is this fictivization – or more precisely the diegetization and the narrativization – of the means of communication themselves: the media, their interfaces, and the entire paratext of the game. The fictional characters speak to the real players through the very technologies they are using, namely, through real media, websites, and places. The game, moreover, does not use the language of fiction to establish its make-believe world. On the contrary, it imitates the forms of factual communication – epistolary, scientific, historical, journalistic, media, etc. – to give credence to the fiction. Alternate reality games are thus part of the imitative practices known as hoaxes. And the narrative instances themselves – gamemasters and players alike – are diegeticized, narrativized, and fictivized, presented as characters in the story. Metalepsis is certainly the dominant rhetorical trope at work in these games, which blur the diegetic registers, the world of the narratee, the world of the characters and the world of the narrator, the spacetimes of the gamemasters, non-playing characters and players.

The City as Gamespace

151

It is clear that the narrative, the genre narrative, plays a fundamental role in this fictivization. Just as the proliferation of platforms fosters the extension of the narrative, the narrative makes this technological convergence possible by masking the heterogeneous nature of medias with the fiction of a great intermedial and crossmedial continuity (what Jenkins [2004] calls “environmental storytelling”). The narrative also ensures the unity of time and space, of territory and history, of objects, events, actions, and episodes, of the signs that appear and messages exchanged within each world – fictional, virtual, real. It allows a synthesis of these worlds and all these diegetic levels. It is hardly surprising that these games promote genre narratives – detective novels or science fiction – and conspiracy plots that like divine providence presuppose a secret unity behind the fragments of reality – a meaning, a purpose, intentionality. In such a narrative context, everything in reality can become a piece of the puzzle, an element of the story, a part of the fiction. A R A DICA L I MM E RSIO N

Paul Milgram and his colleagues have classified “display technologies” on a continuum ranging from pure reality to pure virtuality, and they have used the term “mixed reality” to refer to displays that allow the real and the virtual to communicate, in varying degrees, be it by introducing virtual data into real space (“augmented reality”) or by introducing real data into virtual space (“augmented virtuality”) (Milgram et al. 1995).16 Milgram et al., moreover, have differentiated these displays according to three criteria: the level of modelization (“the extent of world knowledge”), the quality of the image (“the reproductive fidelity”), and the depth of immersion (“the extent of presence metaphor”). In particular, they contrast exocentric displays, which keep the observer outside the represented world (as do most screens), and the egocentric ones, which place the observer in the middle of the represented world (as in virtual reality environments). Obviously, for Milgram, augmented reality displays are always exocentric and virtual reality displays always egocentric. But alternate reality games call into question this simple interpretation: paradoxically, even if they belong to the class of augmented reality displays, they produce an immersion that is radically egocentric, since they often place the spectator in the heart of the represented world.

152

Navigation

Obviously, the purely technological perspective that prevails in discussions of immersion must be abandoned. Though perhaps always based on an image, immersion is not necessarily related to the quality of the image or of the technology that produces it: it depends not only on the perception, but also the imagination of the spectator.17 The immersion of the reader in the novel, the actor on stage, children in their play, are clear demonstrations of this: a meagre, limited or imprecise image – a few words on a page, a costume, a wooden sword – can produce a total immersion if it is an effective “mimetic hook” by which the imagination can figurativize, diegeticize, and narrativize beyond the image. Alternate reality games thus operate on the model of children’s role-playing games. Based on fictional elements introduced into real space by the designers, the players, using their narrative imaginations, can fill in the gaps and lulls between the images, events, media, and technologies to fictivize the entire reality around them, and create an unlimited and persistent diegetic world.18 H E T E ROTO P I A S A N D TH E E C L I P S E O F TH E R E A L

Alternate reality games thus contain a paradox. Because they are generally localized, they would seem to favour an emersion outside the virtual world, fictive and delocalized, a heightened awareness of actual reality, factual and local – of the city, public spaces, communities, real individuals. But because they deploy an extended fictional narrative, they could actually favour an even more radical immersion, where the real world is virtualized, fictivized, delocalized, the city is transformed into a gamespace, passers-by into extras, gamemasters and players into characters, their lives into stories. Although they entertain a desire for the Real, cultivating the thrill of real time, live action, and real presence, alternate reality games can also produce an eclipse of the Real – in extending the fiction of the game beyond the magic circle. The Real is not repressed here, as in neurosis, or foreclosed as in psychosis, but rather denied as in perversion. The games may thus cultivate a strange fetishism, in which both distance and proximity are fantasized. Unsurprisingly, the favourite plot device in these games is suspense.19 It is possible to view the success of these devices, in both the gaming community and industry, as further evidence of the importance of

The City as Gamespace

153

the immersive and ludic culture in the contemporary imagination. Some will deplore this, seeing yet another sign of the unlimited reach of the entertainment industry and the society of the spectacle. The commercial use of alternate reality games, which like The Beast are often designed for marketing campaigns, would appear to prove them right. As ingenious as they are, commercial alternate reality games contribute to the commercialization of the city and to the privatization of public space. But this interpretation, part of the traditional mistrust of mimesis and games, is certainly incomplete. From another standpoint, these alternate reality games testify to the importance of fiction, of narratives and games in human experience, especially today. They have a cathartic function, certainly, but also pedagogical, cognitive, and moral functions. The narrative is a way of synthesizing our experiences, identities, social relationships, life itself, of giving it unity, continuity, finality, and the meaning it seems to have lost in modern times in the wake of fragmented territories and traditions, identities, and communities. Games, moreover, encourage dialogue with others, building real communities, teaching about conflict and collaboration, establishing social connections and even contracts – implicit, of course, and in a reserved symbolic space, but analogous to the legal contracts that bind and structure society. And these ludic contracts are perhaps more ethical than legal contracts since they are not imposed or sanctioned by law, but rather freely agreed upon and respected. From this perspective, the game can be viewed as an allegory of society, and at the same time a mise en abyme of the social within the social, the community of players becoming a paradigm of the community, and the ludic contract an analogue of the social contract. Like all fictions, alternate reality games may well be the matrices not of political utopias but of heterotopias in the Foucauldian sense of the term, that is, reverse representations of the social space within the social space itself (Foucault, 1998). But the heterotopias sketched out in alternate reality games would seem to belong to a new genre, which Foucault could not have foreseen but would probably have approved of, good Borgesian that he was: heterotopias that encompass the entire social space – without, however, entirely coinciding with it. Translated by Jeffrey Moore

154

Navigation

NOTES

1 See Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011. 2 See Simmel 1950, 409–24. 3 See in particular Walter Benjamin, “L’œuvre d’art à l’ère de sa reproductibilité technique,” in Essais 2, 1935–1940, translated by Maurice de Gandillac (Paris: Denöel / Gonthier, 1971–1983), 107–20, first published in French 1955. 4 In addition to The Arcades Project, see: Wismann 1986; Buck-Morss 1989; Rochlitz 1992; Cohen 1993. 5 A free borrowing here from the vocabulary devised by Roger Odin in his semio-pragmatic work on cinema De la fiction (2000). What Odin calls fictivization is a complex process that includes figuratization, diegetization, and narrativization. For purposes of analysis, I am adding gamification, i.e., the transformation into a game. 6 De Certeau, it should be noted, has a rather binary political interpretation, which contrasts powers and users, the political strategies of the one group and resistance tactics of the other, the circumscribed “scene” and the played “space,” etc. But for him, the narrative is not necessarily an act of resistance on the part of the users: it is sometimes the powers who in fact want to transform the spaces into sites. 7 See also Breton (1927) 1960. 8 See Guy Debord, 1955, “Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine,” Les lèvres nues 6, September, La Revue des Ressources, http://www.larevuedesressources.org/spip.php?article33; 1956, “Théorie de la dérive,” Les lèvres nues 9, December and 1958, Internationale Situationniste 2, December, La Revue des Ressources, http://www.larevuedesressources.org/spip.php?article38; 1958, “Définitions,” Internationale Situationniste 1, June, Debordiana, http://debordiana.chez.com/francais/is1.htm#definitions. 9 The game was designed by a small team working in the Entertainment Division of Microsoft: Sean Stewart (head writer), Elan Lee (lead director and producer), and Pete Fenlon (content lead), under the supervision of Jordan Weisman (creative director of the Division). The visuals were designed by Tarquin Cardona (director and photography director), Rudy Callegari and Bob Fagan (producers). Some of these designers, including Bob Fagan, Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, and Jordan Weisman, left Microsoft in 2003 to form 42 Entertainment, and were joined by Susan Bonds, Joe DiNunzio, Jane McGonigal, Jim Stewartson, and John Ziffren. In 2006, other executives

The City as Gamespace

10 11

12

13

14 15

16

17

18

155

joined the team when the company fused with 3 Pin Media; in 2007, some left 42 Entertainment to form other companies. Jordan Weisman founded Smith & Tinker; Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, and Jim Stewarton founded Fourth Wall Studios (www.42entertainment.com/beast.html). The trailer was presented both in theatres and on the Internet. For The Beast, see www.42entertainment.com/beast.html and www.cloudmakers.org. See also Jane McGonigal, 2003, “‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play,” Digital Arts and Culture Conference, May, Melbourne, http://www.seanstewart.org/beast/mcgonigal/notagam/paper.pdf. Regarding I Love Bees, see www.42entertainment.com/bees.html and www.ilovebees.com. For alternate reality games and pervasive games, see Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz, and Matthias Böttger, eds., Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007); Carsten Magerkurth and Carsten Röcker, dir., Concepts and Technologies for Pervasive Games (Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2007); Markus Montola, Jaakos Stenros, and Annika Waern, dir., Pervasive Games: Theory and Design (Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 2009); Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin, 2011). See also http://www.argn.com, www.unfiction.com, deaddrop.us. I am thinking here of the distinction between games of progression, which are based simply on a series of predefined actions, and games of emergence, which allow a large number of unforeseen variations with a small number of rules and combinations. See Juul 2005. Also see Harrigan Wardrip-Fruin 2009. Pardon the neologism: if two simultaneous events are synchronous (from the Greek chronos), then two aligned spaces could be syntopic (from the Greek topos). See also Azuma et al. 2001; Bimber and Raskar 2005; Manovich 2003. The latter text is also available on the author’s website, http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Augmented_2005.doc. Ryan (2001; 2006) has identified three types of immersion – spatial (response to sets), temporal (response to plot), and emotive (response to characters) – and Schaeffer (1999) has introduced a series of vectors and positions with regard to immersion; both have helped to define, alongside perceptual immersion, imaginary immersion. More precisely, role playing, which is based on performative identification,

156

Navigation

presents an unlimited image – materially uniform, hypermodelized, hyperdefined, polysensorial, animated, interactive, and egocentric. In this way, paradoxically, they are akin to virtual reality games. 19 Obviously, the Real, in the Lacanian sense of the word, is not so easily accessible. It is as if the brutal irruption of reality into the game was the means of experiencing, as a socially acceptable substitute, the violence of the irruption of the Real into the Symbolic.

8 Remapping the Space Between: Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation in Rio de Janeiro J U STI N R E A D

P U B L I C / PR IVATE / D IV IN E

With this chapter I would like to examine the politics of Rio de Janeiro’s transformation into a “global” city since the restoration of democratic-republican rule in 1985, focusing on developments since the turn of the twenty-first century.1 My aim is not analyze any particular political movement or party. Rather, I would like to identify conceptual markers in Rio’s social, historical, and political geographies through which Rio has emerged as a place in the world. I wish to analyze how movements between these geographic markers have been mapped and mediated so as to produce sovereign political order, or the lack thereof. What forms of power (political, economic, and/or symbolic) flow between these markers? How have these markers been represented in various media, whether print, television, or digital social media? In sum, I am interested not only in Rio’s place in contemporary global order, but also in how sovereign control over that place (or places) might be exerted and transmitted in the age of globalization. The problematic space I wish to open with respect to Rio de Janeiro is therefore at once geographical, political, symbolic, and “mediatic” (media-related). The first three of these descriptors (geographic, political, symbolic) are commonly bundled in Western thought, returning to the urban topography of classical Athens. Indeed, the very term “politics” is derived from a geographic site, the Athenian polis. The

158

Navigation

term polis, in turn, not only means “city” but also the set of civic relations contained therein. That is, the polis was not merely a physical space, but also embodied the metaphysical ideals of social relations between citizens within that space. As such, the Athenian polis was a spatial representation of the Athenian “people” living within it. (A representation of the citizenry of Athens, but not their slaves … or wives.) In many ways, one can see the modern nation-state as an extension of this ideal: a sovereign territory that embodies a national people. How, then, does Rio embody Brazilian people and their life as a body-politic? Or does it even represent the people so? Political life, it should be noted, was not equally distributed across the space of the polis. Classical Athenian civic discourse took place at a delimited place in the center of the city, the agora. The agora was also a marketplace, a site for economic transaction, also presumably governed by public laws. But public law did not extend fully into household – oikos, or private space – in the urban area surrounding the agora. The oikos, rather, was run by the male head of the household, such that the nomos of the oikos was not political but “economic” of a sort (from oikonomia). Moreover, human law did not intrude into the temple (or naos, sacred space), which was the realm of gods, their priests and priestesses. And political discourse did not truly occur in the porticos (the stoa) surrounding the agora, although certain philosophers (Stoics, for instance) might assemble there to lecture on the morality or ethics of political decisions. Other philosophers must have shunned the city altogether, seeking hermetic retreats (Epicurus) or caves (Plato). Nevertheless, the Classical model of political space appears to have set long-lasting parameters on critique: academic scholars, it seems, were to be of the agora but not quite in it. My brief characterization of Athenian space (written in my kitchen, I might add) is rather reductive, but it has proven to be persistent in Western thought, if not practice. This is particularly evident in ancient Roman law, with its differentiation of gens (family lineage) and civitas (political citizenship), each governed under ius privatum or ius publicum, respectively. The agora-oikos-naos distinction was also conserved in distinctions between ius publicum from lex naturalum and ius naturale (natural law and natural right). Although we may still hold to a conceptual division between public and private (or even urban and rural), however, it is not clear that the Classical model still functions in the contemporary world. Intersubjective political discourse on the agora was conducted through face-to-face oral communication.

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

159

Modern political formations have developed according to different modes of mediation. The Spanish and Portuguese empires, for example, covered expansive territories that remained unseen to the monarchs who ruled them. An Iberian monarch did not set foot in the Americas until 1806, when the Portuguese court moved to Rio de Janeiro after the Napoleonic conquest of Lisbon. Moreover, the Iberian monarchies never sought to incorporate their colonial subjects as a “people,” but merely sought to dominate and extract wealth from them. Yet these same sovereigns managed to control vast territories in minute detail through obsessive written documentation and correspondence. Where is the agora when political discourse is transmitted through letters mailed across the ocean on galleons? Contemporary order is yet more complex. We live in a unique global ecosystem in which human-made factors now exert “geological” forces with respect the lived environment. Global climate change signals the nullification of conceptual divisions between urban space and wilderness.2 Accordingly, theorists like Bruno Latour (2004) now seek to dissolve philosophical distinctions between “nature” and “culture.” This dissolution, if accurate, is driven in part by new media. Given that one can now communicate instantly from anywhere to anywhere on the planet, local political issues may now become global problems regardless of whether one actually lives in a city. As Vilém Flusser recognized as far back as the 1970s, contemporary cities (and the people living in them) have become a “confusion of cables” in which images from the outside world are piped directly into one’s “private” abode. Essentially, any separation of the agora from the oikos (ius publicum from ius privatum) has been erased, and the sacred naos profaned, by the advent of cable television and the Internet: “The typical image we construct of the city looks something like this: houses as economic private spaces that surround a marketplace, the political public sphere, and over there on a hill stands a temple, the theoretical sacred space … The image of the city with its three spaces is now useful only as a point of historical reference” (Flusser 2005, 323–4).3 Beyond the polis, and even beyond “nation” or “state,” the new mediascape has contributed to the advent of new political-economic terrains. Saskia Sassen was among the first to identify the “global city” – that concentration of sleek skyscrapers found in the world’s financial capitals (New York, London, Tokyo, Bangkok, São Paulo, Mexico City, etc.). The global cities are not the entirety of cities, but really command-and-control nodes for flows of capital, all linked together

160

Navigation

by digital informational networks (Sassen 2001). Although global cities begin to resemble one another culturally and architectonically, they often bear little resemblance to the urban areas around them. They reside in a sovereign national territory, but they are not quite of the nation or its sovereignty. Indeed, the global city is “self-inclusive” with respect to other global cities, but as Sassen also theorizes, they may produce “counter-geographies” of political and economic exclusion (Sassen 2000). This exclusion may consist of economic privation and/or exploitation. Giorgio Agamben has taken the concept of exclusion one step further by demonstrating how sociopolitical exclusion might in fact be inscribed within sociopolitical inclusion. As defined by Michel Foucault (2003) in the lectures now collected as Society Must Be Defended, biopolitics is a form of sovereignty in which state power is based on the preservation of life and the regulation of bodies, rather than on the sovereign decisions of banishment and death. For Agamben, life and death have always been mutually inscribed in the concept of sovereignty, since the sovereign’s body is that point at which the ideal quaestio iuris of the law becomes one in the same with the quaestio facti of the law’s enforcement in everyday life. However, modern sovereignty is defined by a peculiar spatialization of life and death. The liberal nation-state roots sovereignty in the subjective Being, rather than the single body of a king or prince ordained by God. The “people” are ultimately sovereign. Yet in order for the “people” to be constituted as a body politic, other people, other bodies, need to be systematically excluded if the identity of “people” is to be differentiated and consolidated.4 The body of the citizenry (bios) must be purified of other bodies now reduced to bare or naked life (nuda vita or zoē), and so reduced, therefore subject to extermination. Biopolitics as it is currently constituted implies the production of thanatopolitics (politics of death). In spatial terms, in order to consolidate sovereignty over the polis and national territory, an alternate space must be created as a repository for naked life to be deposited and exterminated. Agamben analyzes this alternate space as the “camp”: Paraphrasing the Freudian postulate on the relation between ego and id, one could say that modern biopolitics is supported by the principle according to which “Where there is bare life, there will have to be a People” – on condition that on immediately add that the principle also holds in its inverse formulation: “Where there is

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

161

a People, there will be bare life.” The fracture that was believed to have been overcome by eliminating the people (the Jews who are its symbol) thus reproduces itself anew, transforming the entire German people into a sacred life consecrated to death, and a biological body that must be infinitely purified (through the elimination of the mentally ill and the bearers of hereditary diseases). And in a different yet analogous way, today’s democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also tranforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life. (1998, 179–80) The Enlightenment/Romantic political order, that which reserved sovereignty to the immanent power of the people, was designed to override the tyranny of monarchical sovereignty, in which one king alone held transcendent power over life and death. Yet the modernization of sovereignty has produced sovereign life-and-death decisions far more massive – and scientifically precise – than anything imaginable in pre-modernity. Agamben punctuates this thought by positing the camp not just as a prison or concentration camp located beyond the city limits, but as a place integrated into the city both conceptually (civitas) and concretely (urbs): “The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city’s interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet” (1998, 176). I agree with Agamben in most respects, but his speculation on the space of the camp seems to me to be overstated, particularly with respect to the so-called “Third World” he claims to describe. To treat the “entire population of the Third World” as bare life distorts the socioeconomic and political complexities of any city or nation. The variegations in civic and political space that have come about under globalization are far too localized to be described by a rather blunt First World/Third World relation. More significantly, without denying the existence of the “camp” as theorized by Agamben, one must also admit that there a numerous other forms of space and place that have emerged in modernity. Walter Benjamin already recognized the arcades as such, that curious Parisian deformation of the ancient stoa. But what is the Classical Hellenic term for sweatshop? How do you say factory in ancient Greek? More importantly, what is classical Western philosophical term for favela?

162

Navigation

M EDIAT IO N / H I STO RY / WRITING

As I have argued elsewhere, the dialectic of inclusion vs. exclusion in the Latin American city may prove misleading (Read 2006). Brazilian cities are concentrators of great wealth and power, and they are concentrators of unbearable poverty. Yet the two forms of concentration are knotted into one another in every respect, such that “exclusion” is integral to the socioeconomic disparities by which Brazil and its cities are defined. This is especially evident in Rio de Janeiro, where spectacular modernist estates may be located but a few meters from piecemeal shanties made of scraps of word, plastic, and corrugated iron. The proximity of the two is not casual or happenstance. To understand why this is the case, one cannot merely look at a map to measure the distance between wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness. One has to measure how the space in-between has been mediated over time. From the sixteenth century through to the twentieth century, most all Latin American cities were mediated by writing in a peculiar way: while western European colonizer may have established order through the presence of writing, Latin American societies emerged through the absence or invisibility of writing. As scholars like Walter Mignolo (1997) and Antonio Cornejo-Polar (1994) have convincingly argued, Latin America was forged through the mis-encounter of a colonizer’s culture rooted in the concept of the book, with colonized cultures who had no concept of what a book was. The region’s main productive dialectic is in many ways a purely discursive one, between literacy and illiteracy, a dialectic that has translated historically into economic terms (rich/poor), racist terms (white/brown/black), and ethnic terms (creole-European/Amerindian/African). Yet even an examination of literacy and literature on their own terms will return to an absent center. In colonial Latin America, power emanated from the metropole through written documents. And this power was administered in the Americas by an intermediary class of ethnically European scribes who were officially forbidden from ascending the state hierarchy due to their criollo/crioulo (non-European) birth. Power over the largely illiterate masses was transmitted through the letrado class who read and copied edicts from Madrid, Seville, and Lisbon, and wrote responses back to absent authorities who would never set foot in the colonies. Just as the job of the letrado was to copy official discourse, so too was the Latin American city built over the ruins of previous civilizations as a copy of European urban order. But the new American cities

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

163

were copies with a crucial difference, in that they were created as idealizations, as perfections, of order. As Angel Rama theorized in his masterwork The Lettered City (La ciudad letrada), the Iberian colonizers envisioned newly conquered American landscapes as a tabula rasa upon which the ordered “City of God” could be built, since it was presumed that the existing urbs of Europe were already corrupted (1996). This explains why colonial Latin American cities were often built with geometric precision, the Pythagorean perfection of square plazas and rectilinear streets. Rama argues, further, that the letrado class conceived of its place in the city as that of administrators of ideal social order, promulgated through the copying of discourse – legal discourse and literary/poetic discourse. As I have argued in my essays on Brasília, such idealizations of urban space continued well into modernity (Read 2005; 2008). Lúcio Costa self-consciously designed Brasília’s “Pilot Plan” with starkly geometric figures (line and arc) so as to foment civitas on the barren landscape of Brazil’s Central Plateau. Costa’s and Oscar Niemeyer’s designs for the city inscribe social order – order meant to spring poetically from the city’s reinforced concrete. But this plan did not account for build-up of urbs in and around the Pilot Plan, such that urban planning in the Brazil’s Distrito Federal has proven chaotic since the 1960s. As the capital of Brazilian colony (1763–1822), then the Portuguese Empire (1808–22), Brazilian Empire (1822–89), and finally the Republic of Brazil (1889–1960), Rio de Janeiro has been inscribed on the landscape as an emblem of modern “Order and Progress.” But this statement only makes sense if one first understands its emblematic aspect as sprung from a dialectic of (invisible) social order and (visible) social disorder. Beatriz Jaguaribe has written that the modernization of Rio was linked to the consolidation of nationhood and republic: “By tearing down the crumbling colonial mansions of the downtown area, razing topographical obstacles that interfered with the opening of new avenues adorned with modern buildings of eclectic architecture, Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos from 1902 to 1906 sought to transform the antiquated capital into a modest version of the Parisian ideal. Supported by the hygienist endeavors of doctors and engineers, Pereira Passos, in the guise of a local Haussmann, attempted to instill a model of modernity that reproduced in the tropical scenario what was deemed to be the utmost modernity of urban planning forged by French cultural models and, to a lesser extent, American innovations” (Jaguaribe 1999, 294).

164

Navigation

In this sense, “modernity” in Rio de Janeiro was conceived as a copy of European models, perfectly in line with the letrado’s ethos of copying discourse. Moreover, such imitative modernity was intended to “cleanse” the city hygienically of its tropical maladies. Unfortunately, the pathologies of the tropical eventually eviscerated modern hygiene. Jaguaribe continues: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the imitative efforts of local urbanists who sought to transform Rio de Janeiro into a tropical Paris gave rise to a vast assortment of marble muses, colored glass reproductions of European landscapes, revivalist gargoyles, and other Parisian replicas. Set against the tropical vegetation and in the torrid heat of Rio de Janeiro, these European replicas often made in cheaper materials than their European models, decayed quickly, offering the spectacle that Claude Lévi-Strauss would summarize in his famous axiom, “Les tropiques sont moins exotiques que démodés.” Clothed in English cashmere or encased in velvets and corsets, the local elite of the Belle Époque attempted to keep, despite its being somewhat beaded with sweat, a civilized stiff upper lip as they paraded the slogan, “Rio is becoming civilized.” But one of the enduring features of Rio de Janeiro was the strength of its multicultural urban heritage that would not be obliterated by the maintenance of a European façade. (Jaguaribe 1991, 301). The “multicultural urban heritage” to which Jaguaribe rightly alludes, however, was largely that of populations who were illiterate and/or powerless. These populations did not – and still do not – live in the city (cidade), properly speaking. That is, the spatio-conceptual poles around which Rio de Janeiro has “accumulated” as a center of power are not agora, naos, or oikos. Rather, they are cidade and morro – the city, primarily occupying low-lying areas close to the waterfront (center and south zones); and the hill, favelas clinging perilously to Rio’s rocky hilltops and flowing well into the interior North Zone of Rio. As opposed to Rio’s centro (where political and economic power has been concentrated), the morros were originally selvatic areas on the margins of the city’s official limits (particularly the steep cliffs separating the centro from the beaches to the south) that were first cleared and colonized by slaves and then by the urban poor and working class.5 During the Brazilian Empire, the morro was largely ignored by authorities in the cidade. The original favelas were unplanned “inva-

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

165

sions” of unused territory, with improvised structures built from whatever materials could be found. They may have been “in” the city, or “by” the city, but they were not “of” the city. This distinction is indicative of a larger problem of sovereignty during the empire. Allegiance to the sovereign Emperor (Dom Pedro I [1822–31] and Dom Pedro II [1831–89]) held the various, highly autonomous provinces of imperial Brazil together. Yet Dom Pedro II tended to be a liberal and positivist thinker, and he ruled as a constitutional monarch, such that sovereignty was technically shared with a legislative parliament and executive cabinet of ministers. Thus, at the nation’s center in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian state resembled that of England, replete with codified liberal ideals of equality and progress. However, the provinces beyond the capital – which were, after all, the vast majority of Brazil – were ruled by powerful slave-owning oligarchs, who held quasi-feudal control over their territories. Roberto Schwarz has analyzed this uneasy coexistence of evidently modern and pre-modern orders: It is well known that Brazil’s gaining of independence did not involve a revolution. Apart from changes in external relations and a reorganization of the top administration, the socio-economic structure created by colonial exploitation remained intact, though now for the benefit of local dominant classes. It was thus inevitable that modern forms of civilization entailing freedom and citizenship, which arrived together with the wave of political emancipation, should have appeared foreign and artificial, “antination,” “borrowed,” “absurd” or however else critics cared to describe them. The strength of the epithets indicates the acrobatics which the self-esteem of the Brazilian elite was forced into, since it faced the depressing alternative of deprecating the bases of its social pre-eminence in the name of progress, or deprecating progress in the name of its social preeminence. On the one hand, there were the slave trade, the latifundia and clientalism – that is to say, a set of relations with their own rules, consolidated in colonial times and impervious to the universalism of bourgeois civilization; on the other hand, stymied by these relations, but also stymieing them, there was the Law before which everyone was equal, the separation between public and private, civil liberties, parliament, romantic patriotism, and so on. The ensuring of the stable coexistence of these two conceptions, in principle so incom-

166

Navigation

patible, was at the centre of ideological and moral preoccupations in Brazil in the nineteenth century. (Schwartz 1996, 12–13). What Schwarz exposes is a crisis of discursive representation, evident despite the “stable coexistence” of two incompatible social orders. It was possible for a liberal parliament to write voluminous laws enshrining the Universal Rights of Man without threatening the slavery upon which their own political-economic power was based. The discourse of the Law was elegantly crafted, and essentially vacuous. It is no accident that the most representative novel Brazil’s nineteenth century is Machado de Assis’s Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, a “posthumous memoir” beautifully written by a ghost, an impossible subject-position, an empty-set of citizenship. By the twentieth century, slavery had been abolished, and the landed oligarchy had fallen into decadence. “Modern” politics with respect to the favela tended to take two opposing forms: nationalistic populism or nationalistic authoritarianism. Although I describe them as “opposing,” both forms tended to be dictatorial and repressive. The latter (populism) is best embodied by Getúlio Vargas, the proto-fascistic dictator who dominated Brazilian politics from 1930 to 1954. The Vargas strand of populism took the shape of direct intervention in the favela: the creation of a massive bureaucracy that provided regular wage-paying jobs to many living there, but more importantly the extension of governmental institutions – education, public health, infrastructure – into some areas of the morro. One must bear in mind, however, that this governmental presence has always been relatively limited. The modes of indirect incorporation of favaleiros proved far more significant. Utilizing a variety of mass media – print journalism, modernist literature, radio, and film – Vargas’s regimes sought to foment a new sense of “Brazilian-ness,” broadcasting the popular culture of the favela to the rest of the nation. It is no accident that samba and Carnaval – both rooted in Rio’s favelas – became expressions of national identity during this time. The samba schools that participate in Rio’s Carnival parades came under state regulation under Vargas, and they have developed into local non-governmental providers of social services.6 Significantly, many of Vargas’s populist acolytes (such as Juscelino Kubitschek, Janio Quadro, João Goulart, and Leonel Brizola) continued in positions of great power at the state and national levels well after Vargas’s suicide in 1954. For instance, Brizola attempted to concretize (literally) state regulation of the morro while acting as

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

167

governor of Rio de Janeiro State (1983–87, 1991–94), by building modernist Integrated Centers of Public Education (cieps) throughout poor and working-class zones of the city. Designed by none other than Oscar Niemeyer, these reinforced-concrete structures were intended as educational, nutritional, public health, and cultural centers for the favela. Although Brizola did not extend urban planning into most favelas, his administration worked to incorporate the favela into the officially regulated streets of the cidade, at least symbolically, by reaching out to favaleiros as a constituency (Read 2009). Periods of populist ascendancy (1930–64, 1982–90), however, were interrupted by a long stretch of repressive military rule (1964–85). Particularly after the intramilitary coup d’état of 1969, the authoritarian government repressed the populist left violently through torture and outright street warfare, while at the same time expanding industrial development and international export at a pace beyond the capacity of the Brazilian economy. During the 1970s, the military dictators favoured the wealthy enormously, while utterly neglecting the growth of the favela. This proved to have rather dire consequences by the early 1980s. At the macroeconomic level, Brazil could not survive the debt crisis of 1982, since the dictatorship had overextended itself on international credit. The nation entered into a sustained decade-long economic tailspin marked by hyperinflation. Meanwhile, Rio’s favelas grew enormously during the 1970s and 1980s, and poverty intensified greatly, which is to say, official neglect allowed a pool of desperately poor people to concentrate on the morro, thus creating a reserve of underpaid labour and driving production costs down. The suppression of labour costs perhaps still makes Brazil attractive for global outsourcing. Yet, by the same token, the hands-off approach of military governments created a vacuum of sovereignty throughout the morro, effectively ceding power in the favela to armed drug gangs who continue to dominate to this day. I will return to this reality later in the chapter. Taken in the long view, populist regimes in the last century sought to represent the morro by incorporating favela culture symbolically. That is to say, populism sought to “monumentalize” the favela, often through the actual construction of concrete buildings. The populist state therefore represents the people, leaving little room for people to represent themselves. Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, had no need to represent anyone or anything. Their nationalism was best expressed by expansion of gdp, and any popular criticism from the nation therefore needed to be squelched with guns and electric cattle prods – to

168

Navigation

defend the nation. While it is difficult to offer historical commentary on current political conditions, one might say that the current Partido dos Trabalhadores governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff represent a democratic-republican blend of the two modes just outlined. They are populist regimes, built on the support of the lower classes, that are nevertheless oriented to the macroeconomic expansion offered by globalization. In this context, questions arise: to what extent does the government protect life on the morro? And to what extent are people free to represent themselves and their lives in the political sphere? CIDA DE / MORRO / TE LE V ISIO N

These very questions were raised, though not totally answered, by the television series, Cidade dos homens (City of Men), which ran on tv Globo from 2002 to 2005. One of the series’ main writers, Paulo Lins, grew up in the Cidade de Deus favela, and his 1997 memoir Cidade de Deus (City of God) was made into the film (co-written by Lins) of the same name in 2002. The co-directors of the film adaptation, Fernando Meireilles and Kátia Lund, co-created and co-produced Cidade dos homens, and they used many of the same cast members from film to television. Cidade dos homens was notable in that it employed a cinematic realism atypical for Brazilian tv, dominated as it is by the melodramatic novela. And the series utilized poor and predominantly black actors drawn directly from Rio’s favelas, including the show’s adolescent stars, Darlan Cunha (in the role of Laranjinha) and Douglas Silva (playing Acerola). Both actors appear to be young teenagers in the first season. The third episode of the series, “Correio” (“The Mail”), co-written by Lins and Lund, centers on the interrelations between sovereignty and cartographic representation. As is typical for the series, the plotline is quick-moving and convoluted. As the episode opens, Acerola is taking a shower in his underwear at the public fountain while women do laundry. (This indicates that the fountain is the only running water in the favela, where many houses may lack plumbing.) Acerola is called by his grandmother, whom he then accompanies to pick up her mail at a local community center, where they enter into a loud argument between faveleiros and the mailman. The mailman cannot deliver mail to each house since there are no addresses or street names in the favela, so he leaves unsorted piles of mail at the community

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

169

center, which means that the letters often fail to reach their destinations. The argument grows so loud that the local drug lord, Birão, steps in to end the shouting. Clearly annoyed, the drug lord hears both sides of the argument in the community center, and summarily appoints Acerola to be the postmaster for the favela. As he brandishes a pistol, he gives Acerola a wad of cash to buy a uniform, offers him a weekly salary of R$100, and warns him to deliver each and every piece of mail without fail. Birão says, “O certo é certo, e o errado é errado” (“Right is right, and wrong is wrong”), by which he implies that if Acerola fails to deliver even one letter, he will be killed. Acerola then hires Laranjinha to be his assistant. After a few days, the boys try to deliver a letter to a clearly intoxicated drunkard who refuses delivery. With one letter left undelivered, Acerola grows anxious, he cannot sleep at night, and he eventually goes back to the drug lord with Laranjinha to discuss his options. Birão’s “soldiers,” however, refuse to grant the boys entry and begin to bully them. From the hillside with the concrete highrises of the centro in the background, the soldiers tell Acerola to return the letter to the sender. The return address is on Rua Haddock Lobo, in the Tijuca neighborhood in the centro, a place that the boys absolutely do not know. On the discursive level, they do not know how the cidade operates. They never think to mark “Return to Sender” and drop the letter in a mailbox. On street level, they cannot locate themselves in the cidade, although Acerola seems to have an innate sense that he has entered a “globalized” city. “We didn’t know Tijuca very well,” he says, “but we had to find Haddock Lobo one way or another. Because all roads lead to Rome. Or Afghanistan, or Kazakhstan, or the United States, or even the moon.”7 The boys descend from the morro and meander around the centro, until a clerk at a magazine stand shows them the location on a city map. The clerk gives the map to the boys, and they find the house on Rua Haddock Lobo. Unfortunately, the resident there refuses the letter because the boys have failed to understand that the letter was mailed from Rua Haddock Lobo in São Paulo (not the one in Rio). They rip up the letter hoping that no one will know. But Laranjinha casually looks at the city map and notices that their favela is not named on the map. Rather, their morro appears as part of an empty green mass between white spaces of the regular grid of the cidade. The map presents the morro as if it were green space or wilderness or some sort of nature preserve. In short, the boys cannot believe that they have no place on the map.

170

Navigation

They return to the drug lair and propose to the gang soldiers that they could more effectively deliver mail if they assigned street names and place names to the favela. As all the streets are named for important people in the cidade, they offer to name the streets in honour of the soldiers as a token of flattery: Avenida Espeto Boladão, Avenida Nefasto Boladão, Avenida Lord Boladão. But at this moment, the nowsobered drunkard reappears demanding the letter, which had contained a job offer. The boys are forced to admit that they destroyed the letter. They are beaten by the soldiers and placed face-down with rifles pointed, so as to be executed. Fortunately, the lead soldier envisions his name appearing on a “plaza,” and he agrees to Acerola’s scheme, thus saving the boys’ lives. He also gives them money for supplies. As they go around the favela naming streets, the boys realize that they can sell naming rights to residents (once they have exhausted the names of soldiers). They quickly amass a huge wad of bills, and they hire local residents to make signage. They tack up street signs and placards and draw up a map. When it comes time to pay the residents for their labour (at the community center), the drug soldiers find out that Acerola and Laranjinha have profited without telling them, and so the soliders shake the boys down for most of their cash. This doesn’t leave the boys enough to pay the other favaleiros, who begin to complain loudly. Just as this happens, however, the police initiate a raid of the favela, the residents scatter, and in the confusion the boys are trapped in the community center. The police quickly find the boys, their cash, and their handdrawn map with places named for the residents who live there. The police take the rest of the cash for themselves, and the map. Birão, who has been away on “vacation,” returns to find utter chaos. The favaleiros are angry because they are still owed money. And Birão is even more furious at his soldiers for allowing streets to be named – and for giving the police a map of the morro. The boys quickly remedy the situation by swapping all the placards and signs they have hung. And just in the nick of time, because the next day the police again raid the favela using photocopies of the boys’ map to guide their way. The police stumble around the morro completely lost because the hand-painted signage no longer corresponds to the hand-drawn map. When the police captain knocks on a door to ask for directions, however, he unwittingly knocks on the door of Birão’s hideout. Birão attempts to flee on foot, but he is arrested by the police, who then bring him down to the cidade and throw their handcuffed captive

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

171

into a police truck while news cameras film them. In the end, the boys take a shower at the same public fountain where the episode began. They are safe (but penniless again), and the gang soldiers are content because with their leader in jail, they have become the new bosses of the gang. (Tellingly, at the end of the episode the fountain is named “Nefasto Lord Espeto” and not “Birão.”) As the credits roll, there is a voiceover of Birão on the phone to his soldier, Nefasto. He asks for a lawyer, money, a cell phone, and a laptop notebook. His soldier asks, “Notebook? O que é isso?” (“Notebook? What’s that?”), to which Birão responds, “É um computador que parece livro, mané” – “It’s a computer that looks like a book, dude.” “Correio” thus begins in a public space in which biopower is only negatively present. Obviously lacking infrastructure to bathe in his own home, Acerola is pushed into the “street” (really just a widening between alleyways) where a fountain happens to have been built. He bathes, moreover, in the presence of washerwomen, indicating that this space is a place for work – domestic work done in public for someone else’s domicile. One can only imagine the public health consequences of bathing and laundering with the same water in the same public space. This place is not quite oikos, and definitely not agora. Rather, public assembly only occurs in relation to anger directed against an agent of the state. The unfortunate mailman at the beginning of the episode is a representative of a sovereign state whose even most menial institutions cannot enter into the favela, much to the chagrin of the favela’s denizens. Sovereign authority is therefore left to a criminal boss who has no interest in being a sovereign. His true purpose in the favela is to sell drugs and profit. Birão obviously feels some obligation to his comunidade, but any sort of community problems only serve to annoy him. Nonetheless, he becomes the one who decides over life and death. He manifests Right: “O certo é certo, e o errado é errado.” Acerola must deliver the mail, all of it. He must do as Birão demands or he will be killed. Indeed, Birão does not have to actually shoot his weapon for his will to be exercised. Acerola fulfills the duty thrust upon him under the promise of reward (cash) or penalty (murder). The brandishing of Birão’s pistol only confirms what Carl Schmitt once wrote about Force and the Law: “Power proves nothing in law for the banal reason that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in agreement with the spirit of his time, formulated as follows: Force is a physical power; the pistol that the robber holds is also a symbol of power” (Schmitt [1922] 1985,

172

Navigation

117–18). The state’s law dictates that all the mail be delivered, but only Birão’s illegal power carries enough force to see that mail actually be delivered. Accordingly, the agent of the state (the mailman) must stop at the gates of the favela. Is the favela as represented in “Correio” equivalent to the camp theorized by Agamben? Acerola’s morro is clearly represented as a site pushed to the margins of the city. In many of the episode’s shots, the regular, zoned cidade appears in the background, set apart from hovels that cling almost miraculously to the hillside, thus emphasizing the distance between “here” and “there.” Here is a zone in which people, lacking any formal integration into the national body-politic and its institutions, may be killed for the slightest indiscretion, or even just for the amusement of any gang soldier who happens to carry a pistol. It is a depoliticized space – that is, one cut off from official state politics – that is therefore subject to the basest exercises of force imaginable. Comparison to Agamben’s theory of the camp is therefore warranted. But the comparison is not quite accurate. The camp represents a paradoxical outcome of biopolitical sovereignty. It is a site where sovereignty reaches a maximum, but only by constructing a space just beyond the territory where sovereignty is legally and legitimately granted. The camp must be operated by the sovereign authority, but only in the name of protecting that authority’s juridical and political authority with respect to the people within sovereign territory. It is imperative, furthermore, that the authorities maintain constant surveillance of the camp – panoptical surveillance, in fact. The favela, by contrast, manifests a plethora of paradoxes, but just not the specific ones theorized by Agamben. The favela has emerged in the radical disjuncture between sovereignty, law, and capitalism. Accordingly, the sole sovereign authority in “Correio” maintains his control over his territory by evading the surveillance of the state. In fact, Birão would clearly prefer not to have any sovereign power over the favela. He merely placates his comunidade either because it is his home, too, and he would rather not hear people shouting, or more likely because it is easier for him to manage his criminal enterprise that way. Here punishment (death) and reward (cash) are the only “forces” of social power. Indeed, every single social relation revolves around this punishment-reward mechanism, even to a certain extent the friendship between Acerola and Laranjinha. The only real national institution that circulates in the favela is therefore the currency minted and guaranteed by the Brazilian government, and this currency is, in turn,

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

173

subject to the vicissitudes of global financial markets. This ultimate dependence on the force of globalized economy is an interesting turn in the concept of sovereignty that may be at play in the episode. It is not, however, quite what Agamben has in mind when he analyzes the camp, and most certainly not what he has in mind when he suggests that the entire “Third World” has become a camp. The point becomes even clearer when we consider panoptical control (which, again, is a defining feature of the camp) with respect to the favela in “Correio.” Not even the most basic street map represents the favela as a place. Instead, the area is mapped as a “wild” or “natural” green space, which everyone in Rio knows to be untrue. It is not therefore a matter of representing the favela as “naked life” – mere zoological specimens to be controlled. Rather, the problem is that the print representation of the map falsely represents the favela as a unurbanized forest, and does not correspond to the everyday experiences and observations of Rio’s residents (whether or not they live in the favela). Everyone knows where the favelas are, they just don’t need a map to tell them. Residents of the cidade may not have any sense of the twists and turns of the favela’s alleyways, but by the same token the boys have no idea how to get around in the cidade either. The two areas are not known to each other. In the absence of (mechanically reproduced) cartographic inscription, state institutions can scarcely enter or exit the favela, much less control it. Mailmen have no idea where to go, and more importantly, the police have no concept of how to control the area. It is as if the state – which, recall, is historically grounded in the letrado’s power of inscription – requires writing in order to be operant. It is only when Acerola and Laranjinha decide to become “urban planners” of a sort, and make a map of the morro with written names, that the police can begin surveillance operations. Once the map becomes inoperable, with signage displaced so as to be purposefully incorrect, it is merely coincidental that the police fulfill their mission and arrest Birão. But at this point electronic surveillance – that of television news cameras – only goes as far as the border between favela and cidade, but goes no further. The cameras can only record the news at the limit of the cidade. In short, rather than mapping a space of maximum sovereign control, the lack of mapping indicates the utter dysfunctionality of the sovereign state and its de facto organs of mediation. This sets the stage for the final irony of Birão’s voiceover during the credit roll. In the end everyone is happy to see him arrested. The

174

Navigation

police create the impression that they actually do their jobs instead of stealing other people’s money. The news cameras undoubtedly get a lurid story for that evening’s broadcast. And in the favela, it is business as usual. Acerola and Laranjinha are happy because Birão no longer threatens to kill them. The other favaleiros are happy because they’ve already been paid for their labour one way or the other. And the soldiers are happy because the arrest clears a space at the top of the gang’s hierarchy that any one of them may now fill. The only unhappy soul is Birão, locked in a jail somewhere in the cidade, who can only ask for a lawyer, money, cell phone, and a laptop. Birão’s problem, then, is that he has become identified by the state. Once he is made visible by tv cameras and the police, he can now be relegated to the prison (camp), stripped of citizenship and rights that he never knew he had anyway until he was so identified. Once held up to view by the state, he now requires a letrado (lawyer) and a “book” (a notebook in English) in order to deal with the state’s penal system. Biopolitical control begins and ends through the mediation of writing. But he also has a need to stay in touch with the global market – that of the drug market he used to rule. Besides a letrado and a livro, he also requests money and a cell phone – two items metonymically linked to globalization. In the end, Birão’s voice is disembodied through his soldier’s cell phone, and the soldier has little idea what a notebook is, other than that it resembles a book. SO C IA L MEDIA / SURV E ILLAN CE / CO M M E RCE / TRANSLATION

The fictionalized representations of Cidade dos homens are theoretically rich. But by the same token, they are theoretically rich because they are fictions written, directed, and produced by letrados living in the cidade who have an interest in representing the morro in a particular way. These letrados are sympathetic to the plight of the favela, for which they certainly cannot be criticized, and they have taken great efforts to incorporate favaleiros into the production. That is, they are using cultural production as a direct means of economic production in the favela in order to produce politicized representations there. They produce television to make the favela politically visible. If there is one element of panoptical control present in Cidades dos homens, it is the tv Globo series Cidade de homens itself, which has broadcast images of the favela to Brazil and the world. The fact remains,

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

175

however, that Cidade dos homens is not quite a true self-representation or self-reflection of the favela. By contrast, self-representation has recently crossed into Brazil’s mass media by means of eminently violent events that occurred but a few weeks after I began writing this essay. On 25 November 2010, an event occurred that both interrupted and confirmed the chapter I had originally intended to write for this collection: a coordinated military offensive that began in the Vila Cruzeiro favela in the Zona Norte of Rio de Janeiro. In the week following, military action spread to the sprawling Complexo do Alemão, a “complex” of some thirteen favelas atop the Serra de Misericórdia that some have called Rio’s own “Gaza Strip.” These actions were commanded by the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro State and its Battalion for Special Operations, but it also came to include troops drawn from Brazilian Army, Air Force, and Marines, as well as the notoriously corrupt Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro city. As one might expect, mass media reports – most notably those of Brazil’s largest media conglomerate, tv Globo – did not name these military actions for what they really were – that is, civil war – but rather as “police actions” or euphemisms thereof. The nominal purpose for the incursion into Rio’s favelas was to put an end to an organized spate of car jackings, robberies, and vehicle burnings, in which gangs sought to take control of the highway from Rio to the city of Teresina. The official counterattack, however, quickly moved to root out all armsand drug-trafficking organizations in targeted favelas, especially the Comando Vermelho (cv, the “Red Brigade” or “Red Command”), which has been a de facto ruler of much of the Zona Norte since the 1980s. The timing of operations, moreover, proved highly symbolic. Brazil will host the 2014 fifa World Cup, and Rio de Janeiro will host the 2016 Olympic Games, both of which Brazil sought in order to portray itself as a fully “developed” nation of the globe. Both events will be centralized in the Estádio Maracanã situated perilously close to some of the most violent favelas in the city, especially those of Complexo do Alemão. Brazil was sending a message, therefore, to the world and its own citizens that it could control its own territory and make its streets safe for tourists, athletes, and diplomats. As I have argued in this chapter to this point, cultural mediations actively operate to map social space between Latin American subjects – space in which questions of politics, sovereignty, citizenship are resolved, or left unresolved. Particularly in Brazil, media representations (not only journalism, but also literature, architecture, music,

176

Navigation

dance, Carnival, etc.) do not merely reflect or “imagine” political-economic processes, but also work to determine politics and economics as matters of concrete social interaction in space. Given the contemporaneity of police actions in Complexo do Alemão, we should move beyond print or television, to question how virtual spaces of new digital media resonate with already-established intermedial maps in Brazil. How do virtual representations of the assault on the Complexo do Alemão reinforce or disrupt extant mediations of space in Rio? Here I should note that Brazil on the whole has relatively high rates of Internet usage. Brazil currently ranks second to the United States in total number of websites. A recent Nielsen survey of online usage, moreover, reports that Brazil now leads the world in total quantity of online traffic through social networking sites, with some 80 percent to 85 percent of all online users visiting social network sites such as Orkut (Nielsen Company 2009).8 Not only do Brazilians produce a great deal of online content, but they have also developed a culture of sociability around the Web. To use the Web in Brazil is to participate socially on some level. However, it is not yet clear what this “on some level” really means. Cultural participation in Brazil has historically been equated directly with political participation. As I mentioned earlier, cultural organizations, such as the escolas de samba (samba schools) that organize Rio’s Carnival parades, have often served as primary suppliers of social services for Brazil’s poor, in terms of health care, education, nutrition, and so forth. The state has also regulated such organizations as a means of incorporating excluded popular sectors, either through bringing cultural groups under the aegis of state agencies or through extending the patronage of public-private enterprises such as Petrobrás (Brazil’s state-run oil company).9 Many cultural critics have come to believe that digital media will allow cultural participation to bypass official political representation, in the hope that sociopolitical disparities might be equalized. Brazil’s most prominent media critic, Hermano Vianna, in fact published a manifesto several years ago proclaiming this very point. Vianna writes, “On one hand, there are thousands of cultural groups, rising in the periphery, that bring together in their work – in totally original forms, and different in each case – artistic production and the fight again social inequality … On the other, we are also witnessing the birth of popular entertainment industries that already produce the greatest musical hits on the streets of the entire country without having to depend anymore on large recording companies and large

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

177

media companies to build their own national distribution networks” (Vianna 2006). The question of social participation is thus being framed in terms of conflict between social networks: the political network of the state and economic networks of large corporations versus emergent popular networks organized around music and dance. As Roberto Schwarz theorizes in the citation I provided earlier, the nation in Brazil has never quite extended through the entire nation of Brazil, if this contradiction makes sense. The history of the Complexo do Alemão is instructive in this regard. The favelas of the Complexo do Alemão are by and large working-class neighborhoods, even though “working-class” in Brazil can still mean desperately poor. The area of the Serra da Misericórdia was not urbanized until the 1920s, when a large parcel of land was purchased by a Polish immigrant, Leonard Kaczmarkiewicz. Ironically, the German or “Alemão” who gave the area its name was not German at all, but rather a Pole who was known popularly as the “Alemão.” Kaczmarkiewicz in turn began to sell parcels of his property to railways and industry, which then attracted the poor into move to the area seeking work (O Globo Online 2007). The poor eked out a living as best they could, using whatever materials they could find to build hovels and homes on abandoned properties, diverting water from small streams, and eventually lifting electricity from adjacent power lines, and so forth. This is, in fact, the typical pattern of urban growth in Brazil.10 Military governments on both the right and the left have been perfectly content to let industrial zones expand unabated in the area of Complex do Alemão, while allowing poverty to spread unchecked. As a consequence, one can drive along certain architectural structures, such as roads, avenues, and freeways, built by the state to facilitate industrial production, but these structures directly abut zones that have been systematically excluded from state control. In the absence of the nation-state, since the 1980s, sovereignty in the Complexo do Alemão (if indeed we can still speak of sovereignty) has been exercised by criminal organizations. Chief among these is the Comando Vermelho (cv). As its name more than suggests, the cv began as an offshoot of an armed Marxist insurrectionary faction, the Falange Vermelho, which sought to destroy the right-wing military dictatorship of 1964–85. As political prisoners of the Falange Vermelho came in contact with “common” prisoners, a criminal organization formed in Brazil’s federal prisons that began to exploit guerrilla warfare techniques as a means to make urban drug trafficking more efficient. The

178

Navigation

cv therefore took hold of a large number of favelas in the Zona Norte (and upwards of 40 per cent of the entire Rio drug trade) in a manner fully in line with the Sandinistas, Taliban, or Al Qaeda. The cv is a network operation: a loosely organized collection of small “cells” claiming and holding limited areas of the city, selling crack street corner by street corner, and kicking profits up to a decentralized “central” command.11 Since the 1980s, the cv has ruthlessly guarded its territory through police bribery, heavy artillery, automatic weapons, mortars, explosives, and even bazookas and rockets. The cruel irony is that the forces of national modernization and industrialization directly caused the formation of territories the nation can no longer control. Yet it was not until “official” Brazil had become a lead actor in twenty-first-century globalization, and felt the need to project an image of itself back to the globe as host of the two most important sporting events on the globe, that the cidade of “official” Brazil finally recognized the need to exert sovereignty over the morro. There have been major police incursions into Complexo do Alemão in recent years, most notably in 2007, yet these have utterly failed to hold any territory. The November 2010 events are significant in that the police have been working to install small “community policing” units all over the area in hope of driving out criminal organizations for good. Despite the government’s concrete efforts to lay claim to the favelas, however, there can be little doubt that the virtual image of state control and sovereignty was as important, if not more important, than actual activities on the ground. The nominal purpose of the November 2010 raids was to police the comunidade, but it is likely that the generation of publicity was just as powerful a motivation. Most images were broadcast and consumed via large media networks. The primary source of photographs, based on anecdotal evidence of my own viewing habits, were distributed through Reuters and Getty. Most of the national public in Brazil, as well as a large audience internationally, received news of events through the massive Globo conglomerate. Globo is far and away the largest media outlet in Brazil, and one of the largest media empires worldwide. It dominates the Brazilian television market, both in entertainment (Globo produces the best novelas, which are distributed worldwide) and in news. In addition to owning its own cable news network, Globo News, the conglomerate operates some thirty cable tv channels, and it holds a majority share in the largest cable tv service provider in Latin America, net. Its flagship newspaper, O Globo, is the largest in

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

179

Brazil; Globo is the largest magazine publisher in Latin America; and Editora Globo is the largest (and highest quality) book publisher in the country. All of these interests converge in its online operations, which, in addition to news, include social networking, blogging, and e-commerce sites – a point to which I will return shortly. Globo’s coverage of the assault on Complexo do Alemão was unabashedly biased. Groups of reporters were embedded military platoons through the favelas, in a manner similar to the US media’s coverage of the invasions of Kuwait (1991) and Iraq (2003). Like those events, Globo’s coverage quickly devolved into stories of good guys vs. bad guys. Special interest features would typically present some quirky discovery by the troops after the arrest of a drug captain: large quantities of cocaine and pot (that is, drugs, but never cash, since only $60,000 was officially recovered during the whole operation, a fact left unreported or underreported by Globo); C4 explosives and rocket propelled grenades; the high-end modernist architecture of a kingpin’s house in the favela; a mural of Justin Bieber painted inside a drug fortress. All of these images, in turn, were immediately transmitted internationally by other large outlets, the New York Times, msnbc, etc. When following this coverage while it unfolded, I could not fail to be impressed with the horizontal integration of Globo’s operations. On one of Globo’s main news sites called G1 (g1.globo.com), for instance, each page might have a video link and written story, just as most other news sites. However, each page also includes side panels linking to soft pornography (Globo is a large producer and distributor) as well as multiple panels showing products for sale through Globoshopping. A panel at the bottom of each page scrolls through shoes, laptops, electronics, video games, listing the price for each, most of which are probably produced in one of the bric nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China). Incredibly, perhaps the only news not officially linked to the police and military was produced by adolescents living in Complexo do Alemão. René Silva, who was seventeen years old when military actions commenced, is resident of the Morro de Adeus favela. He founded a community newspaper, Voz da Comunidade, when he was only thirteen, which he wrote and produced by photocopy to report on the news in Complexo do Alemão. When military operations commenced, Silva hired five of his friends (one as young as eleven) in various parts of Complexo do Alemão to report on events by email and

180

Navigation

camera phone. Voz da Comunidade then began to post its reports on Twitter,12 and followers began to notice that its tweets had utterly scooped large media outlets like Globo. With first-hand accounts and interviews with effected residents, Voz da Comunidade was the first outlet to report from street-level on the palpable fear felt by faveleiros, incidents of police intimidation, and multiple incidents of police brutality, violence, and theft of innocent bystanders. For his work, René Silva has become a noted figure in Brazilian life, at least from November 2010 to February 2011. The Voz da Comunidade Twitter feed began with 160 followers. It now has over forty-five thousand, and it has its own stand-alone website. Silva has received multiple offers of patronage for Voz da Comunidade, including scholarships for journalism school. A computer company has offered a donation of computers. Silva has appeared on one of Brazil’s most popular talk/variety programs, O Show do Huck (hosted by Luciano Huck), on tv Globo, of course. And he has received offers of sponsorship from three cellular phone companies, chocolate and cosmetics companies, and a bank (Sampaio 2010). Twitter feeds from Voz da Comunidade continue unabated. Like most news cycles in Brazil, reports regarding Complexo do Alemão slowed considerably after an explosive few weeks in November and early December. Nevertheless, the events of November 2010 signal a shift – and perhaps a definitive change – in how Brazilian society is now mapped, as what I would follow Manuel Castells in calling “network society” (whether or not actual digital networks are employed). The military takeover of Complexo do Alemão began when one network (Comando Vermelho, which is an end-point node for another global commercial network, that of cocaine) attempted to seize a traffic network, owned by the state, utilized for flows of automobiles within the city and between cities in the region. Because the state wished to portray itself as a central and hegemonic node in the networks of global capitalism (those of finance, manufacturing, agriculture) – a status symbolized by the nation’s predominance in global sports – the state responded with “shock and awe” in order to install a web of community-based police officers throughout the area. Whether by design, the image of the state’s assertion of “network” sovereignty was then transmitted globally by a massive, horizontally (and vertically) integrated media network whose name, coincidentally, is “The Globe.” The flow of images was only interrupted, perhaps temporarily, by a local teenager who had access to the World Wide Web.

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

181

New digital technologies have lowered the price of production to such an extent that even the poorest residents of the planet can represent themselves and their cities throughout the world. Voz da Comunidade has garnered a recognized place in Brazil’s political and economic public spheres, which, if one were cynical, would also mean that global networks have almost instantly brought previously unrecognized subjects into their fold. These events expose two different modes of representation utilized to incorporate the morro into the global cidade – on one hand, military surveillance and occupation, and on the other, the “interactive surveillance” of social media, which gives favaleiros some measure of control as to how they make themselves visible to the rest of the globe. Citizenship in Brazil is, in this way, being re-defined or re-mapped through one’s physical proximity to communication networks. That is, rather than being represented by the cidade as literary/poetic or “spiritual” subjects, digital media may allow denizens of the morro to represent themselves as material and participatory citizens circulating in the global city. Curiously, both forms of surveillance (military or social network) partake the self-same technologies of global capitalism, often broadcast over the same channels and same websites. This would seem to confirm Sassen’s theory of “counter-geography”: “[Counter-geographies] overlap with some of the major dynamics that compose globalization: the formation of global markets, the intensification of transnational and translocal networks, and the development of communications technologies, which easily escape conventional surveillance practices. The strengthening and, in some cases, formation of new global circuits is made possible by the existence of a global economic system and the associated development of various institutional supports for cross-border money flows and markets. These counter-geographies are dynamic; to some extent they are part of the shadow economy, but they also use some of the institutional infrastructure of the formal economy” (Sassen 2000, 503–4). Voz da comunidade, at least during the last months of 2010, must be read in terms of spatial flows – flow not only between morro and cidade, but also between the “formal-economic” geography typified by Globo, and the “shadow-economic” counter-geography typified by Compexo do Alemão. At times, it can be nearly impossible to tell the two geographies apart. Such indecipherability of geography/counter-geography begs us to reconceptualize “place” and its relation to political order. “To see”

182

Navigation

often means “to understand,” but in a place defined by global flow, mere visibility is not true understanding. Rather than visibility (or invisibility), I would conclude by saying that the “place of flows” (not to be confused with Castells’s “space of flows”) must be understood in terms of translation, in the sense of the Latin root, translatio, to carry across from one place to the next. To move through the formal geographies of globalization implies the ability to translate oneself instantly from one’s current location to anywhere else on the globe. To move from the counter-geographies of globalization may imply the use of the same machines of translation, but only to make movements that are not formally decipherable. Perhaps one’s untranslatability might be used for tactical advantage, but this is not necessarily the case always. Accordingly, the geographical markers of the global city are no longer agora, oikos, and naos. I would propose an alternate trio of terms: globe (the space of transnational/multinational commerce), city (the sovereign territory of law and citizenship), and favela (everywhere else).13 As I have indicated elsewhere, these three sites are not necessarily places in the traditional sense (Read 2012). They would have to be conceived as virtual flows of information, densities of network traffic. Some of these densities (which I term “exones”) channel flows of information that are readily translatable across the globe. Others (which I term “intrones”) channel flows of information that are not readily translatable, and hence they may appear to the globe as noise, as locally situated (and thus of no concern to global flow), and/or as direct threats to global order. These flows may overlap, but they do not always coincide, and they are not commensurable with one another. To my mind, it is necessary to underscore that there is no inherent “right” in the relation between globe and favela. The exone has no natural right to translate the introne according to its own “global” language. There are only things and bodies to be moved around. There are only mediated flows of information between organic bodies and inorganic machines, between human and nonhuman actors. For any sense of right to be justified, the metaphysics of civic participation may have to give way to new technologies: a new sense of city as a technology interceding between globe and favela to make the informational ecosystem formed by them meaningful and sustainable. The political task of this city is to regulate and channel translations (flow) from globe (formal geography) to favela (countergeography) and back again, in a way that is proper to each.

Sovereignty, Globalization, and Media Representation

183

On this point, one should note that favela is a word that as of yet has no proper translation beyond Brazilian Portuguese. Everyone knows what it is. No one quite has the words to describe it in their own language.

NOTES

1 Technically, under Saskia Sassen’s original definition of it, a “global city” is a complex of office buildings that house command-and-control centers for global multinational corporations (Sassen 2001). The global city is therefore not the entire city, but merely a district within a city. In this technical sense, I would like to hold onto the notion that Rio de Janeiro does not “contain” a global city, in the same way that São Paulo does (in the Marginal Pinheiros district) or New York City does (Wall Street). As a matter of common usage, of course, one says that São Paulo is a “global city” or New York is “global city”; however, the point of this article is to ponder sections of Rio that are considered to be “excluded” from globalization, even though their “exclusion” is integral to the formation of the global city phenomenon. 2 See Chakrabarty 2008, particularly his discussion of the oncoming Anthropocene Era. 3 As an aside, one should note how Flusser implicitly critiques Heidegger in these lines. In “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger argues that modern life – not to mention to ravages of the war – had relegated “man” to a state of homelessness and “undwelling.” Heidegger therefore argues that building should allow “man” to dwell in the world properly, to recognize his [sic] interconnectedness with other men, with nature, and with the supernatural. Heidegger essentially makes a case for the (re-)construction of a temple space (naos) from which “man” could contemplate his own time and place (Dasein) in the world. For Flusser, such a notion in the contemporary world is patently absurd since the temple-space, and any theory that goes on there, is but a “fuzzy set” that bears a blurred relation to political and economic, public and private, spaces. 4 Significantly, a similar thesis pervades the work of Roberto Esposito. Although quite different from Agamben’s work in key respects, Esposito theorizes the exclusion/inclusion, People/people, dialect through that of communitas and immunitas. The formation of political community implies the immunization of “foreign” bodies within it. Unfortunately, there is insufficient space in the present chapter to do Esposito’s arguments any justice.

184

5

6 7

8

9 10 11

12 13

Navigation

Yet it must be stated that a reading of Esposito and Agamben in conjunction may provide a far more complete understanding of how sovereignty materializes in urban space under globalization. See Esposito 2009. In distinction to US slavery, Brazilian slaves did not always live in close quarters to their owners. Urban slaves often lived on their own and may have been rented out by absent owners whom they did not really know personally. This generally left a good deal of leeway for slaves to escape or to lead relatively autonomous existences within the highly circumscribed areas available to them. To clarify, this does not mean that Brazilian slaves were any freer than other slaves elsewhere. In terms of Rio’s growth as a city, for instance, it simply means that slaves had to build their own slums to live in. For a recent account of the mobilization of such cultural groups in Latin America for social services, see Yúdice 2003. Although not mentioned in the episode, it may be important to note that Roberto Jorge Haddock Lobo (1817–69) was a prominent physician and politician who served president of the lower house of the Brazilian Parliament. He was one of the first proponents of state-led public health initiatives based on scientific research. As such, Haddock Lobo may be said one of the forefathers of modern biopolitics in Brazil. The Centro de Estudos sobre Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (cetic) estimates that 67 percent of urban internet users in Brazil utilized the Internet for social networking regularly in 2009, out of the 49 percent of the total urban population that used the Internet. Only 27 per cent of Brazilian households, however, have Internet access in the home (cetic, www.cetic.br, accessed 30 December 2010). For a more detailed study of the political incorporation of cultural institutions in Latin America, see Yúdice 2003. I deal with such patterns of urban growth in two articles. See Read 2006 and 2009. Manuel Castells offers detailed analysis of the networked structure of the Latin American drug trade in End of Millennium (1998), 196–211. However, Castells treats only the upper echelon of the industry (production, financing, money laundering), but does not examine street-level distribution in great detail. @vozdacomunidade, www.twitter.com/vozdacomunidade, last accessed 28 February 2011. As contemporary Stoics in the arcades and strips malls beside the global city, we academics will have to find interstices between the globe, the city, and the favela from which to generate theory and critique. Footnotes are a start, but they will ultimately provide insufficient space for such an endeavor.

9 The Urban Night W I L L STR AW

The night of our cities no longer resembles that howling of dogs of the Latin shadows or the wheeling bat of the Middle Ages or that image of sufferings which is the night of the Renaissance. She is a vast sheet-metal monster pierced by countless knives. The blood of the modern night is a singing night. Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant

In 2010, a group of French anthropologists announced the birth of a scholarly field devoted to the study of night (Galinier et al. 2010). The object of this field would be something called “nocturnity,” defined as nighttime “transformations induced by internal and external physical changes experienced by the human body, and their cultural interpretations” (Galinier et al. 2010, 819).1 With their emphasis on the individual human body, the founders of “nocturnity” were not centrally concerned with the place of night in the life of cities. Nevertheless, their call to study nocturnal phenomena was one culmination of two decades of rich research on the social and cultural significance of night. Most of that research has been concerned with the urban night. Early milestones in this wave of writing on the urban include suggestive books by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and Joachim Schlör on European cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Schivelbusch 1995; Schlör 1998). These have given way to a series of works written by historians that trace the shifting status of night between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century (Delattre 2000; Palmer 2000; Ekirch

186

Navigation

2005; Cabantous 2009; Koslovsky 2011). Studies of nighttime in the twentieth century have occurred across a wider range of disciplines, as art historians, sociologists, and others use the night as a conceptual field on which to draw together issues as disparate as visual aesthetics, leisure practices, and social relationships within the modern world.2 While the launch of nocturnity as the focus of a new academic field has met with limited take-up, interest in the urban night cuts across key disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In this chapter, I will gather up approaches to the urban night within four broad clusters of theme and method. The first of these is concerned with the changing status of night within Western modernity, and with the emergence of a new public culture of the night. A growing body of historical scholarship has addressed the interplay of technological innovation, urbanization, and democratization in transforming the character of night from the early modern period onwards. A second cluster of approaches to the urban night is of interest more for the models of night that it constructs and employs. These works treat the night as a material form (a veil, for example) or as a territory to be inhabited, traversed, and mapped. In the third section of this chapter, I will examine the status of the urban night within the discourses of public policy. Since the early 1990s, the night has emerged as the explicit focus of government policy at several levels, and of citizen activism aimed at shaping that policy. Finally, I will discuss the place of different artistic forms within the 24-hour daily cycle, with particular attention to those practices that seek to challenge the division between day and night. C U LTU R E S O F T H E NI G H T

The passage from day to night in Western cities is gently but insightfully captured in Claude Chabrol’s 1960 film Les bonnes femmes. The titular characters of this film work in an electrical appliance shop on a Parisian street. The rhythms of work in which they are caught are by now alien to most North Americans, and slowly disappearing from Europe itself. This is a world of long lunch breaks and 7:00 p.m. closings, of the camaraderie that takes shape in small, owner-operated shops. In a familiar pattern, the passage from day to night in Les bonnes femmes is marked by the growing sexualization of time. The characters

The Urban Night

187

of Les bonnes femmes spend much of the daytime in a languorous boredom that gives way here to the intensity of nighttime encounters desired or resisted. Commercial transactions conducted with distance and formality during the day give way to the more obviously physical, nocturnal activities of swimming, dancing, and embracing. In his study of the Parisian night in the nineteenth century, Delattre describes this transition: “the approach of evening prompts an eagerness, a need for movement whose most obvious signs are clustered in the Boulevard: the pleasures promised by artificial lighting heal the weight of a day devoted to the ordinariness of social obligations” (Delattre 2000, 178). The world depicted in Les bonnes femmes comes very late in a process that Craig Koslovsky (2011), in his study of night in the early modern period, calls the “nocturnalization” of European life. This term designates the movement of more and more social or symbolic practices out of the day and into the night, from the seventeenth century onward. In Koslovsky’s account, sovereigns and court figures of the early modern world were the first to reinvent the night, drawing on its longstanding associations with mystery and the sacred to stage their own power in nighttime spectacles: “Darkness and the night were essential to baroque attempts to articulate and transcend confessional sources of authority: nocturnal darkness intensified the light that represented the Divine or the prince” (Koslovsky 2011, 93). Over the next three hundred years, a number of developments would elicit participation in these nighttime spectacles by a broader range of social groups and classes. These developments included the rise of bourgeois power, the development of nighttime illumination in cities, the growth of nighttime entertainment forms, and the expansion of urban populations. Throughout these transformations, the night remained a time for the staging of spectacles of authority, but the varieties of this authority expanded beyond those of government or aristocracy. They came to include cultural celebrity, monetary wealth, and more elusive forms of social standing. By the late nineteenth century, the spectacle of nightlife had dissolved within a more general sense of what, in France, was known as la société mondaine. The mondaine was a worldly, public culture of cafés and bistros, salons and theatrical openings. It was formed, in Guillaume Pinson’s words, by a set of interconnected

188

Navigation

networks – “familial, professional, political, artistic” – that overlapped with the remnants of a courtly society and, to a great extent, absorbed or displaced these remnants (Pinson 2008, 52). A key event in this “nocturnalization” of European life was the introduction of street lighting in cities. Koslovsky notes that no European city had street lighting in 1660; by 1694, it had been installed in “Paris (1667), Lille (1667), and Amsterdam (1669), followed by Hamburg (1673), Turini (1675), Berlin (1682), Copenhagen (1683), and London (1684–94)” (Koslovsky 2011, 131). By around 1800, Alain Montandon suggests, the popular or bourgeois evening stroll had displaced the military promenade as the most common form of collective movement along a city’s main thoroughfares (Montandon 2009, 13). Mark J. Bouman links the installation of lighting systems to the emergence of a “mercantile society,” in which nocturnal city lighting made possible late-night shopping and 24-hour industrial production (Bouman 1987, 10). It is difficult to disentangle cause and effect here, to separate the increase in demand for nighttime activity from the technological developments that made it possible. Anke Gleber captures the multiple ways in which urban lighting multiplied the variety of urban activities and their spatial extensions, each reverberating with others to produce the general sense of a new culture of the urban night: “The cultural history of every illumination in the street undergoes revolutionary transformations, particularly in the nineteenth century, when an increase in the numbers of pedestrians, the extension of streets that can be passed at night, the amount of time that can be spent in the streets, and the quantities of stimuli that one may expect to experience, multiply to an extent that until then was unimaginable” (Gleber 1999, 31). It is common, in histories of the urban night, to note the movement of distinct activities forward in the 24-hour cycle. For both Alain Cabantous and Koslovsky, the increased lateness of meals between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is a key index of the nocturnalization they are keen to trace. Cabantous notes that supper, within upper-class urban French society, took place three hours later in 1740 than in 1690 (Cabantous 2009, 275; Koslovsky 2011, 129). As the activities of day moved into the urban night, we should see such activities as not simply postponed, but as constituting new gravitational poles around which other activities organized themselves. Here, again, Chabrol’s film Les bonnes femmes gives us a more recent image of this organization. As the central characters of this film end their workdays,

The Urban Night

189

a variety of plot lines, encounters, and motives converge on the scenes in which the main characters take their mid-evening meals. In these scenes, the compression or overlaying of activities is most intense: characters eat, drink, dance, embrace, laugh, and talk almost simultaneously. As the night goes on, this clustering unravels. Drinking, kissing, or dancing become distinct, unitary ways of concluding a night out; each marks an individual’s fate in the games of risk and opportunity that fill their nighttimes. The narrative of the night is one in which multiple activities are layered upon each other, then stripped away. TH E NIGH T A S FO R M A ND TE R R ITO RY

The nocturnalization of Western cities, described so exhaustively by Koslovsky and others, has spurred poetic and moralizing engagements with the night. The key tension around which these engagements turn is that between urban lighting, a product of technological modernity, and a darkness that is no longer natural but given meaning and substance through its interaction with light. In 1850, George Foster spoke of a “thick veil of night” descending on the American city, squeezing the expansive openness of the day into barely visible strata of sinful behaviour (Foster and Blumin 1990, 1). Likewise, in his history of the shadow, Max Milner writes of nighttime darkness as an “enveloping veil, an opaque cloud, an insidious atmosphere annihilating contours and colours” (Milner 2005, 28). These images of night as a veil laid over the modern city may be counterposed to the notion of electrified light as a blanket that gently brings comfort and security to urban life. Writing of the early days of electrification, David Nasaw repeats Theodore Dreiser’s claims about the protective character of nighttime illumination, which “welcomed and protected the decent people of the city” (Nasaw 1992, 16). Here, night is rendered less oppressively heavy by light, which dilutes the night and diminishes its opaque weightiness. In his Poétique de la Ville, Pierre Sansot notes that light may come, at those moments of its fullest expression, to banish the night rather than simply dilute it. More commonly, he suggests, “the urban night can absorb lighting and multicoloured neon without ceasing to be night” (Sansot 1971, 146, my translation). Light comes to act, within the night, as the generator of an unease, rendering the night tense and nervous. It does so, Sansot claims, in two ways. In the first, light

190

Navigation

endlessly reiterates the promise of pleasure that has become central to the meaning of night. Then, nighttime lighting nourishes the fetishes of night, fixing our attention on all those objects which, in the night, come alive: “neckties, bracelets, purses, hands, shoes, looks, even revolvers” (Sansot 1971, 147). The enchantment of the night no longer resides in its lingering associations with a pre-modern sense of magic and the supernatural. Rather, the night enchants through practices of illumination, which are distinct from those of the day and whose objects are the accoutrements of nighttime dynamism. Night and light, in these heterogeneous accounts, become forces or agents capable of defining place and sensibility. A useful conceptual tool is provided by Caroline Renard’s notion of night as a “matièretemps” (a matter-time), as both a substance and a unit of time. For Renard, the “matter” of night, at least in its conceptual representations “resides in its capacity to make forms disappear, to erase them from space, to devour them. Tied to an aesthetic of soft erasure and brutal disappearance, night possesses, in the realm of story-telling (musical, literary or cinematic), its own time. It is a matière-temps that erodes the real and leads to its loss, to a black hole” (Renard 1999/2000, 49, my translation). More expansive imaginings of the night will see it less as form or matter than as a kind of territory – not just a period of time, but a place. In the evocative description offered by the Canadian poet and essayist Christopher Dewdney, the urban night is a world with its own populations and activities, an inverted substitute for the daytime city: A city turns inside out at night. After the outflow of rush hour there is an hour’s pause before the inflow of recreational pilgrims streams back into the city’s core to fill the vacuum. The offices and buildings that teemed during day stand empty while the theatres, bars, discos, casinos, restaurants, opera houses, arcades, and concert halls begin to open. But only the core entertainment districts are active at night. Otherwise, the city is quiescent, and the municipal business of street cleaning and emergency road and transit repairs takes place without the hindrance of traffic. (2004, 89) Twentieth century literature and cinema are full of works that restrict themselves to the night, either as a self-imposed constraint or

The Urban Night

191

in order to highlight the sense of night as an autonomous world. As Evelyne Cohen shows, the theme of “Parisian nights” became a familiar theme in French literature between the two world wars in the work of authors drawn to evocations of a city whose daytime monumentality was missing (Cohen 1999, 273). Literary and cinematic treatments of the night will often organize themselves in relation to two broad tendencies. In one of these, the urban night is the spacetime of an itinerary, to be traversed in voyages of discovery or escape. Novels like Philippe Soupault’s novel Les dernières nuits de Paris (1928) or such films as Deadline at Dawn (1946, dir. Harold Clurman), La traversée de Paris (1956; dir. Claude Autant-Lara) and After Hours (1985, dir. Martin Scorcese) follow quests or missions through the city as they move towards a resolution that usually comes at dawn. In another pattern, the urban night is captured in more static, anthropological fashion as a world with its indigenous inhabitants and recurring rituals. French picture newspapers of the mid-twentieth century were drawn regularly to documenting the night worlds of those who worked in the night, like taxi drivers or pharmacists.3 Minor American crime films of the 1940s and 1950s would focus on the typical (rather than exceptional) events that filled the nighttime street or occupied those working night shifts in neighbourhood police precincts. Examples include Behind Green Lights (1946, dir. Otto Brower), The City That Never Sleeps (1953, dir. John H. Auer), Between Midnight and Dawn (1950, dir. Gordon Douglas). The sense of night as territory finds its most literal expression in visual or informational forms that seek to measure and represent nighttime activity in cities. In Les nuits de Paris: États généraux, the 2010 report of a conference organized by the City Hall of Paris, different maps show the clusters of commercial activity typical of different hours of the night. Following the closure of most bars, at 2:00 a.m., activities (and the graphic marks representing them) cluster around a few places of continued commerce, like Pigalle, Les Halles, or the Bastille. Later still, the report suggests, nighttime activity retreats to the few active sites of what it calls the “libertine” Paris, that of sex shops and after-hours clubs (Paris 2010). With the deepening of night, successive maps show the convergence of activity-marks towards a few isolated areas, then their almost total disappearance. In 1977, the French art historian Anne Caquelin illustrated her book La ville la nuit with almost identical maps, capturing, in successive images, the stages by which Paris shut down: “Hour by hour, the city withdraws.

192

Navigation

Sites of culture and sites for the consumption of pleasure reach out along the dividing line of the Seine, then come together to end up in at a few points: the Champs-Elysée in the West, the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse in the south west, Montmartre in the North” (Cauquelin 1977, 23, my translation). To this sense of a city’s almost natural expansion and contraction we may contrast the renderings of the urban night produced by Montreal’s municipal reform movement of the 1950s, the Comité de moralité publique. Obsessed with the prevalence of nighttime commerce and sociability in a city widely viewed as corrupt, members of the Comité drove around, night after night, noting which restaurants or nightclubs were open and registering the sorts of activity transpiring within or outside them. For the Comité de moralité publique, the extension of entertainment and human intercourse late into the night had nothing to do with semi-natural cycles of invasion and retreat. It was the result of deliberate infractions of urban law and propriety by transgressors who could be identified. This is one excerpt from Comité’s “Rapport de la tournée des Grills et Clubs” for Sunday, 20 January 1952, from 1:30 to 4:30 a.m. 3:45 Palermo, rue Iberville coin Mont-Royal Centre reconnu de prostitution pour les jeunes ouvriers de l’est, taverne en bas, grille au deuxième et chambres au troisième. Fermé 3:50 Mocambo – grand ouvert, foule à la porte qui sort et entre, taxis, stationnement dans les environs, ce grill est un endroit bien fréquenté par prostituées pour les jeunes de l’est (rue Notre-Dame & Havre.) 4:00 Café de l’Est-, rue Notre-Dame Gens sortant, c’est la fermeture. Plusieurs automobiles stationnées, lumière à l’intérieur. Centre de prostitution important pour Maisonneuve 4:01 Rainbow – fermé 4:30 De retour à la maison.4 As tools for capturing the nightly withering of commercial activity, the lists of the Comité de moralité publique are rich in their relentless specificity, in the levels of empirical detail and moral judgment they provide. (As such, they have proved highly useful to those trying

The Urban Night

193

to reconstruct, albeit in celebratory fashion, Montreal’s nightlife during this period.) The night maps of Paris, in contrast, submerge any specificity within the more abstract dynamic by which nocturnal urban energies gather and retreat. In both cases, the nighttime city is a territory occupied by its distinctive populations, then deserted for a time before the populations of the day arrive to fill it again. The question of the distinctiveness of night as a territory or matièretemps has been posed in recent years in relation to new practices of lighting cities at night. Tied to the broader assertion of city-based tourism and urban creativity, strategies for the design of nighttime lighting have gathered strength since the early 1960s at least. Roger Narboni, a leading lighting designer (and historian of his field), notes that the impulse to conceive the overall lighting of urban areas using coherent design principles expanded with the building of new housing developments in the early 1960s (Narboni 2012, 37). The functionality of public lighting, in these cases, was obvious, but modern lighting design was further intended to signify modernity and security, the better to distinguish new residential developments from older, more central parts of a city. In the twenty-first century, lighting design has followed two broad paths of development. One has involved the ordinary, everyday lighting of street lamps and traffic signals. Here, incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs have been replaced by solid state (led) lighting, which has trickled “upwards” from flashlights and consumer electronics to more public and infrastructural uses (California Sustainability Alliance 2012). Raleigh, Virginia, and Toronto, Ontario were the first two cities to subscribe to the so-called led City initiative, which called for the comprehensive replacement of older lighting systems by those employing solid state technology (Remaking Cities Institute Pittsburgh 2011). While the impulses behind this embrace of solid state lighting are primarily ecological and fiscal, more theatrical deployments of public lighting have, since the late twentieth century, been part of the broader revitalization of the urban night. Lighting design has emerged as a vibrant field on the margins of architecture and urban planning, its history marked by already-canonical events like the illumination of the Eiffel Tour in 1986 to commemorate the Pope’s visit to Paris (Narboni 2012, 37). Elaborate designs for nighttime lighting in Lyon, France, or in Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles have raised the question of whether nighttime lighting should

194

Navigation

reveal the daytime city, highlighting civic and historical monuments that otherwise recede into darkness, or strive to enchant the city by emphasizing its other features, by casting its nocturnal landscape as distinct. The simplest strategies of nighttime lighting, Narboni suggests (in terms both gendered and anthropomorphizing) do little more than add makeup (maquillage urbain) to the buildings and other structures (canals, parks) that dominate the day (Narboni 2012, 9). By dressing up these features, it might be argued, designers strengthen the association of the night with a seductive glamour. However, by highlighting the institutions of daytime civility rather than the distinct zones and practices of nighttime urban culture, these strategies protect the official city from nocturnal distractions that threaten its centrality. TH E NIGH T A S O B J E CT O F PO L ICY

In 1995, the Quebec geographer Luc Bureau wrote that “the law hesitates before the night as before a half-open door” (Bureau 1995, 75). This image suggests both the fear of the night, as a territory entered only with caution, and the alterity of the night, as that lifeworld in which the law’s applicability is not certain. As Luc Gwiazdzinski has suggested, “in the nocturnal city, the individual is not able to fully enjoy his or her rights as citizen”(Gwiazdzinski 2005, 197, my translation). The passage from day to night produces, in Gwiazdzinski’s terms, a “discontinuous citizenship” (197) that waxes and wanes throughout the 24-hour cycle on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, and other markers of identity. It is not necessary to trace here the long history of social, political, and textual injunctions against the night and its inhabitants: the curfews, closing hours, vagrancy and solicitation laws, journalistic exposés, and other instruments, legal and discursive, that have sought to limit and define the activities of the night.5 Rather, I will examine, here, some of the more recent ways in which cities and their inhabitants have sought to renegotiate their relationship to the night. In 1994, urban scholars at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom organized a conference whose title contained two terms with ascendant influence in the field of municipal policy: “24-hour city” and “nighttime economy” (Lovatt et al. 1994). This conference brought together representatives of city government, police

The Urban Night

195

officials, cultural entrepreneurs, and a variety of other stakeholders. Among other things, this event was one milestone in the settling-in of ideas that would become foundations of cultural policy during the years of Tony Blair’s Labour Government: ideas about creative industries, creative clusters, creative economies, and so on. In 1994, though, and in a massively deindustrialized and culturally vibrant city like Manchester, the novel appeal of these ideas was easy to grasp. Among the key ideas expressed at the Manchester conference (and at other events with similar agendas) were these: that the urban night is a time of significant and productive economic activity, not just that interval in which the labours of the day are rewarded, through leisure or consumption; that the night is a resource for cities, rather than simply a set of problems to be regulated and controlled; and that those who inhabit and work in the night may claim the rights and privileges of the city just as justly and forcefully as those who occupy the day. With widely varying degrees of concreteness, these ideas have insinuated their way into urban policy and cultural policy across the world since the early 1990s, carried in the laptops of consultants and concretized in the “cultural plans” that even the smallest of cities now commission and debate. In North America, ideas of the nighttime economy and 24-hour city have been interwoven (and often confused) with notions of the creative class put forward by Richard Florida and others.6 Fifteen years following the Manchester conference, we can trace the widespread acceptance of notions of the nighttime economy across an expanding corpus of policy documents or commercial initiatives. In 2009, the Downtown Late Night Task Force of Victoria, British Columbia, released a report entitled Late Night, Great Night! … Putting the Pieces Together. The report began by listing nighttime “behaviours” judged to be tarnishing the image of Victoria: “excessive intoxication, vomiting, spitting,” “street crowding after bars close,” and so on (Downtown Late Night Taskforce 2009, 2). A decade earlier, the recommended solutions to these behaviours would no doubt have involved restrictions on the sale of alcohol and other measures intended to control the populations occupying Victoria’s nighttime. Instead, the 2009 Task Force called for the “Creation of a Welcoming and Diversified Evening and Late Night Economy.” More urinals and other facilities were to be built, closing hours for food vendors to be extended, and a wider range of entertainment options made available.

196

Navigation

As with the extension of pub closing hours in the UK, which followed discussions like those which took place at the 1994 Manchester conference, the strategy proposed to Victoria’s city government involved diluting unwanted behaviours within a rich variety of other ways of occupying the nighttime city. In the same year, Edmonton, Alberta was chosen by the Responsible Hospitality Institute, a US-based nonprofit organization that services the hospitality industry, as North America’s most “Sociable City.” These awards are based on a number of criteria – the safety of a city’s inner core, for example, and a less easily measurable cultural vibrancy. These criteria cohere through a city’s success in developing its nighttime economy (City of Edmonton 2013). While, in the United Kingdom, official uses of the term “night time economy” may be traced back at least as long ago as the 1950s, the sweep of the term through public and industry discourse in North America has been swifter and more recent. TH E A RTS O F DAY A ND NIG H T

The process of nocturnalization discussed earlier in this chapter has been marked by the clustering and unravelling of nighttime practices, as different sorts of activity have been joined to others and then pulled apart. The expansion of theatre-going in the nineteenth century made late-night suppers (after an evening’s performance) common, while the rise of the supper club, in the twentieth century, made public dining and attendance at an entertainment spectacle coincide. Until the 1960s, people would regularly listen to music, dance, drink, and eat in the same place, over several hours of an evening. Since then, these activities have been disarticulated, redistributed across different spaces and blocks of time. The decline of the supper club in the 1960s allowed dancing to move into the far edges of the night, as if dancing was now unmoored and could find more fugitive places and times. Late at night, dancing and dance music have been severed from the sociability of dining, and (perhaps in consequence) become more subcultural and youth-dominated. This question of the overlaying of practices becomes more complex when we pursue it in relationship to artistic forms and activities. The cycle of culture and entertainment in cities has come, with time, to divide the arts of exhibition and static textuality from those of performance, leaving the former in the day and allowing the latter to

The Urban Night

197

multiply at night. Gallery exhibitions typically occur during the day, with a few evenings open during the week, on the model of retail stores. There are any number of seemingly practical reasons for this: daytime openings synchronize the upfront activity of exhibition with the backstage work of gallery professionals, of managers and curators, whose workday follows that of other professionals. For the most part, daytime art events are free of food and drink, and thus avoid those problems of sanitation, propriety, and ambiguous motivation that mark cultural events of the evening or nighttime. Over a hundred years, the withering of daytime variety shows, theatrical matinées, and afternoon film showings has widened the temporal divide between the cultures of exhibition and performance. (The sense of noble accomplishment that comes with seeing foreign or obscure films in a festival is enhanced by the fact that these are often seen during the day, and thus more closely linked to gallery or museum attendance than to recreational film going.) The arts of performance – classical musical concerts and plays – typically unfold in mid-evening, even if this requires that administrative functions be undertaken by people who are at home by the time a performance has begun. Live rock concerts and dance music nights, as we know, will come even later in the night. In these distinctions, typically, increased movement and exuberance replace stasis as night replaces day. If we chart the typical sequence of cultural events from day to night – through a detailed analysis of the events listings in alternative weeklies, for example – we find an increase in levels of oral (rather than visual or printed) communication, a heightening of the proximity between people, and the joining together of different sensebased experiences (combinations of sight, sound, and touch.) If the sequencing of cultural events helps to concretize important aesthetic divisions, we might examine those practices designed to transgress the normal divisions of the 24-hour cycle. In their efforts to override the divisions of time, we see cultural communities negotiating the competing values of stasis and exuberance, decorum and vitality, stability and risk. In Montreal, as in many other cities, gallery openings or vernissages typically occur from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., at a point of transition between day and night. Through their openings, galleries signal their intention to bind the durability of the exhibit to the momentary sociability of the party, before both retreat back into their normal zones within the 24-hour cycle. In The Creative City, Charles Landry distinguished between what he calls

198

Navigation

the “hard” and “soft” infrastructures of cities: between buildings and institutions, on the one hand, and “the system of associative structures and social networks, connections and human interactions,” on the other (Landry 2008, 5). The gallery opening works quite deliberately to marshal the resources of hard infrastructure in the service of the soft to let people talk and circulate around silent, immobile works of art. The more revealing moments in the life of urban art forms, perhaps, are those in which textuality and performance are brought together, in practices that seek to endow the former with a vitality or populism that will revitalize it or extend its social reach. Here, the passage of day into night is marked by reworkings of textuality as performativity – reworkings in which new cultural forms take shape. In well-known instances, performance art has moved out of its conceptualist roots to become part of nighttime music scenes, as in New York in the late 1960s or early 1980s. These convergences helped to bring the visual arts to the temporal edges of music scenes, even as they produced problems of distinction or judgment. (Did Lydia Lunch, at one point, become a performance artist? Did Laurie Anderson become a rock star?) “Post-performancism” was the term offered by critic Douglas Davis offered to describe the sorts of art practices that took place, more and more, within nightclubs and on the edges of alternative music scenes (Davis 1981, 6). Efforts to dissolve or displace the boundaries between night and day often must confront the long-standing and conflicting moral associations of each. The “fantasy city” described by John Hannigan is one which offers hedonistic, morally suspect pleasures typically associated with night (like gambling) around the clock, on the model of the Nevada casino (Hannigan 1998, 3). An inversion of sorts of the fantasy city may be found in the “First Night” celebrations of New Year’s Eve in many American cities (like Burlington, Vermont). In these events, sober activities of the day (like strolling with children or playing outdoor games) are carried forth into the night, pushing conventional year-end revelries onto private spaces or even deeper into the night. CONCLUSION : THIN KIN G ABO UT TE M P O RAL COMMU NITIES

In Times in the City and Quality of Life, European scholars Jean-Yves Boulin and Ulrich Mückenberger suggest that we “consider the

The Urban Night

199

social links not only on a spatial basis but also on a temporal one, particularly with the introduction of the concept of temporal communities” (Boulin and Mückenberger 1999, 52). The political status of communities defined by their relationship to time may be difficult to grasp, but it is from within distinct regions of urban time that some of the most intense and persuasive claims to recognition, resources, and rights have come in recent years. Movements to extend the hours of public transit, to limit or protect live nighttime music festivals, or to enhance protective measures for women on city streets at night all presume and encourage a politics of temporal community. At the same time, the long-cherished status of the urban night as a time/place of reinvention, transgression, and aesthetic fluidity finds itself partially challenged by newly installed technologies, which are not merely those of surveillance but of interpellation as well. Solid state lighting, in particular, is marked by two features that enhance its functionality relative to older technologies. In the first place, its emission of light is strictly directional, reducing the sorts of gradations that were a prominent source both of twentieth-century visual effects (as in film noir) and of those shadowy nether regions of the urban night in which refuge might be found. Secondly, led systems make of each light a distinct “address,” linked to computer control systems that may alter the informational content of lighting on the basis of institutional intent or viewer identification (Chen 2008, 36). The increased functionality of led systems threatens to sever nocturnal lighting from those supplements of enchantment and uncertainty that were key features of nighttime citizenship. Histories of night from the early modern period onward show the extent to which moves to occupy the night struggled against religious, then aristocratic claims of dominion over the night. Since the midnineteenth century, struggles over the night have been more clearly based in the claims of identity-based populations co-inhabiting cities – women, sexual communities, the young, and racially or ethnically marked. These populations move in and out of temporal communities, and their relationship to time is rarely the factor that weighs most heavily upon their political status. Nevertheless, as the flurry of recent reflection on the urban night makes clear, ideals of urban citizenship – of the “right to the city” – must encompass the right to occupy the night.

200

Navigation

NOTES

1 Unusually, the launch of “nocturnity” as the focus of an academic field was the lead, front-page news item in the National Post, one of Canada’s daily newspapers, in an article entitled “Out of the Darkness.” See Brean 2010. 2 See, for example, Cauquelin 1977; Bureau 1997; Dewdney 2004; Talbot 2007; Sharpe 2008. 3 See, for example, “La vie des chauffeurs de taxi: Les ‘nuiteux,’” Faits divers 47 (12 January 1933): 14–15; “Pharmacies de nuit,” V 278 (29 January 1950): 8–9. 4 Comité de moralité publique, “Rapport de la tournée des Grills et Clubs,” 20 January 1952, Fonds Comité De Moralité Publique, Centre de recherche Lionel Groulx, Montreal. 3:45 Palermo, Iberville Street, corner of Mont-Royal Well-known centre of prostitution for young workers of the east, tavern downstairs, grill on the second floor, bedrooms on the third. Closed 3:50 Mocambo – wide open, crowd at the door leaving and coming, taxis, parking in the area, this grill is highly frequented by prostitutes and young people from the east (Notre-Dame Street and Havre.) 4:00 Café de l’Est-, Notre-Dame Street People leaving, it’s closing time. Several automobiles parked with inside lights on. Major prostitution centre on Maisonneuve 4:01 Rainbow – closed 4:30 Return home (author’s translation) 5 See, among many other now classic studies, Boyer 1978; Wilson 1991; Gilfoyle 1992; Walkowitz 1992; Nord 1995; Talbot 2007. 6 See, for example, Florida 2005.

Introduction

Locale

This page intentionally left blank

10 “The Company of Strangers”: Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections in Twentieth-Century Popular Fiction and Cinema MAR KUS REISENLEITNER

In urban cultural studies, the city is approached not so much as a physical environment, but rather as an unstable, intricate set of symbolic and material objects and practices, which are germane to the way people negotiate and construct their identities through space and generate socially relevant meaning (cf. Donald 1999). While these meanings are always ambiguous, negotiated, and contested (as are all cultural practices), they are also socially constructed (they are not private but rather collective, situated practices). Cultural studies perspectives can help in understanding these negotiations because these negotiations are mediated. The mediations that I am particularly interested in here are those provided by popular culture. Popular culture itself can be conceived of as a mechanism that gives form to the forces – or, in Scott Lash’s language, “intensities” (Lash and Lury 2007, 15) – that converge in urban space. From this perspective, “the city of tangible surfaces … is inseparable from the city of popular culture, anecdote and memory” (Stevenson 2003, xii). Popular culture emerges with modernity and urbanization as a privileged site for turning historical forces into narrations, as well as for negotiating the contradictions that the urban creates – fundamentally connected to the emergence of a visual, cinematic mode, as both Ackbar Abbas (1997) and James Donald (1999) maintain.

204

Locale

Popular culture also provides a forum for negotiating – sometimes in very unpleasant ways – the contradictions, challenges, and struggles modern urbanity generates as the transnational site of (mis)translation and encounters with inescapable difference. James Clifford has maybe too often been quoted as saying that “in the twentieth century … the currency of culture and identity as performative acts can be traced to their articulation of homelands, safe spaces where the traffic across borders can be controlled. Such acts of control, maintaining coherent insides and outsides, are always tactical. Cultural action, the making and remaking of identities, takes place in the contact zones, along the policed and transgressed intercultural frontiers of nations, peoples, locales. Stasis and purity are asserted – creatively and violently – against historical forces of movement and contamination” (Clifford 1997, 7). The city can be approached as the ultimate contact zone. In the city, it is precisely the operation of, in Clifford’s words, “historical forces of movement and contamination” that is crucial: urban contact zones generate narratives – and histories – that matter for the way people deal with difference, with their “noisy neighbors,” and with “stroppy” strangers (Donald 1999). The intricate contingencies and specificities of cities can be understood as worldly urban “contact points” – semiotic reservoirs for generating narratives and histories, “struggles over meaning and value of history in the present, where ‘the present’ is assumed to have temporal depth” (Morris 1998, 23). Popular culture opens windows into these spaces, providing an inherently transnational framework of encounter. Contemporary strategies for molding global city images may appear to be new, but they hearken back to shared histories and traditions. The histories of many cities that today emphasize their diversity and cosmopolitanism have unfolded within what is described as the master narrative of “colonialism,” and this is particularly true of the former heart of the British Empire. In what follows, I explore historical layers sedimented into twentieth-century popular imaginaries of London’s past in order to trace how popular culture has helped to shape the urban experience of encounters with “strangers” from the “East” (specifically, China) and how the everyday knowledge and common assumptions manifested in popular culture have been produced within a long-established transnational “trade flow” in images and myths of the city. Since the 1980s, London’s Docklands district has come to signify global finance capital, an upscale lifestyle, and boldly futuristic archi-

Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections

205

tecture. The megalomaniac redevelopment and gentrification of this part of London was initiated in 1981 during a Thatcherite atmosphere of ruthless free market ideology, driven by international finance capital and, with the “Big Bang” of 1986 (the deregulation of London’s Stock Exchange operations), contributed to London’s new image as a global center of finance. Relying on the combination of regeneration and enterprise, this gentrification scheme has had expected side effects that have been commented on extensively. Underemployed workingclass communities were replaced by a youthful army of internationally recruited finance-capital office drones lured by salaries and stock options, while historical building substance was transformed into often shoddily built Legoland apartments, heralding the brave new world of global lifestyle in the capital of the “slightly worse for wear” former empire. Building communities and cities from scratch is never an easy task, and the Haussmann-scale monumentality of the Docklands redevelopment scheme seemed to bear this truism out. Gleeful observers from the left delightedly watched during the recession in the 1990s, as Toronto-based Olympia and York, the property development firm spearheading the Canary Wharf development on the Isle of Dogs, collapsed, and apartments and offices sat empty. Despite the hype, not many people seemed to want to live in the futuristic “new city.” But Y2K and millennium fever brought about a turnaround, and the Docklands, nestled around Canary Wharf, is now connected to the “old city” by the Jubilee Tube line and to the world by the London City Airport. Buoyed by images of Cool Britannia, the London Eye (a twenty-first-century Ferris wheel), the Millennium Dome, and other recognizable landmarks, it presents itself as a gated financial lifestyle community, a global and multicultural utopia for not-yet-but-soon-tobe rich kids – the promise of a “Metropolitan water city of the twentyfirst century” (Bird 2000, 305) almost realized. European bistros, designer bars, brand-name clothing emporia, and delis cater to lifestyle tastes, as do personal fitness trainers and high-profile middlebrow concert events, all under the watchful eyes of cctv cameras and ubiquitous security. While the current economic situation has done considerable damage to this utopia, the imaginary persists, and it remains to be seen whether the 2012 Olympic Games has started another boom cycle in the Docklands. During most of the twentieth century, the image of this particular part of the city was very different. It was known as London’s infamous and dreaded Lime House district, the pre-Second World War “China-

206

Locale

town” in the East End where a large part of London’s (very small) Chinese population resided. I would like to use the Docklands to look at the processes that are responsible for the shift in the global imaginary of London as the city of Big Ben, bowler hats, and stiff upper lips towards a future-oriented center of global capital, and the way different imaginary histories have been mobilized in this process. The material remnants of the pre-Second World War era have been mostly either erased (most of Lime House was blitzed during the war) or resignified, which is not entirely true of the historical memory of this period. While the official 1990s redevelopment and gentrification discourse drew on a future-oriented perspective that stressed how little was worth conserving in this part of the city, in 2013 Docklands we find memorial plaques, statues of historical figures, and, since 2003, a branch operation of the Museum of London, wedged between designer bars and corporate highrises and towered over by the mythical businessman instrumental in expanding the Docks at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a visible reminder of the early roots of global capitalism in the British empire. What are we to make of these moments of remembering the past in-between O2 concerts, frantic money making, and heavy drinking? What are we to make of this easy integration into nostalgia, this sanitized version of historical struggle? Quite obviously, the displays and inexorably nostalgic/teleological sequence immanent in the musealization processes present us with a “fabricated and selective history of the docks [and] represents a systematic refusal of class history and struggle” (Bird 2000, 305). The best example of this is the easy incorporation of the Docklands Community Poster Project of the 1980s, a valiant attempt to mobilize grassroots support against redevelopment and gentrification by public displays of art that emphasized democratic organization and the multicultural potential of the area. What was meant as a politically effective artistic way of resistance has now become a piece of nostalgic history in its own right, tucked away in one of the smaller rooms of the museum. As usual, the heritage industry has done a good job of seamlessly integrating, sanitizing, depoliticizing, co-opting, and commodifying historical memory, particularly when the actors themselves have been squeezed out by gentrification. But if one does not want to hubristically assume that the forms of local resistance evidenced by the Community Poster Project, in facing off against global structures of finance capital and homemade neoliberalism, would have endangered

Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections

207

the very foundation of global capital, the question that seems to become urgent in the context of a self-proclaimed city of the future is, why bother to include posters from the community project in the display? In fact, why bother to build a museum in the first place? What are the larger structures behind global flows and nostalgic visions of a city’s history that seem to necessitate that particular historical imaginaries retain a slender foothold in the present? To probe the intricate intertwining of nostalgia and global modernity that London stands for, I turn to cinematic imaginaries in popular culture that have provided powerful narratives for an urban environment too complex to be captured in other forms of collective memory. It is precisely in these imaginaries that we can trace the tradeflow of images that mediate encounters of global strangers and adjust and negotiate the complex histories of global cities. My particular interest is in London’s imaginary negotiation of the British Empire’s connection to China, which imprinted itself on the Docklands/Lime House district. Two B-movies from the 1960s present us with negotiations of SinoBritish encounters in Lime House. They are based on popular thrillers of the early part of the twentieth century and are remarkable because they are German-British co-productions. Das Geheimnis der gelben Narzissen / The Devil’s Daffodil (1961, dir. Ákos Ráthonyi) is part of a German film series that draws on adaptations of British pre-Second World War mystery and colonial novel writer Edgar Wallace, a series that gave German popular film a new lease of life in the television age (Kramp 2005). Two specific developments in the institutional history of German popular culture contributed significantly to this development: the efforts of the Goldmann publishing house to give the genre a form of literary respectability in Germany by starting a paperback series that positioned itself squarely in the gaps between the trivialities of the dime novel (distributed through kiosks rather than bookstores) and highbrow literature; and the ambitions of the Constantin film distribution group to make German cinema entertainment competitive with international productions by drawing on American noir gangster movies while also taking some of its cues from British Hammer Film Production’s successful horror movies. During its heyday, the film series produced four productions per year and was one of the longest running film series in German cinema (it ran until 1972). Still hugely popular in tv re-runs and with a recently released dvd edition, the films feature a cast of stock characters, an offbeat mixture of

208

Locale

humour and horror, and rather convoluted plots. A major factor in the appeal of these films is undoubtedly their settings, particularly the city of London, and its connectedness to the “mysterious orient.” Two years into the series, the first of a few co-productions with British production companies was realized. The Devil’s Daffodil revolves around a gang smuggling drugs from China into London’s demi-monde via the Docklands. It was simultaneously produced in a German and British version. For each version, the main roles were cast with different stars, with the exception of Christopher Lee, who played the yellow-face role of Hong Kong detective “Ling Chu” (and spoke very convincing German). It became one of the most successful productions of the series. Four years later, in 1965, the by then well-known stars of the Edgar Wallace series Joachim Fuchsberger (who had already starred in The Devil’s Daffodil and several other Wallace movies) and Karin Dor, who had also achieved fame in the series, were placed in another co-production that revived another, even better-known pre-war thriller writer: Sax Rohmer, inventor of the infamous Dr Fu Manchu. The Face of Fu Manchu was directed by Don Sharp, of Hammer Film reputation, co-produced by Hallam Films and Constantin Films, and successfully combined the established recipes of the Wallace series and Hammer horrors. Apart from German stars Fuchsberger, Dor, and Walter Rilla, the film’s international profile was raised by supporting actress Tsai Chin in the role of Lin Tang, Fu Manchu’s daughter (Tsai Chin was the first Chinese to enter the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts). In The Face of Fu Manchu, which is set in London’s Lime House, an evil Chinese doctor, supported by an army of supposedly Burmese thugs (most of the extras are again in yellow face) abducts a German professor (Walter Rilla) and his daughter (Karin Dor) to gain control over a poison that would enable him to rule the world but is predictably thwarted (but not obliterated) by the unlikely combo of Professor Martens’s athletic assistant (Fuchsberger) and Detective Nayland Smith (Nigel Green in a role that embodies British masculinity at its worst). Though not as prolific as the Wallace series, the Fu Manchu thriller produced four sequels in declining quality, budget, and appeal (all of them with German actors in major roles, including supporting villains). The imaginary London presented in this film production is surprisingly close to Sax Rohmer’s, the author who almost singlehandedly

Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections

209

established the reputation of Lime House as well as the strange and fear-inspiring qualities of the Chinese: Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government – which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man. (Rohmer [1913] 2008, 17) This description of Fu Manchu as the personification of the “yellow peril” and evil incarnate has earned its author a reputation as one of the most heinous racists in the altogether not overly politically correct tradition of early twentieth-century crime writing. But equally important are the spatial imaginaries that connect the district of London where Fu Manchu is supposedly active – the East End’s Chinatown Lime House – to the river, the empire, and the East. Rohmer set the tone with his thriller Dope (1919), cashing in on the sensationalist death of West End star actress Billie Carleton from an overdose in 1918. “Billie Carleton was found dead in her Savoy Hotel suite the morning after her starring role at the great Victory celebration at the Albert Hall on 28 November. The inquest decided that she had died of cocaine poisoning and again connections to Chinatown were made” (Seed 2006, 70). In Rohmer’s account, the lure of addiction for the female protagonist is at the same time a journey into the dark oriental spaces of metropolitan London, from the demi-monde of the Strand (the theatre district) into the underworld of Chinatown: As the car sped along the Strand, where theatre-goers might still be seen making for tube, omnibus, and tramcar, and entered Fleet Street, where the car and taxicab traffic was less, a mutual silence fell upon the party. Two at least of the travellers were watching the lighted windows of the great newspaper offices with a vague sense of foreboding, and thinking how, bound upon a secret purpose, they were passing along the avenue of publicity … Cornhill and

210

Locale

Leadenhall Street, along which presently their route lay, offered a prospect of lamp-lighted emptiness, but at Aldgate they found themselves amid East End throngs which afforded a marked contrast to those crowding theatreland; and from thence through Whitechapel and the seemingly endless Commercial Road it was a different world into which they had penetrated. Rita hitherto had never seen the East End on a Saturday night, and the spectacle afforded by these busy marts, lighted by naphtha flames, in whose smoky glare Jews and Jewesses, Poles, Swedes, Easterns, dagoes, and halfcastes moved feverishly, was a fascinating one. She thought how utterly alien they were, the men and women of a world unknown to that society upon whose borders she dwelled; she wondered how they lived, where they lived, why they lived. The wet pavements were crowded with nondescript humanity, the night was filled with the unmusical voices of Hebrew hucksters, and the air laden with the smoky odor of their lamps. Tramcars and motorbuses were packed unwholesomely with these children of shadowland drawn together from the seven seas by the magnet of London … Crossing Limehouse Canal, the car swung to the right into West India Dock Road. The uproar of the commercial thoroughfare was left far behind. Dark, narrow streets and sinister-looking alleys lay right and left of them, and into one of the narrowest and least inviting of all Mareno turned the car. In the dimly-lighted doorway of a corner house the figure of a Chinaman showed as a motionless silhouette. “Oh!” sighed Mollie Gretna rapturously, “a Chinaman! I begin to feel deliciously sinful!” (Rohmer 1919, 144) In Rohmer’s imaginary, the metropolis had been invaded by a racialized Other. Walks, rides, and chases through ethnic districts of the city, districts which are described as disorienting, confusing, threatening, “inscrutable,” shrouded in fog and darkness, with numerous subterranean passages near the river are pervasive. These drawn-out descriptions invariably start with a familiar, homely urban space (a hotel or apartment in the city center, the theatre district) and progressively defamiliarize by moving the protagonists to less familiar quarters of the city – Chinatown. This is, of course, generic to the tradition of mystery writing. The upheavals that accompanied modernization and urbanization resulted in

Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections

211

new ways of seeing the city as opaque and potentially dangerous, with ensuing efforts to create a legible city, and forms of social engineering, surveillance, and control; the alleged illegibility of the city and the urban masses translated into popular fiction as crime and threat associated with the city streets, justifying not only the gaze of power but also the institutionalization of regimes of surveillance, and motivating the transformation of cities according to criteria of rationality and planning. During the nineteenth century, the city was increasingly perceived not only as a problem but equally as a mystery: The city itself as mystery is explicitly announced in the title of Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris (1845), whose resounding success prompted not merely immediate foreign translations but also a rapid succession of imitations featuring other cities. In turn, the mystery novel of urban life (both the city’s labyrinthine public topography and stratified social groupings and its interiors as domestic sites for crimes) soon came to be complemented by a literature on the dark side of the city (the city by lamplight, light and shadow in the metropolis, etc.) As an urban genre, it may well have been associated with a fear of the “dangerous classes” (Louis Chevalier) in the expanding metropolis and a periodically perceived, felt or imagined absence of public order (“crime waves”). (Frisby 2001, 53) Following generic conventions, the material city is imagined as a semiotic reservoir to be deciphered. Clues are spread throughout the urban landscape, and solving this puzzle through powers of intellect is the detective’s forte. Local knowledge and easy movement through every social layer of the city – including its underground, the sewers – make it possible for him to keep at bay the forces that threaten the metropole’s rational social order. This resolution more often than not involves exorcizing (violently and physically) the threat of a colonial Other, corresponding to Edward Said’s reading of Dickens’s London: “subjects can be taken to places like Australia, but they cannot be allowed a ‘return’ to metropolitan space, which as all Dickens’s fiction testifies, is meticulously charted, spoken for, inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages” (Said 1994, xvi). In the case of the Chinese presence in London, the threat of an alien presence that escapes the regulations of empire is condensed in an articulation of the “Chinaman” to illegal drugs – at the same time a

212

Locale

literary construction and a sublimation of British colonial guilt over the Opium Wars. While drug use was generally considered “recreational” throughout most of the nineteenth century, the opium den narratives of Charles Dickens (in the opening scene of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891), Arthur Conan Doyle (“The Man with the Twisted Lip,” 1887), for example, had contributed to a literary tradition that Sax Rohmer and others could draw on to create an almost hysterical moral panic among London’s bourgeoisie during the interwar years. Lime House was identified as the origin of the drug trade, and the River Thames, its underground passages and the sewer system, were seen as conduits of an illicit by-product of empire that could not be controlled satisfactorily by the capitalist world trade system. The detective and thriller genres provided “representational forms of solutions to the problems of social control in a dynamic capitalist urban milieu” (Frisby 2001, 58), and consequently, Sax Rohmer’s imagination-deprived Nayland Smith and his inept sidekick have to police the liminal and transgressive spaces, purge the underground network of trade routes that bypass customs, and police the contact zone that symbolized the spearhead of oriental invasions. While the parameters of the moral panic about Chinese/dope infiltration in the 1920s, the conjuring up of a “yellow peril,” are obvious manifestations of what James Donald has described as “a specifically post-imperialist paranoia about the ‘return’ of the alien” (Donald 1993, 174) that affects the heart of the empire, the 1960s cinematic imaginaries’ hearkening back to a waning empire seems at first sight as puzzling as the survival and musealization of traces of Lime House in twenty-first-century Canary Wharf. While China, generally redeemed in the West during the 1930s and 1940s, began to slowly re-establish itself as a mysterious threat after 1949, this cannot convincingly account for a Fu Manchu revival in the 1960s that hearkens back to the glory days of the British Empire and throws a few German scientists and damsels in distress into the fray. What can? We need to note that the Fu Manchu movies of the 1960s are nostalgic in their settings. Cars, costumes, props, streetscapes, and visual style conjure up a pre-war, pre-blitz Lime House. Even the fight scenes evoke the filmic tradition of the 1930s, with pounces being preferred over the shoulder throws and similar martial arts moves that had become customary in action scenes by then. The Lime House recreated here had ceased to exist after the war, blitzed into oblivion;

Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections

213

“Chinatown” now referred to the Soho district in the center of the city, which was inhabited by newcomers from Hong Kong, who had little in common with, and little time for, the mainland sailors and traders vilified in the Rohmer novels. But then, Lime House had never been the veritable “Chinatown” that sensationalist journalism had conjured up and hack writers had perpetuated in the popular imaginary. While exact population statistics of the Victorian era are hard to come by – census figures asked for place of birth rather than ethnicity (Seed 2006, 62) – it seems fairly clear that although there was a concentration of London’s Chinese population in Lime House, overall numbers were extraordinarily small – at the beginning of the “invasion” of 1880 an estimated one hundred, and by 1931 little more than one thousand (Seed 2006, 64), hardly more than the extras we see in The Face of Fu Manchu. While the “yellow peril” fears were an obvious outcome of strained relations with China (especially after the Boxer Rebellion), Lime House was never “really” a Chinatown, but rather a working-class district whose vicinity to the port produced a somewhat cosmopolitan working class. Projecting fear and allure onto the colonial Other was necessary for the assertion of the globality of the imperial center; it did not need to be, and wasn’t, supported by an actual alien presence. That Chinatown–Lime House was always an already preconstructed image that fed into London’s imaginary appeal and threat, establishing it as a focus of global networks (of crime, drug smuggling, etc.), can help explain the revival of this image in the 1960s, precisely when a different imaginary was starting to establish the city as the “swinging” center of a new global modernity that would eventually pave the way for London’s more recent imaginary as a “global city.” Let’s return to The Devil’s Daffodil to look at how London’s connection to China informs this imaginary. The most obvious parallel between The Devil’s Daffodil and The Face of Fu Manchu is the drug issue. China is the predictable origin in both cases, and London’s global connections are established early on in both movies by scenes in an airport warehouse and a river warehouse. In both cases, these are threatening spaces where the protagonist has to prove his mettle and establish himself as the policeman of the contact zone. But this is where the similarities end. The London of the Wallace movie is a thoroughly modern space; interior decoration and props are contemporary to a fault, and instead of the cozy nostalgia for an empire represented by its museums, churches, cemeteries, and docks (the

214

Locale

preferred locations of the Fu Manchu movies as well as the original novels), we see semi-respectable nightclubs, boarding houses, and, most prominently, Piccadilly Circus (where a woman is shot right in front of the Eros statue). Christopher Lee has mutated from the evil fiend into a Hong Kong detective, spouting “ancient” Chinese wisdoms in a tongue-in-cheek way that almost presciently satirizes the Fu Manchu role he was to play four years later. Audiences would have known Lee from his sinister Hammer roles of Count Dracula and Kharis the Mummy, and maybe even as the Tong leader in The Terror of the Tongs (1961, dir. Anthony Bushnell), so the orientalizing jokes would not have been completely lost on them. Yet the only trace of a sinister oriental character that remains for Lee is allowing him to torture a suspect to obtain information and take revenge for the death of his daughter in one of the film’s initial scenes. Otherwise Lee’s character is as modern and worldly as the white detective (Fuchsberger’s role in the German version), who also hails from Hong Kong – both are perfectly at home in the swinging London of the 1960s, for which Hong Kong had become the colonial/global alter ego. Hong Kong’s role is not coincidental: the British colony metonymically represents the global connections that survive, and are built on, the empire’s dismantling. Juxtaposing The Devil’s Daffodil and The Face of Fu Manchu thus reveals two apparently diametrically opposed imaginaries of London: the nostalgic center of an empire that had vanished, and the fashionable, swinging sixties metropolis of style. These two imaginaries clearly sustain and supplement each other in the popular imaginary by foregrounding and asserting the city’s status as global, and conjuring up and articulating histories that result in this imaginary. London’s (persistent) double imaginary as the locus of nostalgia and the harbinger of globalization, metonymically represented in Sino-British encounters, is palimpsestically inscribed in the popular films of the period both as an object of desire and, if not properly policed, a threat. The nostalgic evocation of an imperial center in its past glory and horror does not contradict, but rather foreshadows Piccadilly Circus’s swinging internationalism, the with-it hipness of an earlier incarnation of Cool Britannia – and in both imaginaries women who are too independent get shot. This double imaginary of London – the modern global city image made possible by the existence of this other, oriental, backward and derelict district – hearkens back to the popular culture of mysteries that I discussed through Sax Rohmer’s and others’ novels, but it has

Urban Cultural Diversity and Colonial Connections

215

cinematic roots as well. The film to mention in this context is Arnold Bennett’s 1929 thriller classic Piccadilly. Heavily influenced by German expressionism, especially Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (the same aesthetic that inspired the Wallace movies thirty years later), this pre-noir British silent movie stars American-Chinese actress Anna May Wong, playing a generically orientalized young woman who rises from downtrodden dishwasher to celebrity West End dance star. The film has its protagonists shuttling back and forth between Lime House and the theatre district, just as they did in Dope. The opening footage of Yellow Daffodils is a clear homage to Piccadilly, with its Ruttmann-esque montages. Images of contemporaneity clearly have their histories as well, histories that are activated and mobilized cinematically. The global city articulates nostalgia and modern appeal: while the strangers who do not adapt are stuck in the contact zone, their presence (and death – Anna May Wong’s character is murdered) is also an enabling condition for modernity, for the bright lights of Piccadilly. Connecting to the “orient,” an orient imagined as existing both within and beyond the physical extension of the city, is an enabling condition for both the city’s “modern,” global status and an affective, nostalgic element of its imperial past – a historically saturated, imaginary space mapped onto London that sutures public memory to imaginary urban geographies through its metonymic sites and its materialized histories. What is intriguing for the 1960s films is the German element, which recasts significantly what had been the evil exotic Kraut of the British thriller tradition of the 1920s and 1930s. The German professors, their daughters and assistants in the Fu Manchu movies add to the connectedness of imperial London as much as Christopher Lee’s yellow-faced Hong Kong detective, while London offered the German imaginary an obvious port of call for re-establishing itself as an indispensable part of a “Western” civilization that safeguards, in its popular imaginary, its global control over (post)colonial encroachments, working to bridge the fissures that had characterized the British–German relationship until 1945. It all comes together in Lime House. The current urban imaginary of London as a global city has retained a palimpsest of cultural inscriptions from Sino-British encounters. Without Lime House’s strange past, mediated through popular culture, the claims and affect attached to its futurism would be much weaker. The city of the future is only possible when it projects its own past – hence the nostalgic

216

Locale

traditions powerfully mediated by the visual imaginaries it generates through the visual spectacularity of cinema, museum, and other institutions. Renato Rosaldo calls this “imperialist nostalgia” (1989), but I would not see it as just another form of co-optation. Musealized nostalgic memory is also an affective semiotic reservoir that can be tapped into, potentially for emancipatory purposes, which is more than can be said of the self-proclaimed authentic Thai food now served in upscale watering holes to wannabe-bankers with hyphenated colonial identities in the Docklands. Some of the ambivalence of remembering the past selectively was manifest in the spectacular opening ceremonies of the London Olympic Games in 2012, an event that has come to define a global city’s imaginary like no other. Replete with (sometimes somewhat oblique and baffling) historical references, the global sport spectacle’s location presented itself to the world with images of smoking cauldrons of an industrial revolution whose Olympic feats of engineering impoverished workers all over the world and destroyed the environment, and not only naysayers were reminded of buildings phallically shooting up in preparation for the Olympics in yet another rush of construction in London’s east with uncertain outcome. But film director Danny Boyle’s spectacle also conjured up the affective draw of the (threatened) tradition of a free national health service provided by staff so dedicated they volunteered to learn to dance, and of a legacy of multicultural youth culture mediated by cutting-edge technologies with the potential to overcome the racial and jingoist legacies that continue to haunt the former empire. The “Isles of Wonder” show left many spectators doing precisely that – wondering whether the do-gooder subtext of the spectacle was just another form of co-optation. But maybe the Corrigan Brothers had it right on their Facebook site: The belching chimneys of industrial history The celebration of the nhs Johnny Rotten singing with the Pistols The passion of the women’s suffragettes A story told with poignancy and humour From printing press right up to internet So take a bow, deservedly it’s due for Oh Danny Boyle, it was as good as it could get. (Corrigan Brothers qtd. in Greenslade 2012)

11 Mapping the Spatial Practices of the Cinema and Protest: Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo S H A RO N H AYA S H I

“Where are we?” means two things at once: “how can we characterize the situation in which we live, think and act to-day?”, but also, by the same token: “how does the perception of this situation oblige us to reconsider the framework we use to ‘see’ things and map situations, to move within this framework or get away from it?”; or, in other words, “how does it urge us to change our very way of determining the coordinates of the ‘here and now’”? Jacques Rancière, “A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière”

M A PPIN G DISASTE R

We begin with a map of Japan broadcast on Fox News shortly after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the northeastern coast of Japan on 11 March 2011.1 Intended to familiarize viewers with the Daiichi Nuclear Power in Fukushima, site of the most serious nuclear meltdown since Chernobyl, and explosion and radiation leak caused by flooding from the tsunami, this topographical map of Japan introduces viewers to the location of major nuclear power plants that line the coasts of the country. Labeled “Japan’s Nuclear Power Plants,” the map incompletely lists only nine of sixteen actual locations of nuclear reactors in Japan but puzzlingly includes the rather fantastic addition of the Shibuya Eggman. The Eggman, an underground dance club situated in the heart of the youth-oriented Shibuya district of the

218

Locale

Figure 11.1 Fox News map of Japan’s nuclear power plants broadcast on 14 March 2011 as it appears on the Media Matters webpage (http://mediamatters .org/blog/2011/03/14/fox-news-discovers-nuclear-reactor-in-japanese/177553)

nation’s capital Tokyo, does indeed exist. No nuclear reactor can be found on the premises, however, which boasts nothing more egregious than a generic Super Suits retail store. One could dismiss this map as yet one more instance of incompetent and irresponsible journalism in an increasingly pervasive but unstable landscape of digital mapping technologies in which our desire to know the place of things is often met with false or partial conveyers of knowledge. Yet Fox News’ geographical and digital blunder eerily echoes the scenario laid out by Yamakawa Gen’s prescient black comedy Tokyo Genpatsu / Tokyo: Level 1. Largely ignored upon its release in 2002, the film took a blunt knife to the undemocratic manner in which decisions about public safety around nuclear technology are made. In doing so, it also highlighted how risks associated with the industry are invariably offloaded on certain regions.2 In the film, a crazed Tokyo governor tries to smuggle a nuclear power plant into the very heart of Tokyo. Behind closed doors, his ministers weigh the risk of a nuclear meltdown in the capital against the city’s hunger for cash with the fate of millions in their hands. Would environmentalists resist the building of a nuclear reactor in front of city hall, although they stood silent on coastal plants built in

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

219

Fukui or Fukushima? Could they use celebrities to sell the idea? Or would the false threat of blackouts get the population on board? The crazed governor – actually well-intentioned – concocts the scheme to bring a nuclear power plant to Tokyo to force the population to consider where it obtains its energy and at what costs to the environment and the periphery. His goal? To instigate a debate about the dangers of nuclear energy that might lead to an anti-nuclear citizens movement. Yet the recent nuclear disaster in Fukushima, a result of government and industry negligence, has achieved exactly what the governor set out to do: create a burgeoning anti-nuclear protest movement that is gaining momentum particularly in Tokyo, even without the looming threat of a nuclear power plant being built in the heart of the nation’s capital. In the present reality of post–3.11 Japan (as the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown on 11 March 2011 has come to be known), the scenario is no less cinematic: right-wing governor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro is calling for Japan to develop nuclear weapons, become a military regime, and institute military conscription. Fearing growing anti-nuclear sentiment, the governor’s son Nobuteru, a representative in the fourth district of Tokyo to the House of Representatives, has denounced the anti-nuclear movement as a form of “group hysteria.” Yet the growing challenge to the cozy relationship between the power industry and Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (meti) bent on expanding nuclear energy contrary to the wishes of the 70 per cent majority of the population, is taking many forms. Shareholders in six of Japan’s major electric companies demanded a retreat from nuclear power only to be voted down. Citizens are lobbying for government research monies – 90 per cent of which is currently funneled to the nuclear industry – to be used to develop innovative, smaller scale natural energy sources. Fox News’ map not only disturbingly fails to convey geographic accuracy, but its view from afar and above fails to capture what is happening on the ground or even underground. So we need to begin with a different kind of map, starting with a limited cartography of Tokyo that can visualize the way people are engaging with each other and the urban fabric. MAPPING DISSENT

On the three-month anniversary of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, the largest street demonstrations since protests against the

220

Map of 11 June 2011 No Nukes demonstration route through Shinjuku, Tokyo. Image: Sharon Hayashi

Locale

Figure 11.2

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

221

Figure 11.3 Protesters leading the 11 June 2011 No Nukes demonstration in Shinjuku. Photo: Louis Templado

US–Japan Security Treaty in 1970 filled the streets of Tokyo with over twenty thousand demonstrators demanding an end to the use of nuclear power. While the usual suspects of the organized left – communist party members and socialists from various factions – were present, the majority of protesters identified themselves as members of issue-based citizens’ groups, or were unaffiliated anarchists, students, and disenfranchised members of society. The ranks of the demonstration swelled with many concerned citizens who had never demonstrated before but were moved by the situation to vocally demand the shutdown of the poorly regulated nuclear industry and to contest the government’s willful negligence and strategic campaign of disinformation. In contrast to the more regulated hierarchy of mass political demonstrations, the playful and unruly 11 June 2011 demonstration was largely coordinated by precarious workers, anarchists, students, and artists who brought a cultural dimension into the political protest. Beginning in Shinjuku Central Park, the very place where Tokyo: Level 1’s fictitious governor threatened to build a nuclear power plant, a row of drummers led the lively street demonstration.3 Protesters in white suits donned gas masks as they pushed oil drums labeled with

222

Locale

radioactive waste signs past City Hall. The gas mask, a hallmark signature of the 1960s and 1970s ritualistic art troupe Zero Jigen, was deployed in this instance to refer to the ill-trained and ill-equipped day laborers and dispatch workers sent to manage and clean up the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima.4 While the film Tokyo: Level 1 pointed towards the regional inequity of supporting the burdens and dangers of nuclear energy in Japan, these demonstrators, while contesting the government’s plans to export radioactive waste to use in construction projects across several prefectures, also signaled the class dimension of nuclear cleanup efforts and the increasingly high levels of radioactive exposure of workers sanctioned by the government and nuclear industry. The diversity of political persuasion was mirrored in the various musical styles of performances. Folk, punk, and rap bands performed live on two-ton flatbed trucks equipped with sound systems blasting music through speakers and drawing crowds through the packed streets of Shinjuku. Reflecting a growing consciousness about the interconnectedness of resources, one sound-system-equipped truck was powered by recycled tempura cooking oil gathered and brought to the event by participants. After transforming the commercial streets of Shinjuku into pathways of protest, the demonstration culminated in the strategic occupation of public space. In a nod to prodemocratic movements in Spain, Tunisia, Greece, and Egypt, and in the spirit of Japanese activism of the late 1960s, the marchers ended by occupying the Alta-mae plaza in front of Shinjuku Station, creating Tokyo’s miniature Tahrir Square, where citizen-consumers of all ages mixed with members of precarity movements, anarchists, antinuclear, and environment activists to reclaim their city, register their disenchantment with a broken political system, and redefine the meaning and space of politics. Organizers of the protest later posted a newspaper parody on the event’s Tumblr blog that corrected the underreporting of the number of participants by mainstream news outlets while directly referring to simultaneous events transpiring in Tahrir Square. The Tumblr blog, initially set up to publicize the protest, now functions as an archive of previous demonstrations as well as those that have been organized since.5 G EN EA LO GI ES O F PROTE ST

The 11 June 2011 No Nukes demonstration tapped members of organized political movements but also used social media to bring togeth-

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

223

Figure 11.4 “Over 20,000 Gather in Shinjuku No Nukes Square,” Nantoka Shimbun, 17 June 2011. Image: Neo Dadakko

er a vast array of new participants from citizens’ and issue-oriented groups, including slow movement ecologists to pyschogeographers to self-characterized apolitical parents – all calling for the removal of Japan from nuclear power dependence.6 The global resonances of occupation movements clearly informs the demonstration’s strategic occupation of one of Tokyo’s busiest commercial districts, but the genealogies of the protest can also be traced back to local engagements with urban space and the architectural landscape of Tokyo. The form of the 11 June 2011 Shinjuku demonstration was largely inspired by earlier street raves or “sound demos” that began in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq and the ensuing increase in security and surveillance measures within Japan.7 Organized by a loose collective of young, often part-time workers, musicians, music writers, artists, and students, the sound demos were so named because they used huge reggae speakers and sound systems mounted onto two-ton trucks to blast music and invite people to join the mobile party to protest. Organizers were inspired by the Reclaim the Street movement in Europe, and, instead of retreating into political apathy like many of

224

Locale

the cultural and intellectual leaders of the time, they brought their club culture into the streets, deploying beats, rhythm, noise, and light – the technological tools closest at hand – to examine and effect changes in their local environment. Although bound by space, language, and economics, protestors experimented with the possibilities of new visual media and sound to remap their lived space in connection with other local sites to create a sense of belonging and citizenship not bound by the parameters of the national. Their engagement with global ideas materialized into a set of spatial practices that dealt with the way the specific configuration of globalization and neoliberalism, neonationalism and militarism was playing out in the local context. Bringing rave culture into the streets became an opportunity to play with the varied architectural landscape of Tokyo and to test the discourses and practices that regulated society. The staging of demonstrations in public plazas, squares, parks, and streets sought to contest the increasing privatization of public space in a neoliberalizing landscape. In 2008, over sixteen hectares of land in Tokyo was designated as privately owned and operated “public space,” whose management the government had turned over to corporations. The occupation of public spaces reasserts the public’s right to the space and exposes the usually invisible economies of control that regulate that space. On a crisp February Sunday in 2004 protesters staged a street demonstration and occupation of one of Tokyo’s few public gathering places, Miyashita Park near Shibuya Station. Performances by leading DJs and rappers flowed organically into teach-ins about the war and occupation in Iraq, relating their own occupation of the park and desire to disrupt repetitive actions of everyday life that had been suspended by the state of emergency to the historic parallels of the Allied occupation of Japan after the Second World War and the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine. To fight the unconstitutional dispatch of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to Iraq, and the heightened security measures imposed on the population at home, protesters used their own cultural weapon – music – and deployed it in the heart of commercial youth culture of Shibuya. A flyer for the demonstration proclaims, “Block Koizumi!! Not the Street!!” referring to the neoliberal economic measures that have deregulated labour and delegated the corporation’s responsibilities onto their workers, and the heightened security measures and regulation of so-called public space, heralded in by then Prime Minister

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

225

Figure 11.5 Flyer for 22 February 2004 anti-Iraq War Shibuya demonstration. Image: Illdozer

Koizumi Junichiro. The words are boldly printed under a defiant fist, overlapping to form a street lined with tall architectural structures on either side. The valley created by the crowded buildings of Shibuya shopping streets portrayed in the flyer was effectively used to reverberate sound. Consciously modulating music from the mobile sounds systems to the architecture of the streets, DJs played a set of global protest songs, culled from Internet submissions, to shake shoppers out of stores and into the street. Video projections from the sound truck drew images onto darkened buildings en route to the central shopping district. In the most densely commercial areas of Shibuya, spectacles of light failed to compete with the bright signage, and the sound blasting from the trucks took over the job of inviting and inciting protesters to join the mobile protest. The demonstration temporarily transformed the landscape of consumer culture into a mobile street party in which participants could register their disenchantment with the government and Japan’s participation in the war in Iraq simply and transgressively by dancing.

226

Locale

The sound demo was closely monitored and controlled by riot police, further highlighting the surveillance mechanisms of the state. All demonstrations of two or more persons must apply for a permit in advance, and a predetermined route must be negotiated with municipal and police authorities. The experimental spatial practices of the demonstrators soon exposed the bureaucratic mechanisms regulating urban space; as the demonstration traversed ward boundaries within the city, police units suddenly withdrew as protesters exited their ward, with new police units falling into place next to the dancing protesters as they entered into another ward, only to be re-accompanied by earlier police units when the demonstration path crossed back into a previous ward. The unpredictability and playful experimentation of sound demos, and their ability to draw bystanders into their ranks instilled fear in the police who were used to the regimented and lackluster demonstrations of both the organized left and the right wing, sprechchor calls through microphones and marching that hadn’t changed since the 1960s. Fear of the unknown led to reprisals – sound demo participants were targeted by riot and plainclothes police and often arrested without cause – and soon the riot police sent to control sound demos outnumbered actual demonstrators. M A PPI N G PO LICE

To make the inordinate police response and surveillance visible, a three-person demonstration was held on 24 February 2006.8 Despite warnings by protesters that the demonstration would be small, police, fearing the worst, sent out riot police in force. A video of the demonstration shows the ludicrous nature of police surveillance – undercover police following the three protestors along their pre-programmed demonstration route followed by a van full of riot police – exposing the inflexible and bureaucratic nature of regulation of public space. At one point in the demonstration, the three protesters take a break in a park along the agreed upon route and exasperated police give them directives about the proper way to carry out a political demonstration. Police who have been trained by leftist and rightist demonstrators in orthodox methods of protest feel the need to give the demonstrators a lesson on how to protest. “You’re not supposed to take a break in the middle of a protest to hang out in the park.” “You’re supposed to be shouting out slogans for what you believe in!” “Don’t you know how to protest?!” they angrily chastised the protesters. This small-scale

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

227

protest makes visible the structures of surveillance we are subject to in our daily lives but it also reveals the underlying norms of what a protest is supposed to be. It exposes what Jacques Rancière (2008, 12) calls the “distribution of the sensible,” providing us with a map of how the visible, the intelligible, and the possible are structured. In other words, it highlights how perception itself is structured – what can be seen, what can be heard, and what can be done in designated spaces at appropriate times. While public parks are being deregulated and privatized, the activities one can perform in them are being increasingly regulated to comic levels. The three-person demonstration seeks to bring visibility to the material conditions perpetuated by neoliberalist policies. Mapping police is not simply noting police presence but entails making visible the structuring norms of society that determine what constitutes acceptable actions in specific places. The “We Are Three Only” protest was organized by members of the anarchist collective Shiroto no ran, known in English as both Amateur Riot and Amateur Revolt. Amateur Riot/Revolt is part of the current proliferation in new forms of collectivity and collaboration among artists and new social movements centered in Tokyo. Members of the collective were central organizers of the 11 June 2011 No Nukes demonstration in Shinjuku and, along with many other collectives, are creatively negotiating the effects of neoliberal policies on their social space – the erosion of public services and elimination of public spaces, the delegation of responsibility for health care, education, and general welfare onto the individual by the state under the veiled discourse of the free market – or individual freedom of choice. They are producing alternative publics by refiguring discursive and material space, both the representation of space and the transformation of material concrete spaces. While many of these collectives are functioning in a neoliberalizing landscape, they are not wholly determined by it.9 FRO M PO L ICIN G TO P O LITICS

To interrogate what constitutes politics, Amateur Riot/Revolt decided to put forward a candidate for Suginami ward office in Tokyo in the April 2007 elections. Candidates for public office are the only members of society who are allowed to hold public gatherings in front of train stations in Japan. Because of train commuting patterns, train stations are one of the main stages of political campaigning. So Amateur Riot/Revolt, which had been banned from holding public demon-

228

Locale

Figure 11.6 Occupation Not Election flyer. Image: Narita Keisuke

strations of more than two people without a municipal and police permit, used their entry into official politics to officially and playfully demonstrate against the policies of their government in front of the Koenji train station. To run for ward office a minimal down payment of around fifteen thousand dollars is conditionally necessary, but is returned to the candidate after he or she secures a successful number of votes. In return for their initial investment, Amateur Riot/Revolt was allowed to occupy space in front of the Koenji train station during the election period. Instead of the usual drone of campaign slogans by earnest but often ineffective candidates, commuters passing through the train station plaza were confronted by punk, heavy metal, and rap concerts that accompanied debates by members of Amateur Riot/Revolt and leaders of precarity movements.10 A space for discussion about neoliberal policies and policing was opened up in the centre of the normative sphere of official politics.

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

229

The strategic transformation of the train station from simply a backdrop of official campaigns into a stage of political demonstration is an example of politics as defined by Rancière (2006): “What I consider to be the real emergence of free speech occurs precisely in places that were not supposed to be places for free speech. It always happens in the form of transgression. Politics means precisely this, that you speak at a time and in a place you’re not expected to speak.” Staging and filming a sound demonstration, dancing and singing, rather than speaking in front of the station, transgressed the norms of official politics, converting a policed space normally relegated to official politics into one of political action. On another level, the documentary footage of this redefinition of politics by Amateur Riot/Revolt brings up the question of representation.11 In her canonical essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak examines Marx’s two notions of “representation” in the eighteenth Brumaire – representation as a re-presentation or portrait in art, on the one hand, and representation as “speaking for,” or as proxy, on the other hand. The videos of these demonstrations that take place under the guise of an official campaign embody representation on two levels. While the footage of this demonstration provides an audio-visual representation of the Amateur Riot/Revolt in the first sense of portrait, it functions more interestingly in the second register of representation, in relation to representational politics. The video is both representation of the demonstration and, at the same time, an intervention into official politics that determines what can be seen, what can be heard, and what can be done. These videos expose who gets to speak and who doesn’t, where one is allowed and not allowed to speak, and who is allowed to speak for others and who is not. In short, they interrogate who is entitled to govern others and who is not. Mapping the spatial practices of these protests allow us to bring into visibility the frameworks that define and structure the space of politics. The map also provides us with a genealogy of artistic and political intervention that makes connections between global and local contexts. C A RTO G R A P H I E S O F CI N E M A

These demonstrations form a continuum of emergent politics and artistic performance that stretches back to the 1960s. The choice of Shinjuku Station in the 11 June 2011 anti-nuke demonstration cited at the beginning of this chapter is not incidental. A hub of commercial

230

Locale

and commuter activity since the postwar era, the area around Shinjuku Station played a central role as the stage for experimental spatial practices of the avant-garde. Films of the visual underground participated in shaping the contested urban terrain of Shinjuku. Oshima Nagisa’s 1968 Shinjuku Dorobo Nikki / Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, a story about a bibliophile who steals books from the Kinokuniya bookstore, a cultural landmark of the intelligentsia near Shinjuku Station, opens with a shot of the public plaza in front of Shinjuku Station that formed the endpoint of the 11 June 2011 sound demo. After the establishment of the contemporaneity of global spaces – the simultaneity of world events in New York, Paris, Moscow, Brazzaville (Congo), Beijing, Saigon, and Japan is suggested through titles – the film is suddenly hijacked by a performance of the Kara Juro’s Situationist Theatre Troupe. Kara, the leader of the troupe, runs into the plaza chased by group of men who accuse him of being a thief. When they surround him, Kara strips his pants off and pulls down his loincloth to reveal a rose tattoo, the symbol of the troupe. At the sight of the tattoo, his pursuers apologize and stand on their heads (Turim 1998, 82). This situationist street performance is foisted on the film audience without warning or contextualization. The situationist troupe is not merely depicted by the film, but functions as a situationist act of détournement of the film itself. What can the analysis of films as spatial practice contribute to cinema and media studies? Until recently, the focus on Oshima’s work has sought to elucidate his films as texts of a great auteur importantly situated in the global idiom of an international avant-garde. While the global resonances are important to underline, so too is the collaboration of many of the era’s avant-garde cultural leaders. In addition to Kara Juro’s Situationist Theatre Troupe, the thief-protagonist of the film is played by the graphic designer Yokoo Tadanori, who illustrated many of Kara’s Juro’s posters. The pink film director and revolutionary Adachi Masao also worked on this and many of Oshima’s other films. When we begin to look at these films as collaborations not simply of individuals but as intersections of different artistic movements and radical student politics, their shared conceptual innovations and engagements can be traced to specific sites. The Scorpio Theatre in the Shinjuku district where the film was first shown helped spawn a shared cultural context for situationist theatre, graphic design, radical student politics, and filmmaking by its very architecture.12

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

231

When mapped onto this shared cultural space, connections between filmmakers and artistic movements emerge. Experimental filmmakers who worked with avant-garde performance artists have long been relegated to the limited and mistaken status of being mere record keepers of artistic happenings. Jonouchi Motoharu, who filmed the activities of Hi-Red Center, a neodadist collective led by Akasegawa Genpei that included Yoko Ono, also created some of the most playful, provocative, and poetic films on the margins of the student movement, including the aptly named Shinjuku Station in 1974. Disciplinary boundaries between art history and cinema and media studies have long stalled collaborative research into the avant-garde. While American film critic and experimental filmmaker Donald Richie’s Cybele and Okabe Michio’s Crazy Love, both from 1968, feature important appearances of the avantgarde ritualistic performance group Zero Jigen, they are notably absent in art historical studies of the period. Even within the discipline of cinema and media studies, histories of political left cinema are often completely sequestered from histories of experimental cinema, the first understood narrowly as political movement-based cinema, and the second, relegated to a formalist cinema of movement. Rather than recounting a history of politics and history of artistic production separately, creating a map of shared space of the visual underground and their spatial practices of protest allows us to see these movements as part of the same context, one in which the avant-garde can neither be separated from political movements nor popular culture. Diary of a Shinjuku Thief was itself shot between two tense moments of political unrest and its temporary reclamations or détournement of space on the specific site of Shinjuku and took place alongside political demonstrations. While the east side plaza of Shinjuku Station, recent site of the temporary anti-nuke occupation, features prominently in the film, the underground plaza on the west side of Shinjuku Station was the site of sustained protest and occupation by folk singers, students, and workers protesting the university system and the war in Vietnam when Oshima and his collaborators were shooting their film. The film participated in a larger struggle to redefine and rewrite the space around Shinjuku station. In this way, mapping the spatial practices of political and artistic protests in Tokyo may lead to a renewed multidisciplinary understanding of the intersecting histories and experiences of the cultural politics of the 1960s to the present. As a collaborative exercise,

232

Locale

mapping can provide visual and contextualizing materials of various artistic and political movements to engage colleagues working across cinema and media studies, art history, anthropology, history, politics, theatre, and geography. M A PPI N G A S M E THO D O LO GY

How can maps help us envision this shared cultural space and function as a collaborative research model? Academic conferences purportedly bring scholars together to discuss their research only to compartmentalize individual presentations, leaving little room for discussion and even less time for collaboration before or after the event, except in the form of compilations of essays published many years later. Generating a map of research with other scholars, curators, and filmmakers working on the visual underground in 1960s and 1970s in Tokyo is a way to envision the networks among the different strands of the visual underground, and just as importantly, the intersections of our research projects.13 Despite a sustained investigation of the spatial practices of the visual underground, few scholars working in the field possess more than a general sense of where events took place especially outside of their direct areas of interest. An archival map can work to connect the partial knowledge of avant-garde film, theatre, radical politics, and other spatial practices to develop a better understanding of the context of the visual underground. Recent practices of radical cartography and experimental geography have charted the ways in which artists map human interaction with the land and property to provoke new perceptions of the networks, lineages, associations, and representations of places, people, and power (Bhagat and Mogel 2008, 6).14 A map of emergent politics and artistic performances in Tokyo could elucidate these networks, lineages, and relations of power as they transform over time. The renewed interest in the spatial praxis of the artistic and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s around the locus of Shinjuku is symptomatic of a larger shift towards engaging cinema as a spatial practice and situating it in a shared cultural space. Just as the 1990s represented a so-called historical turn and witnessed the return of phenomenological studies of spectatorship, one of the methodological turns in cinema and media studies since 2000 that comes out of these developments has been an increased awareness of the

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

233

importance of viewing film and media not simply as representations or a set of images to be analyzed, or texts deciphered for narrative meaning. Instead, emphasis is placed on the viewing context of the film, everything that constitutes the “cinematic experience” of film. In concrete terms, this means the study of the architecture of theatres, the relationship to the urban landscape outside of the theatre, where cinematic representations participate in a larger discourse and intervene in shaping urban space. M A P P I N G A N A RC H I V E O F PO S S I B I L I T Y

Digital archiving and historical mapping software enable us to now map these emergent and convergent artistic and political movements, archiving the ways in which political demonstrations and artistic interventions since 1960 have subverted urban space and interfaced with the architecture of Tokyo. Introducing the historical dimension into recent studies of radical cartography allows us to examine how contemporary protest movements refer both to global events and to an archaeology of spatial practices from the ’60s and ’70s. Plotting these performances and protests on a historically layered map creates connections between different movements or collectives over time. The technical challenges of this project are similar to those of any archive. For one, historical mapping software is limited. Earlier platforms like hypercities.com allow the user to plot markers over time, revealing layers of maps. Designed by scholars for this purpose, the interface is not as intuitive to navigate as more popular mapping applications and more importantly doesn’t have the capability to export work into a sharable form outside of the platform. Not only does this make collaboration challenging but when the platform ends, so does the database. Digital archives also necessarily bring up questions of accessibility. The ubiquity of applications Google Maps (with Street View) and Google Earth, despite being part of the Google corporate empire, permit accessibility and file sharing in ways that surpass more tailored and dedicated historical mapping applications. Places where both ephemeral happenings and larger political demonstrations took place can be marked. Both photos and videos can be uploaded to markers on these maps, which can then be contextualized by text in the sidebar revealing how collectives and political movements interface with

234

Locale

Figure 11.7 Photo of 11 June 2011 Demo Sound Truck inserted in Google Street View. Image: Sharon Hayashi

the local architecture of the urban fabric. The application has a limited ability to place historical maps in layers on top of each other, allowing you to see where protests and performances happened over time and how collectives imagine their own genealogical borrowings. One of the recent developments of mapping software relevant for this project is the 3D and Street View perspectives enabled by Google Earth. Earlier mapping applications present maps in two dimensions. Shifting from satellite views to the view on the ground, Google Earth’s 3D and Street View features provide an experiential perspective of the city in ways that are not possible in 2D programs. Images and videos can be uploaded and inserted into the three-dimensional space of maps, transforming our virtual experiential relationship to the archive. The future archival dominance of Street View representations is perhaps nowhere more tragically concretized than in post 3.11 Japan. Google Street View’s extensive documentation of geographical areas that were devastated by the tsunami are now easily accessible through Google’s Memories for the Future site that provides pre- and post-disaster Street View imagery of afflicted areas.15 As technologies transform our vision and relationship to space, Rancière reminds us that the maps we create must always force us to

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

235

reconsider the framework we use to see things, map situations, and determine the coordinates of our present moment. Mapping these continually emerging spatial practices not only brings visibility to the material conditions of our situation but produces alternative publics by refiguring discursive and material space. Mapping contested spaces in Tokyo illustrates how emergent politics simultaneously engage global events, the local architecture of the urban fabric, and refer to archaeological sites of protest and avant-garde culture. If in the ’60s artist collectives were interrogating the post-Fordist landscape of Tokyo and protesting the Vietnam War, collectives in the present moment in Japan are confronting the way neoliberal policies are being implemented globally – the deregulation of labour, markets, and industries, and the increased regulation and surveillance of public spaces. It must be noted that not everything is visible or can be visualized, but a map can help us recognize emergent relationships. And in mapping how artist collectives and political movements interface with the urban landscape, the re-imagination of space, too, then becomes possible. At once an historical archive to think about lineages and make connections, this project of mapping contested spaces in Tokyo is at the same time an archive of possibility for the present, to help rewrite the map of the city and the frameworks by which we live.

NOTES

1 The map is from a broadcast of Your World With Neil Cavuto, 14 March 2011, Fox News, archived at http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/03/14/fox-newsdiscovers-nuclear-reactor-in-japanese/177553. 2 For a discussion of post–3.11 politics in Japan see the special online issue of Cultural Anthropology, “Hot Spots: 3.11 Politics in Disaster Japan,” guest edited by David Slater (26 July 2011) at http://culanth.org/?q=node/409. This chapter was inspired by discussions with David Slater and other participants of the Alternative (to) Politics: Youth, Media, Performance, and Activism conference held at Sophia University on 10 July 2010 and the Emergent Forms of Engagement in Japan: Politics, Cultures and Technologies conference held at Temple University on 11–12 June 2011. 3 For a video of the 11 June 2011 protest in Shinjuku, see http://www.youtube .com/watch?v=lqKaC23g2b0&feature=youtube (posted by “410nonuke,” 12 June 2011).

236

Locale

4 The nuclear industry, like many industries in Japan, subcontracts labour, thus allowing large firms that are not the official employers to offload benefits and medical expenses onto individuals. During the recent nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, a thirty-two-year-old part-time worker in the industry was offered 500,000 yen per day, fifty times the usual rate of 10,000 yen per day or the equivalent of two year’s salary in ten days, to work on the Fukushima plant clean up. While this worker, a father of two, refused to expose himself to unknown levels of radiation even for the large sum of money, he imagined that many other part-time laborers and unemployed dispatch workers were not in the position to turn down the offer despite the health risks. See “Genpatsu to nihonjin,” special issue, aera, 15 May 2011, 14. 5 See http://611shinjuku.tumblr.com/ for an archive of previous demonstrations and updated information on No Nuke protests. 6 For an informative analysis of the role of social media especially in the immediate aftermath of 3.11 see Slater, Nishimura, and Kindstrand 2012. 7 For a fuller discussion of the 2003–04 sound demos, see Hayashi and McKnight 2005. 8 A YouTube video of the three-person demonstration posted by “exillcommonz,” 15 June 2009, can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= kROFCjoWcYw. 9 For an analysis of neoliberalism in Japan and an extended discussion of the ways collectives are critiquing neoliberal policies in contemporary Japan see Hayashi 2011. 10 A video of Matsumoto Hajime’s electoral campaign can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNstmvH0Bm0 (posted by “maktube83,” 24 April 2007). 11 As one of the documenters of the protests and by default one of the archivists of the media of the protests and performances, the question of representation was significant for me. How do you represent a protest that, unlike earlier political protests, doesn’t necessarily come out of an ideologically united movement? How does a loose collective negotiate how their images are created, distributed, and archived? To what degree should the collective intervene in the production of images of the protests? To what extent should this media be made available to those outside of the organizers and participants? As someone who believes in open access, I found this an especially difficult problem given the police suppression and surveillance of the movement and the real possibility that these images could be used to incriminate participants. Many of these issues were never resolved and as a

Visualizing and Archiving the Urban Space of Tokyo

12

13

14 15

237

reflection of the movement itself, many of the images of the protests have become dispersed and inaccessible. The conceptualization of a shared cultural space of the visual underground is indebted to the study of the Art Theatre Guild independent production company and the Scorpio Theatre in Shinjuku by Roland Domenig and Hirasawa Go. See Domenig 2005 and Hirasawa 2005. I would like to thank the organizer Yuri Furuhata and the participants of the conference “Visual Underground: Theatre Scorpio and Japanese Experimental Cinema of the 1960s,” held at McGill University, 16–18 September 2011, for participating in this mapping project. Special thanks to Masaki Kondo of York University who prepared the shared research map of the visual underground for the conference. See also Thompson 2008 and Abrams and Hall 2006. An overview of the Memories for the Future project can be found at www.miraikioku.com/streetview/en/.

238

Locale

12 Cinematic Border Spaces: Translocality and the Moving Image IAN ROBINSON

The promise of “world cinema,” Dudley Andrew (2006, 28) writes, is to “let us know the territory differently, whatever territory it is that film comes from or concerns.” Andrew’s pedagogical insight seems all the more pertinent for an understanding of films in which the production of “the territory” – as a geographical, political, and cultural entity – is a central problematic. This chapter concerns the ways that contemporary filmmakers have sought to map a sense of place by articulating the relations that constitute the spatiality of both local and global scales. The concept of translocality delimits the relation and interconnection between places as well as a cinematic perspective on the world as a series of interrelated views. As Peta Mitchell (2008) argues in his study of postmodern cartographic literature, the processes of globalization from urbanization to the development of new communication technologies have created new hybrid spaces of local and global activity, leading to the emergence of a new self-conscious mode of cartographic “world literature.” “This literature,” Mitchell (2008, 1) claims, “is explicitly concerned with articulating the late twentieth century’s renegotiation of global and local spaces and cultures.” Cinema can similarly be addressed as a cartographic medium, a notion signalled not only by the recent interest in topics concerning “world cinema” in film studies and the expanse of international film cultures, but also by conceptualizations of the medium that implicitly ground the ontology of cinema in the production and mediation of space and place.

Translocality and the Moving Image

239

Despite much agreement among scholars regarding the reorganization of the spatialities of power and everyday life in the late twentieth century, the “renegotiation of local and global spaces” is still a field in which cultural critics must tread carefully. As Phil Rosen (2006, 13) warns, the tendency to imagine a globalized world unconstrained by material borders approaches the dream of “digital utopia” in which communication overcomes “the limitations of the concrete and the physical.” Rosen links this representation of globality to classical Hollywood’s erasure of boundaries exemplified formally in the eyeline match and looks to the contemporary cinema of Chantal Akerman for a critical aesthetic and political intervention into this genealogy of dematerialized borders. Rosen’s call for a rethinking of the temporality of communications media is itself a crucial intervention into collective understandings and representations of globalization. However, why not also re-imagine the spatiality of the present, a task, which as Rosen points out, concerns both an aesthetic and a political question? And since the film industry no doubt plays a strong role in representations of the world in terms of dematerialized flows of images and virtual spaces, how is it possible to re-imagine and re-frame the material dimension of geography as a condition of both contemporary geopolitics and the social-cultural production of place? The potential of world cinema, then, is to foreground the relation between and across spaces and spatial scales. In addressing the shifting and uncertain spatialities of globalization, border zones in cinema frequently represent liminal spaces inflected by a sense of fear, danger, and transgression as well as boredom and longing. Border zones often serve as gateways or thresholds to controlled spaces as in Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River (2008) or Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002), both of which I will examine in further detail in this chapter. In these cases, borders function to demarcate zones of inclusion and exclusion, reminders of the geopolitical ordering of space and the regulatory constraints on mobility, which often remain hidden from view or out of plain sight. Geographic borders are invoked in cinema whenever a journey or travel takes place. Narrative movement often destabilizes the hidden foundations and assumptions of place. Borders are thus crucial sites for the enunciation and transgression of a sense of place; border crossings serve not only to demarcate where place begins and ends but may also call attention to the constructed nature of place as a relational field.

240

Locale

An analysis of border spaces in contemporary cinema reveals the manifold tensions, contradictions and relationalities by which place is constituted as a translocal entity. Through an analysis of two recent border films, Frozen River and Divine Intervention, I argue that the border provides a particular challenge and opportunity for cinematic articulation of the politics and aesthetics of place in the twenty-first century. If a common and banal view of globalization involves a crisis of place and local specificity resulting from an increasingly borderless world, films like Frozen River and Divine Intervention function not only as reminders of the drastically uneven rights to space and mobility but also point to the fundamental instability of place as an indicator of identity and belonging. As films such as Frozen River and Divine Intervention demonstrate through their appeals to the contingent nature of the image, the cinema is itself constituted as a border space between the real and the imagined, the probable and the possible. These cinematic productions of space can then be read as crucial interventions in the political-aesthetics of place making. In foregrounding the relational geography of both the contemporary world and the contingency of its representational presence in the image, the border film challenges some of our basic assumptions regarding the stable ground of locality. Politics and aesthetics, as Jacques Rancière (2010) argues, are fundamentally practices of dissensus, or disagreement, which seek to question and displace univocal representations of the world. “The practice of fiction undoes, and then re-articulates, connections between signs and images, images and times, and signs and spaces, framing a given sense of reality, a given ‘common-sense.’ It is a practice that invents new trajectories between what can be seen, what can be said and what can be done” (Rancière 2010, 149). Cinematic border narratives thus function to reintroduce political and aesthetic contingency into the local through a reframing of spatial trajectories, a multiplication of sensory and representational identities, and the invention of possible mobilities. SPACE , PLACE A ND TRANSLOCALIT Y I N FROZEN RIVER

Courtney Hunt’s cartographic drama of poverty, loneliness, human smuggling, and desperation in Frozen River (2008) functions as a subtle interrogation and surreptitious unraveling of space as an absolute determinant. The film follows the protagonist Ray Eddy who, after the

Translocality and the Moving Image

241

sudden departure of her husband with all the family’s savings, haphazardly undertakes a series of human smuggling missions with her Mohawk counterpart Lila Littlewolf across the frozen St Lawrence. Without doubting the obstinacy of geopolitical borders as devices of surveillance and control, Frozen River calls attention to the liminality and contingency of the border zone as a radical space of possibility for reinventing and reimagining the prescribed social order. Border crossings, both social and spatial, reveal the inadequacies of the absolute definitions of space and place. In Frozen River, the various journeys and trajectories that make up the film’s narrative reveal the ways in which place is always already constituted by trans-territorial and translocal articulations. The drama of Frozen River revolves around the articulation of multiple cartographies of space. The film presents a contradiction of overlapping yet incongruent spatialities that demand a new politics of place that moves past the binary formulations of place as either an autonomous haven or a defensive enclosure in the midst of a world characterized by global interconnectedness. Instead of an either/or logic that pits local against global, I want to argue that Frozen River points towards a cartographic political aesthetic that refuses to distil place from its field of tension and ambiguity. Borders and border crossings provide the key spatial tropes and narrative action of the film. In Frozen River, a sense of place is defined by the spatial contradiction of the border. The spatial incongruity created by geopolitical borders and the contingent sense of jurisdictional in-betweenness created by movement across borders indicates not the dominance of either globalism or localism over the other but a politics of negotiation, encounter, and sometimes irreconcilable difference. In Frozen River, the multiple intertwined and overlapping borders define a relational cartography of space, identity, culture, mobility, and law as a rearticulation of the scales of global and local experience. Frozen River’s confrontation of space as an articulation of spatial scales (from the local to the geopolitical), each invested with material forms and discursive meaning, can be illuminated with reference to recent approaches in human geography to the description and analysis of the spatiality of contemporary globalization and its implications for the definition of place. Despite the apparent urgency in theoretical discourse to present sufficiently complex and dynamic models of globalization, there persists a tendency to view space and place, and local and global, in purely oppositional terms. On the one hand, the

242

Locale

production of place is celebrated by local boosters and phenomenologists as well as those critics of globalization who mourn the passing of distinct cultural forms and ways of life. On the other hand, place is treated with scorn by critics who associate it with parochialism, sectarianism, and competitiveness and who find globalization to be characterized by the co-option of local distinctiveness and the reduction of the local to a simulacral image (Robinson 2007, 16–37). More recently, theorizing of locality and the connection between the local and the global has been marked by a turn to relational theories of spatiality and a rejection of the notion that locality, or place, can be treated solely as a measurable material entity. Doreen Massey (1994) has offered several critiques of the view of place as a bounded site of authenticity, suggesting it is the result of a static conceptualization of space. Rather, if the spatial is conceived as the product of social interrelations of all scales, the view of place shifts to a “particular articulation of those relations, a particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings” (Massey 1994, 5). More recently, Massey sums up this view of space, writing that, “precisely because space on this reading is a product of relations-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as the simultaneity of stories-so-far” (Massey 2005, 9). Massey’s definition of relational space as consisting of an open multiplicity of narratives finds particular expression in world cinema’s recent fascination with place. What defines the place of Frozen River, then, is a collection of stories, identities, and mobilities in process. Such relational narratives frequently occur around spatial borders and thresholds, both markers of limits of a place and passages in, through, and between localities. From this perspective we might consider how the image in film itself is never complete but, like locality or place, always relational. The moving image, with is associated histories, memories, and symbolizations is constituted by, and constitutive of, relations rather than fixed identities. We can thus consider how the visual image “maps” the diverse trajectories of locality by calling attention to the figuration and relationality of space. One strength of Massey’s emphasis on the relationality of space is that it suggests a conception of space, which is always trans-spatial; it further suggests the need to discuss places and localities in terms of their translocal functions (Zhang 2010, 12).

Translocality and the Moving Image

243

David Harvey has developed his notion of relational space by drawing on the philosophies of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alfred North Whitehead. Harvey, in his 2009 work on the uses of geographical knowledge, proposes that the concept of space encompasses the dialectical tension between three theoretical frameworks for thinking about space and time. These are the absolute (which denotes the measurable and empirical space of things), the relative (the space of one thing relative to another), and the relational (defined as the “immaterial but objective” spacetime of processes and social relations, which are measurable not in themselves but rather only by way of their effects) (Harvey 2009, 150). For Harvey, the relational approach to space allows for geographical inquiry beyond the measurable and the calculable, bringing into view questions regarding identity and value as well as the production of alternative modes of spatiotemporality. Quoting Whitehead on relational space, Harvey writes, “the fundamental order of ideas is first a world of things in relation, then the space whose fundamental entities are the defined by the means of those relations and whose properties are deduced from the nature of these relations” (Whitehead qtd. in Harvey 1996, 256). From this it follows that places, or localities, should be approached in much the same way, as entities that “achieve relative stability for a time in their bounding and in their internal ordering or processes” (Harvey 2009, 190). “The process of place formation,” Harvey writes, “is, therefore, a process of carving out ‘permanences’ from a flow of processes that simultaneously create a distinctive kind of spatio-temporality” (2009, 190). However crucially, such “‘permanences’ – no matter how solid they may seem – are not eternal but always subject to time as ‘perpetual perishing.’ They are contingent on processes of creation, sustenance and dissolution” (Whitehead qtd. in Harvey 1996, 294). This relational approach further brings into focus the space of the translocal and the processes that articulate the production and reproduction of the boundaries that define place. However, Harvey’s conception of space also suggests the relative impermeability of place as a conditional permanence. Here locality acquires the properties of polylocality, in which multiple places exist yet do not necessarily realize a translocal connection (Zhang 2010). As such borders retain their physical, obstinate presence as thresholds (of translocal space) and limits (of polylocality). My use of the term “translocal” in my analysis of cinematic border spaces below thus retains both the communicative links between places and the notion

244

Locale

of relatively impermeable and strategic borders that resist smooth flows between places. Frozen River maps its terrain cumulatively through a process of cinematic spacing. Avoiding recourse to aerial views or diagrammatic overviews, Frozen River stitches together its cartography in a slow meditation on the unfinished trajectories of both landscape and cinema.1 The deictic mapping of the border zone in the river crossing sequences navigates the poles of an absolute physical space and a liminal and contested representational space. The border again figures as the ground through which the meaning of place is challenged and reimagined. The narrative revolves around and is organized by a series of spatial transgressions, or border crossings. Ray and her two sons live in a home outside of Massena, New York, a small city on the Southern shore of the St Lawrence River, across the border from Cornwall, Ontario. East of Massena lies the large Akwesasne Mohawk reservation, a territory that spans the New York, Ontario, and Quebec borders, as well as portions of the St Lawrence River.2 At the first instance, the Mohawk territory’s unique geographic positioning challenges the absolute representation of the nation-state as a determinant of spatiality. In transgressing the fixed boundaries of the United States and Canada, the Akwesasne reservation creates a liminal space that calls attention to the provisionality of borders and the social production of space. Ray Eddy’s everyday space consists of her home, the Yankee Dollar where she works, the town and local shops, and, of course, the roads that connect the various sites of her everyday life. Ray’s immediate sense of place is rather parochial as the story begins. Impoverished and recently abandoned by her husband, Ray dreams of trading in her small trailer home for a “double wide” and aspires to a management position at Yankee Dollar. She carries a handgun for protection and notably has little understanding or interest in her Mohawk neighbours a few miles away. The narrative begins with Ray being drawn into a new geographic and social space. In search of her departed husband, Ray meets Lila Littlewolf, an outsider in the Mohawk community who deceives Ray into embarking on a human smuggling mission by venturing across the St Lawrence ice into Canada in Mohawk territory, outside of the jurisdiction of local police. The polylocal spatiality of the Mohawk land confounds the parochial and absolute sense of place initially held by Ray. Significantly, the narration echoes the multicentered geography of the film through insertions of scenes following Lila’s

Translocality and the Moving Image

245

life independently of Ray’s story. Although the plot begins with Ray and privileges her trajectory, Lila gains prominence in the narrative as a character whose space and action remain independently determined and motivated. Place, in terms of bounded and measurable space, is further destabilized with the smuggling of Chinese and then Pakistani illegal immigrants and the harshness and matter-of-factness with which they are treated as cargo. The smuggled immigrants introduce the scale of the global into the local (parochial) lives of Ray and Lila. Their brief presence in the frame and their hidden presence off-screen stowed in the car’s trunk indexes the surreptitious presence of the global scale of geographical movement in even the most seemingly bounded locality. The destabilizing movement and contingency brought about by the border crossings reaches its most unsettling point in Ray and Lila’s final trek across the ice. When the migrants appear to be Pakistani rather than Chinese, Ray immediately reacts with suspicion. Ray’s prejudiced attitude towards the Pakistani couple, based on a fear of terrorism, leads her to leave their packed duffel bag on the frozen ice only to later discover that it contained the couple’s baby. The scene of Ray and Lila’s retrieval of the frozen baby in the night marks the affective centre of the film. Lila is quick to pronounce the baby dead only to find moments later that it is alive. While it is likely that Lila mistook the baby for dead, she concludes that its return to life was an act of the Creator. The sequence ends unresolved. As a moment of narrative contingency it transgresses the boundaries of absolute space and time. Rather, the film presents the possibility of an explanatory logic based on relationality (myth, imagination, storytelling, belief) as much as empiricism and absolute space and time. It is in no coincidence that it is in the in-between space of the border that this transgression of normative spatial thinking is introduced. The final border crossing goes badly and Ray and Lila take refuge from the police on Mohawk land. Besides resulting in a happy ending, what transpires between Ray and Lila marks the final transgression of place boundaries between their respective communities. Or, moreover, it expresses the evolution of Ray and Lila’s respective understandings of place as relational, open-ended, and indeterminate. Ray offers to take the fall for the smuggling while Lila looks after her two sons. The social space of the home and family (both Ray’s and Lila’s) is thus radically transformed.

246

Locale

Frozen River dramatizes the awakening of a relational and translocal sense of place while meditating on the thresholds of cinematic representation both in terms of narration and indexicality. Subtly challenging the spectator to identify the boundaries of storytelling and perception, the film considers the perceptual distance inherent to the cinematic image as a source of spatial dislocation and contingency in its disjunctive cartography of the border. Frozen River further points to the fluidity of narrative space in representing space as narrative, a set of “stories-so-far” (Massey 2005, 9). The recurrence of borders in cultural representations of local and global spaces can be interpreted as a key spatial trope for the relationality of place as a translocal entity. In his study of the border in European literature, Richard Robinson (2007) notes the “semantic uncertainty” that has surrounded the discourse of borders in cultural and literary theory. “The border stands on the one hand for a transcendent and utopian sign of incompleteness, process, difference and beyondness that is resistant to identiarianism and continuist teleology. At the same time, in its territorialized form, it must remain an unambiguous site of exclusionary terror” (Robinson 2007, 36). However, as Robinson (2007, 36) observes, while the border-as-metaphor is all too common in theoretical discourse, there has been little attempt to connect the metaphors to the actual material geographies from which they arise. Cinema, as I will suggest below, provides one methodology for “materializing” the border, mapping the relationality of place and narrating its conditional “permanence,” characterized as much by mobility and displacement as stasis and emplacement. Yet the “uncertainty” of border discourse is also worth taking at face value; border places (and places as borders) are uncertain places. Such is the critical interjection of cinema in the political-aesthetics of place making. The border as threshold and limit of the translocal (and the polylocal) needs to be imagined, represented, and perceived to be understood. It is here that a consideration of cinema illuminates methodologies to examine the relational properties of place and locality. BO R DER S PACE S , TRAN SLO CAL IM AG E S , AN D D IV INE IN T E RVE NT I O N

As a vehicle for mediating knowledge of place, the cinema has long been recognized to fulfill an ambivalent if not contradictory function in making “truthful” claims about the world. The theoretical legacy of

Translocality and the Moving Image

247

film’s ambivalent status as a source of visual knowledge remains a concern with theorists of the ontological qualities of the moving image, a debate that has become particularly relevant with recent pronouncements of the end of cinema in an age of media convergence.3 As a medium and art form, cinema functions as both a threshold through which knowledge of the world is mediated and as a border, or limit, to communication. In this regard, the “place” of cinema, or its positionality as an expressive and representational medium, is at once accessible and ungraspable. The recurring trope of the border in contemporary cinema as both an aid and an obstruction to movement, and mobility can thus productively be read as an expression of the anxiety surrounding the status of the film medium in the present. World cinema’s exploration of boundaries and border zones invokes a politics that resists representations of the borderless world conjured by global cinema.4 At the moment when communication media and geopolitical globalization conspire to define the world in terms of “smooth” space, filmmakers have sought to focus on sites of striation through explorations of the conditions of translocality, thus relocating and redefining place as an articulation of lived spatialities. At the same time, the cinema itself remains a mode of exploring and representing the world that relies on the striated disjunctions of its perceptual apparatus and the social and cultural context of spectatorship. Cinema thus remains a border place, both a boundary line and gateway to another space. Elia Suleiman’s absurdist drama of the everyday life of Palestinians in Nazareth and the West Bank mounts its intervention in the political-aesthetics of place by drawing attention to the contingent nature of both geographic and cinematic spatiality. Here the heavily militarized border foregrounds both political stakes of mobility in the West Bank and the banal absurdities of everyday urban life in controlled space. The film provides another example of a cinematic study of locality and translocality while further developing the trope of the border, both geopolitical and cinematic. While Frozen River foregrounds a mobile cartography of articulated scales as series of nesting boxes in order to construct a relational and translocal document of place at the Canadian-American-Mohawk border, Divine Intervention shows us a world in which mobility has given way to stasis. At the AlRam checkpoint, those who seek passage to Jerusalem from Ramallah are forced to wait and endure the seemingly arbitrary whims of the border guards. Suleiman (playing himself) and his lover routinely

248

Locale

meet in a parking lot on the Ramallah side of the checkpoint. As they sit together in Suleiman’s car surveying the scene of the border crossing staring forward, they silently and erotically caress each other’s hands. Not once in the film does either Suleiman or his lover speak. Rather, the clandestine handholding remains their only moment of genuine human contact. Paradoxically, the border crossing, which seeks to control the movement of people, provides the only space in the film where any communicative link is established. Suleiman’s portrait of social life among Palestinians emphasizes at every turn a sense of disconnection among neighbours, a profound lack of community. At work in Divine Intervention is a politics of space that mocks the social ties of the parochial in its absurdist representation of individuals who persist in an unforgiving social landscape. This isolation of individuals from one another is expressed by the fragmented narration of the film. A series of unresolved banal vignettes in the first part introduces the audience to this world in which the duration is punctuated by a series of eternally recurring movements, petty conflicts that occupy the time of the local residents. Workers arrive to fix a hole in a road in one scene; a man diligently smashes their work with a hammer in another. One neighbour throws his garbage into another’s yard each week. A boy kicks his football onto the road digger’s roof unwittingly; the neighbour retrieves the ball and matter-of-factly deflates it with a knife. A man waits at a bus stop for a bus that doesn’t run. Few words are spoken and the camera remains for the most part at a distance from the action as if we too are silent disengaged observers of this dysfunctional family. In Harvey’s terminology, the spatiality of moving images can be approached both in terms of absolute and relational frameworks. On the one hand, the space of the frame and the represented space of the world are absolute and measurable entities. This is often how film’s indexical relation to the real world is discussed. When considered in terms of absolute space and time, the image expresses an inert space abstracted from its social context. From this perspective, the image-asdocument conveys no meaning, no “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977); like an old photograph, the film’s image of place expresses most strongly our absence and distance from it (Kracauer 1995b, 46–63). Like the common map, the film image thus works to fix things in place by carving out abstract spatial relations. However, what the dislocated image expresses is not simply a totalizing form of knowledge but rather the always incomplete nature of mediated

Translocality and the Moving Image

249

representation. The critical potential of the image in this regard lies in its capacity for defamiliarization and the introduction of contingency into the ordinary. On the other hand, we might say that the moving image points not only to a static material trace, but a relational, immaterial space of transition and indeterminacy. The deictic mapping performed by the moving image would then affirm for us not just of a world that exists but of a world that is radically contingent on situated processes of emplacement and displacement. If we allow that space and place are relational concepts as much as they denote absolute and measurable entities, then the moving image, if perceived as an index, betrays not the absolute space of locality but an indeterminate and translocal “permanence.” Film’s deictic gesture to the real consists of views and traces, fragments of the world marked by contingency and the experience of insurmountable distance. The contingency of cinema consists of its particular relation to the profilmic, its automatic presentation of a trace of the real world beyond the intentionality of either filmmaker or spectator.5 It expresses the gap that exists between subjectivity and the objective world, and as such provides a means of escape from the clutches of modern rationality and discipline. For Mary Ann Doane, the cinema has historically been aligned with the dominant ideological current of modernity by working to make the contingent legible, such that “contingency and ephemerality are produced as graspable and representable, but nevertheless antisystematic” (Doane 2002, 230). The contingency of the image remains a source not only of cinema’s appeal but of its relevance for creating a “threshold of the past and the present, of the proximate and the distant, of the known and the unknown” (Harbord 2007, 145). For Siegfried Kracauer (1997, 304), the contingent materiality of the film image not only verifies that a world exists but strangely allows the viewer to inhabit it. However, if contingency relates to the ways that cinema creates impressions of liveable places, we must further ask how contingency is produced as an aesthetic and narrative strategy to underscore the relationality of place. This requires aesthetic considerations beyond the indexical imprint and in particular foregrounds the function of editing in distilling a contingent sense of place. Borders are key tropes in this project as spatial articulations of emplacement and displacement in an increasingly globalized world. The dialectic of spatial abstraction and contingency in the image is analogous to Harvey’s dialectic of absolute and relational space. Place

250

Locale

and cinema are thus sites of tension and contradiction, where relatively stable “permanences” of identity and meaning are created while nevertheless occasionally calling attention to the processes of emplacement and displacement that constitute them. Like Frozen River, in Divine Intervention the contingent and the indeterminate are built into the narrative in a deliberate attempt to muddle the neat boundaries of local and extra-local space. The spectator is similarly insinuated in a process of emplacement and displacement expressive of a sense of spatial indeterminacy and the “creation, sustenance and dissolution” of place. Geographically, Divine Intervention captures a series of absolute spaces, centering on the militarized border of Al-Ram. Space is treated as natural, fixed, and unquestionable to the point of absurdity. Characters find themselves in spatial conditions over which they have little control; space contains them such that place is intentionally difficult to locate, a condition that approaches Deleuze’s notion of the any-space-whatever as “space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure site of the possible” (Deleuze 1986, 109). In Ronald Bogue’s analysis, the any-space-whatever describes a “virtual space whose fragmented components may be assembled in multiple combinations, a space of yet-to-be-actualized possibilities” (Bogue 2003, 80). In Divine Intervention, space is discontinuous as the narration jumps geographically from scene to scene. Establishing shots are few, echoing a narrative that foregrounds a lack of an established sense of place. However, on this point the absolute space of control in Divine Intervention reveals a profound relationality. The interchangeability of spatial stories is made explicit in a scene in which Suleiman pulls a Post-it note off a wall of similar notes and moves it to another place on the wall. “Father falls sick,” the note reads, referring to a scene we have just witnessed featuring a middle-aged man collapsing at the breakfast table. The wall of Post-it notes then produces a relational narrative in which the film’s sense of place, or lack thereof, is the “effect” of the relations between its vignettes. The fragmented and discontinuous space that results is akin to a collage. Here translocality, the production of place across material and narrative spatial borders, appears as a strategy for coping in an otherwise controlled and absolute terrain. Suleiman’s revelation of the collage Post-it note storyboard is not the only reflexive instance of relationality in the film, nor the most striking. In exploring the possibility of a sense of place in an occupied territory, Suleiman’s film further explores the possibility of cinema in

Translocality and the Moving Image

251

evoking or mapping place. While Hunt draws on a realist aesthetic to find contingency in the lived geographical imagination of place, Suleiman’s vision of the relation between contingency and filmic indexicality appears somewhat more complex, if less optimistic about the possibility of indexical contingency to resist the controlled representation of space. In the occupied territory of Divine Intervention, contingency becomes a narrative strategy and exists in the realm of fantasy rather than in the indexical truth of the image. Fantasy, abetted by computer-generated imagery, allows for the transgression of borders that strictly demarcate the geography of the occupied territory. In one telling sequence, Suleiman’s lover challenges the border guards at the Al-Ram checkpoint. In the style of a runway model, she walks towards the border guards accompanied by a techno groove soundtrack, unfazed by the signals and trained rifles. At the moment that she passes the agitated soldiers, she turns her head and briefly lifts her dark sunglasses. The soldiers, apparently overcome by her sexual prowess, lower their guns. The lookout tower crumbles to the ground in her wake. Suleiman’s heroine returns late in the film in another fantasy sequence as an angelic Palestinian freedom-fighter who floats above the ground, stops the bullets of Israeli commandoes dead in the air, and downs a military helicopter with a boomerang shield in the shape of Palestine. The absurd and comedic transgression of borders through moments of contingency inserted into the film is further made apparent in an important sequence in which Suleiman (the character) releases a red helium balloon, with a picture of Yasser Arafat’s face on it, from the sunroof of his car as he and his lover sit together outside the checkpoint. The red balloon floats and meanders across the border and into the ancient city of Jerusalem where it rest above the crucifix atop the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. While directly referencing Albert Lamorisse’s famous film (Le Ballon Rouge, 1956), Suleiman’s insertion of the balloon fantasy suggests a need to rethink the paradigm of indexicality as the only guarantee of contingency in cinema. If cinema is a medium that trades in its capacity to generate a sense of place and locality, this is not solely due to its privileged access to the real. Rather as a deictic marker of the world, Divine Intervention points to a deeply unstable place. It alerts us to the relationality of locality – the inherent translocal nature of place – and the relational qualities of moving images challenge the borders and thresholds between truth and artifice, indexical duration, and contingent fantasy. As a relational and

252

Locale

translocal medium, cinema imagines a possible world that is not necessarily free of borders but rather registers the relational processes of emplacement and displacement that constitute the world. As Franco Moretti (1998, 35–40) has demonstrated in his analyses of the nineteenth-century European novel, borders are sites of ideological consensus significant as much for their presence as for their erasure in the service of incorporating the modern state. The films I have examined in this chapter reveal an urge to maintain the complexity and “stubborn obstinacy” of the border to re-evaluate place identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The cinematic meditation on the meaning of place owes to the destabilizing historical geography of contemporary globalization as much as Moretti’s state-sanctifying literature of the nineteenth century owed to that era’s complex upheaval in the social experience of space and time. In the cinema, the problematic of locality as translocality reveals a seemingly paradoxical attempt to ground a cosmopolitan ethics and politics in place. As I have argued throughout this chapter, this has increasingly led filmmakers to territorial margins and borders where place in its typical parochial formulation is destabilized. In these border zones, the provisional and relational identity of place reveals itself though myriad lived cartographies of space and time.

NOTES

1 See Janet Harbord’s discussion of “spacing” in The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies (2007, 39). 2 See www.akwesasne.ca for detailed maps of Akwesasne Mohawk territory in relation to multiple state jurisdictions. 3 While literature in this debate is expansive, frequently cited arguments may be found in Rodowick 2007; Doane 2007; and Andrew 2010ab. 4 See the distinction made by Andrew between global and world cinemas in 2010a, 59–89. 5 See Doane 2007, 128–52; Doane 2002; Harbord 2007, 123–5; Kracauer 1997, 62–3. See also Mulvey 2006.

13 Art and the Post-Urban Condition LEE RODNEY

M A N VA N V E R S U S B O O K M O B I L E

The van beckons like no van before. 2011 Honda Odyssey commercial

The year 2011 might go down on record as the year of the minivan, or at least the return of the minivan. After sales tumbled when the suv became the family vehicle of choice, advertising executives for Chrysler, Toyota, and Honda remade and marketed their minivan lines in a more masculine fashion. One might presume (or hope) that auto manufacturers would be busy retooling for peak oil. However, during the recession two principles swayed the automobile business: don’t make something new when you can simply repackage the old, and bigger cars have bigger profit margins. Both ideas were at work in the 2011 return of the minivan with ad campaigns that tapped into the new masculinity in strange ways: Toyota’s “Swagger Wagon” campaign riffed on hip hop culture and its appropriation of the suv by substituting an annoying, all-white cast of hyper parents with minivan pride. Honda’s Odyssey minivan ads featured Judas Priest’s song “The Hellion” and pyrotechnics to match as a young dad returns to his transformed van in the grocery store parking lot to find a Marshall amplifier emerging from the back. Chrysler, lacking the heightened irony of its competitors, simply referred to its rebranded van as the “man van” or “man cave.” Commenting on the redesign, Ralph Gilles, ceo of Dodge Brands made the desperate statement, “We consider ourselves to be the inventors of minivans and feel we can change the conversation on minivans” (qtd. in Little 2011).

254

Locale

So what is this conversation on minivans that the industry is so desperate to change? Why is the soccer mom taking all the flack for lacklustre sales figures? And will the man van appeal to the brow-beaten and underemployed dad, working its magic in reversing the fortunes of the American auto industry? Probably not, but it’s interesting to speculate on, and it’s made for some pretty amazing car commercials. But this conversation on the minivan is much larger than beleaguered dads and flagging masculinity; it betrays a lot about twentieth-century North American culture and its shifting place in the world. The first generation of minivans was launched by Chrysler in 1982, and the minivan’s popularity coincided with the rise and triumph of the suburbs as the dominant form of spatial planning in North America. The suburban appeal of the minivan is very much evident in the recent rebranding campaigns that feature anxious and competitive parents in their search for domestic perfection. But the larger narratives behind these stories correspond to important shifts in the recent history of globalization: the minivan’s production was simultaneous with just-in-time manufacturing systems, automation, and the expansion of branch plants in Canada, one of the first stops in global capital’s long cost-cutting tour for tax breaks and cheaper manufacturing expenses. Chrysler’s Plymouth Voyager minivan, the flagship model, came out of Detroit’s design studios, but it was wholly manufactured across the border in Windsor, Ontario, which still has the dubious distinction of being “the automotive capital of Canada.” This recent rebranding of the minivan interests me as I am a relative newcomer to the history of the auto industry and an ambivalent minivan owner. Feeling somewhat out of place in Windsor, my adopted home, I purchased a 1993 Plymouth minivan in 2009 as a vehicle for an urban research project called the Border Bookmobile. This vintage minivan was manufactured locally, in Windsor’s Chrysler Minivan Assembly Plant, the largest auto factory in Canada, so the vehicle acts as a symbol of the economic cycles of the region and the vicissitudes of manufacturing and trade that constitute local history. When I purchased it in 2009, in the midst of the first wave of economic recession, it appeared as though Windsor’s plant was in the final throes of production and that the van would serve as a material artefact of suburban culture as Windsor and Detroit transitioned away from the auto industry into something new. But the deeply entrenched circuits of the automobile economy proved resilient over the last downturn and produced yet another

Art and the Post-Urban Condition

255

remodel of a vehicle that has long enjoyed a place of pride in many suburban driveways. The Border Bookmobile’s investment in the history of suburbanization in the Detroit-Windsor region made the minivan a natural choice for a mobile exhibition of books, photographs, maps, and ephemera on this border region. But the project also strives to bring into the discussion larger narratives about borders in the twenty-first century, a theme that is largely absent from urban studies on Detroit. While Detroit is a well-known American city, it is rarely regarded as a border city. Therefore, discourses around urban decay often eclipse the fact that the city is one of the largest on the US border. The Border Bookmobile is in part a memory project that seeks to chart the changing relationship between Detroit and Windsor as border cities in the industrial heartland of North America. But more significantly, it is also a social platform to discuss borders within and between cities and the production of space within borderlands in more heterogeneous and contested parts of the world. The Border Bookmobile encourages its viewers and participants to produce new narratives about the region that speak to the interrelationship between Windsor and Detroit. Through various field trips within the region, the Border Bookmobile seeks to critically and creatively map the spatial politics of this border region in relation to the movements of global culture, thus questioning the complex processes that mark these locales as abject territories.1 While the auto industry seems to be proceeding with business as usual, the region is changing as the border between Canada and the United States thickens and people throughout North America look to the spectacular ruins of Detroit’s industry during a time of economic recession. The cities of Windsor and Detroit occupy a unique position in North American history. Now largely dismissed as a hopeless reminder of the failures of the American auto industry, they have served as the blueprint for urban development in Canada and the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. Much of the core of Windsor and Detroit has been neglected or abandoned since the 1960s in favour of newer suburban communities that skirt the periphery of this sprawling region where the city gives way to a hybrid “rurbanism,” progressively gnawing away at the rural landscape in a long, slow bid to escape the political and economic problems that began in the middle of the last century.2 The current combination of economic and political circumstances in Windsor-Detroit would

256

Locale

Figure 13.1: The Border Bookmobile at the Imagination Station, Detroit, October 2011. Photo: Lee Rodney

seem to suggest a final chapter in the history of these places; however, responses to the challenges posed by these shrinking cities have not been forthcoming from politicians or big business, but rather from artists, designers, writers, and architects – people who have been utilizing the disjointed urban fabric for a range of research strategies that question the standard logic about Detroit and Windsor’s past and its future, seeing it as a place that we must look to seriously to comprehend the philosophical, environmental, and cultural implications of Fordism and its globalized aftermath.3 In this context, the Border Bookmobile is a research vehicle for the post-urban situation that has emerged in Windsor and Detroit as perhaps the most extreme example of modern cities, dissolving and spreading so widely that they no longer behave recognizably as cities, but rather as agglomerations of neighbourhoods and townships punctuated by vast swaths of abandoned property. The Bookmobile’s collection brings together two disparate bodies of research: material on Detroit and Windsor’s rich urban histories as well as borderlands research that investigates the complex cultural politics of the US-Mexico border. While these histories are largely unrelated, there are parallels and points of convergence.4 he collection is rounded out with a range of related subjects: books on global border politics, surveillance,

Art and the Post-Urban Condition

257

Figure 13.2: The Border Bookmobile at the Detroit Figment Festival, Belle Isle, Detroit, July 2012 . Photo: Victoria Symons

urban activism, and public space. While the collection does not strive for comprehensiveness, it aims to animate and activate discussion on the history and future of the two cities as well as the impact of changes in border policies in recent years. It also serves as a springboard for oral history as visitors to the Bookmobile share memories and experiences of living in this border region. In talking to people about their everyday experiences – their perceptions and recollections on the relationship between Windsor and Detroit – the project strives to draw out a micropolitical view that locates the region’s history within larger narratives of globalization resulting from the neoliberal reorganization of the world. As a form of field research, the project serves to animate and question the dominant narratives about Windsor and Detroit: the rise and fall of manufacturing in the rust belt and its inevitable decline, poignantly marked by thousands of abandoned properties, domestic and institutional, as well as vast neglected sections of the two cities’ centres. Detroit’s resurgent popularity owes much to a Benjaminian perspective on history, looking back with a keen sense of the fallibility of what we call progress; but in attempting to mine the region’s his-

258

Locale

tory, one is frequently met with canned responses to the difficult questions as to what happened and why. In talking to long-term residents of Windsor and Detroit, I often hear one of two pat answers. The first, “the ’67 riots killed Detroit,” is an inaccurate, frequently heard refrain, as if the city was attacked by an invading army of guerrilla fighters. The second response, “globalization killed us,” is partial and incomplete. At the crux of the project is something that Jerry Herron (1993) refers to as “the forgetting machine” in his study of Detroit aptly titled Afterculture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. Herron draws links between the American consumer culture perfected through Fordism and its symptomatic inclination to privilege forgetting over remembrance (and abandonment over care) in order to keep people hungry for perpetually new things: new hats, new cars, new homes in new places (Herron 1993, 24). The Bookmobile project seeks to provide alternative histories that take into consideration larger cultural shifts – both those that were precipitated by Fordist ideology and what might be called “automobility,” a historic North American preference for self-movement that began with a populist uprising against rail monopolies in the late nineteenth century, notably prior to the invention of the automobile (Gutfruend 2004, 24). Additionally, the Border Bookmobile aims to situate Detroit and Windsor within broader discussions on borders that have been taking place around the world. Where the US-Mexico border has long been a site for the cultural production of dissent, resistance, and resilience to mainstream American views on migration and security, the Canada-US border figures less prominently as a cultural issue, even though it has changed significantly since 2001. While we hear constantly about the economic burdens of the Canada-US border, its cultural politics are more technological and abstract.5 However, the securitization of this border has put cities like Windsor and Detroit (the only contiguous border city on the Canada-US border) more in league with border cities along the US-Mexico border in terms of a widening gulf between residents on either side. Where it was not uncommon prior to 9/11 to cross the border to go for lunch in either Detroit-Windsor or Juarez-El Paso, passport and security regulations (in addition to the perception of violence – very real in Juarez, and mostly imagined in Detroit) have made cross-border visits decline precipitously. The borderlands of the southern United States and northern Mexico have come to constitute a unique, though contested, cultural

Art and the Post-Urban Condition

259

region that has produced its own set of experimental geographies and borderlands imagined in a multitude of projects as diverse as the longstanding Border Art Workshop (1984–) or the more recent Political Equator conferences (2006–11) where the US-Mexico border is positioned as the beginning of a global division that traverses the world, separating the poverty of the global south from the concentrated wealth of the global north. The concept of the “political equator” was put forward by Teddy Cruz, an experimental architect whose projects span both sides of the Tijuana–San Ysidro border where these divisions are indeed apparent. But what this concept papers over in its tidy division of the world are the internal disparities within North America that have emerged as transnational industry has migrated out of the rust belt of the United States and Canada, first to Mexico and now across the globe to Southeast Asia. The movements of global capital that produced the US-Mexico border as a neoliberal experiment in low-wage export processing zones from the 1960s to 1990s also served to empty out cities like Detroit during the same period. Where the city of Detroit has been traversed by spatial divisions and boundaries that separated class and race, the idea of the international border as a significant territorial demarcation along its southern edge is relatively new. Windsor has historically played a supporting role in Detroit’s history, having little identity outside its American branch plants, its whiskey, and strip clubs, all serving different sectors of Detroit’s economy. RUR B A NISM : SUBURBS WITHO UT CITIE S

In 1905, Henry Ford stated that cities were doomed. “We shall solve the problem of the city by leaving the city,” he proclaimed, and, by 1917, Ford had begun to move the company’s operations and corporate headquarters to the River Rouge Plant in Dearborn, a small farming village ten miles west of Detroit (Park 2005, 36). This was the first in a long line of moves out of the city, both industrial and residential. For Ford, social engineering was at the heart of his worldview, and even his most far-fetched ideas (soybean wool, for example) have left an indelible imprint on North American culture (Garandin 2009). Ford’s esoteric mix of the nostalgic simplicity of rural life and the modern efficiency of the assembly line first came together at Greenfield Village, a combination Americana museum and demonstration community. But this early twentieth-century vision of a clean,

260

Locale

efficient rural America has grown exponentially: the postwar housing boom that made the United States a suburban nation has mutated into a new quasi-rural urbanism, the suburbs beyond the suburbs that satisfy our insatiable consumer desires for new homes on virgin land. This vision of a post-urban, semi-rural America is easily seen in a range of twenty-first-century consumer products, from Home Depot to Pottery Barn where seemingly endless variations on rustic domesticity compete for market share in furnishing the neocolonial super homes of the 1990s housing boom. It seems ironic that, as North Americans moved further away from cities in search of country living, Detroit, the Doomed City, has rediscovered farming – not the industrial soy farms that Ford had envisioned, but small, labour-intensive plots on the lands long abandoned by the various automotive visionaries and their suburban acolytes. At the same time, Detroit’s seemingly enigmatic ruins have attracted an increasing number of artists seeking insight into the world’s most spectacular capitalist ruin (Rodney 2009). Mike Kelly’s Mobile Homestead project (2010) is one of the latest in a long line of celebrity tributes to the Motor City (this list includes Eminem, Clint Eastwood, Johnny Knoxville, Steven Spielberg, and Banksy). While Kelly is best known as a west coast artist, he spent his formative years in Detroit. His symbolic return to his childhood home is a poignant commentary on the exodus to the suburbs and a contemporary portrait of the resilient characters that still populate Michigan Avenue, one of the oldest and longest streets in Detroit, which stretches from the city centre to the suburbs of Dearborn, where Kelly grew up. The Mobile Homestead replicates the suburban vernacular architecture of the Kelly home, an uncanny double that looks remarkably out of place when moved from the suburbs back into the deteriorating urban core. The juxtaposition of the new vinyl home against the backdrop of Michigan Central Station, the crumbling 100-year-old Beaux-Arts structure that has become an icon of Detroit’s predicament, exposes the contradictions embedded in our economic models of endless growth measured by indexes such as housing starts, statistics gathered on new home construction as an indicator of economic health. The Mobile Homestead travelled from Detroit’s centrally located Museum of Contemporary Art to Ford’s Greenfield Village and onward to Kelly’s suburban home, at which point it turned around to retrace its journey, back into the city where it has been established as a community library and centre in Detroit.

Art and the Post-Urban Condition

261

The Mobile Homestead symbolically reverses Ford’s exodus and the white flight that continued throughout the twentieth century. GENTRIFICATION VS . STA B I L I Z ATI O N

In 2008, at the end of the real estate bubble and at the beginning of the foreclosure crisis, a small international group of architects, artists, and curators formed the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency. Their projects were directed toward overarching questions presented by the economic crisis, particularly the question of value as a function of real estate speculation. At the time, Detroit was making international news with its one dollar properties, which formed an hysterical limit to the bottom of housing market. The agency’s work chronicled and inventoried the range of cultural practices in Detroit that function below the radar of standard economic measures, those that aim to create a different value system than the one that has placed Detroit and Windsor (and other rust belt cities) as losers in the game of global cities and their competition for talent. In recent years, Richard Florida’s (2005) familiar creative cities narrative has implicitly relied upon Detroit as its supreme negative example to put at the end of his annual listing of creative class destination points, while Florida himself has come to function more as a real estate guru on a world tour of the world’s priciest cities rather than an urban studies expert. As Florida would have it, creativity chases money, a theory that is more in line with fifteenth-century Florence or nineteenth-century Paris than with the complex digital world that we currently inhabit. Florida stands as the master apologist for gentrification, a cycle that was linked to the arrival of artists seeking cheap studio space since the 1980s by the urban sociologist Sharon Zukin (1982) who studied the post-industrial transformations of neighbourhoods in and around New York City. Detroit real estate continues to hover around its historically low levels, with over a third of its properties vacant or abandoned; but, at the same time, the city has attracted a small but significant influx of artists (both temporary and permanent residents) who have found in Detroit not only cheap studio space but also a means to reconsider the social potential of experimental neighbourhoods. The conventional relationship between artists and cities has typically been a complex symbiosis between the production of cultural and economic capital where artists are forced to seek out low rent areas of cities with high economic value; but in the current economic climate,

262

Locale

the cost of property has forced many artists to move out of the major centres to places that are off the mainstream cultural maps. Occasionally, one hears murmurs about gentrification affecting Detroit, but at the moment, in all but a few neighbourhoods, gentrification seems a remote fantasy. If Detroit and Windsor prove to be resistant to gentrification, it is not merely because of the blue collar legacy; it is because the critical issue facing neighbourhoods is stabilization and how to maintain enough presence so as not to disappear into the demolition cycle, whether mechanical or natural. If the free market system fails to find value in the material remains of one of North America’s most historically significant regions, what seems to be emerging in this post-urban milieu is a much more salient and fine-grained response to the continuing economic downturn where many collaborative projects aim at neighbourhood stabilization against the tide of foreclosures, abandonment, and arson. In the process, these projects seem to be hitting upon a kind of freedom to experiment with long held beliefs about good vs. bad communities, desirable and undesirable cities as well as the scope of art practices within places that would seem to be bereft of cultural and economic capital. Hamtramck’s Design 99 as well as Windsor’s Broken City Lab have prospered in this climate. These collectives have created projects that emerge in response to the challenges posed by living and working in places that are in critical condition. As there seems to be no market solution for the post-urban condition of this region, experimental strategies for stabilizing communities by marking, occupying, and enlivening abandoned space function as forms of creative dissonance – a method that does not fall prey to the logic of gentrification by fixing or papering over structural problems. Design 99 has repurposed neighbourhood refuse (wood, bricks, and stone) to blockade the entrances to abandoned houses to deter arsonists. Their Neighbourhood Machine, a small Bobcat put to the service of reconstructing the neighbourhood through collecting, moving, and recombining its refuse, is a tool that produces a series of new assemblages from the materials at hand. In Windsor, Broken City Lab organized a month-long project in a series of vacant downtown storefronts. The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation (2010), brought in thirty artists who became residents of these spaces and provided a variety of new forms of social services, from collaborative map making to cooking, baking, trading clothes,

Art and the Post-Urban Condition

263

repairing objects, and organizing market research groups. Collectively, the flurry of activity in a normally vacant downtown block served to temporarily reconstruct a social fabric that no longer exists in the downtown core. R ECES S I O N RE SE ARCH

The great recession wears on in North America, officially heralded by the abstract terminology of Wall Street economists who announce the “double dip” patterns that go hand in hand with that wondrous euphemism of a “jobless recovery.” In these times, Detroit and Windsor begin to look less anomalous and more like a harbinger of things to come. Locally, people dismiss the attention, referring to the upswing in popularity of collections of photography documenting Detroit’s iconic remains as “ruin porn,” a body of urban photography that circulates on blogs and coffee table books of images by Camilo Jose Vergara, Andrew Moore, Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre, and others. But, like all pornography, ruin porn simultaneously offends and appeals as we see something of ourselves in the theatricalized, extreme scenarios pictured in the glossy, large format photographs. And if Detroit can be seen as the cause celebre for Westerners soul searching in the midst of a deep economic recession, it not because we feel ourselves to be above and beyond the ruins but rather that we see in these images a momento mori for our own era of global capital. Michigan Central Station frequently plays the role of Detroit’s ground zero. This historic building, erected in 1913 by Warren & Wetmore and Reed & Stem – the same architectural firm that built New York City’s Grand Central Station a year earlier – has become Detroit’s most contentious property (Gallagher and Hill 2010, 220). Empty since 1988, the year the last Amtrak train pulled out of the station, it has been rented out to Hollywood film producers for cop shows and disaster movies at prices up to ten thousand dollars per day. But as Detroit’s most iconic ruin, it also has become the stage for a range of local collective projects that seek out a less dystopian version of Detroit’s future. Imagination Station, a group of media artists and activists set up residence in 2009 across from Roosevelt Park and the train station to establish a project space and media centre. The group purchased two adjacent properties for five hundred dollars apiece: the group regularly hosts artists’ projects and events on the site, though one property has been lost to arson. The remaining house

264

Locale

remains in limbo, though they have established a small park nearby with an impromptu mini-golf from scavenged local materials as well as a jungle gym. The skeletal remains of house that burned were carefully dismantled and repurposed to become the material for Catie Newell’s project Salvaged Landscape (2010–11). Newell took the charred wood and cut it in cross sections to expose the undamaged core and then stacked the pieces, with fresh ends exposed, to reconstruct a series of new rooms and interior and exterior walls. Salvaged Landscape and similar projects in Detroit have worked to establish an interesting tension between clearing and restoration, demolition and forgetting that is often lost when Detroit’s politicians have attempted to improve the city by demolition alone. Object Orange, an anonymous collection of artists who painted the facades of abandoned, destroyed houses in a shade of brilliant orange, initially titled their epic intervention, Detroit, Demolition, Disneyland (2006). The group selected a shade of Behr paints, Tiggerific Orange, from the Disney/Home Depot line to mark these houses, a sly decision given that Behr paints is headquartered in Troy, Michigan, one of many wealthy townships that border Detroit. Seeing a correlation between the houses they painted, which stood out on the landscape like brightly collared targets, and those that the city immediately demolished, the project exposed a sanctioned pattern of demolition, a game of name and shame. While Detroit owns over ten thousand abandoned or vacant houses, their presence has become a kind of normative sight throughout the city, one that draws apocalypse tourists from all parts of the world. Detroit’s official plan for its redevelopment involves structurally shrinking the city through demolishing neighbourhoods and thus encouraging relocation to more densely populated regions. The Ice House (2010), another recent Detroit-based project, similarly draws attention to complicated politics of the demolition crisis facing the city. An abandoned 1930s, Sears Roebuck house, sprayed with water during the winter months, resulted in a hauntingly beautiful ice sculpture, but it also had the unfortunate effect of providing yet another an image of the city as a lost civilization frozen in the past. Detroit City Council voted in 2009 to tear down Michigan Central Station, a fate that was only forestalled by the cost of its demolition, which neither the City nor the building’s owner Manuel Moroun would finance. However, Mr Moroun, a billionaire who regularly makes the Forbes top forty list of the world’s wealthiest people,

Art and the Post-Urban Condition

265

continues to use the structure as a pawn in a larger power game within the border region. The region’s impressive architectural history is rapidly disappearing and the line separating the economic development corporation (which tends to favour demolition projects and flashy new sports arenas and casinos) and the creative communities couldn’t be more pronounced. Demolition has become a kind of strange panacea for the urban ills of the rust belt and is quite a robust industry in Detroit and Windsor. Windsor’s Norwich block, a group of historic, late-nineteeth-century buildings that housed several shops, cafes, and a repertory cinema, was torn down in 1998 to make way for One Riverside Drive, a behemoth complex that housed Daimler-Chrysler’s corporate headquarters. The new structure is currently 90 percent vacant. However, throughout the two cities, former demolition sites remain empty, often remodeled as gravel lots surrounded by chain-link fences and razor wire. As sites of erasure these spaces become wind tunnels between buildings that catch flying plastic bags and other debris. This sanctioned erasure of material history is rationalized by free market logic where renovation is simply too costly. But big, empty buildings also pose too many big, complex questions that our history-averse culture seems incapable of contemplating. The emptiness of a demolition site functions something like a memory block, suggesting that nothing ever happened: just drive by and forget about it. The fate of Michigan Central Station is still uncertain, but for the moment it serves as a projection screen for two speculative economies. The first is centered around the idea of Detroit as spectacle, the demolition capital of the world, the graveyard for American civilization as seen from the perspective of Time magazine and Hollywood; while the second might be understood broadly to constitute a counter spectacle, based in a variety of social practices, projects that take Detroit at face value and offer challenges to the standard logic of economic development, which continuously begins anew (and flops) with each new city administration. This phenomenon of urban research in Detroit has a venerable legacy that has been building since the late 1960s: the work of the radical geographer Bill Bunge, whose early mapping projects examined the racial segregation patterns emerging in the greater Detroit region, has been rediscovered by architects and urbanists (Bunge 1971). Likewise, Tyree Guyton’s longstanding Heidelberg Project has received more traffic and more acclaim since 2007 than it had in the previous twenty years (Laitner 2012).

266

Locale

However, the range of collaborative projects in both Windsor and Detroit has intensified. The post-urban condition that has manifest in the region has served as a springboard for reconsidering ideas of repurposing and re-use, approaching the holy grail of sustainability from a different angle than usual, which typically involves branding green products (and green buildings) as new items. If sustainability asks us to monitor our use of the earth’s resources, why is it that we need new houses and new products to go green? Many of these collaborative projects seem to be coming to the sustainability issue obliquely, slowly, and philosophically. Implicitly, they seem to point to some crucial questions about continuing to view this region as a vast demolition site. For what is it that prevents us from recycling a neighbourhood or even a whole city when roads and infrastructure are already in place? And why do developers continue to eat away at the fringes of an international metropolitan region that has close to 5.4 million people within a hundred-mile radius? I N T ER N ATI O N AL SUBURBAN D O N UT

Windsor and Detroit occupy a unique position within the geography of the Canada-US border: the two cities form the second largest urban border region within North America. While the city centres are separated only by the Detroit River, which spans just a little over five hundred metres at its narrowest point, the two places have become increasingly disconnected since the 1950s. Historically, this region was defined by the narrows of the Detroit River, which connects Lake Erie and Lake St Clair, a natural transition point in the Great Lakes geography. Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit, established by the French in 1701, took its name from the straits (étroit or narrows) between two land masses on the western frontier. Two hundred years later, as industry established and the city grew, international crossings and engineering projects of vast proportions were established in the same location to span the river by bridge and tunnel, thus accommodating the increasing traffic between the two cites. Detroit’s location on the Canadian border enabled the “Border Cities” (Windsor’s moniker prior to 1937) to become one of the first export processing zones in the early twentieth century when the American auto industry set up branch plants to gain access to tarifffree markets within the British Commonwealth. By the end of the twentieth century, the economic integration of this region was deeply

Art and the Post-Urban Condition

267

ingrained. Manufacturing logistics sent cars (in various stages of completion) back and forth across the international border multiple times before the finished product rolled off the assembly line in one of the many plants in Ontario, Michigan, and Ohio (Colling and Morgan 1993). The Ambassador Bridge accommodates much of this transnational traffic; at its peak in 2001, it accommodated up to twelve thousand transport trucks daily. This bridge still has the highest trade volume of any international land crossing, spanning some of the poorest, most polluted, and neglected parts of Windsor and Detroit’s historic centres. Notabl,y Michigan Central Station, the relic of American rail infrastructure, is best viewed while crossing the Ambassador Bridge from Canada into the United States, where sunsets pierce through the blown out windows of its upper stories. While the international crossings were once an advantage for Windsor and Detroit, they have more recently become a site of the competing forces of globalization where new border security mandates run counter to the flows of industrial production that still define the region. During the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s border regions were established as economic nodes that freely accommodated transnational industry.6 In the twenty-first century, however, borders are not merely physical entities; they effect and condition the flows of our transnational, global world. They are, moreover, riddled with contradiction. To paraphrase Stefano Boeri (2011), they are at the same time, abstract and real, controversial and ordinary, inconvenient and necessary. In Detroit and Windsor, relations of proximity and distance are determined by border infrastructure, traffic volume, and wait times, producing a fragmented cultural geography that is difficult to parse within existing lexicons of urbanism. But even before 2001, the Canada-US border served as a centrifugal force as populations on both sides gravitated out towards the edges of the metropolitan regions of the two cities, establishing new townships at the peripheries. As a result of these pressures, the Windsor-Detroit region currently functions as a large, international suburban donut with border crossings and highways traversing the emptied out centre. The cultural and geographic fragmentation is particularly notable in Windsor where the border is the focal point formed by the Detroit skyline – a horizon that is visible only from the Canadian side. However, the perception of the international border as a point of orientation is far less pronounced in Detroit, which was divided up by the freeways that transported its population out to the suburbs in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s (Sugrue

268

Locale

2005, 181–208). And, while the automobile industry built Detroit, it also led to its destruction. Postwar housing policies and the interstate highway system that emerged mid-century worked in tandem with Detroit’s industries to create new consumer values that denigrated cities as outmoded nineteenth-century cultural forms. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, passed in 1956, was in large measure a Cold War military strategy that sought to disperse urban populations across larger areas so that Americans would not be susceptible to foreign bombing campaigns like those they had unleashed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 (Sugrue 2005; Jackson 1985, 190–218). So while Detroit did not suffer from military strikes, it has still lost nine hundred thousand inhabitants who left between 1950 and 2000 (Park 2005, 36). As such, Detroit became invisible to most Americans. However, the city’s still impressive skyline – a collection of glass towers and art deco skyscrapers – is still plainly visible from the south side of the Detroit River on the Canadian bank, which suggests that Detroit’s best view is not visible from within, but rather from the outside, across the international border. Jerry Herron (2010) refers to the conditions produced in Detroit as a “borderama,” a series of spectacles for the world where the city continually threatens to disappear, hovering in a borderline state “between city/not-city.” Herron’s metaphor is borrowed from the performances and writings of performance artist Guillermo Gómez Peña, who characterizes the media politics of the Mexico–US border as a “borderama,” a panoramic spectacle, a ruse to incite fear (Herron 2010). From the vantage point of Windsor, Detroit looks like a city; likewise, from Detroit’s waterfront, one can see the corporate signage of American enterprise advertising Hilton, Ceasar’s, and Chrysler, which all have tower blocks along Windsor’s waterfront. But beyond these borderama spectacles, the signs of urban life are not those advertised by the architectural theatre along the waterfront. Where the border was once an important point of contact, it has functioned in the recent history of globalization as an increasingly efficient thoroughfare for auto parts, widgets moving back and forth in transport trucks. At the same time, it becomes more and more difficult for people to cross with the same degree of efficiency and ease. Much of this problem is linked to increased border security, which has worked in tandem with manufacturing industries to tailor the border to its needs under the North American Free Trade Agreement,

Art and the Post-Urban Condition

269

privileging products over people, and flexible spaces before places. Windsor and Detroit might stand as the media’s favourite backdrop for news stories about the most recent recession, but the highways, border crossings, and peripheral roads are still busy, populated by Ford F-150 pick-ups, Lincoln Navigators, and a large number of minivans, some gleaming, others falling apart as they orbit the two cities in an ever growing miasma of rurban and gated communities seeking to forget about the urban origins from which they all emerged.

NOTES

1 The project is documented in more detail on my website: borderbook mobile.net. 2 The idea of rurbanism, a neologism that attempts to define the interface of rural and urban contexts and use patterns, is used in two different, opposed contexts. The first refers to situations where suburban density drops to a point that housing developments take on a distinctly rural character, as in the development of “country estates” or suburbs that are so remote that they are disconnected from municipal utilities lines. The second, more progressive use of the term comes from projects that seek to embed agricultural processes within existing urban contexts such as homesteading or the development of brownfield sites for food security. See Hayden (2004, 56). 3 See O’Gorman 2007, Oswalt 2006, Rodney 2009; 2011, Steinmetz 2009 for readings of Detroit’s urban history and its relationship to the arts. 4 I have written elsewhere about the parallels and relays between events on the Canada-US border and the Mexico-US border that indicate that American anxiety about its borders has become generalized and has spread far beyond the territory of the southern borderlands. See Rodney 2011. 5 See especially McLuhan 1977 and Berland 2009. 6 The Border Industrialization Program (1965), an economic program that established Mexico’s northern border towns as an export-processing zone with the now well-known maquiladoras, was an outgrowth of the earlier pronaf project (Programa Nacional Frontizero) that was established as “cultural gateway project” in the early 1960s. See Arreola and Curtis (1994, 28). Likewise, the Canada-US Auto Pact effectively established American branch plants throughout southwestern Ontario as similar move toward offshore, transnational assembly. See Colling and Morgan (1993, 110).

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Aarseth, Espen. 1998. “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games.” www.hf.uib.no/hi/espen/papers/space. (Site discontinued). Abbas, M. Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Abrams, Janet, and Peter Hall. 2006. Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Althusser, Louis. 2006. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87. London: New York: Verso. Amin, Ash. 2008. “Collective Culture and Urban Public Space.” City 12 (1): 5–24. Anand, Shaina. 2009. “Khirkeeyan.” In New Communities, edited by Nina Möntmann, 122. Toronto: Public Books/The Power Plant. Andersen, Margaret, and Howard F. Taylor. 2008. Sociology: Understanding a Diverse Society. 4th ed. Belmont, ca: Thomson. Andrew, Dudley. 2006. “An Atlas of World Cinema.” In Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics, edited by Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim, 19–29. London: Wallflower Press. – 2010a. “Time Zones and JetLag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema.” World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman, 59–89. New York: Routledge. – 2010b.What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge. Malden, ma: WileyBlackwell.

272

Bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 2001. Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press. Aragon, Louis. 1994. Paris Peasant. Boston: Exact Change. Arreola, Daniel, and James Curtis. 1994. The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape, Anatomy, and Place Personality. Tucson: Arizona State University Press. Augoyard, Jean-François. 2007. Step by Step: Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project. Translated by David Ames Curtis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Originally published in France in 1979. Austin, James. H. 1978. Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty. New York: Columbia University Press. Azuma, Ronald, Yohan Baillot, Reinhold Behringer, Steven Feiner, Simon Julier, and Blair MacIntyre. 2001. “Recent Advances in Augmented Reality.” ieee Computer Graphics and Applications 21 (6): 34–47, http://www.cs. unc.edu/~azuma/cga2001. Baer, Ulrich. 2000. Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Banham, Reyner. 1971. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. London: Harper Row. Baudelaire, Charles. 1970. Paris Spleen. Translated by Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions. – 1972. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Translated by P.E. Charvet. Harmondsworth: Penguin. – 1989. Flowers of Evil. Edited by Jackson Mathews and Marthiel Mathews. New York: New Directions. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2012. Liquid Modernity. 2nd ed. London: Polity. Basualdo, Carlos, and Reinaldo Laddaga. 2009. “Experimental Communities.” In New Communities, edited by Nina Möntmann, 20–31. Toronto: Public Books/The Power Plant. Becker, Howard S. 1994. “‘Foi por Acaso’: Conceptualizing Coincidence.” Sociological Quarterly 35 (2): 183–94. Bell, Gwen, and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. 1972. Human Identity in the Urban Environment. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. – (1929) 1979a. One-way Street, and Other Writings. London: NLB. – (1929) 1979b. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” In One Way Street and Other Writings. London: Verso. – 1986. Moscow Diary. Edited by Gary Smith. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press.

Bibliography

273

– 1998. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. New York: Verso. – 1999. The Arcades Project. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. New York: Belknap Press. Originally written between 1927 and 1940. – 2002a. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Harvard Press. – 2002b. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 3. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Harvard Press. – 2004. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 1. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Harvard Press. – 2005a. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 2, part 1. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Harvard Press. – 2005b. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 2, part 2. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Harvard Press. – 2006. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Harvard Press. Bennett, James. 1988. Oral History and Delinquency: The Rhetoric of Criminology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bergson, Henri. 1988. Matter and Memory. Translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Berland, Jody. 2009. North of Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Bhagat, Alexis, and Lize Mogel. 2008. An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press. Bimber, Oliver, and Ramesh Raskar. 2005. Spatial Augmented Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds. Wellesley, ma: A.K. Peters. Bird, Jon. 2000. “Dystopia on the Thames.” In The City Cultures Reader, edited by Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Ian Borden, 303–9. London: Routledge. Bishop, Claire. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (Fall): 51–79. – 2006. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents in Contemporary Art.” Art Forum (February):179–85. Blomley, Nicholas. 2010. Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. London: Routledge. Blum, Alan. 2003. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism. Englewood Cliffs, nj: Prentice Hall. Boeri, Stefano. 2011. “Border Devices.” http://www.multiplicity.it/ index2.htm.

274

Bibliography

Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Cinema. New York: Routledge. Boulin, J.-Y., and Ulrich Mückenberger. 1999. Times in the City and Quality of Life. Dublin: European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. Bouman, Mark J. 1987. “Luxury and Control.” Journal of Urban History 14 (1): 7–37. Bouman, Ole. 2006. “Re:Orientation.” In Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, edited by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 54–7. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1972. Esquisse d’une theorie de la pratique. Paris: puf. – 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, ma: Harvard Belknap Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les presses du réel. Boutros, Alexandra, and Will Straw, eds. 2010. Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Boyer, Paul S. 1978. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Brean, Joseph. 2010. “Out of the Darkness.” National Post (Toronto), 30 December, 1. Breton, André. (1937) 1987. Mad Love. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. – (1927) 1960. Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. – 2002. “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, Politics and the Citizen.” Journal of Visual Culture 1 (3): 325–40. Bull, Michael. 2000. Sounding out the City. Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. New York: Berg. – 2007. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. New York: Routledge, 2007. Bunge, William. 1971. Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution. Cambridge, ma: Schenkman Publishing Company. Bureau, Luc. 1997. Géographie de la nuit. Montréal: Hexagone. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge. Cabantous, Alain. 2009. Histoire de la nuit: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Fayard. Caillois, Roger. 1984. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” October 31:16–32.

Bibliography

275

California Sustainability Alliance. 2012. “Case Studies Building Exteriors.” http://sustainca.org/techshowcase/ssl/building_exteriors. Campanario, J.M. 1996. “Using Citation Classics to Study the Incidence of Serendipity in Scientific Discovery” Sociometrics 37:3–24. Carpenter, Edmund, and Marshall McLuhan. 1960. Explorations in Communication: An Anthology. Boston: Beacon Press. Castells, Manuel. 1977. The Urban Question. London: Edward Arnold. – 1998. End of Millennium. Malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing. Cauquelin, Anne. 1977. La ville la nuit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Centro de Estudos sobre Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (cetic). Accessed 30 December 2010. www.cetic.br. City of Edmonton. 2013. “Edmonton Hailed as Most Sociable City in North America.” http://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/initiatives _innovation/edmonton-hailed-as-most-sociable-city-in-north-america.aspx. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35:197–222. Chaplin, Sarah. 1995. “Desire Lines and Mercurial Tendencies: Resisting and Embracing the Possibilities for Digital Architecture.” Leonardo 28 (5): 409–14. Chen, Leah Yau. 2008. “Transformative Lighting Strategies in Vancouver’s Urban Context: Using Less, Living Better.” Master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, Advanced Studies in Architecture, Vancouver, bc. Chicago Area Transportation Study. 1959–1962. Chicago Area Transportation Study: Final Report in Three Parts. Chicago: State of Illinois. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. – 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Cohen, Anthony Paul, ed., 1982. Belonging: Identity and Social Organization in British Rural Cultures. St. John’s, nl: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Cohen, Evelyne. 1999. Paris dans l’imaginaire national de l’entre-deux-guerres. Paris: Publ. de la Sorbonne. Cohen, Margaret. 1993. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coles, Alex, ed. 2000. Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn. London: Black Dog. Colling, Herbert, and Morgan, Carl. 1993. Pioneering the Auto Age. Windsor, on: Benchmark Publishing.

276

Bibliography

Cooke, Philip, ed. 1989. Localities: The Changing Face of Urban Britain. London: Unwin Hyman. Corboz, André. 2009. “Apprendre à decoder la nébuleuse urbaine.” De la ville au patrimoine urbain. Histoires de forme et de sens. Textes choisis et assemblés par Lucie K. Morisset. Edited by André Corboz, 133–8. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec. Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1994. Escribir en el aire. Ensayo Sobre la Heterogeneidad Socio-cultural en Las Literaturas Andinas. Lima: Editorial Horizonte. “Correio.” 1994. Cidade dos homens: The Complete Series. Palm Pictures/tv Globo palmdv3141 (3 dvd discs), 2006. Video. Côté, Jean-François. 2007. “Comparing the Culture of Cities.” In Urban Enigmas: Toronto, Montreal, and the Problem of Comparing Cities. Edited by Johanne Sloan, 52–93. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. – 2011. “Urbi et Orbi: The City and the Road in Kerouac’s New Form of Cosmopolitanism.” In The Function of Contemporary Travel Narratives in the French, Anglo and Latin Americas: Mixing and Expanding Cultural Identity. Edited by Jean-François Côté, 133–48. Lewiston, ny: Mellen Press. Coyne, Richard. 2010. The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Darroch, Michael. 2008. “Bridging Urban and Media Studies: Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group, 1951–1957.” Canadian Journal of Communication 33 (2): 147–63. Darroch, Michael, and Janine Marchessault. 2009. “Anonymous History as Methodology: The Collaborations of Sigfried Giedion, Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and the Explorations Group 1953–1955.” In Place Studies in Art, Media, Science and Technology: Historical Investigations on the Sites and Migration of Knowledge, edited by Andreas Broeckmann and Gunalan Nadarajan, 9–27. Weimar, Germany: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. Davis, Douglas. 1981. “Post-Performancism.” Art Forum 20 (2): 31–9. De Certeau, Michel. (1980) 1990. “Les arts de faire.” In L’invention du quotidien. Vol. 1, 115–30. Paris: Gallimard. – 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. – 1985. “Practices of Space.” In On Signs, edited by Marshall Blonsky, 122–45. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. – 2011. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bibliography

277

Dean, Colin. 1977. “Are Serendipitous Discoveries a Part of Normal Science?” Sociological Review 25:73–86. Debord, Guy. (1967) 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books. Delattre, Simone. 2000. Les douze heures noires: La nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 1988. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. – 2000. Proust and Signs Translated by R. Howard. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press. Denzin, Norman K. 1994. “The Art and Politics of Interpretation.” In Handbook of qualitative research, edited by Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, 500–15. Thousand Oaks, ca: Sage. Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1996. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Dewdney, Christopher. 2004. Acquainted with the Night: Excursions through the World After Dark. New York: Bloomsbury. Diaconis, Persi, and Frederick Mosteller. 1989. “Methods for Studying Coincidences.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 84 (408): 853–61. Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. – 2007. “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18 (1): 128–52. Domenig, Roland. 2005. “A Brief History of Independent Cinema in Japan and the role of the Art Theatre Guild.” “atg Symposium, Against the Grain: Changes in Japanese Cinema of the 1960s and Early 1970s.” Special issue, Minikomi 70 (December): 6–16. Donald, James. 1993. “How English Is It? Popular Literature and National Culture.” In Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, edited by Erica Carter and James Donald, 165–86. London: Lawrence and Wishart. – 1999. Imagining the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Downtown Late Night Task Force. 2009. Late Night, Great Night! … Putting the Pieces Together. Victoria, bc: City of Victoria.

278

Bibliography

Doyle, Richard. 2003. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doxiadis, Constantinos. 1963. “The Delos Symposium (July Events, 1963).” DA Newsletter 3 (7). Durkheim, Émile. 1974. Sociology and Philosophy. New York: Free Press. – 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Edensor, Tim. 2010. Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ekirch, A. Roger. 2005. At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. New York: Norton and Company Inc. Ekistics: Review on the Problems and Science of Human Settlements. 1963. 15 (88). Esposito, Roberto. 2009. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, Henry K. (1966). A Vast New Storehouse of Transportation and Marketing Data. Journal of Marketing 1 (January): 33–40. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2006. T’es où? Ontologie du téléphone mobile. Translated by P.E. Dauzat. Paris: Albin Michel. Fine, Gary Alan. 2003. “Towards a Peopled Ethnography: Developing Theory from Group Life.”Ethnography 4 (1): 41–60. Fine, Gary Alan, and James G. Deegan. 1996. “Three Principles of Serendip: Insight, Chance, and Discovery in Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 9 (4): 434–47. Florida, Richard L. 2005. Cities and the Creative Class. New York: Routledge. Flusser, Vilém. 2005. “The City as Wave-Trough in the Image-Flood.” Translated by Phil Gochenour. Critical Inquiry 31:320–8. Foster, George G., and Stuart M. Blumin. 1990. New York by Gas-light and Other Urban Sketches. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. – 2006. “Chat Rooms.” In Participation, edited by Claire Bishop, 190–5. Cambridge, ma: mit Press / London: Whitechapel. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Space, Knowledge, and Power.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 239–56. New York: Random House. – (1967) 1998. “Different Spaces.” Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, 175–86. New York: The New Press. – 2001. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. – 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador. Fraser, Benjamin. 2011. Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience: Reading from the Mobile City. Lanham, md: Rowland and Littlefield.

Bibliography

279

Freud, Sigmund. 1979. Case Histories II. Pelican Freud, Vol. 9. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. – 1990. Art and Literature. Pelican Freud, Vol. 14. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. – 1991. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis. Penguin Freud, Vol. 11. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. – 2002. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by David McLintok. London: Penguin. Frisby, David. 1981. Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s Social Theory. London: Heinemann. – 1988. Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kraucauer and Benjamin. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. – 2001. Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Galinier, Jacques, Aurore Monod Becquelin, Guy Bordin, Laurent Fontaine, Francine Fourmaux, Juliette Roullet Ponce, Piero Salzarulo, Philippe Simonnot, Michèle Therrien, and Iole Zilli. 2010. “Anthropology of the Night: Cross-Disciplinary Investigations.” Current Anthropology 51 (6): 819–47. Gallagher, John. 2010. Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City. Detroit, mi: Wayne State University Press. Gallagher, John, and Eric Hill. 2003. AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture. Detroit, mi: Wayne State University Press. Garandin, Greg. 2009. Fordlandia. New York: Metropolitan Books. Geertz, Clifford. (1973) 1993. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. London: Fontana Press. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Giedion, Sigfried. 1952. “The Heart of the City: A Summing Up.” In ciam 8: The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life, edited by Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, José Luis Sert, and E. N. Rogers, 159–63. London: Lund Humphries. – (1948) 1969. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York: W.W. Norton. – (1941) 2008. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Gilfoyle, Timothy J. 1992. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920. New York: W.W. Norton. Gilloch, Graeme. 1996. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge: Polity Press.

280

Bibliography

Girard, René. 1979. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press. Girardin, Fabien, Francesco Calabrese, Filippo Dal Fiore, Carlo Ratti, and J. Blat. 2008. “Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content.” Pervasive Computing, ieee 7 (4): 36–43. Gleber, A. 1999. The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Goodman, Leo A. 1961. “Notes on the Etymology of Serendipity and Some Related Philological Observations.” Modern Language Notes 76 (5): 454–7. Gordon, Eric, and Adriana de Souza e Silva. 2011. Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Chichester (West Sussex): Wiley-Blackwell. Gottmann, Jean. 1964. Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States.Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Graham, Stephen. 2011. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. Brooklyn, ny: Verso. Granick, Harry. (1947) 1991. Underneath New York. New York: Fordham University Press. Greenslade, Roy. 2012. “Oh Danny Boyle, Look What They Did to Your nhs Tribute…” Guardian, Greenslade Blog, 30 July, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ media/greenslade/2012/jul/30/nhs-uk-uncut. Gregory, Derek. 1994. Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1966. “Eléments pour une théorie de l’interprétation du récit mythique.” Communication Research 8 (30): 28– 59. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1992. “Bodies-Cities.” In Sexuality and Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina, 241–53. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. – 2001. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Guide to Architecture. 1951. Festival of Britain. Gutfreund, Owen D. 2004. Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape. New York: Oxford University Press. Gwiazdzinski, Luc. 2005. La nuit, dernière frontière de la ville. La Tour d’Aigues: Aube. Hampton, Keith N., and Neeti Gupta. 2008. “Community and Social Interaction in the Wireless City: Wi-fi Use in Public and Semi-Public Spaces.” New Media and Society 10:831–50. Hannigan, John. 1998. Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. New York: Routledge. Harbord, Janet. 2007. The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bibliography

281

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Harrigan, Pat, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. 2009. Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Harvey, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Malden, ma: Blackwell Press. – 2001. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge. – 2003. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge. – 2009. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press. Hayashi, Sharon. 2011. “From Exploitation to Playful Exploits: The Rise of Collectives and the Redefinition of Labor, Life and Representation in Neoliberal Japan.” In Neoliberalism and Global Cinema, edited by Jyotsna Kapur and Keith Wagner, 180–96. New York: Routledge. Hayashi, Sharon, and Anne McKnight. 2005. “Goodbye Kitty, Hello War: The Tactics of Spectacle and New Youth Movements in Urban Japan.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 13 (1): 87–113. Hayden, Delores. 2004. A Field Guide to Sprawl. New York: W.W. Norton. Hénaff, Marcel. 2008. La ville qui vient. Paris: L’Herne. Herron, Jerry. 1993. Afterculture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History. Detroit: Wayne State University. – 2010. “Borderland/Borderama/Detroit: Part 1.” [Essay]. The Design Observer Group, 6 July, http://places.designobserver.com/feature/borderland-border ama-detroit-part1/13778/. Highmore, Ben. 2004. “Homework: Routine, social aesthetics and the ambiguity of everyday life.” Cultural Studies 18 (2–3): 306–27. – 2005. Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Hirasawa Go. 2005 “ATG’s Early Years and Underground Cinema.” “atg Symposium, Against the Grain: Changes in Japanese Cinema of the 1960s and Early 1970s.” Special issue, Minikomi 70 (December): 7–26. Hirsch, Sharon. 2004. Symbolism in Modern Urban Society. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Hogan, Trevor. 2002. “Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World.” Thesis Eleven 71:106–8. Holston, James. 2001. “Urban Citizenship and Globalization.” In Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy, edited by Allen J. Scott, 325–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Humphreys, Lee. 2010. “Mobile Social Networks and Urban Public Space.” New Media and Society 12:763–78.

282

Bibliography

Innis, Harold A. (1951) 2008. The Bias of Communication. 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jackson, Kenneth. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Jaguaribe, Beatriz. 1999. “Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms.” Public Culture 11 (1): 294–312. Janowitz, Morris, ed. 1966. W.I. Thomas: On Social Organization and Social Personality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah WardripFruin and Pat Harrigan, 118–30. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Joyce, James. (1922) 1997. Ulysses. London: Picador. Juul, Jesper. 2005. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Kantorovich, Aharon. 1993. Scientific Discovery: Logic and Tinkering. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kantorovich, Aharon, and Yuval Ne’eman. 1989. “Serendipity as a Source of Evolutionary Progress in Science.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 20:505–29. Kao, R. C. 1963. “The Use of Computers in the Processing and Analysis of Geographic Information.” Geographical Review 53 (4): 530–47. Kepes, Gyorgy. 1956. The New Landscape in Art and Science. Chicago: Paul Theobold and Co. Kerouac, Jack. 1950. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co. Kester, Grant. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Knapp, Nancy Flanagan. 1997. “Interviewing Joshua: On the Importance of Leaving Room for Serendipity.” Qualitative Inquiry 3 (September 1): 326–42. Konecki, Krzysztof T. 2008. “Grounded Theory and Serendipity” Qualitative Sociology Review 4 (1): 171–88. Koslovsky, Craig. 2011. Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1995a. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Edited and translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. – 1995b. “Photography.” In The Mass Ornament, edited and translated by Thomas Y. Levin, 46–63. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. – 1997. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Kramp, Joachim. 2005. Hallo! Hier spricht Edgar Wallace. Die Geschichte der

Bibliography

283

Kriminalfilmserie von 1959 bis 1972. 3rd ed. Berlin: Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York: Norton. Lacy, Suzanne, ed. 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press. Laitner, Bill. 2012. “Detroit’s Got Talent Festival Draws Crowds to Heidelberg Project.” Detroit Free Press, 11 August, http://www.freep.com/article /20120811/ENT05/120811046/Detroit-sGotTalentfestival-draws-1000-toHeidelberg-Project. Landry, Charles. 2008. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. New Stroud, UK: Comedia. Lash, Scott, and Celia Lury. 2007. Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things. Cambridge: Polity Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1972. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Seuil. – 1972. La Pensée marxiste et la ville. Paris: Casterman. – 1974. La production de l’espace. L’Homme et la société, 31/32, 15–31. – 1980. Presence et l’absence. Paris: Casterman. – 1996. Writing on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell. – 2003. The Urban Revolution. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. – 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. New York: Continuum. Lefebvre, Henri, and Catherine Régulier. (1985) 2003. “The Rhythmanalytical Project.” In Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, edited by Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman, 190–8. New York: Continuum. Lieblich, Amia, Tammar B. Zilber, and Rivka Tuval-Mashiach. 2008. “Narrating Human Actions: The Subjective Experience of Agency, Structure, Communion, and Serendipity.” Qualitative Inquiry 14 (4): 613–31. Lind, Maria. 2007. “The Collaborative Turn.” In Taking The Matter into Common Hands, edited by Johanna Billing, Maria Lind, and Lars Nisson, 15–31. London: Black Dog Press. Little, Lyneka. 2011. “The Man Van: A Gender Neutral Minivan for Men? Chrysler’s New Dodge Grand Caravan rt: The Minivan for Men.” abc

284

Bibliography

Online News: Money, 9 February, http://abcnews.go.com/Business/chryslerdodgegrand-caravan-rt-man-vanminivan/story?id=12866809. Lovatt, Andrew, Justin O’Connor, John Montgomery, and Paul Owens, eds. 1994. The 24-Hour City: Selected Papers from the First National Conference on the Night-time Economy. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of The City. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. – 1990. “The Visual Shape of the Shapeless Metropolis.” City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch, edited by Tridib Banerjee and Michael Southworth, 65–86. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Manovich, Lev. 2003. “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” In New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, edited by John T. Caldwell and Anna Everett, 75–92. London: Routledge. Maspero, Francois. 1994. Roissy Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs. Translated by Paul Jones. London: Verso. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. – 2005. For Space. London: Sage. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1977. “Canada: The Borderline Case.” In The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture, edited by David Staines, 226–48. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. – 1987. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Edited by Matie Molinaro, Corrine McLuhan, and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada. – (1964) 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. McQuire, Scott. 2009. The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space. London: Sage Publications. Merton, Robert K. 1948. “The Bearing of Empirical Research upon the Development of Social Theory.” American Sociological Review 13 (5): 505–15. Merton, Robert K., and Elinor Barber. 2006. The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: a Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, Walter. 1997. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Press. Milgram, Paul, Haro Takemura, Akira Utsumi, and Fumio Kishino. 1995. “Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum.” In “Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies,” edited by

Bibliography

285

Hari Das. Special issue, Proceedings of spie – The International Society for Optical Engineering. 2351:282–92. Milner, Max. 2005. L’envers du visible: Essai sur l’ombre. Paris: Seuil. Mitchell, Peta. 2008. Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction. New York: Routledge. Montandon, Alain. 2009. Promenades nocturnes. Paris: L’Harmattan. Möntmann, Nina, ed. 2009. New Communities. Toronto: Public Books/Power Plant Gallery of Contemporary Art. Montola, Markus. 2009. “Games and Pervasive Games.” In Pervasive Games: Theory and Design, edited by Markus Montola, Jaakos Stenros, and Annika Waern, 7–23. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufman Publishers. Moretti, Franco. 1998. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso. – 2011. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” New Left Review 68. Morris, Meaghan. 1998. Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books. Mumford, Eric. 2002. The ciam Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Musil, Robert. (1930) 1995. The Man Without Qualities: Volume 1. Translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Minerva. Narboni, Roger. 2012. Les éclairages des villes: Vres un urbanisme nocturne. Gollion: Infolio. Nasaw, David. 1992. “Cities of Light, Landscapes of Pleasure.” In The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900–1940. Edited by David Ward and Olivier Zunz, 273–86. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. The Nielsen Company. 2009. “Global Face and Networked Places: A Nielsen Report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint.” Accessed 30 March 2010. http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wpcontent/uploads /2009/03/nielsen_globalface_mar09.pdf. (Site discontinued). Nold, Christian. N.d. Emotional Cartography: Technologies of the Self. Wellcome Trust, UK. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2009/News/WTX 054534.htm. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. 1980. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. London: Academy Editions. Nord, Deborah Epstein. 1995. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press. November, Valérie, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner, and Bruno Latour. 2010.

286

Bibliography

“Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (4): 581–99. O Globo Online. 2007. “Complexo do Alemão, faixa de Gaza carioca.” 1 October. http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/mat/2007/09/29/297940467.asp. Odin, Roger. 2000. De la fiction. Brussels: De Boeck. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2007. “Detroit Digital: On Tourists in the Apocalypse.” 1000 Days of Theory, C Theory, 29 November, http://www.ctheory.net/ articles.aspx?id=586. Oswalt, Philipp. 2006. Shrinking Cities: Volumes 1 and 2. Ostfildern: Verlag Hatje Cantz / New York: Distributed Art Publishers. Otis, Laura. 2001. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Palmer, Bryan D. 2000. Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression. New York: Monthly Review Press. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2007. “Glimpses of Cosmopolitanism in the Hospitality of Art.” European Journal of Social Theory 10 (1): 139–52. – 2009. “Collaboration in Art and Society: A Global Pursuit of Democratic Dialogue.” In New Communities, edited by Nina Möntmann, 31–51. Toronto: Public Books/The Power Plant. Paris, Mairie de. 2010. Les Nuits de Paris: Etats Généraux. Paris: Mairie de Paris. Park, Kyong. 2005. Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond. Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers. Park, Robert. 1925. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment.” In The City, edited by Robert Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, 1–46. Chicago: Chicago University Press. – 1969. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment.” In Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, edited by Richard Sennett, 91–130. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. – 1972. The Crowd and the Public. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perloff, Marjorie. 1986. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. “Photo Map Shows Traffic Flow.” 1961. Popular Mechanics 115 (2). Pile, Steve. 1996. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and the City. New York: Routledge. – 2005. Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life. Thousand Oaks, ca: Sage. Pinson, Guillame. 2008. Fiction du monde: de la presse mondaine à Marcel Proust. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Platt, Jennifer. 1998. A History of Sociological Research Methods in America: 1920–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bibliography

287

Pløger, John. 2010. “Presence-experiences: The Eventalisation of Urban Space.” Environment and Planning D-Society and Space 28 (5): 848–66. Proust, Marcel. 2003. In Search of Lost Time. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rama, Angel. 1996. The Lettered City. Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham, nc: Duke University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of the Aesthetic: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum. – 2006. “Our Police Order: What Can be Said, Seen and Done: An Interview with Jacques Rancière.” Le Monde diplomatique, 8 November, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-08-11-lieranciereen.html. – 2008. “The Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics.” In The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill, 12–19. London: Continuum. – 2009. “A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Rancière.” Parallax 15 (3): 114–23. – 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. Continuum: New York. Read, Justin. 2005. “Alternative Functions: Oscar Niemeyer and the Poetics of Modernity.” Modernism/Modernity 12 (2): 253–72. – 2006. “Obverse Colonization: São Paulo, Global Urbanization, and the Poetics of the Latin American City.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 15(3): 281– 300. – 2008. “Axes of Projection: Poetics of Urbanisation and Globalisation in the Americas.” The Journal of Architecture 13 (5): 607–31. – 2009. “Intermedial Maps: The Street as Site of Cultural-Political Regulation in Modern Brazil.” In “Bâtir / Build,” edited by James Cisneros and Will Straw. Special issue, Intermédialités: Histoire et théorie des arts, des letters et des techniques 14:143–70. – 2012. “Unicity.” Telemorphosis: Essays in Critical Climate Change. Vol. 1. Edited by Tom Cohen and Henry Sussman. Ann Arbor, mi: Open Humanities Press. Remaking Cities Institute Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 2011. led Street Light Research Project. http://www.cmu.edu/rci/images/projects/led-updated-webreport.pdf. Renard, Caroline. 1999/2000. “La nuit: durée, espace, noir.” Cinergon 8/9:49–55. Riesman, David. 1950. The Lonely Crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Roberts, Royston M. 1989. Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science. Toronto: Wiley. Robinson, Richard. 2007. Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan.

288

Bibliography

Rochlitz, Rainer. 1992. Le désenchantement de l’art. La philosophie de Walter Benjamin. Paris: Gallimard. Rodney, Lee. 2009. “Detroit is Our Future.” Fuse 32 (4): 6–12. – 2011. “Road Signs on the Border: Transnational Anxiety and the Re-bordering of North America.” Space and Culture 14 (4): 384–97. Rodowick, D.N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Rogers, Tim. 2000. Applying the Spatial Critique to Theory in Psychology: Toward a Useful Third Space. http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/ v16.1/rogers.html. Rohmer, Sax. 1919. Dope. New York: Robert M. McBride and Company. – (1913) 2008. The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Hong Kong: Forgotten Books. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. “Imperialist Nostalgia.” In “Memory and CounterMemory.” Special issue, Representations 26:107–22. – 1993. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Rosen, Phil. 2006. “Border Times and Geopolitical Frames.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 15 (2): 2–19. Rosler, Martha. 1991. If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism. Edited by Brian Wallis. Seattle: New Press. Ross, Kristin. 1988. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press. – 2006. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Press. Sampaio, Paulo. 2010. “Um Natal incomum no Complexo do Alemão.” O Estado de São Paulo, 26 December, http://www.estadao.com.br/ estadaodehoje/20101226/not_imp658212,0.php. Sansot, Pierre. 1971. Poétique de la ville. Paris: Klincksieck. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “Women’s Burden: Counter-geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival.” Journal of International Affairs 53 (2): 503–24. – 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Saunders, Peter. 1981. Social Theory and the Urban Question. London: Hutchinson. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 1999. Pourquoi la fiction? Paris: Seuil. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1995. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization

Bibliography

289

of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schlör, Joachim. 1998. Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930. London: Reaktion Books. Schmitt, Carl. (1922) 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Schneider, Arnd, and Christopher Wright, eds. 2006. Contemporary Art and Anthropology. New York: Berg. Schutz, Alfred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh and Fredrick Lehnert. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Schwarz, Roberto. 1996. “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination.” In Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, edited by John Gledson, 1–18. London: Verso. “Script for the Town Planning Exhibition March 1950.” Papers of Jaqueline Tyrwhitt. Royal Institute of British Architects, TYJ\14\7. riba British Architectural Library Drawings and Archives Collection, London, UK. Seed, John. 2006. “Limehouse Blues: Looking for ‘Chinatown’ in the London Docks, 1900–40.” History Workshop Journal 62:58–85. Self, Will. 2007. Psychogeography (with illustrations by Ralph Steadman). London: Bloomsbury. —-. 2011. “Diary.” London Review of Books 33 (20): 38–39. Sennett, Richard. (1974) 1978. The Fall of the Public Man. New York: Vintage Books. – 1994. Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. London and Boston: Faber and Faber. – 2002. “Cosmopolitanism and the Social Experience of Cities.” In Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, edited by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, 42–7. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharpe, William. 2008. New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850–1950. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Sheringham, Michael. 2000. “Attending to the Everyday: Blanchot, Lefebvre, Certeau, Perec.” French Studies 54 (2): 187–99. Shields, Rob. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge Chapman Hall. – 1998. Raumkonstruktion und Tourismus. Voyage: Jahrbuch für Reise und Tourismusforschung 2:53–72. – 2003. The Virtual. London: Routledge. – 2013. Spatial Questions. London: Sage.

290

Bibliography

Simard, Stephanie, Erica Springate, and Jeff M. Casello. 2011. “The Development and Deployment of gis Tools to Facilitate Transit Network Design and Operational.” urisa Journal 23 (1): 41–51. Simmel, Georg. (1903) 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by Kurt. H. Wolff. Glencoe, il: Free Press. – (1903) 1950. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, 409–24. New York: Free Press. – 1971. On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Translated by Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1997. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Edited by David Frisby and M. Featherstone. London: Sage. – 2004. The Philosophy of Money. Edited by David Frisby. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge. – 2005. Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art. Translated by Alan Scott and Helmut Staubmann. London: Routledge. – (1908) 2010a. Sociologie. Paris: puf. – 2010b. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays, with Journal Aphorisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sinclair, Ian. 2002. London Orbital: A Walk around the M25. London: Granata. Slater, David H., Nishimura Keiko, and Love Kindstrand. 2012. “Social Media, Information and Political Activism in Japan’s 3.11 Crisis,” AsiaPacific Journal: Japan Focus 10 (24), http://www.japanfocus.org/-nishimurakeiko/3762. Solesbury, William, and Alan Townsend. 1970. “Transportations Studies and British Planning Practice.” Town Planning Review 41 (1): 63–79. Solnit, Rebecca. 2001. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso. – 2006. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Edinburgh: Canongate. Soupault, Philippe. 1928. Les Dernières Nuits de Paris. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education. Steinmetz, George. 2009. “Detroit: A Tale of Two Crises.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (5): 761–70. Stevenson, Deborah. 2003. Cities and Urban Cultures: Issues in Cultural and Media Studies. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time. Vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. – 2009. Technics and Time. Vol. 2, Disorientation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bibliography

291

– 2011. Technics and Time. Vol. 3, Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press. – 2012. “Le bien le plus précieux à l’époque des sociotechnologies.” Réseaux sociaux. Culture politique et ingénierie des réseaux sociaux, edited by Bernard Stiegler. Paris: fyp Éditions. Stutz, Frederick P. 1973. “Distance and Network Effects on Urban Social Travel Fields.” Economic Geography 49:134–44. Sugrue, Thomas. 2005. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Talbot, Deborah. 2007. Regulating the Night: Race, Culture and Exclusion in the Making of the Night-time Economy. Aldershot: Ashgate. Tarde, Gabriel. (1902) 2008. La morale sexuelle. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot. Taussig, Michael. 1998. “Viscerality, Faith and Skepticism: Another Theory of Magic.” In In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century, edited by Nicholas B. Dirk, 221–56. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. 1958. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. New York: Dover Publications. Thompson, Nato. 2008. Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. New York: Independent Curators International. Thom-Santelli, Jennifer. 2007. “Mobile Social Software: Facilitating Serendipity or Encouraging Homogeneity?” ieee Pervasive Computing 6 (3): 46–51. Thrift, Nigel J. 2004. “Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1): 175–90. – 2006. “Space.” Theory Culture Society 23 (2–3): 139–46. Thum, Reinhard H. 1994. The City: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verhaeren. New York: Peter Lang. Timmermans, Stefan, and Iddo Tavory. 2012. “Theory Construction in Qualitative Research.” Sociological Theory 30 (3): 167–86. Turim, Maureen. 1998. The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline. 1957. “Across the Street.” In Mosaic (November): 9–11. Toronto: Architectural Society of the School of Architecture, University of Toronto. – 1964. “The Eye, The Node, and the Path.” Connection: Visual Arts at Harvard 5 (29): 11–17. van Eijk, Gwen. 2012. “Good Neighbours in Bad Neighbourhoods: Narra-

292

Bibliography

tives of Dissociation and Practices of Neighbouring in a ‘Problem’ Place.” Urban Studies 49 (14): 3009–26. Various. 2002. “Round-Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film.” October 100: 115–32. Vianna, Hermano. 2006. “Central da Periferia – Texto de Divulgação.” http://www.overmundo.com.br/download_banco/central-da-periferiatexto-de-divulgacao. Vidler, Anthony. 1994. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Virilio, Paul. 1986. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e). Originally published in France in 1977. – 1991. Lost Dimension (L’espace critique). Translated by Daniel Moshenberg. New York: Semiotext(e). Originally published in France in 1984. Virilio, Paul, Sylvère Lotringer, and Michael Taormina. 2001. “After Architecture: A Conversation.” Grey Room 3:32–53. Voz da Comunidade. www.twitter.com/vozdacomunidade. (Twitter feed), last accessed 28 February 2011. Walkowitz, Judith R. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waters, Malcolm. 2001. Globalization. London: Routledge. Weber, Max. 1966. The City. Glencoe, il: The Free Press. – 1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weigel, Sigrid. 1996. Body – and Image – Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin. New York: Routledge. Whebell, C. F. J. 1969. “Corridors: A Theory of Urban Systems.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59 (1): 1–26. Wigley, Mark. 2001. “Network Fever.” Grey Room 4 (Summer): 82–122. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Elizabeth. 1991. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wirth, Louis. 1938. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American Journal of Sociology 44 (1): 1–24. Wismann, Heinz, ed. 1986. Walter Benjamin et Paris, Colloque international 27–29 juin 1983. Paris: Editions du Cerf. Yúdice, George. 2003. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham, nc: Duke University Press.

Bibliography

293

Zhang, Yingjin. 2010. Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Zukin, Sharon. 1982. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Baltimore, md: Johns Hopkins University Press.

This page intentionally left blank

Contributors

olivier asselin is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at Université de Montréal, where he teaches contemporary art, expanded cinema, and film production. He is coeditor of Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (with Ross and Lamoureux, mqup) and The Electric Age (with Mariniello and Oberhuber, University of Ottawa Press). He is a member of Mediatopias (on the use of locative technologies in contemporary art), sass (on the spatialization of knowledge) and iact (Institut Arts, cultures et technologies). He has made several films, including La liberté d’une statue and Un capitalisme sentimental. marie-laurence bordeleau-payer is a doctoral student in sociology at uqam. She completed a master’s thesis on the role of the artifact in the development of a conscience of self. Her current work focuses on the concept of mimesis as mediation in self-formation. She has published on the connection between objectified forms of culture and the construction of individual subjectivity. jean-françois côté is professor in the Department of Sociology at Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam). He specializes in the sociology of culture and is particularly interested in the Americas. He has published books and articles on the theory of sociology, urban studies, and the literature of the Americas. He has been a visiting professor to France, Mexico, Brazil, Austria, and the United States. Current-

296

Contributors

ly, his research interests focus on intermediality in the theatre and theatricality at large within metropolitan contexts. michael darroch is associate professor of media art histories and visual culture at the University of Windsor and director of the in/terminus Creative Research Collective. He has published essays on cities, media, architecture, borders, theatre, language, sound, and translation. His current research explores urban media studies, the Windsor-Detroit urban region, and the histories of Canadian communication and media studies. He is completing a book manuscript on transatlantic and interdisciplinary influences on the journal Explorations (1953–59). sharon hayashi is associate professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Film at York University. Her current research interests include the architecture of cinema and the resurgence of artistic and political collectives in urban Japan. She has published articles on Japanese pink cinema and the travel films of Shimizu Hiroshi, and is currently creating Mapping Protest Tokyo, a historical mapping website that analyzes the new media work of artistic collectives and new social movements in relation to artistic performance and political protest in Japan and globally from 1960 to the present. ben highmore is professor of cultural studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of books including Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday and A Passion for Cultural Studies. His latest book is The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House. mervyn horgan is assistant professor of social theory in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph. He has published widely on urban studies, visual culture, strangership, and community conflict. He is currently researching incivilities between strangers in everyday life. stephan kowal is a phd candidate in architecture at Université de Montréal. He is recipient of the J. Armand Bombardier Scholarship Award (sshrc) for his doctoral studies on the relationship between architecture and cartography at the dawn of the digital era. He received his Master of Architecture diploma from the Southern Cali-

Contributors

297

fornia Institute of Architecture (sci-Arc) in Los Angeles. Since 2003, he has been teaching representation and architectural design in the School of Architecture at Université de Montréal. saara liinamaa completed her phd in social and political thought at York University. She currently holds a sshrc Postdoctoral Fellowship at nscad University. Her postdoctoral project is an examination of advanced research at Canada’s three independent art and design universities and the political and cultural economies of creativity in the contemporary moment. janine marchessault is the director of Sensorium, Centre for Digital Arts and Technology Research, and professor of cinema and media studies at York University. She is the author of McLuhan: Cosmic Media (Sage, 2005) and co-editor of numerous collections including Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema (utp, 2007), 3D Cinema and Beyond (Intellect Press, University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Reimaging Cinema: The Films of Expo 67 (mqup, 2014). In 2012 she received a Trudeau Award to support her research and curatorial practices in the area of new city spaces. She is currently completing Ecstatic World: Media, Humanism, Ecology. justin read is associate professor of romance languages and literatures at the University at Buffalo (suny). He has published work on inter-American cultural studies, translation, architecture, and the spaces of poetry and politics in Latin America. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on liberalism and space in Argentina in the first century of independence, Buenos Aires and the Birth of the NonSubject, part of an extended project on the “poetic ecologies” of twentieth-century Latin America. markus reisenleitner is director of the Graduate Program in Humanities at York University. He is also affiliated with the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture and the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies. Before joining York’s Division of Humanities in 2006, he taught at the University of Vienna, the Vienna campus of the University of Oregon’s International Program, the University of Alberta, and Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where he was head of the Department of Cultural Studies from 2004 to 2006.

298

Contributors

ian robinson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. His research focuses on transnational cinema, film festivals, and urban film cultures. lee rodney is associate professor of media art histories and visual culture at the University of Windsor. An interdisciplinary writer/curator interested in mobile spaces, and alternative economies, she has published essays on contemporary art and cultural theory in a range of books and journals including Space & Culture, Parallax, Prefix Photo, paj: Performance Art Journal, and The Informal Markets World Atlas. In 2009 she began the Border Bookmobile project, an urban research platform and traveling archive of about the urban history of the Windsor-Detroit region and other border regions around the world. It was recently exhibited in conjunction with Border Cultures series at the Art Gallery of Windsor and has been expanded as an online archive: frontierfiles.org. rob shields is the Henry Marshall Tory Chair, a professor in the Departments of Sociology and Art and Design, and director of the City-Region Studies Centre at the University of Alberta. His work spans architecture, planning, and urban and regional geography. His interdisciplinary research is in the areas of urban cultural studies, regional development, and locative media. Current cultural studies include Spatial Questions: Social Spatialisation and Cultural Topologies (2013) Rereading Jean François Lyotard (with H. Bickis, 2013), A Deleuze and Guattari Glossary (with M. Vallee, 2013) and book projects such as a City-Regions in Prospect (forthcoming with K. Jones and A. Lord) and Ecologies of Affect (with T. Davidson and O. Park, 2011). will straw is director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and professor in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University. He is the author of Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America and of over a hundred articles on cinema, music, and popular culture. He is currently director of an interdisciplinary research project on media and urban life in Montreal and manages the website theurbannight.com.

Index

2D, 234 3D, 234 42 Entertainment, 146; I Love Bees (creator of), 146 Adachi, Masao, 230 Agamben, Giorgio, 5, 160 Amin, Ash, 12–13 Akasegawa, Genpei, 231 Akerman, Chantal, 239 Akwesasne Mohawk reservation, 244 Aldiss, Brian, 145 aleatory urbanism. See under urbanism Al-Ram, 247, 250, 251 alternative reality game, 15, 18, 141–56 Althusser, Louis, 72 Amateur Riot/Revolt, 227–9. See also Shiroto no ran. Anand, Shaina, 94, 95 Andrew, Dudley, 238, 252 anthropology, 25, 96 anti-nuclear movement, 219, 222, 223

any-space-whatever, 250 Arafat, Yasser, 251 Arcades Project, 108 archaeology, 233, 235 architecture, 225, 230, 233, 234, 235; built environment, 10, 118, 135. See also Giedion (on interpretation of contemporary architecture); McLuhan (on architecture and media) archive, 234; digital, 233 Aristotle, 42 ArtCite, 4 artistic research, 4 Asselin, Olivier, 15–16, 19 augmented: city, 141; reality, 141, 151; virtuality, 141, 151 Augoyard, Jean-François, 40 automobile, 253–5 avant-garde, 38, 230, 231, 232 Baer, Ulrich, 100 Ballon Rouge, Le, 251 Banham, Reyner (filmmaker): on navigating Los Angeles, 38 Basta, Enrico, 145

300

Basualdo, Carlos, 94 Baudelaire, Charles, 5, 61, 62, 73, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 110, 111; “The Painter of Modern Life,” 100. See also flâneur Bauhaus, 5 Bauman, Zygmunt, 73 Beast, The, 144, 146, 148, 153 Beijing, 230 Benjamin, Walter, 34–5, 61, 62, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105–10, 111 141–3; works of: Arcades Project, 108; “Berlin Childhood Around 1900,” 106; “Berlin Chronicle,” 106; Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian, 105; Moscow Diary, 106; “One-Way Street,” 107; The Origins of German Tragic Drama, 107 Bergson, Henri, 8, 11, 44 Berlin: Symphony of a City, 39 Bishop, Claire, 95 Blair, Tony, 33 Blomley, Nicholas, 65 Bogue, Ronald, 250 bonnes femmes, 186, 187 Bordeleau-Payer, Marie Laurence, 16, 19 borders, 20–1, 255, 258–9; space, 250; zone, 239, 241, 252 Border Art Workshop, 259 Border Bookmobile, 255, 256, 257–8 Borges, Jorge Luis, 153 Boston: (1960) urbanization of, 31 Bourdieu, Pierre, 50 Boutros, Alexandra, 38 Brando, Marlon: A Streetcar Named Desire (actor), 31; On the Waterfront (actor), 31

Index

Brazaville (Congo), 230 Breton, André, 143 Britain, 38 Brumaire, 229 Buck-Morss, Susan, 108, 109 Bull, Michael, 143 Burgess, Ernest, 56 Bush, George W., 33 Butler, Judith, 50 Camacho-Hübner, Eduardo, 15 Canada, 244; on rural and urban dualism, 42. See also Windsor, Ontario capitalism, 108 Caracas, 94 cartographatron. See under digital mapping technology cartography/cartographic, 4, 5, 12, 14–15, 88, 117, 241, 244, 246, 247; emotional, 126; of place, 5, 65–6; radical, 232–3 Cathy’s Book (multiplatform novel), 147 cats (Chicago Area Transportation Study), 85–7 Chaplin, Sara, 90 Chernobyl, 217 Chicago, 146; Polish immigrants, 55 Chicago School, 17–18, 43 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, 251 ciam (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne), 7, 82 cinema. See film studies circulation: and the city, 26, 28, 29, 68; closed system (internal relations), 28–9, 31–3; open system (connective relations), 28–33; of

Index

information and communication, 30; of people and things, 32, 120 Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture, 38 citizenship, 4 city: augmented city, 141; as built structures, 3, 6, 25–7, 64–5, 66; city as body, 28–9, 33, 124–5; imageability of, 5; as living entities, 3; 26, 29, 33; material city as ideal-type, 41; as mediated experience, 4, 117–18; as modern, 33, 37, 38, 61–2; as organism, 28–32; perceptions of, 5, 17, 25–8; and place (representations of), 25–8, 121; representations of, 26–8; representational modes of, 63–72; rhythmcity and, 33; serendipity and, 61–3, 70–3, 75; and space (representations of), 4, 26–8, 51, 53; and urban (dialectic relationship), 44–5, 53–4; versus urban, 41–3, 48; as virtual, 31, 47, 48, 118. See also urban culture civitas, 3 Clifford, James, 96 colonialism, 20 communication technology, 30, 41, 238 contemporary art, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 111, 112 context shifter, 95 Cornwall, Ontario, 244 Côté, Jean-François, 4, 16, 19, 99 Covenant (Halo), 147 Crazy Love, 231 culture, 79; consumer, 225, 258; as material, 3, 25–7. See also urban culture

301

Culture of Cities Project, 2000–05, 4 Cybele, 231 Cyberpunk, 146 Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Fukushima, 217 Dark Knight, The, 147 Debord, Guy, 26 de Certeau, Michel, 53, 66, 70, 143 Deleuze, Gilles, 5, 44, 250; and Félix Guattari, 48, 49, 90, 118 delocalization, 121–2 Delos Symposium (Greece 1963), 77, 82, 83, 85 demos, 12 dérives, 143 desire lines, 89–90 détournement, 230, 231 Detroit, 20–1, 260, 264–5; downtown abandoned parts, 42. See under Windsor, Ontario Deutsche, Rosalind, 103 dialectical image, 108, 110 dialectical materialism, 49–50 Dick, Philip K., 146 digital footprint, 90–1 digital mapping technology, 218. See also locative technology digital media. See media digital networks. See networks digital utopia, 239 Discman, 142 Disney, 147; Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, 147 display technologies, 151 “distribution of the sensible,” 227 Divine Intervention, 40, 239, 247, 248, 250, 251

302

Doane, Mary Ann, 249, 252 Donald, James, 103, 212 Doxiadis, Constantinos A., 11, 18, 77, 82, 83, 84 Dromology, 36. See also Paul Virilio ecology, 5; of the city, 39, 43 Edensor, Tim: Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies, 38 Egypt, 222 Ekistics, 11, 18, 82 emersion, 152 emotional cartographies. See under cartography Engels, Friedrich, 100 environmental storytelling, 151 ethnography, 60, 68, 96 Europe, 223; on rural and urban dualism, 42 experience, 5, 17 experimental: cinema, 231; communities, 94; spatial practices, 226, 230 Explorations Group, 6–7, 9–11; journal, 9 Facebook, 128–31, 138n13, 139n15, 216. See also media (social) favelas, 14, 19, 164 “fake reality,” 31 Festival of Britain 1951, 7; Live Architecture exhibition, 7–8, 10 fictivization, 150–2 Field Guide to Getting Lost, A, 40 film studies, 10, 14, 16, 20 flâneur, 18, 100, 101, 142–3. See also Baudelaire, Charles

Index

Fleming, Alexander, 57 Ford, Henry, 259; Fordism, 258; post-Fordism, 235 Foster, Hal, 95, 96, 97 Foucault, Michel, 43, 118, 153 Fox News, 217–19 France: Lascaux caves, 81; la société mondaine, 187–8 Freud, Sigmund, 92, 97–8, 103–5, 110, 111, 126; works of: Civilization and its Discontents, 104; Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva, 104; Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 104; Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 103. See also psychoanalysis Frisby, David, 99, 101 Frozen River, 239–42, 244, 246, 247, 250 Fuchs, Eduard, 105 Fukui, 219 Fukushima, 217, 219, 222 futurism, 33, 39 futurology, 31 gamification, 143 Geertz, Clifford, 25 Gen, Yamakawa, 218 Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies, 38 German Baroque, 107 Gibson, William, 146; Neuromancer, 146; Sprawl Trilogy, 146 Giedion, Sigfried, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 18, 77, 81, 84, 88; on interpretation of contemporary architecture, 78–9; on historiography, 79–80; works of: Mechanization Takes Command (1948), 79, 80; Space,

Index

Time and Architecture (1941), 78, 79, 80. See also McLuhan, Marshall; Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline global city, 157, 159–60 global warming, 144 globalism, 241 globalization, 32, 157, 224, 238–42, 247, 252, 258, 268 Google, 233–4; Google Earth, 233, 234; Google Maps, 14, 18, 233; Google Street View, 233, 234; Memories for the Future, 234, 237 Gottmann, Jean (French geographer), 31. See also megalopolis gps. See under locative technology Graham, Stephen, 13–14 Granick, Harry: on New York infrastructure (1947), 29 Greece, 222; Athens, 51, 157–8 Greimas, Algridas Julien (linguist), 43 Gun (video game), 147 Grosz, Elizabeth, 124 Halo 2 (Xbox game), 146 Harbord, Janet, 249, 252; The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies, 252 Hardt, Michael: and Antonio Negri, 118–19 Harvey, David, 14–15, 119–20, 243, 248, 249 Harvey, William (1628): blood flow as mechanical operation, 28 Haussmann, Baron, 32 Hayashi, Sharon, 14, 20 Heathrow Airport, 39 Heron, Jerry, 258; Afterculture:

303

Detroit and the Humiliation of History, 258 heterotopia, 43, 44, 152, 153 Highmore, Ben, 4, 10,17; Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City, 39 Hi-Red Center, 231 historical mapping software, 233. See also mapping historiography, 78; and Giedion on, 79–80. See also methodology Hollywood, 239 Hong Kong, 20 Horgan, Mervyn, 4, 17–18 Hunt, Courtney, 239, 240, 251 hypercities.com, 223 hypercity, 120 ideal-type, 99; as material city, 41 imageability, 5, 6 immersion, 151, 152 impressionism, 101 India: Fatehpur Sikri, 81–2 Innis, Harold, 5, 78, 81; The Bias of Communication, 80; and McLuhan, Marshall, 80 interdisciplinarity, 6 Internet, 141, 146–53, 225; as neural metaphor, 30 iPod, 143 Iraq, 223, 224, 225 Ishihara, Nobuteru, 219 Ishihara, Shintaro, 219 isotopic, 43; isotopia, 47 Israel, 224 Japan, 14, 20, 218–19, 221, 223, 224, 227, 231, 232, 235; Japan’s SelfDefense Forces, 224

304

Jenkins, Henry, 151 Jensen, Wilhelm, 104; “Gradiva,” 104 Jerusalem, 247, 251 Jonouchi, Motoharu, 231 Joyce, James, 39; Ulysses, 45, 121 Jung, Carl, 58 Kara, Juro, 230 Keiller, Patrick, 38; Robinson in Ruins, 38; Robinson in Space, 39 Kelly, Mike, 260; Mobile Homestead, 260 Kepes, György, 5, 6, 8 Kerouac, Jack, 127; The Town and the City, 127 Kester, Grant, 95 Khirkee extension, 94 Khirkeeyaan, 94 Kinokuniya, 230 Koenji, 228 Koizumi, Junichiro, 224, 225 Kowal, Stephen, 11, 18 Kracauer, Sigfried, 248, 249 Kubrick, Stanley, 145 Kwon, Miwon, 95, 96 Lacy, Suzanne, 95, 112 Laddaga, Reinaldo, 94 Latour, Bruno, 15, 159 Le Corbusier, 64 Lefebvre, Henri, 11–12, 13, 17, 18, 36–8; “Dark moments” and “Blind fields,” 45, 46, 47, 53; on virtuality and urban culture, 41–54; 120, 122–3; works of: La production de l’espace (1974), 44; Production of Space, 11, 46, 48; The

Index

Urban Revolution (1970), 42; 11, 38. See also rhythmanalysis legibility, 5, 17–18, 19 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 243 Lemmon, Jack (actor): The Apartment, 31 lighting (nighttime), 187–90 Liinamaa, Saara, 4, 18 Lind, Maria, 95 live puppetmastering, 148 locale, 5, 19–20, 47, 54; locality, 53–4. See also place; place making localism, 241 localization, 121–2 locative technology, 141, 144, 147; cartographatron, 77–91; gis, 89; gps, 19, 89–90. See also mapping or digital mapping technology London, 7, 14, 20, 38, 39n8, 81, 159, 188, 204–16. See also United Kingdom Los Angeles, 38, 146 Lynch, Kevin, 6, 8, 9, 10, 17; Visual Shape of the Shapeless Metropolis, 6 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 5 Man with a Movie Camera, 39 mapping, 16, 65, 118, 121, 126, 217, 218, 219, 226, 227, 229, 231, 232, 233, 235; cartographatron, 77–91; software, 141. See also digital mapping technology; locative technology Marx, Karl, 48, 229 Maspero, Gaston Massena, New York. See under New York Massey, Doreen, 14–15, 242, 246 materiality/materialism, 25–6, 30; of

Index

place, 43, 45; versus idealism, 50–1, 54. See also culture (material) Matrix, The (film), 31 McLuhan, Marshall, 5, 6, 9, 11, 77, 78, 81, 84, 88–9; on architecture and media, 77, 78; and Sigfried Giedion, 78–9, 80, 81; The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), 78, 80, 83, 88; “medium is the message,” 78; Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), 78, 82–3, 88. See also Innis, Harold; Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline McQuire, Scott, 16 media: and cities, 3, 31; digital, 3, 4, 5, 11, 15, 31, 77, 90, 91n1, 127, 131, 134, 157, 160, 176, 180–1, 218, 233, 239, 261; environment, 5, 6; Facebook, 128–31, 138n13, 139n15, 216; “hot” and “cold” media, 78 (see also McLuhan); mobile, 3, 16, 19; networks, 180–1; research tools, 3; social, 4, 18, 19, 128–31, 136, 157, 174–81, 222, 236n6; studies, 3, 4, 16–17; technologies, 3, 30 (see also display technologies); tools of expression, 3; Tumblr, 222; types of communication, 30, 78, 239 mediation, 5 megalopolis, 31, 120 memory, 9–10, 48–9 Metabolist group. See Tange, Kenzo metalepsis, 150 metaphoric system, 10, 17, 27–8 metaphorics, 27–8, 30, 31, 33, 51, 79 methodology, 56, 232; historiography 78; Giedion on historiogra-

305

phy 79–80; social scientific, 57. See also serendipity métissage, 53 Milgram, Paul, 151 militarism, 224 Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, 219 Mitchell, Peta, 238 mixed reality, 151 Miyashita, Park, 224 modelization, 151 modernism, 5, 33, 38, 61–2 modernity, 61–2, 92, 93, 99, 100, 107, 109 Moholy-Nagy, László, 6 Mohawk, 241, 244, 245 Montmann, Nina, 95 Montola, Markus, 147 Moretti, Franco, 252 Moscow, 230 Mulvey, Laura, 252 Musil, Robert, 34; description of plural rhythms, 34; The Man Without Qualities, 34 navigation, 4, 15, 18–19, 141 Nazism, 35 neoliberalism, 118, 224 neonationalism, 224 networks, 4, 11, 18, 29, 30, 42, 44, 66, 83, 85, 89, 90, 93, 128–31, 146, 149, 177, 178, 180–1, 198, 212, 213, 232, 242; artists’ networks, 93; digital, 160, 180; global, 150, 181, 213; social, 128–31, 146, 176–7, 198 New Delhi, 94 New Haven: urbanization of (1960), 31

306

new landscape, 6, 18, 42, 44 New York, 127, 146, 230, 244; urbanization of (1960), 31; Massena, 244. See also Granick, Harry night/nighttime, 19, 185. See also spectatorship; urban Nine Inch Nails, 147 No Nukes demonstration, 222, 223, 227, 229 Nolan, Christopher: The Dark Knight (director of), 147 North American Free Trade Agreement, 268 North Carolina, 42 Novembre, Valérie, 15 objective chance, 143 objectivity, 102 Okabe, Michio, 231 Ono, Yoko, 231 Ontario, 244 ontological tetrad (the concrete, abstract, and virtual), 48, 50–1, 53–4. See also real; Tetrology Oshima, Nagisa, 230, 231 Otis, Laura: Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, 30 Palestine, 224, 251 Papastergiadis, Nikos, 95 Paris, 107, 109, 230; characterization of, 51; nineteenth-century urbanism, 32 Park, Robert: “The City,” 92 parochialism, 242 Patte, Christian, 28 Phantasmagoria, 108–9, 142, 143

Index

phenomenology, 5, 19, 36, 68, 232 Philadelphia, 31 place, 5, 10, 17, 20, 21, 26, 43, 125–6, 127 place making, 5, 6, 240, 246. See also locale Pløger, John, 44 poiesis, 71 police surveillance, 226 polylocality, 243 Pompeii, 104 post-Fordism, 235. See also Ford, Henry postmodern cartographic literature, 238 Potrč, Marjetica, 94, 95 Proust, Marcel, 48–9, 51; memoire involontaire, 106 psychoanalysis, 103, 126–7. See also Freud psychogeography, 143; genre, 38. See also Keiller, Patrick; Self, Will; Sinclair, Iain public space. See under space Quebec, 244 radical cartography. See under cartography Ramallah, 247, 248 Rancière, Jacques, 98, 217, 227, 229, 234, 240 Read, Justin, 14, 19 real: versus virtual according to Richard Doyle, 49; the Real, 152. See also ontological tetrad Reclaim the Street movement, 223 Red King, 145 Régulier, Catherine, 36

Index

Reisenleitner, Markus, 14, 20 Renaissance, 79, 82 representation, 227, 229, 232, 233, 234, 235; of people, 232; of place, 25–8, 121; of power, 232; of urban (representational modes of), 63–72. See also space (representations of) rhythm: Robert Musil’s description of plural rhythms, 34; rhythmanalysis, 11, 13, 17, 33–9; rhythmicity, 33. See also Lefebvre, Henri Rils, Jacob, 100 Rio de Janeiro, 19, 157, 164 Ritchie, Donald, 231 Robinson, Ian, 14, 20 Robinson, Richard, 242, 246 Rodney, Lee, 20–1 Rodowick, D.N., 252 role-playing games, 147, 152 Roissy Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs, 40 Rome, 104 Rosen, Phil, 239 Rosler, Martha, 93 “rurban/rurbanism,” 255, 269 Ruttmann, Walter, 39 Saigon, 230 Salla, Jeanine, 144, 145 San Francisco, 146 science fiction, 146, 149, 151 Scorpio Theatre, 230 Second World War, 26, 224 Self, Will, 38, 39 Sennett, Richard, 28, 131–4, 139–40n18, 140n19; Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in

307

Western Civilization, 28, 131–2, 139–40n18 serendipity, 18, 66, 73, 75; and the city, 61–3, 70–3, 75; as methodology, 57–60, 72, 73–4 Shibuya, 217, 224, 225; Shibuya, Eggman, 217; Shibuya Station, 224 Shields, Rob, 4, 17 Shinjuki, Dorobo Nikki/ Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, 230, 231 Shinjuku, 222, 223, 227, 230, 231; Central Park, 221; Shinjuku Station, 222, 229, 230 231 Shiroto no ran, 227 Simmel, Georg, 92, 97–9, 101, 102, 110, 111, 126, 141, 142; The Metropolis and Mental Life, 102 Sinclair, Iain, 38; London Orbital, 38 Situationists, 143; Theatre Troupe, 230 Skinner, B.F., 65 social media. See media social network. See network sociality, 47, 94 sociology, 99, 101; American urban, 55; of the urban, 43, 44, 51–2 Solnit, Rebecca, 40 sound demos, 223, 226, 230 space, 119; auditory, 81; cultural, 4, 5; differential space-time, 44, 47, 79; public, 52, 54, 141–53, 222, 224, 226, 227, 235; relational, 242, 243, 249; representations of, 4, 26–8, 51, 53; of localization, 117; space-time, 79; time-space, 44; virtual, 19, 41–54, 117–18, 122–5, 128–9, 135, 141, 148–52, 176, 239, 250. See also urban space

308

Spain, 222 spectatorship, 232; city as spectacle, 268; Granick, Harry, 29; nighttime, 187–9 Spielberg, Steven, 144, 145; A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (director), 144 Spivak, Gayatri, 229; “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 229 sprechchor calls, 226 St Lawrence River, 241, 244 Statue of Liberty, 146 Step by Step: Everyday Walks in a French Urban Housing Project, 40 Straw, Will, 4, 19. See also Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture Suginami ward, 227 Suleiman, Elia, 239, 247–8, 250–1 Super Suits, 218 Surrealism, 27, 34–6, 38, 107; Surrealists, 107, 143 surveillance, 223, 226, 227, 23 symbolism, 27, 30, 101 Tahrir Square, 222 “Take Back the Streets,” 53 Tange, Kenzo, 30; Metabolist group, 30 telegraphy, 30 telephony, 30 telos, 71 Tetrology, 50 thinking-in-images (Biddenken), 108 Thomas, William Isaac, 62, 66, 75; The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 55–6 thought-images (Denkbilder), 108

Index

Thrift, Nigel, 12, 13 Thum, Reinhard, 100 Tokyo, 14, 218–19, 221, 223–4, 227, 231, 232, 235 Tokyo Genpatsu/Tokyo: Level 1, 218, 221, 222 topology, 12, 126 topography, 71, 104, 126 Toronto School of Communications, 78, 81 transfiguration, 142 translocality/translocalization, 122, 123, 238, 250 transnationalism, 20 Tumblr, 222. See also media (social) Tunisia, 222 Tyrwhitt, Jaqueline, 7, 11, 13, 18, 77, 81–2, 84; on collaboration with Marshall McLuhan and Sigfried Giedion, 81, 82 uncanny, 104. See also Freud unconscious, 103, 104, 105. See also Freud United Kingdom: Aberdeen commuter area (research on locality), 53; London, 7, 14, 20, 38, 39n8, 81, 159, 188, 204–16 United States, 244, 260; 1950s and ’60s (economy), 31; census definition of urban and rural, 42; on rural and urban dualism, 42 urban: built environment, 10, 118, 135; capitalism, 43, 46; and city (dialectic relationship), 44–5, 53–4; versus city, 41–3, 48; cultural studies, 4; culture, 26–8, 38, 41–2; environment, 5, 6, 9, 12, 18, 100, 124, 126, 132, 136; geogra-

Index

phy (modern), 30; metropolitan urban culture, 30; modernization, 30, 61; night, 185–9; planners/planning, 3, 7–11 26, 27, 28, 41, 82; representational modes of, 63–72; research, 42, 43, 53–4, 63–4, 71, 72, 92, 93, 95, 97–9, 108, 110–12; versus rural, 42; screens, 3, 16; space, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12–13, 26–8, 30, 31, 38, 43, 46, 64, 120; studies, 3, 4, 16; virtuality of, 45–53. See also under Henri Lefebvre, urban culture urbanism, 32, 238; aleatory, 56, 60, 62, 63, 64, 70, 72–5 urbanity, 4, 16, 64, 121; of urban character, 41–2 urbanization, 93; of the US (1960), 31 US–Japan Security Treaty, 221 utopianism, 32 Vertov, Dziga, 39n5 Vienna, 34 Vietnam, 231 Vietnam War, 235 viral marketing, 146 Virilio, Paul, 35–6; Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, 35 virtual: alternate reality games, 15, 18, 141–56; augmented virtuality, 141, 151; city, 30, 31, 41–54, 118, 123; communities, 150; data, 141, 151; global network, 150; onto-

309

logical tetrad and, 48; representations, 176, 178; and self-identification, 117–40; space, 19, 41–54, 117–18, 122–5, 128–9, 135, 141, 148–52, 176, 239, 250; virtuality and urban culture, 30, 31, 35–6, 41–54, 120, 122–3 Walkman, 143 Wanderlust: A History of Walking, 40 Warner Brothers, 144 Weber, Max, 99 Weigel, Sigrid, 108 West Bank, 247 Whitehead, Alfred North, 243 Williams, D. Carleton, 7, 9 Windows Vista, 147 Windsor, Ontario, 20–1, 253–5; Border Bookmobile, 255, 256, 257–8; Broken City Lab, 262–3; WindsorDetroit, 254–5, 256–8, 259, 262, 263, 266, 266–9 wireless technology, 141, 144, 147 world cinema, 238, 247 World Trade Centre, 66 Xbox/Xbox 360, 146, 147 Yokoo, Tadanori, 230 Zero Jigen, 222 Znaniecki, Florian: The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (coauthor), 55