Disquieting familiarities
Ines Weizman
"In order to grasp and analyse rhythms, it is necessary to get outside them, but not completely: be it through illness or a technique. A certain exteriority enables the analytic intellect to function. However, to grasp a rhythm it is necessary to have been grasped by it; one must let oneself go, give oneself over, abandon oneself to its duration."
(Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis)
Reading and Reflection
Revelling at his encountering with megacities a few years ago, Rem Koolhaas called for an ‘urban condition free of urbanity’. Essentially promoting an understanding of cities as being without a centre, without borders, and hence without any formal gateways. A bizarre reversal of values and imagination is seemingly taking place: The city, once the symbol of all evil, seems to promise the essence of everything that is both good and evil – in fact the totality of life . In the absence of gates, that would circumscribe the territory of a city, and without other markers of an inside urbanity sprawls as if ‘by instinct’ rather than by intelligence, cultural values and political consciousness.
In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs already in 1961 argued for the reinvigoration of the neighbourhood form with its function of social control and its streets’ “ballet of shopkeepers and stoop-sitters”. Jacobs called for an understanding of the city at a different scale and from a different perspective than those from which the modern master planners have seen the city. City surveys and archives with their new probability and statistical methods once promised more ‘accurate’ data and scope of the city. However, these ‘mere mappings’ of what exists (a very common practice of young students of the city) made it only possible to map out plans for the statistical city, for ever greater territories, eventually allowing for an Olympian view and treatment of the supposed problem of the city. With these calculations, it became possible to ‘scientifically’ plan standardised shopping and to analyse statistically, a given quantity of people and the feasibility of large-scale relocation of citizens.
Michel de Certeau’s in his famous essay Walking in the City that began its narrative on the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre took initially “the voluptuous pleasure” in seeing the city as a whole. Looking down on it, understanding the city as a concept, the author suddenly halts in his “ecstatic reading” of the city and modifies his attitude of analysis and reflection. Trying to read the city and its urban practices on ground level through footsteps, pedestrian speech acts, the rhetoric of walking, myths, rumours, names and symbols, he argues for the city as an operational concept. Far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, the city, according to de Certeau allows for a laboratory in which different spatial practices and meanings can be discovered, tested and re-evaluated. In what he so beautifully names “the disquieting familiarity of the city”, he shifts focus on instances of resistance and on stubborn procedures in the city that have been largely overlooked in previous theories about everyday practices.
In his essay Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre argues that the city offers a certain form of legibility in the way it orchestrates ‘spatio-temporal rhythms’ and suggests the possibility that a suitably knowledgeable observer would be able to plot the interactions of time and space in urban group practices and form. This ‘rhythmanalyst’, would be able to ‘read’ the routines of everyday life as they are played out in particular forms of space: “The rhythmanalyst thus knows how to listen to a square, a market, an avenue.” Lefebvre’s studies of political practices as reflected in everyday urban life are designed, with a certain revolutionary romanticism, to advocate an alternative revolutionary reorganisation of the institutionalised discourses of space and new modes of spatial practices. Elsewhere, Lefebvre writes: “Only groups, social classes and class fractions capable of revolutionary initiative can take over and realise to fruition solutions to urban problems. It is from these social and political forces that the renewed city will become the oeuvre. The first thing to do is to defeat currently dominant strategies and ideologies.”
This short reflection is based on the assumption that political relations are spatially reproduced, through the actualization and enactment of rituals of its citizens within the given fabric and structure of the city. The city, to use Judith Butler’s formulation “not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being”. Hence, living (in) the city, working in the city, being inspired by the city, questioning its formal markers of inclusion and exclusion also describe an important practice or agency as a form of membership in a political community that carries with it both the right and duty to political participation, as well as the possibility of dissent. This concerns the ‘duties’ and responsibilities of the urban professional and her ability not only to participate (through her architectural or spatial practice/praxis) in politics, but in fact her ability to avoid the ‘paradox of subjection’ through dissidence. As such spatial dissidence must capture its due place as one of the most important vehicles of political action and agency.
Text for Sheffield Hallam Contemporary Fine Art Degree Show 2009
