Emplacing Materiality

What are the materials of urban space and urban life? The dense forest full of volunteer trees and plants. The beveled, dark grey and somewhat translucent fence that surrounds 100-acres of land newly seized by eminent domain. The hoops and nets of a circular basketball court situated within the green of a vertical park. The aged red bricks of a three-story home. The calm pond in the middle of a calm park full of exercise activity stations. What are the materials of urban space and urban life?

Pruitt-Igoe forest

Last weekend, I considered this question as I visited three sites in North St. Louis City.

The first: Pruitt-Igoe/NGA. That moniker, as Heidi Kolk (mentioned below) has explained, is an amalgamation of two very different sites nevertheless linked due to proximity as they are across the street from each other. Pruitt-Igoe was the massive concrete public housing project first occupied in 1954, and demolished in the early 1970s. Although the complex began with the Pruitt tower for blacks and the Igoe for whites, Pruitt-Igoe soon became all-black and during its peak had 15,000 residents. Lee Rainwater’s famed 1970 ethnography, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum, described residents’ lives. After Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition in the early 1970s, the land slowly become a burly forest. Today, urbanists often venture to the forest, which is now private property: in 2016, developer Paul McKee bought the land from the city for a little more than $1 million. Across the street from Pruitt-Igoe will be the NGA or National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; in 2016, the NGA bought a 100-acre plot within the St. Louis Place neighborhood. Eminent domain recently forced that area’s mostly black 200 residents and businesses to move. Both Pruitt-Igoe’s dismantling and NGA’s development, then, have displaced black residents.

Church within land seized by eminent domain for future NGA site (photo credit: Morgan Brooks)

The second site: a basketball court in St. Louis place. The third site: Fairground Park, site of the 1949 race riot that erupted after whites began to attack blacks near and within the park’s newly integrated swimming pool.

Basketball hoop in St. Louis Place Park (photo credit: Morgan Brooks)

We visited these sites as part Material World of Modern Segregation. A symposium convened by Iver Bernstein and Heidi Kolk, both of Washington University in St. Louis, the event brought together an interdisciplinary group of 20+ scholars (including historians, anthropologists, sociologists, film-makers, and urbanists) researching sites of modern segregation in St. Louis city and county. The symposium offered a chance for scholars to share research conducted thus far, and workshop ideas within and themes across the works. On the second day, Bernstein and Kolk split scholars into four groups, each headed to a region of St. Louis: 1) East St. Louis; 2) St. Louis University/Midtown/Mill Creek Valley (Mill Creek Valley was the thriving mostly black neighborhood of 20,000 demolished in the 1950s); 3) “Delmar Divide”; and 4) North St. Louis (my group).

I thought of geographer Katherine McKittrick throughout the symposium. In her 2011 article, “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place,” she defines a black sense of place as “as the process of materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter” (949). Crucially for this symposium McKittrick also writes: “[a] black sense of place draws attention to the longstanding links between blackness and geography. It brings into focus the ways in which racial violences (concrete and epistemic actions and structural patterns intended harm, kill, or coerce a particular grouping of people) shape, but do not wholly define, black worlds” (947) Her attention frames the processes that shape the materialites and geographies of black life, such as displacement of black residents and neighborhoods.

I also thought of ethnographer Sarah Pink as we experienced the site visits. In her 2008 article “An urban tour: The sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making,” Sarah Pink details her experience in Mold, Wales, UK. A Cittàslow (or Slow Cities) member town, Mold aims towards, what as Pink writes, “an attentiveness and mindfulness that stresses the quality of experience” (192). Pink describes taking a tour of Mold that emphasized that Slow City status; in the tour she walks with, eats with, talks with, explores with, photographs with, and experiences the city with residents. Her experience is not just one of being with residents; consciousness of the experience in the town also comes when Pink leaves the tour. She writes:

Most striking was perhaps not the process by which, through consuming my half-milk coffee, falling into step with my guides and trying to imagine the futures they mediated, I became attuned to their world. Rather, it was that once walking hurriedly to my car I felt more deeply how my way of both being in and knowing the town shifted as I was disengaged from my hosts and (without my mediators) returned in ‘transport’ (Ingold, 2007) mode to my car. (192)

Two of Pink’s ideas, I find, are crucial. First, she details how emplacement frames ethnographic approaches. She writes, “we should think not only about how the subjects of ethnographic research are emplaced … [r]ather, it invokes the additional question of how researchers themselves are emplaced in ethnographic contexts” (179). Second, she positions the tour as “a case study of an embodied and reflexive engagement with the discourses, materiality, sociality and sensoriality of a particular way of being in a town” (192). We make sense of urban spaces through discourses, materials, social experiences, and sensorial awareness; we also make sense of space by being conscious of how others and ourselves are emplaced. Critically, for the symposium, this approach situates sites and materiality as only given meaning by being emplaced to capture the often under-studied emplaced histories and practices of segregation that pervade St. Louis.

The mesh fence that now surrounds the future NGA was put up in the last few weeks. Within the fenced area still are churches and homes recently abandoned as residents have been forced out. The churches and homes no longer act as spaces for worship and residence; framed by the fence, they are now marked for destruction. At one moment during our visit, as we looked at the fence and through the fence, a security guard driving in a car approached us and added unease to our observations.

Security guard driving towards us within newly fenced area slated for NGA (photo credit: Morgan Brooks)

When we were in the Pruitt-Igoe forest, John Early (a member of our group) mentioned that when he often walks through the forest he feels under his feet a dismantled curb or another remnant of the apartment complex demolished more than 40 years ago. That day, we saw what appeared as a large rock spray-painted in a bright pink color. Also, when within the forest although surrounded by seemingly calm green plants, I felt not ease but anxiety as I was technically trespassing on private property.

We played basketball in the court in St. Louis Place Park Basketball court and then walked by several homes in the neighborhood, including a “new” one. Charlesetta Taylor, one resident of the NGA eminent domain area, was able to have the city pay to move her home a mile away in the northern part of the neighborhood. (Other residents have not had her fate).

Charlesetta Taylor’s newly moved home (photo credit: Morgan Brooks)

As we walked by her recently moved home–which aesthetically seemed to fit into its new block–new meaning was made of the bricks that held together parts of the home, and continued to give strength and resilience in the new location. When we consider the materials of urban life, we make fuller sense of these materials by considering how they engage with our (and more importantly) with residents’ emplacement.

 

UCS 008 Masterson-Algar on Ecuadorians in Madrid’s Retiro Park

UCS 008 Masterson-Algar on Ecuadorians in Madrid’s Retiro Park (8 October 2013)

Conversational interview inspired by scholar Araceli Masterson-Algar’s article “Juggling Aesthetics and Surveillance in Paradise: Ecuadorians in Madrid’s Retiro Park,” published in the International Journal of Iberian Studies (26.1-2, 2013). Mixing ethnography on the ground with Ecuadorian immigrants to Madrid with cultural analysis and discussion of urban planning, topics range from urban parks (the Retiro Park [the section known as La Chopera now home to the 11-M memorial and Forest of Memory], the Casa de Campo…) to Manuel Delgado’s urban anthropology and the dynamics of migration as tied to urban processes of tourism and capital accumulation. [LINK TO ORIGINAL PUBLISHER]

Stephen Vilaseca’s Barcelonan Okupas [new book just published]

Barcelonan Okupas: Squatter Power! is the first book to combine close-readings of the representations of Spanish squatters known as okupas with the study of everyday life, built environment, and city planning in Barcelona. Stephen Vilaseca broadens the scope of Spanish cultural studies by integrating into it notions of embodied cognition and affect that respond to the city before and against the fixed relations of capitalism. Social transformation, as demonstrated by the okupas, is possible when city and art interrelate, not through capital or the urbanization of consciousness, but through bodily thought. The okupas reconfigure the way thoughts, words, images and bodily responses are linked by evoking and communicating the idea of free exchange and openness through art (poetry, music, performance art, the plastic arts, graffiti, urban art and cinema); and by acting out and rehearsing these ideas in the practice of squatting. The okupas challenge society to differentiate the images and representations instituted by state domination or capitalist exploitation from the subversive potential of imagination. The okupas unify theory and practice, word and body, in pursuit of a positive, social vision that might serve humanity and lead the way out of the current problems caused by capitalism.

[Click here to listen to a podcast interview with Stephen Vilaseca]

[Click here to go to the book’s Amazon page]

001 – Valencia/Bilbao/Barcelona – Vilaseca on Street Art in Spain – Urban Cultural Studies Podcast

UCS 001 Stephen Vilaseca on Street Art in Barcelona Valencia and Bilbao Spain (28 June 2013)  Conversational interview inspired by scholar Stephen Vilaseca‘s recent article “From Graffiti to Street Art: How Urban Artists Are Democratizing Spanish City Centers and Streets,” originally published in the journal Transitions: Journal of Franco-Iberian Studies (8, 2012). Topics include: public space, graffiti vs. street art, artists Escif, Frágil and Dr. Case, Valencia, Bilbao, and Barcelona. [LINK TO ORIGINAL PUBLISHER]

CFP-edited book on Marxism and Urban Culture

CFP-edited book on Marxism and Urban Culture

Submissions are invited for an edited book on Marxism and Urban Culture that has received initial interest from an international publisher known for their strength in Marxian-themed series and titles.

While all abstracts using a Marxian framework to approach culture in urban contexts are welcome, it is anticipated that submissions will conform to one of two subtypes reflecting the division of the book into

CFP–new Journal of Urban Cultural Studies launched

Visit the new Journal of Urban Cultural Studies site here.

Call for Papers

The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies is a new peer-reviewed publication cutting across both the humanities and the social sciences in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities. The journal is open to studies that deal with culture, urban spaces and forms of urbanized consciousness the world over.

Although we embrace a broad definition of urban cultural studies, we are particularly interested in submissions that give equal weight to: a) one or more aspects of urban studies (everyday life, built environment, architecture, city planning, identity formation, transportation…) and b) analysis of one or more specific forms of cultural/textual production (literature, film, graphic novels, music, art, graffiti, videogames, online or virtual space…) in relation to a given urban space or spaces.

Essays of 7,000-10,000 words (including works cited and notes) should be sent by attachment to the Editor at urbanculturalstudies@gmail.com. JUCS is also open to proposals of special issues by guest editors working individually or in teams of two. All citations in other languages should be translated into English for the journal’s international reading public, in addition to including the original text.

While the journal does not publish book reviews, we do publish review essays—which should discuss 3-5 recent books on a shared topic or theme (or place) and run from 2,500 to 4,000 words. Review essays of urban-themed installations or other works of art are also welcome. These essays will be reviewed in house. Given our visual focus, we are interested in original, unpublished artwork on the topic of cities and in publishing articles accompanied by images where appropriate.

We encourage a variety of approaches to the urban phenomenon—the strengths of the editorial board run from urban geography to literature and film, photography and videogames, gender and sexuality, creative economy, popular music, Marxist approaches, fashion, urban planning, anthropology, sociology, Deaf culture, built environment, philosophy, architecture, detective fiction and noir, and more…

Future Tenochtitlan?

Tlatelolco Marketplace, Wikimedia, Joe Ravi, Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0

There’s an interesting piece in this year’s Nebula Awards Showcase, a lively short story about an alternative future premised on Aztec culture, “The Jaguar House, in Shadow,” by Aliette de Bodard.  One of the biggest challenges to those of us trying to imagine and evoke alternative futures is precisely what animates de Bodard’s story: can we come up with futures that aren’t already colonized by Western modernity?  As she writes (185):

“Part of the challenge (and what had frustrated me with the earlier attempt) is making sure that “modern” doesn’t end up equating “twentieth-century Western culture”; and equally making sure that the Aztec culture doesn’t turn out to be an ossified version of what the conquistadors saw.”
De Bodard struggles with this premise, ultimately sketching a future Tenochtitlan that is at turns archaeological speculation and Aztec steampunk.  Maglev stations, nanotechnology, religion, traditional drugs, Aztec ball courts.  It all pushes the story forward, and beyond: the ending makes me suspect that there’s a novel in the works.

But is this really an alternative future?  Or is this just Western sf playing in the ruins of Tenochtitlan?  De Bodard’s protagonist, Oballi, breaks into the house of her own Jaguar order in order to rescue her friend, a feat enabled by various physically extending drugs and technologies, including nanotechnologically enhanced finger-nails.  “She extended, in one fluid, thoughtless gesture: her nails were diamond-sharp,  courtesy of Atcoatl’s nanos, and it was easy to find purchases on the carving” (192).  It’s that juxtaposition of Aztec carvings and nanotechnology that gesture to the limits of this “alternative” future.

Contrast this to Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain (2010), a decidedly non-fictional evocation of an “alternative future” that is premised on what Pickering calls (after the work of Bruno Latour) “nonmodern” ontologies.

“What I want to suggest is that the ontology of cybernetics is a strange and unfamiliar one, very different from that of the modern sciences. I also want to suggest that ontology makes different—that the strangeness of specific cybernetics projects hangs together with the strangeness of its ontology (17).”

In the performative ontologies evoked in cybernetics, the world appears less as the transparent workings of a Cartesian universe than as a series of black boxes that we interact with in a performative way–with frequently surprising results.  Examples of cybernetics as an alternative epistemology for knowing this black-box ontology abound, but one of my favorites (and, I think, also Pickering’s) is Gordon Pask’s 1950’s work on Musicolour.

“Materially, the music was converted into an electrical signal by a microphone, and within Musicolour the signal passed through a set of filters, sensitive to different frequencies, the beat of the music, and so on, and the output of the filters controlled different lights.  You could imagine that the highest-frequency filter energized a bank of red lights, the next-highest the blues, and so on.  Very simple, except for the fact that the internal parameters of Musicolour’s circuitry were not constant.  In analogy to biological neurons, banks of lights would only be activated if the output from the relevant filter exceeded a certain threshold value, and these thresholds varied in time as charges built up on capacitors according to the development of the performance and the prior behavior of the machine” (316).

Rather than treat music, sound, cognition, perception as divisible parts rendered knowable by science as discrete data, Pask developed a machine that encouraged the adaptive coupling of diverse systems to each other, a kind of performative epistemology that was, as Pickering points out over and over, both a “theater” and an example of what might be called a non-modern ontology: the world construed not as divisible, objectified parts, but as complex systems loosely coupled to each through feedback, where the goal is not to dominate and exploit but to interact, cope–to negotiate a truth rather than command one.   The point, of course, is that this is ultimately an alternative modernity (or, as Pickering writes, a “nonmodern” epistemology).

It’s all interesting, and Pickering hits on what excites me most about cybernetics: it’s capacity to interrogate the assumptions that have guided technological development up to now, and possibility for “lines of flight” within the hegemonic discourse of objectivist science and the domination of nature.  Indeed, Pickering reflects on cybernetics in the wake of Deleuzean “nomad science,” and finds the work Beer, Pask, Bateson and others to anticipate much of the Deleuzean turn. Of course, Pickering uses that problematic “nonmodern”–I am not nearly so sanguine that we can escape the modern by emphasizing a performative ontology, since the message here is that it was implicit in the cybernetic modern all along.

And this gets me back to de Bodard’s story.  Can we evoke a truly non-Western future?  Is there a “nonmodern” modernity?  Can we simultaneously imagine a future and escape from that future’s overdetermination by, perhaps, the most central characteristic of modernity itself: “futures thinking”? We can see de Bodard’s writing as part of the answer–imagining non-Western futures–although I wish she had spent some time looking at actual Aztec futures, as in the Mexican environmental groups and sustainability techniques that have been developed off of insights into Aztec irrigation and farming. Or even at the interesting (and tumultuous) world of Mexican sf (see Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz’s Biografias del Futuro: La ciencia ficcion mexicana y sus autores (2000)).

The other part, though, must be examining Western futures themselves as multiple, or, more precisely, as a virtual field of difference through the potentialities Pickering sketches.  Perhaps we can approach that alternative future through multiple estrangements.  First, undermining our own assumptions about the future by excavating “roads not taken”–cybernetics, Bergonism, etc., while struggling to understand non-Western epistemologies.  Second, the fuzzy coupling of alternative futures, non-Western futures, sublimated utopia: in other words, the performative ontology Pickering lionizes performed on a grander temporal and spatial scale.  Ultimately, the goal is less prediction and control than adapting to these shifting, swirling, Musicolour constellations.

There’s a story about his time working in a VA hospital that Gregory Bateson told in a 1971 Naropa Institute lecture that I explore in a 2010 article (Collins 2010: 60):

“At the request of the ward superintendent, he invited a new patient to his office and, in way of initialing conversation (and building rapport) offered him a cigarette. The patient took a few puffs and then, looking Bateson straight in the eyes, dropped it on the carpet. The next day, he again met with Bateson, took a cigarette, lit it, and dropped it on the carpet. Only this time, he decided to take a walk. Bateson followed him for 100 yards or so, and then couldn’t take it any longer. “Look, man, I’ve got to know what that cigarette is doing!” They turned back to retrieve it. On the third day, the same thing, only this time, when the resident got up to take a walk, Bateson palmed the cigarette and followed behind. A few yards out the door, Bateson said, “Ed, I think this is your cigarette, isn’t it?” Ed laughed, and Bateson felt that he had been admitted in (if only fleetingly) into the resident’s world.”

What is the point here to Bateson’s enigmatic parable?  First, that understanding here is not premised on control.  It’s not about forcing the patient into the Bateson’s cognitive schema.  Instead, it’s about creating cybernetic couplings that interact along “lines of flight” that gesture to something else entirely.  Could this be a metaphor for strange (and estranging) futures?

References

Collins, Samuel Gerald (2010).  “‘An Electronic Buzzer is Laughing’.”  Cybernetics & Human Knowing 17(3): 45-64.

Pickering, Andrew (2010).  The Cybernetic Brain.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.