Smooth City, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Smooth Structures

This chapter goes into more detailed discussion of the Reestraat and the redevelopment of King’s Cross Central in London, in order to illustrate the structures or “mechanisms” that produce and reproduce the “perfection” of the smooth city.

It is important to understand that the smooth city does not appear out of thin air, but is the result of all kinds of power structures, political impulses, planning processes, and design choices. (29)

One of these mechanisms is private ownership of land, and investment in redevelopment; this is tied to certain forms of state control and promotion, and results in a lack of certain [democratic mechanisms] to challenge planning and use. Together, local government and private property-holders exert a “matrix of control” (49), policing the use of space, and excluding undesirable or un-“smooth” populations, as well as unapproved practices such as loitering, putting up flyers, graffiti, etc. Boer emphasizes the role of privately-owned parks as a sort of pseudo-public space, where cryptic rules are enforced by private security guards. The generally unspoken but inferred scripts of acceptable and expected behavior in the smooth city are sometimes, in “awkward cases,” spelled out, as in a sign in King’s Cross Central commanding passersby to “Shop, Eat, Drink, Play” (52). “Smart city” policing, screening, and scripting dramatically reduce the unpredictability of encounters in the smooth city, as do the rise of delivery and e-hailing apps, which replace the chance of encounter with algorithmic manipulation, turning the smooth city into essentially the opposite of what the city has always been, and the opposite of what most urban enthusiasts and critics have tended to celebrate. However, this may very well appear “perfect” to those who can afford it, and who can follow the script.

B has some interesting passages on the way the smooth city interacts with history and place, through a sort of recasting and hollowing out – place names are preserved, as often are historic façades while the interiors are gutted and redesigned. [I was recently in just such a building in downtown Phoenix, across the street from the Footprint Center, the wind-rippled tile “skin” of which is a rare, actually beautiful (and presumably ecologically beneficial) example of contemporary architecture. Yet, much like with King’s Cross Central, a former industrial zone has been gutted and repurposed, to create a safe, smooth space for the “Shop, Eat, Drink, Play” set.] With an eye for material detail, B discusses the acid-cleaning of historical bricks, the replacement of older glass panels with up-to-date glass, and the transformation of Amsterdam streetscapes with new materials according to the rules of the “Puccini method” (24). He concludes with a discussion of how the production, maintenance, and replication of the smooth city is embedded in flows of capital, and how it relies on non-smooth or less-smooth spaces in which it exists in a hierarchy. Examples of these are the peripheral neighborhoods to which those displaced by gentrification have had to relocate; from these neighborhoods come the daily flux of workers who maintain, clean, and labor in the smooth city, and yet are excluded from local politics and decision making. This is true also on a global scale:

The complicated-looking intercom on the gasholder apartment building in King’s Cross Central was assembled in a factory near Shenzhen a few years ago, and will be disassembled by kids in the open wastelands near Accra a few years from now. (57)

The chapter also includes an inset of several pages of collages, using images presumably from the street spaces described, which highlight the attraction and repulsion exerted by the perfected/alienated space of the smooth city.

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 5

 

Summary of Chapter 5: The Decline and Fall of Work

V’s summary:

The obligation to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning expands.

“In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.” (52) The two opposed terms through this chapter will be productivity, forced upon us from above, and creativity, freely chosen from below. In the current capitalist system, forced labor maintains order and the status quo by confusing and exhausting people.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanised slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, taking to the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is forming; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future.

V traces the etymologies of travail and labor from torture and suffering, respectively. While in the feudal order, the elite eschewed labor as demeaning, the bourgeoisie embrace it:

The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand this? (53)

Is it because work ameliorates the human condition and saves the poor, at least in illusion, from eternal damnation? Undoubtedly, but today it seems that the carrot of happier tomorrows has smoothly replaced the carrot of salvation in the next world. In both cases the present is always under the heel of oppression.

The point of productivity (as opposed to creativity) is not the transformation of nature, and not self-realization, because Taylorism destroyed the craft spirit of work.

Nowadays ambition and the love of a job done are the indelible mark of defeat and of the most mindless submission. Which is why, wherever submission is demanded, the stale fart of ideology makes headway, from the Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homilies of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-tung. (54)

The aristocracy ruled on the basis of a “unitary myth;” the bourgeois order cannot recreate this, so relies on the fractious reign of competing ideologies, unified by the ideal of productivity.

So what is the function of forced labour? The myth of power exercised jointly by the master and God drew its coercive force from the unity of the feudal system. Destroying the unitary myth, the fragmented power of the bourgeoisie inaugurated, under the flag of crisis, the reign of ideologies, which can never attain, separately or together, a fraction of the efficacy of myth. The dictatorship of productive work stepped into the breach. Its mission is to weaken the majority of people physically, to castrate and stupefy them collectively and so make them receptive to the feeblest, least virile, most senile ideologies in the entire history of falsehood.

V discusses the role of consumerism and the “leisure explosion” in prompting people to work harder to be able to have leisure. He critiques Maoist China as just “another example of the perfected form of capitalism called socialism.” (55)

Has anyone bothered to study the approaches to work of primitive peoples, the importance of play and creativity, the incredible yield obtained by methods which the application of modern technology would make a hundred times more efficient? Obviously not.

[This is an interesting observation in 1967, as Marshall Sahlins would have recently articulated the concept of the “original affluent society,” and Vaneigem might well have heard of this; Richard Lee had finished his dissertation, and Pierre Clastres was conducting fieldwork in South America. On the liberatory potential of modern technology, several of Bookchin’s essays that would later be collected as Post-Scarcity Anarchism would have been coming out in New York during this period, as well. So, despite V’s “obviously not” shrug, such questions were definitely in the air.]

To the extent that automation and cybernetics foreshadow the massive replacement of workers by mechanical slaves, forced labour is revealed as belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed to maintain order. Power manufactures the dose of fatigue necessary for the passive assimilation of its televised diktats.

And yet:

One day, perhaps, we shall see strikers, demanding automation and a ten-hour week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love in the factories, the offices and the culture centres. Only the planners, the managers, the union bosses and the sociologists would be surprised and worried. (56)

 

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part Three, Introduction

 Summary of Part Three, [Introduction]: Evolution of Technical Reality

Part three, “The Essence of Technicity,” begins with this brief introduction, which is not listed in the table of contents, and is given the title “Evolution of Technical Reality” only in the header. Sort of a hidden track, you could say.

S lays out the underlying question for part three (167): “what is the sense of the genesis of technical objects with respect to the whole of thought, of man’s existence, and of his manner of being in the world?” His answer to this question will be a “generalized genetic interpretation of the relation between man and the world” (167-8).

He discusses his particular meaning of genesis, which was developed in his other book, as “as the process of individuation in its generality” (168):

There is genesis when the coming-into-being of a system of a primitively oversaturated reality, rich in potential, greater than unity and harboring an internal incompatibility, constitutes for this system the discovery of compatibility, a resolution through the advent of structure. This structuration is the advent of an organization that is the basis of an equilibrium of metastability. Such genesis opposes itself to the degradation of the potential energies contained in a system through the passage to a stable state from which transformation is no longer possible.

He criticizes, or rather questions the relevance in this context, of the evolutionary concept of adaptation, which implies a correction of the relationship between species and environment towards a “functional finality” and a “stable equilibrium,” “which does not appear to be correct in man’s case, perhaps no more than it is for any living being.” He discusses the Bergsonian concept of élan vital as an alternative to adaptation, then announces that the truth is somewhere between these:

It seems that these two opposed notions, as the couple they form, can be replaced, by the notion of the individuation of oversaturated systems, conceived as successive resolutions of tensions through the discovery of structures at the heart of a system rich in potential.

Rather than tending to the final state of stable equilibrium, evolution produces metastability, “going from metastable state to metastable state” (169), and thus charged with potential. S provides a very Simondonian quote, “the potential is one of the forms of the real, as completely as the actual” (168) [which stands in nice contrast to the position of my high school teacher, Mr. Bonfigli, who used to say, “potential means you ain’t done shit yet.”]

[I must have that quote slightly misremembered, because I doubt Mr. Bonfigli would use the word “ain’t.”]

But in any case it is easy to see how this idea of the reality of potential, having real effects in a system, links us to the physical analogy of metastability, and plays a major role in Simondon’s theory of the evolution of technology, as the “discovery” of potential structure.

He lays out another of his historical just-so stories, which will be developed more fully in the next chapter. Human history begins in the magical phase or mode of relation with the world: “in the magical mode the mediation between man and the world is not yet concretized and constituted as standing apart, by means of specialized objects or human beings” (169). The magical phase splits into technicity and religion, which focus on the functions of figure and ground, respectively. This essentially sets up how S will go about answering his initial question, the relation between technicity and other forms of thought (e.g., religion, art, social science, etc.), through this initial family relationship. To the tendency towards divergence in different kinds of thought, must be opposed the thinking of convergence, “a relational function maintaining unity despite this divergence” (170):

The purpose [sens] of philosophical thought, intervening between the two representative orders and the two active orders of thought, is to make them converge and establish a mediation between them. Now, in order for this mediation to be possible, the very genesis of these forms of thought must be known and accomplished in a complete manner on the basis of previous stages of technicity and religiosity... (171)

 

Writing and Identity, Chapter 3

Summary of Chapter 3: Literacy and Identity

In this brief chapter Ivanič extends the concerns of the previous chapter to the subject of literacy. She notes that there are two ways the term “literacy” is used: the traditional or common meaning of ability to read and write, and the more nuanced and productive meaning, “way(s) of using written language” (58). The latter meaning is the focus here, as this allows for a variety of considerations of how literacy is embedded in social context (59). Ivanič has criticisms for the old “great divide” theory of Ong, etc., which posited a vast cognitive gap between pre-literate and literate societies, as well as for the idea that literacy is “decontextualized” in comparison with face-to-face speech. She points out that this narrows the meaning of “context” to physical presence. In addition to physical presence, she delineates two additional aspects of context: 1) an interactional level of the purposes to which communication is put, and the relationships in which it takes place, and 2) the context of culture (from Halliday), meaning “competing systems of values, beliefs, and practices” which shape and constrain both spoken and written communication (60).

She explores the idea of an “ecology of literacy,” in which various, diverse practices of reading each have their own “ecological niche” (62). The concepts of literacy practice and literacy event are discussed, both of which get beyond the reductionist view of literacy as a “skill,” and also bring into focus the broader social and cultural contexts in which literacy is practiced. She emphasizes the distinction between “the actual, observable practices of individuals, and the abstract, theoretical idea of the practices which are the norm for a cultural group” (67); however, she does not follow Gee (1990) in adopting distinct terms for these. She discusses the problems with verbs like “learn” and “acquire” in relation to literacy, which treat it as a pre-formed ability or resource that students earn or strive for; instead she prefers verbs like “develop” or “extend,” one “extends” one’s literacy practices. “What distinguishes students is not whether they are or are not literate, but the characteristics of the repertoire of resources they bring with them to the task” (70).

Identity is the book’s theme: “acquiring certain literacy practices involves becoming a certain type of person” (67). She concludes with some terminology adopted from other scholars: e.g., Besnier’s distinction between person (or role) and self (individual) as two aspects of identity; some writing (such as a sermon, or an academic paper) foregrounds the person, while other forms (such as personal letters) foreground the self. A quote from Gee spells out the positions of insider, colonized, and outsider in relation to a discourse; notably, “colonized students control and accept values in the Discourse just enough to keep signalling that others in the Discourse are their ‘betters’ and to become complicit with their own subordination” (Gee, quoted on p. 73).