Learning The City, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Assembling the Everyday: Incremental Urbanism and Tactical Learning

As advertise, M uses this chapter to discuss the related concepts of incremental urbanism and tactical learning. Incremental learning is illustrated with an account of a bricolage-built home in a São Paola favela; and more generally, any kind of building and dwelling in a home is a sort of “learning through assemblage” which takes place over time: a “house is a set of contingent sociomaterial orderings, the constitutive geographies of which extend far beyond the house” (36). He brings in the concepts of extensive and intensive multiplicities from D&G, then discusses skateboard as a form of urban learning, drawing on Borden 2001. Reciprocity is discussed (40ff).

Another example of urban learning is provided through the experience of street children in Mumbai (43ff). M turns to the subject of rhythm, listing three functions of urban assemblages (48) and describing dwelling as an “education of attention,” a term to which he will return throughout the chapter (49). He reviews some of the literature on walking (50ff), then notes some critiques of Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling,” though these do not require a rejection of the concept or term per se.

The section on “tactical learning” combines De Certeau’s distinction between “strategy” and “tactics” with James C. Scott’s “weapons of the weak,” through the lens of Hansen and Verkaaik’s “urban infrapower (54ff). The notion of infrapower helps highlight the fact that the tactics and weapons of the weak described by De Certeau and Scott have to be learnt. M discusses a tenants’ association campaign as another example of urban learning.

Seeing Like a State, Chapter 4

 

Summary of Chapter 4: The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique

This chapter joins into the eternally popular and rewarding practice of bashing Le Corbusier, followed by an appreciation of the work of Jane Jacobs. Visits to Brasília and Chandigarh illustrate the failings of High Modernist city planning. Scott begins with an opening quote from Mumford about Baroque planning not being amenable to change, and so having to be done at one stroke by an despotic ruler. Scott applies the criticism to “the embodiment of high-modernist urban design,” Le Corbusier (103). Most of his plans were never built, because “they typically required a political resolve and financial wherewithal that few political authorities could muster.” When such planned cities were built, they required autocratic state power, just as Mumford predicted.Scott notes:

These urban planners backed by state power are rather like tailors who are not only free to invent whatever suit of clothes they wish but also free to trim the customer so that he fits the measure. (146)

If one were looking for a caricature—a Colonel Blimp, as it were, of modernist urbanism—one could hardly do better than to invent Le Corbusier. (104)

Though some of Le Corbusier’s early creations are actually quite decent, the LeC we are taking issue with is the author of La ville radieuse. “Here as elsewhere, Le Corbusier’s plans were self-consciously immodest.”

No compromise is made with the preexisting city; the new cityscape completely supplants its predecessor. In each case, the new city has striking sculptural properties; it is designed to make a powerful visual impact as a form. That impact, it is worth noting, can be had only from a great distance.

None of the plans makes any reference to the urban history, traditions, or aesthetic tastes of the place in which it is to be located. The cities depicted, however striking, betray no context; in their neutrality, they could be anywhere at all.

Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. He heaped scorn on the tangle, darkness, and disorder, the crowded and pestilential conditions, of Paris and other European cities at the turn of the century. (106)

Scott notes the romance of the modernist architect and the airplane, illustrated with a lengthy quote from Le C on the “bird’s-eye view” (381n7).

Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the ‘general truths’ behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as possible to the history of existing cities.

Le C had a deep dislike of complexity; he believed that that straight lines and right angles are more rational and “geometric” than organic or rounded forms, but as Scott points out, this is not true. Scott describes Le C’s infamous concept of the “death of the street,” which is linked to the fetishization of zoning, per which each district of the city to have one and only one function.

The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly clear. It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose. It is far easier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains. It is far easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield of furniture-grade timber. When two purposes must be served by a single facility or plan, the trade-offs become nettlesome. When several or many purposes must be considered, the variables that the planner must juggle begin to boggle the mind. (110)

If the only function of roads is to get automobiles from A to B quickly and economically, then one can compare two road plans in terms of relative efficiency. This logic is eminently reasonable inasmuch as this is precisely what we have in mind when we build a road from A to B. Notice, however, that the clarity is achieved by bracketing the many other purposes that we may want roads to serve, such as affording the leisure of a touristic drive, providing aesthetic beauty or visual interest, or enabling the transfer of heavy goods.

In the case of the places that people call home, narrow criteria of efficiency do considerably greater violence to human practice.

...what is going on in the kitchen when someone is cooking for friends who have gathered there is not merely ‘food preparation.’ But the logic of efficient planning from above for large populations requires that each of the values being maximized be sharply specified and that the number of values being maximized simultaneously be sharply restricted-preferably to a single value. The logic of Le Corbusier’s doctrine was to carefully delineate urban space by use and function so that single-purpose planning and standardization were possible. (111)

Le C’s first “principle of urbanism” was “The Plan: Dictator.” “He returned repeatedly to the contrast between the existing city, which is the product of historical chance, and the city of the future, which would be consciously designed from start to finish following scientific principles.” Le C’s city is to be “monocephalic.”

The scientific urban planner is to the design and construction of the city as the entrepreneur-engineer is to the design and construction of the factory. Just as a single brain plans the city and the factory, so a single brain directs its activity—from the factory’s office and from the city’s business center. The hierarchy doesn’t stop there. The city is the brain of the whole society. (112)

Scott compares this view to Plato’s in The Laws (382n28). He also notes the resonance with the career of Walter Christaller, the inventor of central place theory, whose “search for the autocrat who will give him the power to realize his vision” led him to court first the Nazis, then the German Communist Party, in “a classic case of the attempt to impose what had begun as a simplified analytical description of the economics of location” (382-3n29).

Le C’s had a typical high modernist faith in “universal scientific truths”; his vision of the Plan as despot has resonances with modern technofetishism.

The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected authorities, the voting public, the constitution, and the legal structure. At the very least, we are in the presence of a dictatorship of the planner; at most, we approach a cult of power and remorselessness that is reminiscent of fascist imagery. (113)

Technocracy, in this instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute. Deciding such technical matters by politics and bargaining would lead to the wrong solution. As there is a single, true answer to the problem of planning the modern city, no compromises are possible.

Believing that his revolutionary urban planning expressed universal scientific truths, Le Corbusier naturally assumed that the public, once they understood this logic, would embrace his plan. The original manifesto of CIAM called for primary school students to be taught the elementary principles of scientific housing: the importance of sunlight and fresh air to health; the rudiments of electricity, heat, lighting, and sound; the right principles of furniture design; and so on. These were matters of science, not of taste; instruction would create, in time, a clientele worthy of the scientific architect. Whereas the scientific forester could, as it were, go right to work on the forest and shape it to his plan, the scientific architect was obliged to first train a new clientele that would ‘freely’ choose the urban life that Le Corbusier had planned for them. (114)

An extended discussion of Brasília (117ff) serves as an example of the design and failings of the High Modernist city. Though not designed by Le C himself, its planners were clearly inspired by his thinking, and there is also a handy book which Scott draws on extensivly (James Holston, (1989) The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília . Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Brasília is in several ways “the negation or transcendance of Brazil” and its culture.

Brasília was designed to eliminate the street and the square as places for public life. Although the elimination of local barrio loyalties and rivalries may not have been planned, they were also a casualty of the new city. (120)

The goal was to replace the public squares and crowded “corridor” streets of traditional Brazilian cities:

the square, as a confluence of streets and a sharply enclosed, framed space, become what Holston aptly calls a ‘public visiting room.’ As a public room, the square is distinguished by its accessibility to all social classes and the great variety of activities it accommodates. Barring state proscriptions, it is a flexible space that enables those who use it to use it for their mutual purposes. The square or the busy street attracts a crowd precisely because it provides an animated scene—a scene in which thousands of unplanned, informal, improvised encounters can take place simultaneously... It goes without saying that the street or the public square, under the right circumstances, could also become the site of public demonstrations and riots directed against the state. (120-1)

Scott inserts a relevant quote from Le C: “Cafes and places of recreation will no longer be the fungus which eats up the pavements of Paris. We must kill the street” (385n60). The massive central square of Brasília is not at all like the human-scale public squares of the past:

If one were to arrange to meet a friend there, it would be rather like trying to meet someone in the middle of the Gobi desert. And if one did meet up with one’s friend, there would be nothing to do. Functional simplification demands that the rationale for the square as a public visiting room be designed out of Brasília. This plaza is a symbolic center for the state; the only activity that goes on around it is the work of the ministries. (121)

The functional division of the city means everyone must drive everywhere, from home, to work, to commercial centers, etc.

One striking result of Brasília’s cityscape is that virtually all the public spaces in the city are officially designated public spaces: the stadium, the theater, the concert hall, the planned restaurants. The smaller, unstructured, informal public spaces—sidewalk cafes, street corners, small parks, neighborhood squares—do not exist. Paradoxically, a great deal of nominally open space characterizes this city, as it does Le Corbusier’s city plans. But that space tends to be ‘dead’ space, as in the Plaza of the Three Powers.

[This is readily confirmed with Google streetview; looking around the wide open spaces in the middle of Brasília, the only people I could find in any of the parks were three guys maintaining shrubbery]

There were definite advantages to beginning with an empty, bulldozed site belonging to the state. At least the problems of land speculation, rent gouging, and property-based inequalities that beset most planners could be circumvented. As with Le Corbusier and Haussmann, there was an emancipating vision here. The best and most current architectural knowledge about sanitation, education, health, and recreation could be made part of the design. Twenty-five square meters of green space per resident reached the UNESCO-designed ideal. (125)

Virtually all the needs of Brasília's future residents were reflected in the plan. It is just that these needs were the same abstract, schematic needs that produced the formulas for Le Corbusier’s plans. Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents. In some important respects, Brasília is to São Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to the unplanned forest. Both plans are highly legible, planned simplifications devised to create an efficient order that can be monitored and directed from above. Both plans, as we shall see, miscarry in comparable respects.

it is almost as if the founders of Brasília, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to prevent a city. (126)

Residents complain of brasilite, aka Brasília-itis.

The recipe for high-modernist urban planning, while it may have created formal order and functional segregation, did so at the cost of a sensorily impoverished and monotonous environment—an environment that inevitably took its toll on the spirits of its residents.

Holston asked a class of nine-year- old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a picture of ‘home.’ Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All drew, instead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a central door, and a pitched roof. (127)

The disorienting quality of Brasília is exacerbated by architectural repetition and uniformity. Here is a case where what seems like rationality and legibility to those working in administration and urban services seems like mystifying disorder for the ordinary residents who must navigate the city.

Scott turns to some of the unplanned elements which in the end shaped Brasília otherwise than it had been planned; particularly the role of the army of “candango” workers/squatters who built the city, who organize and get political power. In the end there are both rich and poor unplanned Brasílias, alongside the planned areas.

The unplanned Brasílias—that of the rich and that of the poor—were not merely a footnote or an accident; one could say that the cost of this kind of order and legibility at the center of the plan virtually required that it be sustained by an unplanned Brasília at the margins. The two Brasílias were not just different; they were symbiotic. (130)

This is because it was the political necessities of building Brasília in an autocratic manner, that, ironically, required some influence to be ceded to these competing power bases.

How successful was Brasília as a high-modernist, utopian space? If we judge it by the degree to which it departs from cities in older, urban Brazil, then its success was considerable. If we judge it by its capacity either to transform the rest of Brazil or to inspire a love of the new way of life, then its success was minimal. The real Brasília, as opposed to the hypothetical Brasília in the planning documents, was greatly marked by resistance, subversion, and political calculation.

Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, treated on pages 130-2, reveals essentially all the same problems. The rest of the chapter focuses on the trenchant critique of high modernist planning offered by Jane Jacobs (132ff). In contrast to Le C, Jacobs gives a bottom-up view starting from the street level experience of pedestrians; she will “argue from close daily observation at street level rather than stipulating human wishes from above” (140).

A formative insight in Jacobs’s argument is that there is no necessary correspondence between the tidy look of geometric order on one hand and systems that effectively meet daily needs on the other. Why should we expect, she asks, that well-functioning built environments or social arrangements will satisfy purely visual notions of order and regularity? (133)

A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level.

Scott characterizes Jacobs as a “functionalist” in contrast to Le C’s aesthetic approach. Jacobs writes on the true sources of social order, e.g., “eyes on the street.” S adds in a footnote:

It is important to specify that Jacobs’s point about ‘eyes on the street’ assumes a rudimentary level of community feeling. If the eyes on the street are hostile to some or all members of the community, as Talja Potters has reminded me, public security is not enhanced. (386n85)

[To this could be added the question, of course, security for whom? There might be some “functionalist” assumptions about “order” to be unpacked here].

The process is powerfully cumulative. The more animated and busier the street, the more interesting it is to watch and observe; all these unpaid observers who have some familiarity with the neighborhood provide willing, informed surveillance. (135)

People in Jacobs’ city are on “sidewalk terms” with each other (136). S notes in a footnote how many of Jacobs’ examples involve “the fast-disappearing and much maligned petite bourgeoisie” (386n86) [a clue to one of Scott’s differences from Marxism].

The web of familiarity and acquaintanceship enabled a host of crucial but often invisible public amenities. A person didn’t think twice about asking someone to hold one’s seat at the theater, to watch a child while one goes to the restroom, or to keep an eye on a bike while one ducks into a deli to buy a sandwich.

The agents of this order are all nonspecialists whose main business is something else. There are no formal public or voluntary organizations of urban order here—no police, no private guards or neighborhood watch, no formal meetings or officeholders. Instead, the order is embedded in the logic of daily practice. What’s more, Jacobs argues, the formal public institutions of order function successfully only when they are undergirded by this rich, informal public life. An urban space where the police are the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place. (136)

Diversity, cross-use, and complexity (both social and architectural) are Jacobs’s watchwords. The mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces makes a neighborhood more interesting, more convenient, and more desirable—qualities that draw the foot traffic that in turn makes the streets relatively safe. (136-7)

What are the conditions of this diversity? That a district have mixed primary uses, Jacobs suggests, is the most vital factor. Streets and blocks should be short in order to avoid creating long barriers to pedestrians and commerce. Buildings should ideally be of greatly varying age and condition, thereby making possible different rental terms and the varied uses that accompany them. Each of these conditions, not surprisingly, violates one or more of the working assumptions of orthodox urban planners of the day: single-use districts, long streets, and architectural uniformity. (137)

“The very jumble of activities, buildings, and people—the apparent disorder that offended the aesthetic eye of the planner—was for Jacobs the sign of dynamic vitality.” Scott adds what he considers a “larger argument” to Jacobs’ case for cross-use and diversity:

Like the diverse old-growth forest, a richly differentiated neighborhood with many kinds of shops, entertainment centers, services, housing options, and public spaces is, virtually by definition, a more resilient and durable neighborhood. Economically, the diversity of its commercial ‘bets’ (everything from funeral parlors and public services to grocery stores and bars) makes it less vulnerable to economic downturns. At the same time its diversity provides many opportunities for economic growth in upturns. Like monocropped forests, single-purpose districts, although they may initially catch a boom, are especially susceptible to stress. The diverse neighborhood is more sustainable. (138)

Scott avers that Jacobs contributes a “woman’s eye,” more attentive and insightful than male colleagues of the time, allowing “her realization that a great deal of human activity (including, by all means, work) is pursued for a wide range of goals and satisfactions” (139). She characterizes “authoritarian planning as urban taxidermy” (139ff). A note explores links between Jacobs and anarchist precursors such as Goodman:

The echoes of such influential anarchist thinkers as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin reverberate in this passage. I do not know whether Jacobs intended these resonances, which may have come from the work of Paul Goodman. But what is missing is a recognition that, in the absence of state-based urban planning, large commercial and speculative interests are transforming the urban landscape every day. The effect of her argument is to ‘naturalize’ the unplanned city by treating it as the consequence of thousands of small and notionally equal acts. (387n99)

Scott discusses how urban planning parallels “optimum control theory” in forest planning, providing an example of planning for a shopping center’s catchment zone. “Rigid, single-use zoning is, then, not just an aesthetic measure. It is an indispensable aid to scientific planning, and it can also be used to transform formulas posing as observations into self-fulfilling prophesies” (141).

If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail. (142)

The historic diversity of the city—the source of its value and magnetism—is an unplanned creation of many hands and long historical practice. Most cities are the outcome, the vector sum, of innumerable small acts bearing no discernible overall intention.

He quotes Jacobs to the above effect, and adds:

Le Corbusier would have agreed with this description of the existing city, and it was precisely what appalled him. It was just this cacophony of intentions that was responsible for the clutter, ugliness, disorder, and inefficiencies of the unplanned city.

They each have influenced different schools of thought in urban planning:

Whereas Le Corbusier’s planner is concerned with the overall form of the cityscape and its efficiency in moving people from point to point, Jacobs’s planner consciously makes room for the unexpected, small, informal, and even nonproductive human activities that constitute the vitality of the ‘lived city.’ (143)

Jacobs is also more aware of other urban processes: ecology, market effects, gentrification.

The nature of the city was flux and change; a successful neighborhood could not be frozen and preserved by the planners. A city that was extensively planned would inevitably diminish much of the diversity that is the hallmark of great towns. The best a planner can hope for is to modestly enhance rather than impede the development of urban complexity.

Scott approves of Jacobs’ (and later de Certeau’s) analogy of urban change with linguistic change, then in a footnote takes issue with Hayek’s similar claim to the self-organization of markets:

The problem that I see with this analogy is that the market in the modern sense is not synonymous with ‘spontaneous social order,’ but rather had to be imposed by a coercive state in the nineteenth century, as Karl Polanyi has convincingly shown. Hayek’s description of the development of common law is, I believe, somewhat closer to the mark. In any event, city, market, and common law are all creators of historical power relations that are neither ‘natural’ nor creative of ‘spontaneous social order.’ In her telling critique of planning, Jacobs is frequently tempted to naturalize the unplanned city rather as Hayek naturalizes the market. (388n106)

Like planned languages, planned cities need to be let loose to the transformative power of users: “Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities” (144).

He discusses Jacobs’ laudable and prescient opposition to slum clearance, then notes more recent criticisms of Jacobs, but insists that “she has put her finger on the central flaws of hubris in high-modernist urban planning” (145). These flaws are, 1) “the presumption that planners can safely make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require;” 2) the complex ways in which healthy neighborhoods and communities form cannot be reducible to formulae.

Learning The City, Chapter 1

Summary of Chapter 1: Learning Assemblages

In this highly theoretical chapter, McFarlane lays out his concept of learning assemblages, and discusses his view on assemblage theory more broadly. He begins with a general definition of learning and, following Ingold, considers learning as a process rather than as the incorporation or familiarization with some body or corpus of information; “learning emerges through practical engagement with the world” (16). [It seems worthwhile to note in this context, that machine learning does the opposite: it imbibes a corpus, and has no engagement with the world.] “As a process and outcome, learning is actively involved in changing or bringing into being particular assemblages of people-sources-knowledges” (16). He emphasizes three aspects of learning, which he discusses through the chapter: translation (17-9), coordination (19-20), and dwelling (21-3). (The terms are conveniently defined on page 23, and then again with some slight difference on page 31). He considers learning as an assemblage in order to “highlight how learning is constituted more through sociospatial interactions than through the properties and knowledges of pre-given actors themselves” (16). Assemblages are 1) situated in terms of “history and potential;” 2) [(re)produced] through “doing, performance, and events” (17) [what is the difference between “doing?” and “performance?” Perhaps this will be addressed later]; and 3) “socially structured, hierarchized and narrativized” through unequal relations of [power/knowledge].

Translation is “the relational distributions through which learning is produced as a sociomaterial epistemology of displacement and change” (23). The choice of a term naturally owes a good deal to Latour, who contrasts “translation” (good) on the one hand (as phenomenon) to “purification” (bad) (Latour 1993), and on the other (as theoretical concept) to “transportation” (bad) (Latour 2005: 106ff). [I have elsewhere criticized Latour’s simplistic use of “transportation” as a sort of straw man in this regard.] McFarlane deploys the concept of translation to highlight four “perspectives” on learning. First, he wants to counteract the “diffusionist” model according to which knowledge flows, discrete and immutable, e.g., from centers to peripheries [what Latour had been calling “transportation,” above]. Translation, in contrast, “emphasizes the materialities and spatialities through which knowledge moves and seeks to unpack how they make a difference to learning, whether through hindering, facilitating, amplifying, distorting, contesting or radically repackaging knowledge” (17). Secondly, translation emphasizes the role of intermediaries [as opposed to “mediators;” see the same passage of Latour, cited above.]

Third, learning-as-translation emphasizes the role of practice. “The attention to practice collapses traditional dichotomies that separate, for example, knowing from acting, mental from manual, and abstract from concrete” (18). [This separation of messy reality into neat, reifying categories was what Latour had referred to as purification, above]. Fourth, McFarlane states that a focus on translation brings out the fact that learning, or much of learning, is comparative, which he will presumably return to and elucidate at more length later in the book.

Coordination is “the construction of functional systems that enable learning as a means of coping with complexity, facilitating adaptation, and organizing different domains of knowledge” (23). Drawing on Edwin Hutchins’ classic text Cognition in the Wild, McFarlane here refers to “mediating structures” which “can be as varied as language, models, procedures, rules, documents, instruments, traffic lights, market layouts, ideas, discourses, and so on” (19). “Coordination is a process of sociomaterial adaptation.” The role of coordination in linking together different domains of knowledge will be elucidated in later chapters.

Dwelling is “the education of attention through which learning operates as a way of seeing and inhabiting urban worlds” (23). Quite naturally, McFarlane is here drawing on Heidegger above all, along with such other usual suspects as Tim Ingold and James J. Gibson; the relation to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is also noted in passing.

The rest of the chapter is devoted to laying out McFarlane’s use of “assemblage” in relation to the literature more broadly. He notes that “assemblage” is sometimes used to refer to a way of thinking about the world, and sometimes as an object in or characteristic of the world; he will do both, because they are not mutually exclusive. He discusses various nuances of the ways the concept is used, by such interlocutors as De Landa, Ong, Deleuze and Guattari, and so on, and notes how it relates to the ANT concept of “network.” He concludes by emphasizing the political possibilities opened up by this perspective.

The critical purchase of of the concept of urban learning assemblage is not simply a call to know more of cities, but to unpack and debate the politics of learning cities by placing learning explicitly at the heart of the urban agenda. (30)

Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

 

Learning the City, Introduction

McFarlane, Colin (2011) Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.

Summary of Introduction

McFarlane states that he writes to address five questions:

How might learning be conceptualized? How does learning take place on an everyday basis? How does learning occur translocally? How do different environments facilitate or inhibit learning? And how might we develop a critical geography of learning? (1)

He casts this in terms of assemblage in order to “emphasize the labour through which knowledge, resources, materials, and histories become aligned and contested;” he posits different “urban learning assemblages” in different contexts, which will be explored in the book. Drawing on writers like Heidegger, Sennett, and Ingold, he plans to explore urban learning through the concepts of dwelling, struggle, and practice (2). From Lefebvre, he draws the importance of interpretation and participation to a democratic understanding of urban learning:

if we are interested in urban justice, then we cannot simply ask what specialist and expertise knowledge is and what it does, nor simply how learning takes place—we need alongside this to ask constantly who we learn from and with; that is, we need to attend to where critical urban knowledge comes from and how it is learnt.

M takes care to distinguish learning from knowledge. “Knowledge is the sense that people make of information, which is anchored in practices, beliefs, and discourses” (3). He does not by this want to make of it a [reified] “possession,” but rather to say that

knowledge is located in space and time and situated in particular contexts; it is mediated through language, technology, collaboration and control; and it is constructed, provisional, and constantly developing.... Most importantly, if knowledge is the sense that people make of information, that sense is a practice that is distributed through relations between people, objects, and environment, and is not simply the property of individuals or groups alone.

[This last point is likely key to M’s project of democratization.] He notes the traditional distinction between tacit and codified or explicit forms of knowledge, which distinction can be useful, but which runs the risk of obscuring how these are both distributed in assemblages.

Learning, for its part, is “the specific processes, practices, and interactions through which knowledge is created, contested, and transformed.... a dstributed assemblage of people, materials, and space that is often neither formal nor simply individual.”

M will explore the issue of urban learning in a wide variety of senses and contexts, with a focus on varying “urban learning assemblages.”

urban learning is not exhausted by the specificity of particular encounters with urban form or process, but is instead embedded in the current of people’s lifeworlds, and is shaped relationally. (7)

The city “demands” learning, which is not a set or fixed thing but an unending process over time. McFarlane will focus not only on individual or group bodies moving through and experiencing the city, but also on the city as learned by activists, urban planners, etc. His goal is not to privilege certain kinds of learning as more “real” or “authentic”, but to argue for “a democratization of urban learning” (13). He ends with Le Corbusier’s quote that “a house is a machine for living in,” concluding, essentially, that a city is an assemblage for learning in.

Seeing Like A State, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Cities, People, and Language

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The chapter starts off with the classic Borges quote on the one-to-one scale map, for which Scott cites (ahem) the fictional author rather than Borges himself (nevertheless he will mention Borges and this same story in a footnote to the next chapter). The focus is on how the state tries to redesign society to make it more governable, primarily through three means: urban design, imposition of permanent surnames, and standardization of language. For the first of these, Scott contrasts the medieval streets of Bruges with the modern grid of Chicago as two opposing ideal-types of urban form:

For those who grew up in its various quarters, Bruges would have been perfectly familiar, perfectly legible. Its very alleys and lanes would have closely approximated the most common daily movements. For a stranger or trader arriving for the first time, however, the town was almost certainly confusing, simply because it lacked a repetitive, abstract logic that would allow a newcomer to orient herself. The cityscape of Bruges in 1500 could be said to privilege local knowledge over outside knowledge, including that of external political authorities. It functioned spatially in much the same way a difficult or unintelligible dialect would function linguistically. As a semipermeable membrane, it facilitated communication within the city while remaining stubbornly unfamiliar to those who had not grown up speaking this special geographic dialect. (53-4)

Historically, the relative illegibility to outsiders of some urban neighborhoods (or of their rural analogues, such as hills, marshes, and forests) has provided a vital margin of political safety from control by outside elites. A simple way of determining whether this margin exists is to ask if an outsider would have needed a local guide (a native tracker) in order to find her way successfully. If the answer is yes, then the community or terrain in question enjoys at least a small measure of insulation from outside intrusion. (54)

A key motivation for the mapping of cities was to enable control. City planners looked at cities the way foresters looked at forests; Scott cites the influence of the Roman castra. “Other things being equal, the city laid out according to a simple, repetitive logic will be easiest to administer and to police” (55), with straight, wide streets for the marching of armies. Nevertheless he notes that street grids do not ensure governability: “No amount of formal order can overcome massive countervailing factors such as poverty, crime, social disorganization, or hostility toward officials. As a sign of the illegibility of such areas, the Census Bureau acknowledges that the number of uncounted African-Americans was six times the number of uncounted whites. The undercount is politically volatile since census figures determine the number of congressional seats to which a state is entitled” (369n12).

The aboveground order of a grid city facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways—an order no less important to the administrators of a city. Delivering mail, collecting taxes, conducting a census, moving supplies and people in and out of the city, putting down a riot or insurrection, digging for pipes and sewer lines, finding a felon or conscript (providing he is at the address given), and planning public transportation, water supply, and trash removal are all made vastly simpler by the logic of the grid. (56-7)

Three aspects of geometric order bear emphasis:

1: “The first is that the order in question is most evident, not at street level, but rather from above and from outside.” (57) This is achieved through miniaturization, for instance models of buildings, or of cities. S notes the use of airplanes for the top-down view [cf. Certeau]; today drones, satellites, etc.

2. “A second point about an urban order easily legible from outside is that the grand plan of the ensemble has no necessary relationship to the order of life as it is experienced by its residents.” (58)

The formal order of a geometrically regular urban space is just that: formal order. Its visual regimentation has a ceremonial or ideological quality, much like the order of a parade or a barracks. The fact that such order works for municipal and state authorities in administering the city is no guarantee that it works for citizens. Provisionally, then, we must remain agnostic about the relation between formal spatial order and social experience. (58)

[The point here is not that it is unrelated but that there is no necessary or inherent relationship. Obviously, as Scott makes clear later, the formal order impacts and shapes social experience, and is intended to.]

3. “The third notable aspect of homogeneous, geometrical, uniform property is its convenience as a standardized commodity for the market.”

[This point is very relevant to SF history:]

Precisely because they are abstract units detached from any ecological or topographical reality, they resemble a kind of currency which is endlessly amenable to aggregation and fragmentation. … Bureaucratic and commercial logic, in this instance, go hand in hand.”

Plans to completely remake cities rarely come to pass, so most old cities are mixes of Bruges and Chicago (his two examples). He illustrates with the oft-told story of Haussmanization in Paris.

As happens in many authoritarian modernizing schemes, the political tastes of the ruler occasionally trumped purely military and functional concerns. Rectilinear streets may have admirably assisted the mobilization of troops against insurgents, but they were also to be flanked by elegant facades and to terminate in imposing buildings that would impress visitors. Uniform modern buildings along the new boulevards may have represented healthier dwellings, but they were often no more than facades. The zoning regulations were almost exclusively concerned with the visible surfaces of buildings, but behind the facades, builders could build crowded, airless tenements, and many of them did. (62)

The desired legibility is not just architectural [a la Lynch], but social [a la Jameson]:

Legibility, in this case, was achieved by a much more pronounced segregation of the population by class and function. Each fragment of Paris increasingly took on a distinctive character of dress, activity, and wealth—bourgeois shopping district, prosperous residential quarter, industrial suburb, artisan quarter, bohemian quarter. It was a more easily managed and administered city and a more ‘readable’ city because of Haussmann’s heroic simplifications. (62-3)

Poorer residents were displaced to outer suburbs such as Belleville, which become seats of resistance, involved in the Paris Commune as “partly an attempt to reconquer the city … by those exiled to the periphery by Haussmann” (63).

Moving on from urban design, Scott turns to the imposition by the State of permanent surnames (64ff). This was in contrast to local naming practices: “Like the network of alleys in Bruges, the assortment of local weights and measures, and the intricacies of customary land tenure, the complexity of naming has some direct and often quite practical relations to local purposes.” (64)

The adoption of permanent, inherited patronyms went far, but not the whole way. How is a state to associate a name, however unique and unambiguous, with an individual? Like identity cards, social security numbers, and pass systems, names require that the citizenry cooperate by carrying them and producing them on the demand of an official. Cooperation is secured in most modern state systems by making a clear identity a prerequisite for receiving entitlements; in more coercive systems, harsh penalties are exacted for failure to carry identification documents. If, however, there is widespread defiance, individuals will either fail to identify themselves or use false identities. The ultimate identity card, then, is an ineradicable mark on the body: a tattoo, a fingerprint, a DNA ‘signature.’ (371n38)

Campaigns to assign permanent patronyrns have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state’s exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns. (65)

In Han China, surnames were imposed on commoners for tax collection, at the same time stabilizing/creating the patrilineal family as a legal entity. In Europe the traditional system of naming was also overhauled:

An individual’s name was typically his given name, which might well suffice for local identification. If something more were required, a second designation could be added, indicating his occupation (in the English case, smith, baker), his geographical location (hill, edgewood), his father’s given name, or a personal characteristic (short, strong). These secondary designations were not permanent surnames; they did not survive their bearers, unless by chance, say, a baker’s son went into the same trade and was called by the same second designation. (65-6)

He illustrates with the failed Florentine census (catasto) of 1427:

The matter of age, like the matter of landholding, was a vastly different concept in the state’s hands than it was in popular practice. ... In local practice, exact ages were unimportant. Approximate ages and birth order (e.g., oldest son, youngest son) were more useful; in the catasto this is reflected by the tendency to declare ages in units of five or ten years (e.g., thirty-five, forty, forty- five, fifty, and sixty years). For the state, however, exact age was important for several reasons. The age of ‘fiscal adulthood’ as well as liability for conscription was eighteen, and, beyond age sixty, one was no longer responsible for capitation taxes. As one might expect, there was a demographically improbable clustering of declarations just below age eighteen and just above sixty. Like the surname, the designation of age, in the strict, linear, chronological sense, originates as a state project. (372n45)

When making his declaration, a typical Tuscan provided not only his own given name but those of his father and perhaps his grandfather as well, in quasi-biblical fashion (Luigi, son of Giovanni, son of Paolo). Given the limited number of baptismal names and the tendency of many families to repeat names in alternate generations, even this sequence might not suffice for unambiguous identification. The subject might then add his profession, his nickname, or a personal characteristic. (66)

In the final analysis, the Florentine state was inadequate to the administrative feat intended by the catasto. Popular resistance, the noncompliance of many local elites, and the arduousness and cost of the census exercise doomed the project, and officials returned to the earlier fiscal system.

The older method of naming can still be seen in many surnames:

A great many northern European surnames, though now permanent, still bear. like a fly caught in amber, particles that echo their antique purpose of designating who a man’s father was ( Fitz-, 0’-, -sen, -son, -s, Mac-, -vich. At the time of their establishment, last names often had a kind of local logic to them: John who owned a mill became John Miller; John who made cart wheels became John Wheelwright; John who was physically small became John Short. As their male descendants, whatever their occupations or stature, retained the patronyms, the names later assumed an arbitrary cast. (67)

Surnames were imposed with spread of written documents, allowing people to be identified even though the official identifying them or using the document did not know them personally. For individuals and communities, adopting surnames aligned with, and facilitated, interactions with state structures like taxation (record of previous payments) and property (inheritance).

One imagines that for a long time English subjects had in effect two names—their local name and an “official,” fixed patronym. As the frequency of interaction with impersonal administrative structures increased, the official name came to prevail in all but a man’s intimate circle. Those subjects living at a greater distance, both socially and geographically, from the organs of state power, as did the Tuscans, acquired permanent patronyms much later.

For instance, the Scots and Welsh getting surnames later than English. S goes into the interesting example of the Philippines, where Spanish officials created a list of “nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts” (69) which were used to assign surnames. Schools and other officials were ordered to require surname use, so people couldn’t just ignore them.

Surnames were imposed by various European states on Eastern European Jews. Other examples: US immigration, colonies, modernizing states.

Today, of course, there are now many other state-impelled standard designations that have vastly improved the capacity of the state to identify an individual. The creation of birth and death certificates, more specific addresses (that is, more specific than something like ‘John-on-the-hill’), identity cards, passports, social security numbers, photographs, fingerprints, and, most recently, DNA profiles have superseded the rather crude instrument of the permanent surname. But the surname was a first and crucial step toward making individual citizens officially legible, and along with the photograph, it is still the first fact on documents of identity. (71)

[Speaking of crude instruments, it is interesting that signatures are still used, often in very attenuated form (as in the digital scribble I used to sign for a UPS package, which was clearly not expected to be legible or match some “official” signature).]

Scott now turns to the imposition of a standard, official language, as a project of State control, with the particular example of France (drawing heavily on Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchman, among other sources):

The great cultural barrier imposed by a separate language is perhaps the most effective guarantee that a social world, easily accessible to insiders, will remain opaque to outsiders. (72)

Where the command of Latin had once defined participation in a wider culture for a small elite, the command of standard French now defined full participation in French culture. The implicit logic of the move was to define a hierarchy of cultures, relegating local languages and their regional cultures to, at best, a quaint provincialism. At the apex of this implicit pyramid was Paris and its institutions: ministries, schools, academies (including the guardian of the language, l’Académie Française). (73)

This was accompanied by the centralization of travel in France with Paris as a hub; (which became a liability in wartime):

It was aimed at achieving, for the military control of the nation, what Haussmann had achieved in the capital itself. It thus empowered Paris and the state at the expense of the provinces, greatly affected the economics of location, expedited central fiscal and military control, and severed or weakened lateral cultural and economic ties by favoring hierarchical links. At a stroke, it marginalized outlying areas in the way that official French had marginalized local dialects. (76)

Conclusion:

Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step—and often several steps—removed from the society they are charged with governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture.

...complex reality must be reduced to schematic categories. The only way to accomplish this is to reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation. The invention, elaboration, and deployment of these abstractions represent, as Charles Tilly has shown, an enormous leap in state capacity—a move from tribute and indirect rule to taxation and direct rule. (77)

Direct rule sparked widespread resistance and necessitated negotiations that often limited the center’s power, but for the first time, it allowed state officials direct knowledge of and access to a previously opaque society.

For this biopolitical point S gives the example of the CDC, and the lifesaving capacities this creates.

The techniques devised to enhance the legibility of a society to its rulers have become vastly more sophisticated, but the political motives driving them have changed little. Appropriation, control, and manipulation (in the nonpejorative sense) remain the most prominent.

[By “nonpejorative” S means he is making basically the same point Foucault makes: this state logic is not “good or bad, but dangerous.”]

The interventions it does experience will typically be mediated by local trackers who know the society from inside and who are likely to interpose their own particular interests. Without this mediation—and often with it—state action is likely to be inept, greatly overshooting or undershooting its objective.

An illegible society, then, is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare. As long as the state’s interest is largely confined to grabbing a few tons of grain and rounding up a few conscripts, the state’s ignorance may not be fatal. When, however, the state’s objective requires changing the daily habits (hygiene or health practices) or work performance (quality labor or machine maintenance) of its citizens, such ignorance can well be disabling. A thoroughly legible society eliminates local monopolies of information and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of codes, identities, statistics, regulations, and measures. At the same time it is likely to create new positional advantages for those at the apex who have the knowledge and access to easily decipher the new state-created format. (78)

A telling illustration is the use of such knowledge by Nazis in the Holocaust. In the case of Amsterdam, the use was made of the legibility created by existing Dutch population and business registries, to which the Nazis “supplied the murderous purpose” [which phenomenon I have elsewhere called the “complicity” of the liberal state].

That legibility, I should emphasize, merely amplifies the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions—a capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them.

Legibility implies a viewer whose place is central and whose vision is synoptic. State simplifications of the kind we have examined are designed to provide authorities with a schematic view of their society, a view not afforded to those without authority. Rather like U.S. highway patrolmen wearing mirrored sunglasses, the authorities enjoy a quasi- monopolistic picture of selected aspects of the whole society. This privileged vantage point is typical of all institutional settings where command and control of complex human activities is paramount. The monastery, the barracks, the factory floor, and the administrative bureaucracy (private or public) exercise many statelike functions and often mimic its information structure as well. (79)

State simplifications can be considered part of an ongoing ‘project of legibility,’ a project that is never fully realized. The data from which such simplifications arise are, to varying degrees, riddled with inaccuracies, omissions, faulty aggregations, fraud, negligence, political distortion, and so on. A project of legibility is immanent in any statecraft that aims at manipulating society, but it is undermined by intra-state rivalries, technical obstacles, and, above all, the resistance of its subjects. (80)

Scott lists five characteristics of state simplifications:

1. They are interested, utilitarian;
2. They are documentary (written, recorded);
3. They are static (S defends this in a footnote: “Even when these facts appear dynamic, they are usually the result of multiple static observations through time that, through a ‘connect the dots’ process, give the appearance of continuous movement. In fact, what actually happened between, say, observation A and observation B remains a mystery, which is glossed over by the convention of merely drawing a straight line between the two data points” (375n79));
4. They are mostly aggregate facts (allowing for greater impersonality);
5. For most purposes, they are standardized for practical purposes.

There are at least three steps to manufacturing facts which are standardized and aggregatable [which could be glossed as coding, counting, and calculation]:

1. “the creation of common units of measurement or coding”;
2. “each item or instance falling within a category is counted and classified according to the new unit of assessment”;
3. “the creation of wholly new facts by aggregation, following the logic of the new units.”

Combining several metrics of aggregation, one arrives at quite subtle, complex, heretofore unknown truths, including, for example, the distribution of tubercular patients by income and urban location. (81)

Though S calls these “state simplifications,” he does not mean to say by this that they are simple or foolish per se. Rather, the term simplification has here two senses:

1. “First, the knowledge that an official needs must give him or her a synoptic view of the ensemble; it must be cast in terms that are replicable across many cases. In this respect, such facts must lose their particularity and reappear in schematic or simplified form as a member of a class of facts.”
2. “Second, in a meaning closely related to the first, the grouping of synoptic facts necessarily entails collapsing or ignoring distinctions that might otherwise be relevant.”

Taking the example of measuring employment, S devotes a substantial footnote (375n82) to three problems created in the use of statistics:

1. The “hegemony of the categories,” i.e. a complex and diverse world of unique and varying circumstances must be radically simplified to fit [Procrustean] categories;
2. The fact of observation and measurement shapes the response of those being measured, for instance unemployment statistics being exaggerated, because of people working “off the books” to avoid taxation;
3. Those creating the statistics are also interested in the outcomes, and could [“massage”] the data to create desired impressions.

S notes that “accuracy is meaningless if the identical procedure cannot reliably be performed elsewhere” (81). [Though this sort of begs the question of just what “accuracy” would be, if not a feature of some “better,” more precise and exhaustive system of measurement? It is like contrasting any given map to Borges’ perfect (but useless) 1:1 map].

But Scott’s ultimate argument is that the State not only tries to create the map to suit the territory, but also seeks to transform the territory, to better suit the map.

The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations. (82)

The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a ‘civilizing mission.’ The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.

If you wish to have any standing in law, you must have a document that officials accept as evidence of citizenship, be that document a birth certificate, passport, or identity card. The categories used by state agents are not merely means to make their environment legible; they are an authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance. (83)

 

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.

Smooth City, Chapter 1

 

René Boer (2023), Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives. Valiz, Amsterdam.

Summary of Chapter 1: Welcome to the Smooth City

In this brief introduction, Boer illustrates the “smooth city” with the example of Amsterdam’s Reestraat. He sets up a by now very familiar opposition between the homogenized, “perfect” and “safe” city produced by the process of “smoothening” which he will discuss, and the more interesting and diverse cities which the smooth city replaces, erases, or displaces – he cites several of the earlier authors in this discourse (Jacobs, Sennett, Debord, etc.). I say it is a familiar discourse (cf. the Hollow City, the Soft City, etc.), but this does not mean it is not still timely and relevant, and in need of a clear articulation of the current state and processes involved, and means of fighting back, which this book promises to discuss, in terms of queering and commoning. Boer invokes Benjamin and Lacis’s concept of porosity as a potential counterpoint to the smooth city; he also spends some time clarifying the difference between his concept of smoothness, and the “smooth space” discussed by Deleuze and Guattari.

Profane Illumination, Chapter 3

 

Summary of Chapter 3: “Qui suis-je?” Nadja’s Haunting Subject

In this chapter, Cohen traces Andre Breton’s relation to Freudianism through his novel Nadja. Breton saw connections between Freudianism and Marxism:

he pursues not only how the Marxist and Freudian forces of deter­mination in the last instance are susceptible to apprehension by each other’s methodologies but also the possibility that they communicate closely (thus the notion of communicating vessels) and may in fact ultimately be indistinguishable. (60)

She traces in particular the concept of the “haunting” self in Nadja.

Breton posits this identity as a sequence of temporally differentiated moments. The I becomes a series of ghosts of its contiguous experience rather than a centered self. (64)

Breton references Rousseau, and C contrasts his writing with Rousseau’s project of portraying himself “as the portrait of an already formed, extratextual subject” in his confessions:

Breton's subjectivity is not any­where fully present but rather must be constructed through narrative; his textual act of representation resembles the process of self-construc­tion characteristic of the Freudian talking cure. (66)

Like an analysand’s discourse, Breton’s narration acquires significance not from the accuracy of any event represented but rather “dans son ensemble,” from the relation among the memories narrated, as the narration be­comes itself the event that generates meaning....

Breton’s text lacks a metalanguage that will comment with authority on the events he recounts. Asserting that his self is constituted by a series of haunting I’s, he refuses to grant to any one I a privileged status as the real Breton.

Breton suggests the subject as the ghost of some sort of unconscious realm, simultaneously implying that this unconscious is individual and that it is related to objective factors. Breton emphasizes the objective character of this realm increasingly as his reflections on its content proceed.

By “objective character,” she means the I as an object:

Alienating the I as the objective myself and then dissociating this objectified self from himself, turning it to “he who from farthest away comes to meet me,” Breton raises the uncer­tainty of his being able to reconstitute such alien material as a unified self at all. With the introduction of an objective dimension into the sub­ject, the possibility exists that the boundary between subject and object will crumble in the direction of contingency rather than recuperation, and this problem echoes in the final question, “Is it myself [moi­-meme]?” (67)

She discusses Sartre’s attack on Surrealist views of the subject, for instance his criticism of automatic writing (which Breton championed) as a sort of eating away at, or erosion of, the subject:

Au­tomatic writing is above all else the destruction of subjectivity. When we attempt it, spasmodic clots rip through us, their origin unknown to us; we are not conscious of them until they have taken their place in the world of objects and we have to look on them with the eyes of a stranger. (Sartre, quoted on p. 68)

Sartre is thus alarmed at the alterity or uncanniness of the self to its self, which the surrealists celebrate. It is interesting to consider why this alarms Sartre (speaking here for the viewpoint of existentialism, and to a degree for traditional Marxism) so much, given that in the traditional Hegelian dialectic, the individual consciousness must in fact go through this phase of becoming an object to itself, in order to become a full “self-consciousness.” The issue, I think, is that the dissolution of subject into object celebrated by the Surrealists such as Breton goes too far, and is not recuperable into the unified and rational self which traditional Marxism desires. Whereas in Marx the worker, for example, sees themself through their product, their own agency mixed with the world, in the case of automatic writing, it is the opposite, some other force intrudes and supplants or replaces our own agency, so our own creations are mysterious and alien to us. [On “action without agency,” see below.]

Sartre reacts with venom to the surrealist representation of the sub­ject because such a subject is ill-suited to carry out the praxis an existen­tialist protocol of engagement demands. (68)

Cohen makes much of Breton’s juxtaposition of a photo of himself with the subtitle referring to his envy for “any man who has the time to prepare something like a book”:

While in a standard documentary photo Breton’s portrait would illustrate the sentence to which it is juxtaposed, Breton constructs this sentence in such a way that he problematizes establishing a one-to-one correspondence between photograph and the textual passage whose ex­traliterary existence it documents. There are, after all, two parts of the sentence to which the photograph could refer. The subject of the photo­graph could be identical with the subject of the sentence, “I.” It could also, however, refer to the object of the sentence from which Breton’s subject here differentiates himself, “every man who has the time to prepare something like a book.” (69)

The photo of himself appears in a sense to refer to some other guy who can more confidently write and finish a book. B had presaged this with an earlier reference to a character from

a film I saw in the neighborhood, in which a Chinese who had found some way to multiply himself invaded New York [actually San Francisco] by means of several million self-reproductions. He entered President Wilson’s office followed by himself, and by himself, and by himself, and by himself; the President removed his pince-nez. (Breton 1960, 34-7)

Breton states that this film “has affected me far more than any other.” Howard translates the French title L'Étreinte de la Pieuvre as The Grip of the Octopus, but the original English title is in fact The Trail of the Octopus (though how often does an octopus leave a trail?). The self-duplication cited by Breton is achieved through a cinematic trick, which Cohen explores through a quote from Barthes on photography, but is interestingly far from the only example of self-duplication in that rambling, semi-coherent, massively trashy and entertaining silent film serial (the plot makes as much sense as automatic writing). First off, the number of villains (various stock ethnic stereotypes, for the most part) in the film start to multiply, ally, bicker, and fight amongst themselves; there is a Monsieur X (evil French guy) who obscures his face with a mask, but soon there are at least three characters wearing the same mask, posing as Monsieur X. Towards the end Wang Foo (the evil Chinese guy, who can multiply himself) rips the mask off the true Monsieur X, only to find he is one of his own (Wang Foo’s) copies!

The full potential of this serial’s accidental surrealism has yet to be taken up by scholars, though some exceptions are Mayer 2017 and Ungureanu 2020. Apropos of Breton’s agenda in Nadja, Mayer uses The Trail of the Octopus to demonstrate that “the detective serial maps a world of action without agency,” observing that “nobody is in control any longer, the police, the detective, the villains and the victims each pursuing their own, often discordant, agendas.” The movie also happens to feature disembodied eyes, such as appear several times in the images accompanying Nadja, and Monsieur X’s mask is similar to that which appears in one of “Nadja’s” (Leona Delacourt’s) artworks.

To return to Cohen’s argument:

This mention of how cinematic reduplication captures a differentiated subject points to a more general similarity between Breton’s ghostly definition of subjective manifesta­tion and what numerous theoreticians of photography have charac­terized as the ghostly nature of the photographic sign. (70)

She gives a quote from Barthes, which she suggests is influenced by a close reading of Nadja:

In the realm of the imaginary, the Photograph . . . represents this very subtle moment where, to tell the truth, I am neither a subject nor object, but rather a subject who feels itself become object: I then live a micro-experience of death (of parenthesis): I become truly a ghost. (71)

Rosalind Krauss had discussed surrealism and photography as index; Cohen notes this but decides to use the related but more Freudian term, trace.

We might term the ghostly mode of presence that Breton’s haunting subject shares with the photographic image trace-like, borrowing from Nadja’s own description of how she will haunt Breton.

Nadja in fact describes herself as a “trace,” in one of her cryptic statements to Breton. C links this to uses of the term “trace” in Freud:

For Freud the term designates a sign that represents the subjective activ­ity that produced it in distorted rather than mimetic fashion. (72)

[We can see how “distorted rather than mimetic” will link back to the previous chapter’s discussion of Benjamin and superstructure.] For Freud, the trace in the dream is altered through displacements to avoid censorship by the conscious ego or whatever.

Extending the term from dream to waking experience, Breton uses trace to designate the indexical fashion in which the ghostly subject haunts the tracks of his own experience.

The subject of Nadja is “the obscure realm of which the subject is a ghostly manifestation.” C notes Freud’s theory of the uncanny, according to which this is all the return of the repressed.

She comes now to a very interesting quote in which Breton distinguishes his own method in the novel from that of psychoanalysis. In Cohen’s version:

I would like finally . . . if I say, for example, that in Paris the statue of Etienne Dolet, place Maubert, has always simultaneously attracted me and caused me unbearable discomfort, that it will not immediately be deduced that I am merely ready for psychoanalysis, a method I respect and which I consider to aim for nothing less than the expulsion of man from himself, and from which I expect other exploits than those of a bailiff. (Breton, quoted in Cohen, p. 73)

Her reading here actually caught me by surprise, as being the opposite of what I had thought on reading the novel; I had interpreted Breton as criticizing psychoanalysis by saying that it “expels a man from himself,” but according to Cohen, he is in fact saying that it should do this but does not, instead locking him in like a bailiff. The issue here is that Cohen has departed from Howard’s translation, something she usually indicates but here does not. Here is Howard’s translation of this passage:

… it will not immediately be supposed that I am merely ready for psychoanalysis, a method I respect and whose present aims I consider nothing less than the expulsion of man from himself, and of which I expect other exploits than those of a bouncer. (Breton, 1960, 24)

The actual word in French is huisser, which can have either meaning, but from the French original we can see that Cohen’s interpretation is correct:

… on n'en déduisît pas immédiatement que je suis, en tout et pour tout, justiciable de la psychanalyse, méthode que j'estime et dont je pense qu'elle ne vise à rien moins qu'à expulser l'homme de lui-même, et dont j'attends d'autres exploits que des exploits d'huissier. (Breton, 1998, 24)

A pun is being made on the word “exploit;” “exploit d’huisser” means a kind of writ which is served by a bailiff or process server. So the “bailiff”/psychoanalyst is neither confining nor expelling the subject, but serving them a writ to appear in court, which could be understood as another metaphor like Althusser’s “interpellation.” [After all, psychoanalysts are priests, as D&G would say.] A vignette of Breton and Freud’s mutually dissatisfactory encounters at the beginning of the chapter had illustrated Breton’s impatience at Freud’s deeply bourgeois agenda; in contrast

Instead of using psychoanalysis in the service of the ruling bourgeois order, Breton is interested in pressing it into the service of revolution, although the distance between his conception of this notion and the event as under­stood by orthodox Marxism remains to be defined. (73)

[Breton has reasonably good leftist cred, but this did make me laugh, remembering a passage in which the narrator/Breton, who repeatedly insists in the novel that he is “not a public person” and wants to disappear, etc., looks at the people of Paris around him, shaking hands and talking on the morning sidewalk, and observes morosely, “No, it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution.” (Breton 1960, 64). Alas! If only it was circa 1991 and I was young, black-clad, and smoking arirangs because they’re too cool for anyone, I could see myself shouldering through a crowd, muttering, “Allons, ce n’étaient pas encore ceux-là qu’on trouverait prêts à faire la Révolution...”]

The novel Nadja is full of contradictions, as numerous scholars have noted and made hay of. To begin with, it is named after the female lead character, but the male narrator begins it by asking, “Who am I?” and this is indeed the primary theme of the book. Breton announces at the beginning his inspiration by Huysmans’ plotless stories, and the novel shares certain features with automatic writing. Much of it revolves around serendipity and coincidence, and the characters wander the streets of Paris in a way that at once evokes the dérives of the Situationalists several decades later, and yet is distinct in that while the Situationalists felt they were exposing and challenging the workings of capitalism and the Spectacle, for their Surrealist forebears it appears to be more about exposing the truly haunting and ephemeral character of the self, or the unconcious. In the light of (for instance) D&G’s discussion of interpellation, Breton’s exploration of the ephemerality of the self, refusing to return it to a unity, and his exposure of its changing nature in relation to Nadja [who serves as his “point of subjectification” in D&G’s terms], seems less like a challenge to subjectification than a cogent understanding, and illustration, of how it works.

I’ll throw in my favorite quote from the book for no special reason; a great summation of life and love in the [second world]:

How does it happen that thrown together, once and for all, so far from the earth, in those brief intervals which our marvelous stupor grants us, we have been able to exchange a few incredibly concordant views above the smoking debris of old ideas and sempiternal life? (Breton 1960, 111)

Breton, Andre (1960) Nadja. Translated by Richard Howard. Grove Press, New York.

Breton, Andre (1998) Nadja. Editions Gallimard, Paris.

Mayer, Ruth (2017) “In the Nick of Time? Detective Film Serials, Temporality, and Contingency Management, 1919-1926" The Velvet Light Trap 79:21-35.

Ungureanu, Delia, (2020) “What Dreams May Come: Marguerite Yourcenar, Van Gogh, Akira Kurosawa.” Renyxa 10:227-44.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 13

Summary of Chapter 13: The Universal Market

This chapter is a succinct, eloquent, and quite accessible iteration of the classic leftist critique of [formal subsumption]. B points out the rapid growth of market relations, percolating into all aspects of social life and reproduction, largely replacing older forms of organization, in particular the family and community. This is the “universal market,” in which everything is for sale.

It is only in its era of monopoly that the capitalist mode of production takes over the totality of individual, family, and social needs and, in subordinating them to the market, also reshapes them to serve the needs of capital. (188)

All of society transformed into a “gigantic marketplace.” This is contrasted with the more limited range of goods which had been available in early industrial capitalism, many of which were raw materials to be made use of by household, farm, etc. labor (e.g., flour instead of bread). The role of the family remained essential before 1810. Family farms produced own food, clothing, construction work, etc.; even many urban families had some livestock or gardens to supplement income. Most of this work was done by women.

But during the last hundred years industrial capital has thrust itself between farm and household, and appropriated all the processing functions of both, thus extending the commodity form to food in its semi-prepared or even fully prepared forms. (190)

This conquest of the labor processes formerly carried on by farm families, or in homes of every variety, naturally gave fresh energy to capital by increasing the scope of its operations and the size of the “labor force” subjected to its exploitation.

Women were transformed from housewives into workers, and many of the new, particularly poorly paid jobs, end up done by woman, doing the same work they had done before, but now being profited off of.

B ties this to the separation of town and country:

the tighter packing of urbanization destroys the conditions under which it is possible to carry on the old life. The urban rings close around the worker, and around the farmer driven from the land, and confine them within circumstances that preclude the former self-provisioning practices of the home. (191)

The availability of cash makes it easy to buy instead of make, and the cheapening of manufactured goods renders home production uneconomic. This is compounded by social pressure, style, fashion, marketing, educational [propaganda/indoctrination], and the loss of the skills which had been passed down through previous generations. The market becomes a source of individualization/atomization, bringing about

the powerful urge in each family member toward an independent income, which is one of the strongest feelings instilled by the transformation of society into a giant market for labor and goods, since the source of status is no longer the ability to make many things but simply the ability to purchase them.

But the industrialization of food and other elementary home provisions is only the first step in a process which eventually leads to the dependence of all social life, and indeed of all the interrelatedness of humankind, upon the marketplace.

Thus the population no longer relies upon social organization in the form of family, friends, neighbors, community, elders, children, but with few exceptions must go to market and only to market, not only for food, clothing, and shelter, but also for recreation, amusement, security, for the care of the young, the old, the sick, the handi­capped. In time not only the material and service needs but even the emotional patterns of life are channeled through the market.

It thereby comes to pass that while population is packed ever more closely together in the urban environment, the atomization of social life proceeds apace. (192)

Acc B, this “often noticed phenomenon can be explained only by the development of market relations as the substitute for individual and community relations.”

The social structure, built upon the market, is such that relations between individuals and social groups do not take place directly, as cooperative human encounters, but through the market as relations of purchase and sale.

Apart from its biological functions, the family has served as a key institution of social life, production, and consumption. Of these three, capitalism leaves only the last, and that in attenuated form, since even as a consuming unit the family tends to break up into component parts that carry on consumption separately.

...like machinery in the factory, the machinery of society becomes a pillory instead of a convenience, and a substitute for, instead of an aid to, competence. (192-3)

Work ceases to be a natural function and becomes an extorted activity, and the antagonism to it expresses itself in a drive for the shortening of hours on the one side, and the popularity of labor-saving devices for the home, which the market hastens to supply, on the other.

Corporations come to dominate entertainment and “free” time consumption:

By their very profusion, they cannot help but tend to a standard of mediocrity and vulgarity which debases popular taste, a result which is further guaranteed by the fact that the mass market has a powerful lowest-common-denominator effect because of the search for maximum profit.

The stress and alienation of this system create a “human detritus”:

Whole new strata of the helpless and dependent are created, or familiar old ones enlarged enormously: the proportion of “mentally ill” or “deficient,” the “criminals,” the pauperized layers at the bottom of society, all representing varieties of crumbling under the pressures of capitalist urbanism and the conditions of capitalist employment or unemployment. (194)

Thus understood, the massive growth of institutions stretching all the way from schools and hospitals on the one side to prisons and madhouses on the other represents not just the progress of medicine, education, or crime prevention, but the clearing of the marketplace of all but the “economically active” and “functioning” members of society, generally at public expense and at a handsome profit to the manufacturing and service corporations who sometimes own and invari­ably supply these institutions.

The growth of the service industry

brings into being a huge specialized personnel whose function is nothing but cleaning, again made up in good part of women who, in accord with the precepts of the division of labor, perform one of the functions they formerly exercised in the home, but now in the service of capital which profits from each day’s labor.

He discusses the product cycle, “which invents new products and services, some of which become indispensable as the conditions of modem life change to destroy alternatives.”

In this way the inhabitant of capitalist society is enmeshed in a web made up of commodity goods and commodity services from which there is little possibility of escape except through partial or total abstention from social life as it now exists.

Just as in the factory it is not the machines that are at fault but the conditions of the capitalist mode of production under which they are used, so here it is not the necessary provision of social services that is at fault, but the effects of an all-powerful marketplace which, governed by capital and its profitable investment, is both chaotic and profoundly hostile to all feelings of community. (195)

This is the paradox of expanded social services under the conditions brought about by the universal market:

As the advances of modern household and service industries lighten the family labor, they increase the futility of family life; as they remove the burdens of personal relations, they strip away its affections; as they create an intricate social life, they rob it of every vestige of community and leave in its place the cash nexus.

The condition of service sector labor is contrasted to the manufacturing sector:

It is characteristic of most of the jobs created in this “service sector” that, by the nature of the labor processes they incorporate, they are less susceptible to technological change than the processes of most goods-producing indus­tries. Thus while labor tends to stagnate or shrink in the manufacturing sector, it piles up in these services and meets a renewal of the traditional forms of pre-monopoly competition among the many firms that proliferate in fields with lower capital-entry requirements. Largely nonunion and drawing on the pool of pauperized labor at the bottom of the working-class population, these industries create new low-wage sectors of the working class, more intensely exploited and oppressed than those in the mechanized fields of production.

There is the irony that by mainstream economic accounting, this represents a massive growth in the economy, even though it is really just a shift in how and where work is done:

The goods and services produced by unpaid labor in the home are not reckoned at all, but when the same goods and services are produced by paid labor outside the home they are counted.

The work of the housewife, though it has the same material or service effect as that of the chambermaid, restaurant worker, cleaner, porter, or laundry worker, is outside the purview of capital; but when she takes one of these jobs outside the home she becomes a productive worker. Her labor now enriches capital and thus deserves a place in the national product. This is the logic of the universal market. (196)