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.

 

Writing And Identity, Chapter 11

Summary of Chapter 11: Writer Identity on the agenda in theory and in practice.

In this concluding chapter Ivanič sums up the “so what?” of her work, and lays out suggestions for further explorations along the same lines. Her contribution toward an understanding of writer identity is relevant to two main “agendas:” theorizing writing in general, and the teaching and learning of academic writing, in particular. Though her study has honed in on a particular type of writer in a particular type of setting, it could be usefully applied in a wide range of other contexts, to other populations of writers.

Much of the chapter reiterates important concepts and key points made in the rest of the book, chapter by chapter, and indeed could be used as a basic outline of the text. She also lists concepts and questions that she has not pursued, which could usefully orient future research. Citing bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, she advocates a liberatory, [Freirean] pedagogy, listing four “criteria” for research and practice: 1) relevance (to writer-learners), 2) explanatory power, 3) accessibility, and emancipatory power (336-7). “Such a pedagogy is founded on a view of learners as intellectuals, as researchers, and as active participants in social struggles, not just passively receiving knowledge and advice,” but learning writing as a tool for “their own emancipatory and transformatory action (337-8).

“Writing is not a neutral ‘skill,’ but a socio-political act of identification” (345). “The fact that we are putting ourselves on the line in a relatively non-negotiable way is one of the things that makes writing difficult.” [It is interesting in this context to consider how this description of writing aligns with a disciplinary regime; how does this change in the current, increasingly post-disciplinary context? Assuredly, one attraction of the automated plagiarism we see today is that the “writer” can avoid “putting themselves on the line.” Throughout the book, we have seen students wrestling with academic discourse and working to choose how much to accommodate to, what to internalize, and what to resist; now they can simply push a button and Copilot (etc.) will “rewrite” their text in any desired style or “mood.”

Ivanič has earlier shown great empathy with struggling writers, and reasserts her own ideas (from chapter 4) for how plagiarism should be addressed, not as a crime, but as a (misguided?) attempt to identify with the academic community (330).

I have often had the experience myself of not being able to find the right words for what I want to write, and then realizing that it is not so much a problem of the meaning I want to convey as a problem of what impression of myself I want to convey. (336)

This passage perfectly summarizes the tension in the Langston Hughes poem “Theme for English B,” between the white teacher’s confident assertion

let that page come out of you— 

Then, it will be true. 

And the black narrator’s response,

I wonder if it's that simple?

since for this writer, the question of how his writing will be received and the “impression of myself I want to convey” cannot be backgrounded. In any event this sort of anxiety is what Grammarly and other “word-smoothers” feed off of, “correcting” the text into a blandly acceptable form. Just type up that text that came “out of you,” then hit this button and the text will be white.

DeKeyser et. al, AI Authoritarianism

DeKeyser, Thomas; Casey R. Lynch; and Sophia Maalsen (2025) “AI Authoritarianism: Towards an Analytical Framework.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70048

This article traces some of the “authoritarian tendencies” embedded in AI technology and culture, and proposes some lines of possible research focus. In particular, they discuss AI “as a techno-­material, an ideological, and an everyday ensemble” (2).

Their discussion of the first, “techno-material” aspect makes two key points. The first is inhumanisation, whereby the labor, decision-making, etc. of (specific) humans is replaced by inhuman machinery. The authors emphasize that this is selective inhumanisation, in that AI takes power away from some humans, but increases the power of others. Second, AI authoritarianism works by the integration of difference, rather than simply by suppression or expulsion like other forms of authoritarianism. [In this way it is not dissimilar from market capitalism’s incorporation of difference through commodification]. “Integration” here means that, in addition to suppression, difference is made use of by the regime as a means to make itself more powerful.

To give an example, in an authoritarian context without AI capabilities, a statement critical of a government may be rapidly removed (e.g., from an online or offline public space) and even lead to the dissident’s imprisonment, while an AI authoritarian actor may translate this same statement into data to be incorporated into data sets to train AI models on, providing the authoritarian, for instance, with stronger tools for the pattern recognition of dissent or for developing more clever communication strategies culturally attuned to dissent. This is not the termination of the authoritarian intolerance toward difference, but its technological refinement—the dream of a world devoid of any meaningful opposition. (3)

As the authors note, “what is at stake is the possibility of contestation within a given socio-­political order: how to resist that which renders productive your resistance?”

The second, ideological aspect follows the longstanding discussion of the so-called “California Ideology” and the links between the “cult of intelligence” and racism and eugenics, also discussed in several other sources (e.g., Bender and Hanna), and so far as I can tell completely ignored by mainstream media accounts of AI today. The long history of Silicon Valley’s military links, and the military contacts of the various leading companies, are mentioned here and well-documented in general. It would have been interesting here to see a more global discussion of ideological shaping of AI discourse in other cultural settings where AI is being produced.

Third, the authors look at the effect of AI scaling on its everyday deployment. They focus on the example of the urban “street-level bureaucrat,” whose agency and situational knowledge is supplanted by a distant, inscrutable, and practically incontestable AI model. “Beyond reducing transparency and enabling deskilling, AI diminishes the amount and intensity of stakeholder involvement in local governance” (5).

Most notably, if conventional authoritarianism relies on the active, and purposeful, centralisation of power and disabling of accountability, then AI authoritarianism integrates these features into its very functioning, making it part of its very basic design. To position AI at the heart of urban local governance is, almost by default, to embrace centralised authority and unaccountability.

In conclusion, they suggest three further things for geographers to consider when studying this subject going forward. First, they are not arguing that all uses or framing of AI interventions are going to be authoritarian. Nevertheless, they want to highlight these authoritarian tendencies within AI, which could be present even in “seemingly benign” AI systems. Second, researchers should take note of the diversity of ways AI and authoritarianism influence and shape each other; this will require “in-­depth, contextual examinations” (6). Third, they challenge scholars to “imagine and critically assess the possibilities for non-­ authoritarian or even anti-­ authoritarian AI.” This, of course, would necessitate challenging or moving away from the inherently authoritarian techno-material, coding, and scaling aspects of AI which they identified above, not to mention the problematic ideological framing of “intelligence.” [And there is an argument to be made, that what the AI industry is misidentifying as “intelligence” inhering in the machine, would be better understood as patterns of language/articulation/discourse existing in culture, and thus part of the commons]. The authors conclude:

Considering all of this, we might question whether a non-­authoritarian AI would indeed still be AI at all, or perhaps something else entirely.

 

Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 12

Summary of Chapter 12: Sacrifice

This chapter begins a new section, titled “The impossibility of realisation: power as sum of seductions,” which V summarizes:

Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it people give up their real riches: for a cause that mutilates them {twelve}; for an imaginary unity that fragments them {thirteen}; for an appearance that reifies them {fourteen}; for roles that wrest them from authentic life (fifteen}; for a time whose passage defines and confines them {sixteen}. (105)

This chapter will thus be on “the cause that mutilates.” V’s summary (107):

There is such a thing as a reformism of sacrifice that is really a sacrifice to reformism. Humanistic self-mortification and fascistic self-destruction both leave us nothing – not even the option of death. All causes are equally inhuman. But the will to live raises its voice against this epidemic of masochism wherever there is the slightest pretext for revolt; for what appear to be merely partial demands actually conceal the process whereby a revolution is being prepared: the nameless revolution, the revolution of everyday life (1). The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered: human beings are not exchangeable. Henceforward the appeal to voluntary self -sacrifice is going to have to rely on three strategies only: the appeal to art, the appeal to human feelings and the appeal to the present (2).

“Where people are not broken – and broken in – by force and fraud, they are seduced.” The seduction of the current consumerist world (and its parallel in the State-socialist world, at the time V was writing), is familiar from earlier chapters. The way that myth and sacrifice operate in the current bourgeois world is a sort of debasement of their aristocratic predecessors (cf. Chapter 8).

the master-slave dialectic implies that the mythic sacrifice of the master embodies within itself the real sacrifice of the slave: the master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his real power to the general interest, while the slave makes a material sacrifice of his real life to a power which he shares in appearance only.

The decline and fall of sacrifice parallels the decline and fall of myth. Bourgeois thought exposes the materiality of myth, deconsecrating and fragmenting it. It does not abolish it, however, because if it did the bourgeoisie would cease to exploit – and hence to exist. The fragmentary spectacle is simply one phase in the decomposition of myth, a process today being accelerated by the dictates of consumption. Similarly, the old sacrifice-gift ordained by cosmic forces has shrivelled into a sacrifice-exchange minutely metered in terms of social security and social-democratic justice. (108)

Throughout this book V has been discussing “privative appropriation” (l’appropriation privative), and only now has it occured to me to wonder how this relates to the more common phrase “primitive accumulation.” V defines privative appropriation elsewhere (Vaneigem 2009) as “the seizing of control by a class, group, caste or individual of a general power over socioeconomic survival whose form remains complex — from ownership of land, territory, factories or capital, all the way to the ‘pure’ exercise of power over people (hierarchy).”

He mocks the pro-Soviet, statist left as also demanding “sacrifice.” Fanatics across the political spectrum sacrifice themselves to a Cause, which is really an aesthetics of death.

For aesthetics is carnival paralysed, as cut off from life as a Jibaro head, the carnival of death. The aesthetic element, the element of pose, corresponds to the element of death secreted by everyday life. (109)

The moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist. The individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for a fetish. (110)

Ideology is the rebel's tombstone, its purpose being to prevent his coming back to life.

And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext. Thus a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival spirit. (111)

Thus for V, any of these specific causes or goals is a “thing,” a limitation to which individuals are called to sacrifice themselves; the real aim of revolution in his eyes is this reawakening of the “carnival spirit.”

The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution.

The ‘road to socialism’ consists in this: as people become more and more tightly shackled by the sordid relations of reification, the tendency of the humanitarians to mutilate people in an egalitarian fashion grows ever more insistent. And with the deepening crisis of the virtues of self-abnegation and of devotion generating a tendency towards radical refusal, the sociologists, those watchdogs of modern society, have been called in to peddle a subtler form of sacrifice: art. (112)

He traces how art changed from ancient, to bourgeois times, and its role in recuperating struggle into the service of the status quo.

The function of the spectacle in ideology, art and culture is to turn the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. (113)

New art movements are subject to planned obsolescence, such that the “dictatorship of consumption ensures that every aesthetic collapses before it can produce any masterpieces.” V is critical of attempts to resist this manufacturing a new aesthetic out of everyday life via “Sociodramas and happenings which supposedly provoke spontaneous participation on the part of the spectators,” as these do not truly challenge the spectacle. He considers the potentials, and failures, of surrealism, but notes that the “present state of affairs tends to favour situationist agitation” (115).

Wherever the will to live fails to spring spontaneously from individual poetry, there falls the shadow of the crucified Toad of Nazareth. The artist in every human being can never be brought out by regression to artistic forms defined by the spirit of sacrifice. We have to go back to square one. (115)

The fact is that there will never be any friendship, or love, or hospitality, or solidarity, so long as self-abnegation exists. The call for self-denial always amounts to an attempt to make inhumanity attractive.

We never really give ourselves over completely to what we are doing, except perhaps in orgasm. Our present is grounded in what we are going to do later and in what we have just done, with the result that it always bears the stamp of unpleasure. In collective as well as in individual history, the cult of the past and the cult of the future are equally reactionary. Everything which has to be built has to be built in the present. (116)

I want to live intensely, for myself, grasping every pleasure firm in the knowledge that what is radically good for me will be good for everyone. And above all I would promote this one watchword: ‘Act as though there were no tomorrow.’

Vaneigem, Raoul (2009 [1963]) “Basic Banalities.” The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-basic-banalities

Seeing Like A State, Chapter 3

Summary of Chapter 3: Authoritarian High Modernism

This chapter introduces the concept of “High Modernism” which will be explored through subsequent chapters.

All the state simplifications that we have examined have the character of maps. That is, they are designed to summarize precisely those aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the mapmaker and to ignore the rest. (87)

Yet they not only summarize facts, they transform them in portraying them; not just description, but prescription:

The state has no monopoly on utilitarian simplifications. What the state does at least aspire to, though, is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is surely why, from the seventeenth century until now, the most transformative maps have been those invented and applied by the most powerful institution in society: the state. (87-8)

This had to wait until the mid-19^th to 20^th century, when state power grew to match its ambitions. “I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements” (88). These are:

1. “the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society”. S terms this high modernism (after Harvey), an ideology shared by both right and [statist] left.

2. “the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” (88-9)

3. “a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans”

The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias. (89)

S sees Nazism as a reactionary form of Modernism. He discusses “progressive” variants of High Modernism:

Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance.

A section on “the discovery of society” (90ff) details the role of the social sciences; S quotes Condorcet on the “moral sciences,” which are to be modeled after the physical sciences.

One essential precondition of this transformation was the discovery of society as a reified object that was separate from the state and that could be scientifically described. (91)

The development of statistics:

The existing social order, which had been more or less taken by earlier states as a given, reproducing itself under the watchful eye of the state, was for the first time the subject of active management. It was possible to conceive of an artificial, engineered society designed, not by custom and historical accident, but according to conscious, rational, scientific criteria. (92)

There is a link between class control, and colonialism, in this project:

It is important to recognize that, among Western powers, virtually all the initiatives associated with the “civilizing missions” of colonialism were preceded by comparable programs to assimilate and civilize their own lower-class populations, both rural and urban. The difference, perhaps, is that in the colonial setting officials had greater coercive power over an objectified and alien population, thus allowing for greater feats of social engineering. (378n19)

The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian. In place of multiple sources of invention and change, there was a single planning authority; in place of the plasticity and autonomy of existing social life, there was a fixed social order in which positions were designated. (93)

In the 20^th century, industrial warfare and the response to the Depression both required a more thorough mobilization of society; as did the rebuilding of post-war states. Beyond this, both revolutionary and colonial societies exerted special concentrated power [meeting the three criteria listed above].

The “birth” of 20^th-Century High Modernism can be located in post-WWI Germany, under Walter Rathenau, who was motivated in part by his belief in productivism:

For many specialists, a narrow and materialist “productivism” treated human labor as a mechanical system which could be decomposed into energy transfers, motion, and the physics of work. The simplification of labor into isolated problems of mechanical efficiencies led directly to the aspiration for a scientific control of the entire labor process. (98)

Productivism had two lineages: 1) Taylorism; 2) the European school of “energetics.” S quotes Rabinbach (from the Human Motor book) on the point that productivism is “politically promiscuous,” embraced by both left and right (99). Productivism is a technological fix for class struggle; for capitalists, enabling control of worker; for the statist left, the elimination of capitalist management:

For much of the left, productivism promised the replacement of the capitalist by the engineer or by the state expert or official. It also proposed a single optimum solution, or ‘best practice,’ for any problem in the organization of work. The logical outcome was some form of slide-rule authoritarianism in the interest, presumably, of all.

Scott lists Thorstein Veblen, Sinclair Lewis, and Ayn Rand as all very different expounders of this ideology.

The world war was the high-water mark for the political influence of engineers and planners. Having seen what could be accomplished in extremis, they imagined what they could achieve if the identical energy and planning were devoted to popular welfare rather than mass destruction. (100)

Lenin was impressed with Rathenau’s example, and with Taylorism:

A command economy at the macrolevel and Taylorist principles of central coordination at the microlevel of the factory floor provided an attractive and symbiotic package for an authoritarian, high-modernist revolutionary like Lenin. (101)

S ends with three sources of resistance to “the authoritarian temptations of twentieth-century high modernism” in liberal democracies:

1. The “existence and belief in a private sphere of activity in which the state and its agencies may not legitimately interfere.” Scott notes that such private spheres have been much eroded, but the idea that there is a proper outside to the control of the state still forms a limit.

2. The “private sector in liberal political economy;” this is thought to be outside the capacity of the state to recreate or master, and thus limits the state’s “economic sovereignty” [quoting from The Foucault Effect].

3: Most importantly, democratic institutions and liberal freedoms; “the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make its influence felt” (102), and thus limit the power of elites and bureaucrats.

Course in General Linquistics, Part 1, Chapters 1 and 2

Summary of Part 1: General Principles; Chapter 1: Nature of the Linquistic Sign; and Chapter 2: Invariability and Variability of the Sign

Dismissing a “naive view” of language as a one-to-one correlation of words and things, Saussure expounds on the dual nature of the linguistic sign. “A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a noun, but between a concept and a sound pattern” (66). In a footnote, the editors recognize that S’s concept of “sound pattern” is a bit too narrow to do the required work here. S’s point is in any event that the “sound-pattern” is a concept as well, not an actual sound per se. Reserving the term sign for the unified whole, S refers to the word/sound pattern as the signal and its object as the signification.

He then discusses two further principles of the sign; first, that it is arbitrary, and second, that it is linear. His insistence on the arbitrariness of signs leads him to argue for the lesser importance or relevance of various other ways of making meaning, viz. mime, onomatopoeia, and exclamations. [This is where Peirce’s terminology is more useful]. The linear nature of the sign is a result of its position in speech, as a group of sounds in a sequence; it this has one dimension only, which is temporal. [Here Saussure does not appear to have succeeded in separating out the concept of sign, and thus of language in general, from spoken language, which is in fact just a particular form language can take, along with written language, sign language, etc. [S’s concept of parole or “speech,” contrasted with langue “language,” refers not to spoken language as I am using the term, but more precisely to the event or moment of enunciation/reproduction of the system of language, and so would refer equally to other, non-spoken forms of language expression]].

Chapter 2 tackles the apparent contradiction of [synchronic] invariability and [diachronic] variability. In emphasizing invariability, S is making the case again for his fundamentally synchronic treatment of language. The sign is invariable because it is not chosen by the speakers of language, but, for all intents and purposes, by “language” itself:

...from the point of view of the linguistic community, the signal is imposed rather than freely chosen. Once the language has selected a signal, it cannot be freely replaced by any other. (71)

Because language is a collective phenomenon, which people are born into instead of inventing, neither individuals nor groups actually can choose to change it. The translator adds in a footnote that S is not in fact denying the possibility of “linguistic legislation,” just delineating its limitations; as an example we could take Saussure’s own assertion of a new definition for the word “sign” in the previous chapter. Because the word belongs to the community of speakers, S cannot really redefine it unless that definition spreads out and is adopted by others. The actual change in definition is not under his control. [One does wonder about cases such as languages with death-name taboos, which replace words in the language in order not to speak the names of the dead; someone must in such a case decide what the new word will be].

S interestingly takes this as an opportunity to make a case against social contract theory: “For if we wish to demonstrate that the rules a community accepts are imposed upon it, and not freely agreed to, it is a language which offers the most striking proof.” He further argues that searching for language origins is largely irrelevant, because “The sole object of study in linguistics is the normal, regular existence of a language already established” (72). He lists the primary reasons for the invariability of the sign:

1) Its arbitrary nature: This is an important point he will re-emphasize later. Basically, because the link between the signal and its signification is arbitrary, there is no basis on which to debate or prefer one word or another. [And when such bases do come into existence, this is a social factor, not something intrinsic to the linguistic system as S sees it. To take a case in point, an old professor of mine told a story of being called into the office of his professor (J.H. Rowe) and given an impressive etymological lecture correcting his use of the word “archeology” in a paper, instead of the more correct “archaeology.” Saussure’s point still holds here, as the importance of this etymological argument had everything to do with social factors and theoretical conflicts over the emergence of the “new archeology” at the time.]

2) The great number of signs in a language.

3) The complexity of the language as a system.

4) Collective inertia.

Having made this argument for the invariability of the sign, S then turns to its equally inevitable variability over time, in terms of the “shift in the relationship between signal and signification” (75). In a footnote, Harris (the translator) points out that this is not a contradiction, summarizing Saussure’s argument as being that language “is impervious to interference although it is open to development” (74n2). It is, again, the arbitrary nature of the sign which is, at basis, responsible for the inevitability of change. Other social institutions, S avers—even fashion!—“are all based in varying degrees on natural connexions between things” (76). Only language is completely arbitrary at its basis, and so cannot be “argued” [to the eternal regret of stickler grammarians everywhere]. He points out that no language is immune, and even an artificial language like Esperanto would, if actually adopted, start to change over time.

A second reason for the inevitable variability of the linguistic sign [which is, as we just saw, also a reason for its inevitable invariability] is its social nature: “a language never exists even for a moment except as a social fact. … Its social nature is one of its internal characteristics” (77). He creates a diagram showing the inseparable connection between the language and the linguistic community, to which he adds an arrow showing the influence of time.

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.