Read an Excerpt
Alternative Modernities in French Travel Writing
Engaging Urban Space in London and New York, 1851â"1986
By Gillian Jein Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 Gillian Jein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-515-6
CHAPTER 1
PRODUCING THE CITY
The only thing that is radical is space we don't know how to inhabit.
Lebbeus Woods, cited in Alison et al. 2007, 7
Recognizing the inexhaustible quality of the urban flow of goods, capital and people that inform metropolitan life and in order to approach a means of interpreting urban travel writing, it is helpful to engage with a number of influential theoretical approaches for understanding cities. This chapter explores theories of the city along two main axes: first, as a material condition of the planning perspective, which is to say an urban environment concerned with function and place-making; and, second, as a narrative space, a space of practice where meanings are performed by subjects in places across space and time. Both of these axes correspond with common modes of differentiating between 'place' and 'space' thus facilitating a position from which to understand the interaction between ideological processes at stake in the strategies of urban planning and the 'tactics' of representation (Certeau [1980] 1990, xviii) in the travel account.
Theoretically speaking, the functionalist perspective, or how to manage urban environments, was the key perspective identifying modern cities as special entities that required new social, infrastructural and architectural arrangements. The identification of 'modernity' with the emergence of the city preoccupies the work of influential twentieth-century urbanists such as Georg Simmel ([1903] 2006), Louis Wirth (1938) and Max Weber ([1922] 1958, repr. 1969). In this view, 'what is distinctly modern in our civilization is best signalled by the growth of great cities' (Wirth 1938, 1) and, further, the shift from a largely rural to a predominantly urban society was understood to be 'accompanied by profound changes in virtually every phase of social life' (Wirth 1938, 2). In these sociologists' conception one of the central factors shaping these changes at a macrostructural level was the new economic relations of production. Cities were largely conceived from the point of view of their marked economic drive, as the 'seat of the money economy' (Simmel [1903] 2006, 12), the centre for financial, economic and capital accumulation, and thus as the driving force behind new distributions of labour, which had far-reaching effects on individuals and forms of social interaction. Simmel, for example, saw the ascent of money and capital as productive of modern 'psychic currents' and a 'number of characteristic mental tendencies', leading him to determine that the 'modern mind has become more and more a calculating one' (Simmel [1903] 2006, 13). Weber's complex structuralist typology of the social and infrastructural elements of the city emphasized the anonymity of urban life, thus building on the work of Simmel and the earlier writings of Ferdinand Tönnies ([1887] 2001). Tönnies had distinguished between Gemeinschaft (community) – understood as a grouping based on mutual bonds and togetherness – and Gesellschaft (society) – groups that are instrumentally maintained by individual members' aims and impersonal monetary connections. In all cases, the distinctions and meanings of life in the modern urban environment are articulated in opposition to a (supposedly) organic set of intercommunal relations characterized by premodern, rural societies, and suggested that communitarian arrangements were eroded and possibly destroyed by the rise of urban market societies. These sociologists thus saw modern cities as spatially concentrated power structures and identity catalysts, formative in the psychological, political and economic constitution of those dwelling in them. From this perspective too, the city is conceived as operational on multiple levels to produce ideology, understood to mean the range of ideas that urban institutions incarnate and their procedures for materializing such ideas in the space–time of human social relations. Sociologically speaking, then, urban infrastructures are seen to order urban spaces, and combine to produce a spatio-temporal organization conditioning urban practice at the experiential level. With their emphasis on the macrostructures organizing urban life, these theories tend to present the modern city as pivotal in the decline of a more affective life expressed in terms of 'organic', personalized and perpetuating relationships. In his famous essay, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', Simmel writes that 'the essentially intellectualistic character of the mental life of the metropolis becomes intelligible as over against that of the small town which rests more on feelings and emotional relationships' (Simmel [1903] 2006, 12). He saw the industrial city as productive of a 'fight with nature' that had been going on between the individual and social forces since primitive times, but which had attained to new extremes in the age of the metropolis, thus giving birth to the 'metropolitan personality' (11). As opposed to these communitarian, affective ties, the modern city replaces such forms of social interaction with individualism, commerce, industry and relationships based on monetary value or abstract public opinion. Finally, although Wirth is careful to identify the growth of the city in this period as a specifically Western phenomenon, very often the sociologists of the German school tended to universalize urban phenomena and talk in terms of 'the city', considered as a singular rationalized site with shared consequences for the organization of social relations across cultures. Taylor, for example, draws on Weber as an influential proponent of what he terms the 'acultural' narrative of modernity, commenting that for Weber 'rationalization was a steady process, occurring within all cultures over time' (Taylor 2001, 174).
Attempting to harness a broader encapsulation of the city, Yves Grafmeyer (1994) proposes the following definition: 'The city is at once a territory and a population, a material framework and a unity of collective life, a configuration of physical objects and a nexus of relations between social subjects' (8). Grafmeyer's definition is useful for the way it combines two orders of reality where, on the one hand, the city is static, a fixed entity circumscribed by material frameworks, and on the other, it is a dynamic space composed of individuals and interrelated groups of social actors. This tension is expressed in Henri Lefebvre's distinction between 'habitat' and 'living', which makes room to acknowledge cities as constituting at once a kind of morphology of designed environments, but one which is never neutral and cannot be understood in a purely ratio-scientific sense. Space for Lefebvre consists in moving collections of ways of living and engaged existence in and through space. Lefebvre's influential book The Production of Space is, therefore, a central text in foregrounding the insufficiencies of considering space as a container that might be either neutrally classified or the outcomes of its presence predicted. Lefebvre argues that:
'human beings' do not stand before, or amid, social space; they do not relate to the space of society as they might to a picture, a show, or a mirror. They know that they have a space and that they are in this space. They do not merely enjoy a vision, a contemplation, a spectacle – for they act and situate themselves as active participants. They are accordingly situated in a series of enveloping levels each of which implies the others, and the sequence of which accounts for social practice. (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 294)
This understanding of space as inseparable from its human perception and practice – and, by implication, space as living systemically in layers of practice that produce social space – heavily informs this book's understanding of the ways in which spaces produce meaning in tandem with human interaction. The city for Lefebvre is a language, a semiological system, and most importantly, what he calls 'an œuvre of certain historical and social agents, the action and the result' ([1968] 2003, 102–3). The œuvre is linked to the formal qualities of the urban environment and its capacity to generate multiple levels of experience that transcend functionalist separations – creative activity, for example, information, symbolism, the imaginary and, significantly, play – these are all 'particular expressions and moments which can more or less overcome the fragmentary division of tasks' (147). These moments are akin to the spaces of improvisation which Jane Jacobs describes in The Death and Life of Great American Cities ([1961] 1962), where the streets constitute balletic performances, and are filled with potential for play, contact and encounter. The urban œuvre, according to Lefebvre then, constitutes the myriad ways in which the city is employed, 'the eminent use of the city' ([1968] 2003, 66), and this emphasis on practice positions itself in opposition to the broader strategies of urban planners and urbanization as planned modality, which tends to realize the city in terms of exchange value, productive of fixed concomitant modes of consumption and the organization of social life as a direct result of this economy. In Lefebvre's words:
The thesis of an inert spatial medium where people and things, actions and situations merely take up their abode, as it were, corresponds to the Cartesian model (conceiving things in their extension as the 'object' of thought) which over time became the stuff of 'common sense' and 'culture'. A picture of mental space developed by the philosophers and epistemologists thus became a transparent zone, a logical medium. Thenceforward, reflective thought felt that social space was accessible to it. In fact, however, that space is the seat of a practice consisting in more than the application of concepts, a practice that also involves misapprehension, blindness, and the test of lived experience. (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 297)
1.1 Practising Place
Unpacking further these ideas around practice and agents' use of the urban environment, we begin by underscoring a theoretical difference between the terms 'space', 'place' and 'site' as they are used throughout the chapters that follow. After Certeau ([1980] 1990), a 'place' or 'site' is understood here as somewhere that is, first of all, geometrically circumscribed, namely that does not permit two things to occupy the same position at once, and that distributes things in distinct locations, so that a 'place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions', and 'implies an indication of stability' (Certeau 1984, 117). 'Place' in the urban context is remarkable for its architectural and delimited qualities, where infrastructures and points of entry or enclosure determine the geographies of possible pathways through the environment. Furthermore, 'place' implies the singularity of identity. 'The law of the "proper" rules in the place', Certeau explains, 'the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own "proper" and distinct location, a location it defines' (1984, 117). Place implies an ordered configuration of positions, and in many ways here Certeau's definition can be approximated to a Euclidean conception of finite dimensional space. Recent work in human geography has sought to move away from the ratio-scientific definition which Certeau bestows on 'place'. Indeed, when I talk of 'place' later on I will not usually refer to Euclidean containers, but rather to an anthropological understanding of 'place' as a site of collective meaning and shared history, which I will elaborate further in the next sections. However, Certeau's first distinction is an important set-up for the way in which 'space' will be used throughout my discussion. To distinguish better the existence of 'place' as static or absolute, Certeau reappropriates the term 'space' so as to introduce movement, practices and the inscription of meaning (as narrative) through human engagement with place. In this engagement, 'place' becomes 'space' or is 'spatialized' so that 'vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables' (117) are constitutive in producing its mobile, modular quality. 'Space' is animated, defined by happenings and as such constitutes 'the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflicting programs or contractual proximities' (117). Space, conceived in this way, implies further the rejection of absolutes with regard to time, the subject or agent, and space, and invites the consideration of space–time from a cultural point of view, as culture – and cultural difference in particular – is significant in determining the myriad uses of place so that it becomes space. Certeau effectively reorients space to the dimensions of human experience, of what it means to be situated – subjectively, culturally, temporally – and implies the potentialities of place, drawing it nearer to a series of processes that place undergoes through being lived and experienced. As Certeau states, 'In short, space is a practiced place' (1984, 117, emphasis in original). In this scenario, space is opened out to its full phenomenological potential, inserted into the strong qualitative differentiations of human agency, and by extension into the modes of expression that human beings employ to make sense of themselves in the world. Certeau's stance on space is intricately entwined therefore with anthropological and philosophical perspectives of the human being as articulate agent, notably engaged in the search for meaning (see Taylor [1989] 2004, 2001). Certeau posits that human practices are all manners of living that articulate ways into meaning, and that ordinary life materially and corporeally engages in the production of important distinctions that enable the self to situate itself in relationship to the world. Space conceived as practiced place thus positions the human subject as an agent whose identity is inherently spatialized as well as temporalized, and it is in this sense that we speak of 'spatialities' to refer to the inseparability of space from human identity and the sense we make of our lives. If we are talking of sense-making, we are, Certeau reminds us, talking essentially about narrative, and the transformation of place through practice into space, is akin for Certeau to the reciprocal semiological processes involved in writing (place) and reading (space). As he puts it, 'Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e. a place constituted by a system of signs' (117). In drawing the analogy between the city as text and the walker as reader of that text, we arrive at the first level through which travellers, as readers of the city, can be understood. The modes of reading, or 'strategies' and 'tactics' engaged in the emergence of legibility, will be discussed further below. For now, it is sufficient to point out a further layer in this schema wherein, with the production of the travel text, the spatiality enacted by reading the city and articulating its meaning in written form engenders a moving narrative matrix of interlocutionary forces. It is in this sense that the travel text provides a rich source for understanding the emergence of peculiarly modern Western urban lifeworlds, for the way in which, as an interpretation of foreign places in relation to home cultures, it reinforces the awareness of the travelling subject as interpreter, and of the city as multiplying the modalities of sense available to that subject. Drawing out the implications of the city as an accumulation of spatial practices means viewing it as a performative interaction of spaces, temporalities and subjects, or a 'theatre of narratives' (Schulz-Forberg 2005a, 267). In other words, a city constitutes a culturally situated agglomeration of stories, myths, memories and interpretations that pool to form a discursive and intimate physiognomy. Seen in this way, cities not only store narrative but, through the production of new representations and frameworks for meaning, are active in the modification of such narratives.
Both of these perspectives – the discursive aculturalism of functionalists and the narrative intimacies of Marxist poststructuralists – have constituted influential ways of thinking through the physical and imaginative geographies of the modern city. But well before our period, both function and narrative are identified by sixth-century scholar Saint Isidore of Spain in his book Etymologies to be fundamental to an understanding of the word 'city', wherein he distinguishes two strands of meaning. The first strand, the urbs, signifies the built environment or stones of the city representing the material, objective dimension of the town, while the second strand, civitas, reveals the city's role in the elaboration of social networks of meaning and denotes the emotions, rituals, value and belief systems which are formulated among these stones (see Sennett [1990] 1993, 11).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Alternative Modernities in French Travel Writing by Gillian Jein. Copyright © 2016 Gillian Jein. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
