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{ Category Archives } Remembering the City

The Bronze Lions Outside the HSBS Headquarters

Following comments and an exchange of emails from my previous post about the bronze lions outside the HSBS headquarter in Canary Wharf, London, I am extremely pleased to publish this amazing series of photographs about Hong Kong and the bronze lions there. Mr. Hagan’s two black-and-white photos were taken in the 50′s, and the two colour ones very recently, when he re-visited China with his youngest grandson. An amazing story, as it follows:

I was a 20 year old marine attached to the USS Princeton, the first US commissioned anti submarine carrier. This Essex class carrier was built in 1945, one of the last to be built (in background of b &w Hong Kong harbour). A buddy took my pic sitting beside “Stephen”, the lion in front of the bank of china in 1955. There were two such bronze lions cast in 1935 in Shanghai, then brought to Hong Kong, the lions were taken to Japan during WWII to be melted down for war materials, but this never got done, as gen. MacArthur ordered them back to Hong Kong. Bullet impacts are still visible from the battle of Hong Kong in the 1970′s the original bank was torn down and rebuilt, thus the different backgrounds. The colour pics show Hong Kong as it is today, a huge city of towering buildings and commerce. Stephen was not difficult to find last year when i took a tour of China. A fellow traveller took the shot.

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2010 07 09 pa_card Dreaming the City
Imaging the City Comments (0)

The Physical Rim, aka A102(M)

The confusion starts with the naming of it, and names are utterly important. The roads have been given specific numbers according to their grade so not to confuse motorists. The south stretch of the road going from Blackwall Tunnel down to Kidbrooke, across Est Greenwich and Eltham, has a long peculiar story. It has many names and denominations too. It is fascinating reading through its history and going back to the debates in the House of Commons before the Plan for its implementation, the infamous Ringroad 1, one of the four planned all around the capital in the early Seventies. Rather than summarise this story, I give you a couple of links, below. To cut a long story very short, the motorway went ahead for this part of London, while most of the Plan was scrapped, conflating in the infamous M25.

What I am interested in is first of all the unpacking of the rhetoric that at the time accompanied the building of the motorway (by the way, for a bureaucratic reason it has been downgraded to an A road, A12, but it has all the characteristic of an M road, including the SOS and the six lanes). An incredible leaflet, a ruin of the time, has been found and rescued from oblivion by the weblog cited thereafter, from which I have also taken a couple of images. As I haven’t had a chance to read it myself, I can only point out to the original source and to the comments made around it:

footbridge

“It’s a Greater London Council document about the proposed new Blackwall Tunnel Southern Approach Road (the A102). Charmingly, one of the ingredients is ribbed concrete. The pamphlet can hardly conceal its excitement that this is the very same material that had just been used on the new elephant house at London Zoo. In similarly excited terms we are told of exotic materials such as ‘grit-blasted’ and even ‘fair-faced’ concrete. Innovations such as electrical road heating on the Woolwich Road Flyover (blimey…) emergency telephones and traffic surveillance equipment would be installed. Truly a Seventies Dream” ((extract from “The Greenwich Phantom”)) .

Let us go back for now to the debate in the House of Common, where at the end of 1971 we find the Labour MP for Woolwich West, William Hamling questioning the GLC planning of radial system to the then under-secretary of state for environment, Mr Michael Heseltine. Here, the concerns for Eltham being closed off by a box of road and lorries going around the streets of Greenwich sound very actual indeed, and if it wasn’t for the price of property (£ 10,000 circa) we would not imagine this discourse as being articulated a long time ago:

“…If one looks at the motorway map for London one can see that this network will cause a tremendous change in the character of London. It will isolate thousands and thousands of homes. We shall be involved in the destruction of many houses, many of them modern houses, perfectly desirable houses, houses which, in a free market today, command prices of ¬£10,000. It is not just the destruction of homes; it is the destruction of urban life as we know it, and the emergence of an urban life which is unreal, artificial and unacceptable to the people of London.

This is something which the planners do not always understand. After all, most of the people who talk and write about these plans do not themselves live in London. They do not live in the areas which will be so drastically affected. Those of us who live in London, who live with the ordinary people of London and who know where the shoe pinches do not accept that this kind of concept can lead to anything but the carving up of London once again and the emergence of a pattern of urban life which is uncivilised and dehumanised. The prospect of 40- and 50-ton lorries coming off the motorways and going through Plumstead, Charlton and Greenwich fills me with horror” ((MOTORWAYS, LONDON House of Commons Deb 15 December 1971 vol 828 cc746-64 746v)) .

subway

I found this extract particularly touching, for its actuality and ability to foresee what in fact happened. Find more current pictures in my photoblog, in particular my impression of the footbridge. As marginal note to our discussion, there are also proposals in the same debate to facilitate travel fares for elderly people, or the few pennies bus fare for all in order to relaunch the public transport system as an alternative to private transport, and the concerns for the deserted river (sounds familiar? now at least there is a chance to travel fast on the Clipper, while drinking a glass of champagne!)….

Anyway, the end of our story is that the few bits of the radial system to be implemented were the south part of the Ringroad 1, with an additional top-up in the golden age of the LDDC: ‘When the Ringway plans were dropped, the traffic situation in Eltham was so bad that the former A2(M) plan was resurrected and the ensuing construction works were the largest and most complex new road in London in the 1980s’. The rest was blend into the disastrous M25, but this is another story… ((many more details here: the CBRD website is an amateur’s project and they have done a wonderful work of post-industrial archaeology on the planning of the Ringroads or Radial System. They also say: ‘From some perspectives it’s starting to look like the project wasn’t just halted, but comprehensively destroyed – either to prevent further bad publicity or simply to reduce storage costs’)) .

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2009 03 17 pa_card Dreaming the City
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The Face of the Other

live

…Is this person gay? Is s/he British? Is this person happy? Intelligent? These are some of the strong questions participants were asked to cast their vote about when faced with the anonymous picture of a stranger in latest Christian Nold‘s provocative installation. Over 14,000 people in one month cast their vote in the ‘Community Metrics in Nottingham (UK) and decide ‘live’ who of the volunteers should be deported: a sort of ‘friendly fascism’, a dystopian version of Facebook, a tease out of many reality TV shows.

The installation prompted me to read again (that’s what is good about radical art!) Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas on ethics: for the French philosopher, whose family was wiped out by the Holocaust, ethics begins with the direct encounter with the face of the Other. This action is ethical because, rather than knowing, and hence objectifying the other, by way of static representation, in the face-to-face encounter,

‘The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves in me…the Other signals but does not present themselves’ ((E. Levinas, cited in R. Durie. Face to Face: directions in contemporary women’s portraiture’)) .

There is a sense in which, by making an image of this overflowing, by reducing the Other to a set of conventions, a-priori categories, and image-repertoire, we might be perpetrating a form of violence, which hence denies the alterity expressed by the face of the Other.

For Skeggs (2004) ((B. Skeggs, Class, Self, and Culture, 2004: 155)) , rather, in the urban context that brings people into contact, “these encounters force a reading of proximate bodies and, in some cases, generate a need for boundary maintenance. It is not just the encounter, but the relationships generated from the encounter between bodies that rely on prior systems of inscription – rhetoric, representation, discourse – that…positions some groups as the ground of fixity, otherness, strangeness and danger”.

This opens a big problem for representation, especially visual, to the extent that the object of representation always falls under the power of thought. Jacques Lacan notoriously develops a new form of epistemology based on the Four Discourses (Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst), which produce four respective apprehensions to knowledge. As Kirsten Campbell explains it ((K. Campbell, ‘Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology’, Routledge, 2004: 37-39)) :

‘Reality is a function of discourse, for discourse produces both the world that is known, and the only world that can be known. Knowledge is contingent upon the discursive position of the knower. However, that subjective structure is necessarily an effect of discursive structure. By taking up a speaking position, the knower thereby is enmeshed in the fundamental relations of discourse…Discourse produces the known object, since the object can only be represented through signifying structures. The act of knowing is an act of representation that the stable structures of signifying chains produce. Therefore, knowledge itself has a discursive structure and thereby is rethought as the product of signification. [Crucially] In later Lacan’s epistemology, what is know is inseparable from how it is known‘ (cit: 54-55, my emphasis).

But, what is the nature of this objectification? According to Derrida ((Jacques Derrida: ‘Right of inspection’, photographs by Marie-Francoise Plissart; New York, Monacelli Press, 1998)) , there is an unequal exchange between the viewer and the subject portrayed: the former holds a position within which is inscribed the power to dominate, whilst the latter, the photographed face, is silent because it cannot express or represent itself, the source of its significance is then placed in the viewer. There is then an intrinsic rhetoric, a grammar, a symbolic practice, a pose of the act of taking photographs of others, a division of positions between ‘looking at’ and ‘looked at’, a structural binary determination that is not easily broken. How can we achieve a grammar of non-violence in visual representation?

‘A true photograph of the face – one which is not objectifying, one which does not deny the faciality of the face – would be one which ‘represents’ the unpresentable look of the face’ (Durie, cit:38).

One way of representing the face of the other respectfully is in the radical involvement of the subject within the dynamics of representation. That is, in a process that goes beyond the “shooting back” techniques of the recent years. For instance, the different techniques of self portraiture might instigate a loop of signification between the looker and the looked at, ‘a loop which excludes any possible interruptions from an outsider, who might want to determine the meaning of the subject, and hence objectifying her, from a privileged position beyond the frame’ (ibidem: 50). Or something deeper, that question the overall image of ourselves as founded on particular images which are stored in our memory and which are the product of various photographic practices (first of all the photo album, or the family portrait). Jo Spence’s and Rosy Martin’s phototherapy seems to address this difficulty: the subject is invited to re-enact their own perceptions and memories , retaining maximum control on the representation. Photo-therapy is not just about performances, but involves a relationship with the other ((“Family snaps: the meanings of domestic photography” / edited by Jo Spence and Patricia Holland. London: Virago , 1991)) . ‘The aim of the practice is to interrupt the objectifying influence of these images on our self-perception, reconstructing or reinventing the images in order that they might work with the subject in the creation of her or his self-image’ (in Durie, cit: 30). But is it there a ‘real’ face? An image of oneself to be held upon against the performative? In what sense Barthes declared: ‘The mask is the meaning”?

What these examples might imply is that, if ‘discursive structures delimit what is thinkable and signifiable as knowledge, [then] to change those structures is to change how we know the world’ (Campbell, cit: 55). In this sense, we might say with John Berger  that the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. Meanings exist only at risk, they are never fixed, never arrested.

Simmel wrote a brief and very important article ‘The Stranger’ (1908), in which the notion of ‘estrangement’ has some flexibility, according to the shifting notion of ‘human commonness’. As I read it, he makes a crucial link between the alterity of the stranger and the affective bond of community. I think Simmel’s position embeds the discourse on representations of types, very similar to the one highlighted in the post. Playing with the concepts of nearness and distance, he links the ’stranger-danger’ discourse to the symbolic construction of community. The ‘estrangement’ happens “when the consciousness that only the quite general is common, stresses that which is not common” ((George Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, 1908/1950: p. 3)) .
But, I ask, how do we get to that consciousness? What role has photographic representation in the construction of the symbolic community? What notions of homogeneity and togetherness are we prioritizing when we attempt to photograph what we see as a ‘community’? And, what kind of idea of community this discourse imply in the first place?
Others, like Richard Sennet, privilege the encounter with strangers as at the very heart of urban living, from which an incomplete sense of personal identity, as well as re-assembled communities (I think here of Jan-Luc Nancy and Iris Marion Young), might emerge. Others, so to speak, might refuse a blase’ attitude to the metropolis. I think there is hope in Levinas’ ethics.

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2009 02 08 pa_card Framing the City
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A place for art in place-making?

[keywords: art integrated in urban design, modernist art, permanent features of the landscape, agents and commissions]

There is a sense in which the extensive use of arts in public development helps to marginalise communities rather than regenerate them. Urban development for instance has been increasingly creating ‘sharply delineated (geographic and conceptual) zones of success which define counter spaces of failure, and separate monolithic corporate culture, which increasingly stands for the city, from the diversity of street culture…set up an adversarial social model: good affluence against defiling deprivation’ ((M. Miles, ‘Arts, Space and the City’, 1997, Routledge)) . The issue of the audience is of course central, so it is the question of who might feel as part of it (remember J. Jacob’s New Urbanism and S. Zukin’s ‘pacification by cappuccino’?). Besides, arts-led regeneration has often the side effect of increasing property prices, and further  can cause residual residents to be priced-out (gentrification). Finally, arts can provide a helpful hand to the problem of image, recently associated to mega projects (e.g. Canary Wharf), in which the ‘beautiful’ is often mixed up with the ‘opportune’ and the ‘good’. Professionals of the place-making, art experts, space designers, are often brought in, increasing the sense of detachment of locals.

‘Art in development aids this socially divisive process by aestheticizing it, in ignoring the social impact of development, art is complicit in the consequent social fragmentation’ (cited: 106).

Generally speaking, most of the commissions are given either to make a place or a community (sometimes even give them a heart!), or to give a sense of visual cohesion to the whole: in this context, art is used as instrument of pacification, filtered by funding structures and their sanitizing effects. ‘No one seems to propose art as adding difference, or what Sennett terms ‘disorder’, to a site’ (Miles, cit: 127). There would be no funding, no commission, no residency! Imagine that!

‘Art in urban development is a case of hegemony [in Gramscian terms] in which the status quo, that is, freedom for capital to increase and the unfreedom for the majority of the population to determine the conceptualization of the city, is preserved, it locates art in a domain which is outside political contantion…perhaps this is exacly the kind of function for which modernist art is suited’ (Miles, cit: 131).

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2009 02 04 pa_card Framing the City
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Space, time, and…architecture

Is architecture a three dimensional space? Nobody would really argue with this at first glance. But what about ‘time’? Isn’t it an intrinsic element of place-making? And what if we add the mental projection of the unconscious? But, at the end of the day, isn’t it the body which inhabits and sets in motion the architectural space? And what ‘to inhabit” means? To dwell, for sure, but also to cover and protect, an almost tangible status of the body (from the Latin, habitare, and the Italian abito, both dress and address, in German wand, wall and screen, and gewand, garment and clothing. But also, abitudine, that is, habituation, practise, what people do without paying too much attention to. They all have the same root). As film theorist Giuliana Bruno ((G. Bruno, Public Intimacy’, 2007, MIT Press)) writes:

‘We inhabit space tactilely by way of habit, and tangibly so. A haptic bond links sheltering to clothing the body. To occupy a space is to wear it. A building, like a dress is worn and wears out’.

What are other links between Fashion and Architecture? I think also of Benjamin’s Thesis XIV in which ‘Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands’.

Anthony Vidler insists that ‘Architecture now operates as a psychic mechanism, constructing its subjects in time and space’. Drawing from Jacques Lacan, and his intuition that ‘architecture is organized around a void’, it’s that hidden reality attempting to encircle emptiness, Vidler (2005) writes:

‘Architectural space, in its role as a stimulator of mental introjection (memory) and physical and psychical projection (event), still retains its primordial power to capture the body’.

But we could try to push this discourse a little bit further, focusing on the spatial products in Teflon format: space of entertainment, consumption, and logistics. These spatial products ‘act not only as a glyph or monument to an overt political text, but as heavy information that becomes a nuanced, unexpressed subtext of action or practice’ ((Keller Easterling, ‘Enduring Innocence’, 2005, MIT Press)) . Moreover,

‘Logistic spatial products make vivid the fact that architecture is a theatre of activity – consequential sequencing of organizations, activities, claims, and exchanges. Architecture is a technology, the medium of an open platform storing both structure and content. The information it stores, as both data and persuasion, is literally a product, property, or currency’ (cited: 2-3, my emphasis).

Similarly, George Battaille writes that architecture is a sort of religion which brings forth the power it represents, the event it celebrates, the space it encircles, the performance it stages, ‘it is identical to the space of representation; it always represents something other than itself, from the moment that it becomes distinguished from mere building…this extends to language where architectural metaphors are very common. These metaphors seem for us too inevitable to see them as sought-after literary effects. Their cliché’ nature and their anonymity are, however, an indication that they are not innocent, but rather surreptitiously accomplishing some ideological tasks for which they are the instruments. The term ‘structure’ itself it is not the least of evidence. That it is used today to describe practically all organizations and all systems shows just how far the domination extends’ ((Denis Hollier, ‘Against Architecture: the writings of George Battaile’, 1998:32-34, MIT Press )) .

‘This metaphore provides the system’s form in every area where it appears. Which results in the repression of anything resembling play, exteriority, or alterity. Otherness is excluded; it has no other place than outside. In an exterior which, reduced to silence, has no voice in the matter…the ideology function of architecture: it does not produce copies, but models. It does not imitate an order, but constitutes it: whether the order of the world or of society. In its most accomplished stage, architecture ‘imitates’ nature itself, it ‘reproduces’ the armonious system of cosmic laws’ (ibidem).

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2009 01 31 pa_card Framing the City Comments (0)

On Materiality and Space

What is a materialist approach in social analysis?

Lets try to go beyond the discursive, and focus on the practice, on what effectively happens or what people do. Without re-claiming truth, we can pinpoint to a lived space and the interrelation between people and objects, as well as between people of course, and the objects as stand-alone categories:

‘Objects exceed the classificatory systems in which they originate and have an existence, a ‘thingness’, of their own. Object have agency, they are cultural agency objectified, compressed performativity. Things of everyday life are a part of who we are and how we operate in the world at large’ ((Caroline Knowles, Race and Social Analysis, 2003: 9)) .

Objects have memories, in the sense that both belong to and make the spatial dimension of memories, the geometry and the kinaesthetic of our thoughts. They are, as we are, in space.

Talking about race making, for instance, Knowles insists on a framework which involves a shifting lens in order to catch up with the minutiae of everyday life, the level of details or grain of one’s own biography and unpredictable behaviour:

‘Racial orders are in fact composed of myriad and ordinary everyday social processes and mechanisms with which people interface in no predictable way…Race making centrally involves people and their decisions and their actions: their way of being in the world in which they live. And race making involves a myriad rather ordinary social processes and activities’ (cited: 25)’.

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2009 01 28 pa_card Blogging the City Comments (0)

The Body at War

I was daring thinking about a densely packed city under heavy attack from air strikes and cannons. I have tried to do this exercise for the last couple of days, sometimes at night time, in the almost absolute silence of our sleeping city. Will the market be there? Would I sleep comfortably ever again? How big is my grief? Would I ever recover from the death of my family members, my neighbours, my friends? Who keeps me informed of the events?

But, more importantly, and consequentially, I have been trying to imagine how everyday life gets distressed, changed, and adapts to the new dramatic regime. How would I go to the loo? Is there any water? How would I post my blog without electricity?  Could I send my children playing outside during the few hours ceasefire? How could I take my son to school? Is there any school?
I just cant get it, without the risk of falling into rhetoric, or worse, into a patronising attitude.  I cannot but think in fact I belong to that privileged minority in the western world. I can only be a spectator or worse watch the event on telly. But on the other hand I do believe that it is not just spectacle: the reality of the war out there needs some deep thoughts, reflections, and critiques. I do agree with the latest writing of Susan Sontag’s on the subject of the grief, the pain, the representation of the wars of the others. She writes:

‘To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalises the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment. It assumes that everyone is a spectators…[and then, discussing Jeff Wall's famous transparency 'Dead Troops Talk', 1996]… “We” – this “We” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what went through – don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly cannot imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is – and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine. That’s what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer stubbornly feels. And they are right’ ((S. Sontag, ‘Looking at War’, The New Yorker, 9/12/02))

Yes, I think Sontag is absolutely right. We don’t understand the direct experience of suffering, but we are eager to represent it. And images are the trickiest medium of all, inexorably real but incredibly able to be bend to this or that party. One example: pictures of dead children at war. They have been used many times either to arrest or to provoke a military action. Again, Sontag:

‘Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally, in the form that is registered by the camera, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account, which, depending on its complexity of thought, references, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership, a photograph has only one language and it is destined potentially for all…The photographic image [on the other hand] cannot be a simply a transparency of something that happened. It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.’ (ibidem).

Following these and other issues about representation, truth, and realism, that I preferred to turn my gaze to the pacifist movement (or I shall say demonstrations) rather than the conflict itself. It feels like there are two binary, parallel, different worlds. A Here and There. A space of suffering and one of representation of this suffering. On the other hand though, the possibility offered by the Internet are now wider, I mean, the chance to communicate, listening, interacting with the Others much more developed and sophisticated than ever before. For these reasons, I started reading, researching and annotating blogs from the warzone, mostly from Gaza, sometimes from people directly connected to the denied citizens (exiles, relatives, aid workers). I believe that in this way the spaces of representation and the representation of spaces collide to some extent. The pain of the others might be reflected and reproduced, bounced back and fro to Others, participated to some extent at last. What I am interested into is the direct experience of ordinary people under attack (rhetorically referred to as ‘civilians’ in the death toll), the emphasis being on the actual description of their daily life, rather than the much talked about political issues. I slowly started to feel a sense of grief, a general anxiety of mourning, and an inexorable sliding into the character of the sympathetic pacifist, rather different thing from a Palestinian Father under siege: this would have been at very least pretentious (a sort of Butlerian discursive magic spell).

In particular, I found incredibly inspiring and touching a blog from a Palestinian journalist, with a foot in the States and the mind in Gaza, as many exiles on the border, in-between identities and statuses. The reason I chose it from the many is that it comes from a mother and talks about the everyday life of exiles as well as continuously reminding us of the terrible situation in Gaza. The title is exemplar and I invite anyone to have a read:

Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother.

Also of particular interest and full of ‘hands-on’ information from the Occupied Territories, a blog from Sharyn Lock, a human rights worker based in Gaza.

http://talestotell.wordpress.com/

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2009 01 08 pa_card Blogging the City
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Comment and Response

I received this excellent comment via email to my post ‘Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body’ on Sociology Eye Blog (also on this blog), and am very happy to publish it here with my response thereafter.

Dear Paolo,

<<REMOVED>>

by sender’s request for alleged breach of confidentiality.

If you did get it, just forget it.

Here is my response:

Dear <<REMOVED>>

many thanks for your critical feedback, it is always good to have some and also gives me a chance to write more on the topic, without the constraints of the blog post, that is usually tight and fast. And this peculiarity of the medium gives room to mistakes quite often. For instance, as you said (my emphasis):

‘the last paragraph might be interpreted as symbolic interactionism, particularly as you point to the complications of daily life (terms that seem to be ubiquitous in responses to capitalism’s meltdown)’.

There is in my opinion some confusions here as I meant to address exactly the opposite: instead of using ‘complicate’ as adjective to ‘everyday lives’, I should have written in fact ‘complex’, in the sense of ‘differential’, ‘complicating’ and ‘always emergent’, in Delueze’s words ‘rhizomatic’. My apologies for the mistake, I amended this in the post, which is now: ‘He made me think that everyday’s life is a challenging terrain [for the social scientists], more complex, and fluid that we are usually inclined to think [as social scientists]‘. The sense of my post remains as polemics ‘against these increasingly common nightmare scenarios which seem to be so prevalent’ (Thrift 2004), dozens of which you might find in other contributors’ posts, maximalist representations of mainstream quantitative sociology.

On the other hand, though, you encourage me to develop in writing the situation in which I found myself at that precise moment of recording the story: ‘it might be a good idea to explore the interaction between you and him more fully’, as you wrote. This is a valid suggestion. I found symptomatic though that there is no mention at all in your comment to the overwhelming picture on the top of the post. The text there is intended in fact to be just a corollary, an accomplishment to the visual. I use often photographs to open up spaces, to invite the reader to enter the story, to invite them to imagine the lives of the people and the objects pictured in them, as well as their interrelations. More than pages of text, the scene – at least in my intentions – hinted at a usual performance made by the barber in his daily encounters with his clients, friends, people he might just known, and with whom he talks of all the possible subjects, including the economic crisis. There are daily performances, theatrical dramas, and hilarious vignettes unfolding in the life of the barber that written text, even if it not constrained by the 200 words of the blog post, cannot render effectively.

As my supervisor, professor Knowles writes:

‘Sociology has remained firmly focused on text and on narrative: on the written and spoken word. Sociologists listen and map and turn what they see into text. Sociology is effectively visual illiterate: picturing features neither as a technique for recording nor as a tool in social analysis’ (Bedlam on the Streets, 2000: 20).

How often have you found such an intruding scene where two relatively old men chat with vigour of the end of the capitalism, and with such a bodily expression? And doesn’t it happen in fact every day, in the cafés, stations, dole offices, on the buses, ‘as they exist in their hundreds of thousands at the same hour’? This is the ability of critical photography, to ‘pump the aura out of the reality’, to strip bare the objects, to initiate ‘the emancipation of objects from aura’, as Walter Benjamin would have perhaps maintained it (Short History of Photography).

In terms of non-representational theory, it seems to me that there is a drive towards a dialogue between writers, readers and subjects, as the space of rendering the story becomes infused with imagination, both of the author and the viewer, who should work together at making the story:

‘This is the difference, then, between representation and practice. In the one, we know the outcome. In the other, we can only, to insert a Wittgensteinian moment, guess. And this imagination extends to conceptual practice, as well as the realms of percepts, affects, and sensations’ (Thrift cited: 6, my italics).

It has been a pleasure to enlist such an authoritative comment, hope to have more in the future.

Many thanks.

Paolo

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2008 12 05 pa_card Blogging the City
Imaging the City Comments (0)

Capitalism’s meltdown and the Body

My barber doesn’t bother at all: “Hair -he told me last week – will always grow on people’s head!”. The phantasmagorical numbers of the capitalist crisis do not mean anything at all to him (do they mean anything to most of us, by the way?). He carries on as he can, as he has almost always done, a coffee and a cigarette here and there, a joke quite often.

He made me think that everyday’s life is a challenging terrain for social scientists, more complex and fluid that we – social scientists – are usually inclined to think: it engages simultaneously with the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, and ‘how and what it is experienced as experience is itself variable’ ((N. Thrift, Non Representational Theory, 2008)) .

Thrift on malice and misanthropy

Non-Representational Theory

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2008 12 03 pa_card Blogging the City
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Mr. Alemanno strikes again…

The ex-fascist mayor of Rome Mr. Alemanno made again the headlines lately, when while visiting Israel refused to call on Fascism ‘as absolute evil’ and labeled it as ‘a complex phenomenon’. The outcry of condemnation at this latest ‘slippage’ from the Italian Center-Left and the Jewish community is highly justified, but in my view missed the point: they are in fact rehearsing a view of Fascism (with capital letter) as ‘historical norm’ (see on this Walter Benjamin’s Thesis VIII), missing the true aspects of its strenght. Mr. Alemanno, in fact, suggested a more suttle reading of Fascism when he declared: “Many people joined it in good faith”. It is that ‘good faith’ which should have been addressed, as it highlights the deeply popular roots of fascist ideology, its ability to reinvent itself in many ordinary behaviors and daily actions, and bring back to Rome, for instance, people like Mr. Alemanno.

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2008 10 27 pa_card Comments (0)

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