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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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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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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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The Mating Game

This is the title of a chapter of an amazing book I have just finished: ‘The Code of the Street’ by Elijah Anderson ((Anderson, Elijah: Code of the street: decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city. New York; London:Norton, 2000.)) , probably one of the best inner-city ethnography, concerned mostly with poor black youth of Philadelphia.

The teenage pregnancy and the widespread one parent family have to be framed as an other manifestation of that set of attitudes, behaviors, non written rules, dystopian symbols that form the ‘code’. This is well embedded in a more general ‘kind of institutionalized oppositional culture, a reaction to a history of prejudice and discrimination that now finds its way into schools and other institutions’ (323). According to Anderson, a dangerous vicious circle has been allowed to start and develop in the impoverished inner city communities, which primarily has structural causes:  ‘The emergence of an underclass isolated in urban ghettoes with high rates of joblessness can be traced to the interaction of race prejudice, discrimination, and the effects of the global economy’ (316). Poverty, isolation, alienation, oppositional culture: ‘but such oppositional produces even more alienation and lines become hardened, polarities develop’ (318). ‘This alienation from the system and the belief that blacks have to mobilize against it helps to legitimate – for its participants – the code of the street, settling scores personally, going for oneself’ (299)…

It is in this deprived economic settings and vicious cultural context that the mating game has to be inscribed. What in fact becomes obvious is the sexual game among urban youth is the outcome of two opposite drives, the longing for sexual gratification and peers recognition from the boys and the dream of forever happiness and solid family of the girls. What makes this game more cruel and distintive for inner city black youth is the social and economic context: on one hand, the ‘code’ dictates the maschilist attitudes of the boys, for whom the woman becomes the ultimate sexual object to control in order to gain respect from the peer group; on the other, the promises and the perhaps genuine intentions of the Prince Charming cannot be fulfilled as the middle class American dream of the caring father and the supporting husband is an empty and distant dream for these deeply deprived communities. In the end, it is often the boy who prevails, as often very inexperienced girls, whose role model is often an older sibling or their own mother with a similar background, tend to adjust to the rap, the attentions, the symbolic climate, the prospectives of a welfare payment (often the only source of income, flat, and security in their young lives).

Anderson distinguishes clearly between ‘street’ and ‘decent’ families as fundamental background in which this game is played: the lack of prospective, middle-class values, hopes in the future, and entrenched ‘code’ culture, all play their role in forging these young people’s expectations ((alarm! there is the underlining risk of defining the poor as lacking of middle class values. In the discussion of class and race, on the other hand, there is often the case that all blacks are deemed of belonging to the working class, or even worse that they would not care of the signifier of class as are fully embedded in a conclusive discourse of race around their subjectivity: is Anderson’s argument descriptive or normative? Also compare Walkerdine’s view (cited: 194) that ‘prospects of a professional career act as a contraceptive for middle-class girls: nothing is allowed to obstruct the academic path – certainly not motherwood, which is seen as the ultimate failure, to be avoided at all costs)) .The class background and the cultural context are here crucial: ‘Sexual relations, exploitative or otherwise, are common among middle class teenagers as well, but most middle class youth take a stronger interest in their future and know what a pregnancy can do to derail it’. On this point, also Walkerdine et alia (2001) distinguish:

‘The pressures on the fecund body present a problematic path through education and life, whatever the class position. What is important is how that fecundity is regulated and lived. For middle-class young women it is their inscription as the bourgeois subject that counterposes fecundity in a way that simply does not allow the possibility of pregnancy. Conversely the position of working-class girls is to be the fecund Other to the middle-class girls, a designation that is difficult to escape in order to follow a career or manage upward mobility. It seems that the regulation of femininity works quite differently upon the body of working- and middle-class girls. Indeed it is the fecund body of the middle-class girl that has to be regulated at all costs in favour of the predominance of the mind [as school achievement and career]. On the other hand, the fecund body of the working-class girl does not represent a threat to bourgeois masculinity but rather contributes to a discourse on welfare scroungers’ ((Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody ‘Growing up Girls’ 2001:187-188; I think that massimalist arguments do not help us to read the social world. I have the impression that normative (e.g. welfare) and academic (that is mainly white, liberal, and middle class) discourses on race have helped to conceal the issue of class. That is, there is the tendency to think about ethnic minority groups as ‘poor’ or ‘working-class’. On the other hand, birds’ eye view on poverty have created a voyeuristic and sexualised discourse of the working-class female body )) .

And while ‘it becomes extremely difficult for the boys, in view of their employment prospects, to see themselves taking on the responsibilities of conventional fathers and husbands’, on the other hand ‘the young woman has a certain amount of help in settling for the role of single parent. A large part of her identity is provided by the baby under her care and guidance, there is no quicker way to grow up’ (148-149). And to stress this last point further, there is the status oriented behaviour, the large sum of money spent on dresses and shoes on the babies: ‘for a young mother who fails to secure a strong commitment from a man, a baby becomes a partial fulfillmant of the good life. The young mothers who form such baby clubs develop an ideology counter to that of the more conventional society, one that not only approves of but enhances their position. In effect, they work to create value and status by inverting that of the girls who do not become pregnant. The teenage mother derives status from her baby’ (164-165). Also in Walkerdine (cited:196), ‘to understand why keeping the baby appeared to be a better solution to the working-class girls and their families, we need to understand their embodiment as the fecund body as a psychically and socially safe place to be, which kept them away from the terrifying path to transformation’.

On the other hand, ‘the lack of gainful employment today not only keeps the entire community in the pit of poverty but also deprives young men of the traditional American way of proving their manhood – by supporting a family. They must thus prove themselves in other ways. Casual sex with as many women as possible, impregnating one or more, and getting them to have his baby brings a boy the ultimate esteem of his peers and makes him a man’ (177). This is the essence of the mating game, the extraction of the maximum personal benefit from sexual relationships, and cannot be understood if taken away from the severerly impoverished inner-city neighborhood: ‘trapped in poverty, ignorant of the long term consequences of their behaviour but aware of the immediate benefits, adolescents engage in a mating game’ (177).

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