I doubt I’ll get much of a response to this post, but here goes. Suppose you were designing a polis or city. What would your ideal city be like? In particular, what sorts of entities, human and nonhuman, would populate your city. Most importantly, what would be the mission and prime directives of your ideal city? What sorts of things would your city seek to guarantee and accomplish for its citizens, both human and nonhuman.
Aside from potentially being an interesting thought experiment, these questions are inspired by Exemplaria Symposium entitled “Surface, Symptom and the State of Critique”. On the one hand, I’m interested to see how people react to the very posing of the question. I get the sense that many, myself included, become very shy and uncomfortable when asked to make positive proposals and to “existentially own” a particular set of commitments (i.e., to be responsible for a commitment). What might this unease be a symptom of and what historical circumstances– assuming that this affect is a historical phenomena –might have lead to this hesitation?
On the other hand, I get the sense that while critique is a vital enterprise not to be abandoned– as Deleuze remarks in Nietzsche & Philosophy, “philosophy is nothing without critique –it seems as if there are significant problems with the project of critique where the project of producing social change is concerned. First, it seems that critique somehow ends up parasitically attaching us to that which we critique. Like the hysteric that requires his castrated master to sustain his desire, critique seems to require that which it attacks to sustain the existence and identity of the critique. How might this phenomenon of the beautiful soul– if that’s indeed the appropriate figure in Hegel –be overcome so that we we might get beyond the moment of destruction. Second, critique is skilled at tearing things down, yet once it has done so it seems ineffectual in replacing what it has torn down with something else. How might the project of critique overcome its constructive ineffectivity? Finally, third, critique often leads to a sense of paralysis as in the case of the radical pessimism of Adorno? In and through the critical enterprise we often become so overwhelmed by the mechanisms of power that we see functioning everywhere and that we discern as always recouping that which tries to escape that we come to feel as if no escape is possible whatsoever. Paradoxically, where we begin, de facto, in the project of critique from a stance that is unfree like Plato’s prisoners in the cave but that believes itself to be free, we end in a state that believes itself to be completely unfree, that believes itself to be completely dominated by power, and that therefore comes to believe that it is futile to act. How might we escape this overwhelming sense of impotence, pessimism, and powerlessness, that the critical enterprise seems to produce? How might we escape the sickness of critical paranoia where we come to believe that the gaze of the Other has everywhere already won? As I’ve argued elsewhere, critique is a necessary and indispensable moment of the practice of terraism, yet critique alone seems insufficient. We need construction as well. Might not construction be rendered possible through the development of a clear mission as to what the polis is supposed to accomplish and guarantee? Doesn’t this sense of what ought to be provide the telos that allows us to begin building?
February 14, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Hi Levi,
great blog!
Perhaps the urban physical cultural practice of Parkour could inform this discussion.
Below I have begun to construct a concept that I call the ‘the art of tracing’. One of the things I have tried with it is to offer an alternative to critique.
http://sportminor.blogspot.com/search/label/Parkour
/Kalle
February 14, 2012 at 6:38 pm
Being a passive though interested observer of this blog at first prevented me from posting my answers to the thought experiment you asked me to perform.
Then I got into that mindset I sometimes get into, where I leap before looking. Interestingly, I feel challenged whenever one of these blogs I read poses a question and then have this compulsion to at least write down an answer for myself. I’ll see how my ‘outside’ opinion is regarded when posted on the internet.
My ideal city(-state) notes:
Three cities connected by train and road; one for living, one for destructive and one for constructive production. Public transport only in these cities. An airport, railway, road and canal for traffic to other cities. Carbon neutral traffic only. For every person a tree. For every window a solar panel, for every roof a wind mill, for every canal a water mill. For every two roads a canal, for every square meter of stone a square meter of plant-life. Every building should be fit for vertical expansion, as well as overlap with other buildings around it. The ground floor of the city should always receive sunlight. Around the city should at all times be a nature reserve of one square mile in every direction, regardless of expansion of the city. When the city meets the grounds of another city, it should start expanding in another direction until growth is no longer possible. For every six buildings there should be a public square of a hundred square meters. For every six buildings there should be a council of people and environment management. In this city, humans have to coexist with the city as much as it has to exist for them. The councils for people and object management should, among other things, remind them of that.
I believe all of this should be possible. These rules should at least be used as a challenge to the people involved in creating my perfect city. Ideally, they are followed to the letter.
Fun mental exercise, thanks for that!
February 14, 2012 at 7:31 pm
I think Deleuze in his “Expressionism in Philosophy” offers a worthy project for any polis:
“There could be only one way of making the state of nature viable: by striving to organize its encounters. Whatever body I meet, I seek what is useful ” (Deleuze, 1990: 260-261).
“A City is so much the better the more it relies on joyful affections; the love of freedom should outweigh hope, fear and confidence. Reason’s only commandment, the sole requirement of pietas and religio, is to link a maximum of passive joys with a maximum of active ones (Deleuze, 1990: 272)”
I think this organization of encounters with the maximization of power and joy in mind is a project every city should aspire to.
February 14, 2012 at 9:08 pm
I would try to design a city that would create a population of saints.
Actually, there is a pretty clear analogy here between the city and the classroom. Since I teach studio art classes I have the ridiculous task of trying to teach other people how to be creative, something that I’m not really sure is possible to do. Yet when I think of my own experience there are some environments that seem to pull creativity out of me, and others that seem to squash it. The role of teaching then is to create an environment such that, just by entering in the environment, students cannot help themselves but think better ideas and come up with more creative work. I’m not sure how to do this either, lots of trial and error.
And we know that some environments, like Abu Ghraib, bend almost anyone into a torturer. Any city worthy of the name would be a kind of anti-Abu Ghraib. Just by entering the city people would become better (the artists Arakawa-Gins said that all architecture should address the problem of mortality, they claimed to construct houses that would let you live forever if you lived in them). But what does this mean on a practical basis? I know there is a fair amount of research into environmental psychology that looks at how architecture shapes the people who live in it. I’m not vary familiar with the literature but I know it’s out there.
My city would certainly have no cars.
February 14, 2012 at 11:10 pm
Like the Republic, Sim-City is a game. The ideal city would be, by definition, not where we are. If critique is only a battle within, common, or between, rare, structures of imaging our occupations, then its agency is worse than destructive as it dematerializes the relations we have. From Deleuze, I hope critique is the glimmering of a problem that is not mastered by a higher agency but stimulates concepts that are orthogonally independent. That is not destruction or even construction but one more venue for engagement and it is such engagement with the surrounding which is the polis and not the brick or the law. Schmitt’s nomos is the opposite: he thinks he sees the Cave’s fire. You say in your terrasim post ” It is never the case that everything is related to everything else”: I am not sure what would count as proof or not. However, I would assert the contiguity of any here to its neighbors is substantial, dynamic, and complex and that the best one can do is to be open to the saliences that can appear in that embedding.
February 15, 2012 at 5:57 am
Great project.
My city would be dedicated to the establishment and cultivation of institutions that rehearse democracy.
Some portion of the city seal would be without referent (including author) — i.e. some portion of the representation of law would remain in the public domain.
The city would have centers for rehearsing hospitality. That is, they would be required to admit citizens without charge, but the city charter would lay out no specific agenda for doing so — this would be up to the individual centers. A ratio of citizens to centers would be maintained.
The burial grounds existing at the time of the city’s establishment would be permanent and exempt from any violation. If this proved untenable, it would mark the lifespan of the city itself.
That’s a start!
February 15, 2012 at 11:06 am
Critique should build? It does, does it not? It allows growth; prepares the ontic strata for movement. But this is not perhaps the growth of which you speak. Critique is an observation of the phenomenon/object called the polis. You speak of utopian performance like it could be a part of critique. Yet critiquing is utopian. Design of spatial form is the single realm that comes to mind that fits the desire lines in your provocation. Design is also a radically utopian enterprise. In the midst of this confluence, I think that we do build objects, but that there is as yet no communication between the system of critique and the system of design. The ontically constructed object and urban design do not cognize each other’s presence. I am working on it.
February 17, 2012 at 1:41 pm
Hi Levi,
Quite a challenge you’ve laid down! The Urban has become central to my interest in everyday life, philosophy and politics. The Urban is also something that easily escapes our conceptual grasp and requires orientation (my preferred term) because, in accordance with what I understand of your mereology, it does not coincide with the city or the assemblage of objects that constitute it, all of which are withdrawn from each other. I remember Ian Bogost did a nice little small post on urban withdrawal a while back.
Reading your post I was interested that you link the challenge of urban design to the petrifying gaze of the Other. I myself constantly struggle against the temptation to re-edit whatever I write. Unfortunately being told, and perhaps knowing, that the Other doesn’t exist isn’t sufficient to alter the belief. Reading your post made me think of my frustrated interactions with some of the architects I’ve met. Before I proceed I should also say that I have had the good fortune to collaborate with some truly inspiring people who either practice as or have trained as architects. Naturally as an outsider to architecture I approach them as the ‘subject supposed to know’ but have found them compromised or castrated in terms of both economic factors and the planning regulations to which professional practice must submit. The main theme is the complaint concerning the lack of control in the role of architect that they have over the projects that they work on. My disappointment comes from the resignation that can come with this. It intimates that architects can’t really be the arbiters of the Urban that they might claim to be in the interest of their profession…an urban Myth! So, if not the architect then who?
Going back to the theme of the Urban I’m fascinated by Utopia’s and planned cities. In ‘The Urban Revolution’ Henri Lefebvre linked thought to the utopic (non-placed) and argued that a totalizing and centralizing view of a kind implied by the plan would be necessary for change. At the same time he suggests that the completion or closure implied in the realisation (actualisation) of the plan compromises the utopic element. Granting that I’m reading in translation I was surprised to find that he appears to frame his argument in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms of the ‘virtual’ and of the ‘assemblage’. I’m unsure whether these terms were simply in vogue at the time or this shared vocabulary evidences shared theoretical commitment. Broadly this seems to gesture toward the Lacanian “Not All”. Hence, I suppose, the urban plan would be essential for Lefebvre and MUST be realised (the political), but at the same time it cannot (ontology) be fully actualised. That might be a bit of a caricature of Lefebvre but, if broadly accurate, I gather that it would be consonant with the ontological implications of withdrawal within OOO. With regard to the political implication of such a project for OOO I’m still not wholly clear.
In any case I think that you are right that we do need a vision or plan, not simply critique. That we cannot fully actualise that vision from an ontological perspective is no argument against it…it does not become redundant as a result. Then if we are compelled to act on that project nonetheless, what really matters is how we go about it. In this regard I like Latour’s comment in ‘Reassembling the Social’:
“we are like lazy car drivers newly converted to hiking; we have to relearn that if we want to reach the top of the mountain, we need to take it one step at a time, right foot after left foot, with no jumping or running allowed, all the way to the bitter end!”
In other words there is a lot of work ahead. We must also not forget that very few cities are created ex nihilo. Instead new cities will tend to be built on the ruins of those that have been, or amidst the ongoing everyday life of those already existing. Rather than relying on the established paradigms of the urban imaginary defined by the architectural and planning professions, I’d like to argue for the necessity of a supple, active and creative imagination which articulates thought and practice as the key to change and better cities. That the plan for the imagined city be incomplete or not fully explicated would be no argument against allowing it to guide us up the mountain.
For my own part I’ve probably been hystericised by my encounter with the architectural profession. The ‘King has no clothes’! Architects and planners may rule over an established urban imaginary but they do not have a monopoly on the urban imagination as I’d like to define it. This is not to say that architecture and infrastructure aren’t central concerns, rather that the question of the Urban is not exhausted by these concerns for the design of buildings or the layout of streets etc.
With regard to architectural design it has never been easier to participate. Download google sketchup and rendering software such as Kerkythea (both of which are free) and with a little work and patience anyone could create designs on a par with anything realised in an architect’s studio. As indicated above though, the task of building better cities is not simply a matter of vying with architects and planners. There must be a wider engagement. This thought opens onto the questions of democracy and the commons. Are we all architects?
At present I’m particularly interested in the task of reclaiming privatised or neglected places and bringing them back into public use. This doesn’t require the skills of planners or architects but can contribute to the improvement of the city and urban life. This is why some of the Occupy actions such as the School of Ideas here in London are so exciting:
http://schoolofideas.org.uk/
Hopefully I’ll be participating in this years London Festival of Architecture but we’ll have to see how that shapes up.
I’d be interested to hear any thoughts you have.
Cheers for taking the time to read.
February 24, 2012 at 7:13 pm
I’ll have an answer to your city question later, because it requires I go off and reflect on myself and the world, muster up some creativity, but I can respond to your post critically right now, by looking at what I immediately think is missing:
Which is upgrading the old Heglian approach to seeing negation as constructive, or rather, looking at what you are affirming when you critique something, and maybe critiquing that.
But of course, there’s a missing step there, as I referred to earlier.
February 25, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Ok, being more productive:
Critique is powered by disgust, or similar emotions, and it is the practice of seeing the disgusting, and creating “transparency” that substitutes internal disgusting features for surface attractiveness. A worthy objective in a world of advertising!
It has a tendency towards the conspiratorial, towards substituting for people’s subjective experience of themselves with evil gods of varying stripes, and disregarding or side-lining the beautiful.
But not always! Sometimes it is about the internal contrasts of each of many perspectives, between their ideals and their practice, it is tragic rather than disgusted because it empathises with what is trying to be formed. About hypocrisy and poor application, rather than alliance.
But I would guess that even a perspective that is totally focused on degradation and repulsion has implicit contrast: However demiurgic the critic becomes, I would hope that he still has access to what he values, even if only as an absence. Attempts to picture what this absence entails – the true limits of applicability of his criticism – may then allow the critic to see those situations where he has over-reached, and find things in the world that are actually pretty great, even if they are only in edge cases. From there you can get to a positive description of the reality you’re looking for.
There’s also the sense-data-channels angle to consider; sometimes the critic is parasitic on that which he studies simply because he hasn’t given himself a break in ages. His world is full of power structures because his memory of weeks and months is full of it. Sometimes there are known examples of places where the things that critic loves appear, and he just doesn’t spend enough time involving himself in them. He is trapped with what he hates not by philosophy but by the habit of his life, which by daily routine, orbits it.
Personally, I’d like to see cities where as a matter of course, the symbology of the neighbourhood is both fluid and locally owned, where anything may be graffiti’d over so long as you give people a few days notice to say they want to change it, so that symbolic space cannot be “owned” by advertisers, and nor can people cannot dominate a space simply by exerting energy.
I’d like to see cities where there are traffic lights for animals; crossing mechanisms that allow nonhuman creatures to avoid being parcelled up by our own transit systems, and that make cities permeable to a wider spectrum of nature than just those “pest” animals that can already traverse it.
I’d also like cities that are by default quieter but can be locally louder; I’d like to see further improvements in the efficiency of air conditioning, car noise, acoustic behaviour of buildings and streets etc, but also better handling of music, parties etc, so that cities can be more exuberant by canny handling of the limiting factors like “my grandmother cannot bear the noise”, “I’d like to be up early in the morning”, and “I’m trying to work out something complicated and philosophical”!
Of course each of these objectives requires massive reconfiguration of the urban fabric and the patterns of many people’s lives to succeed:
The first of these touches a vast array of areas, from protest rights, casual defensibility of communities, mechanisms for community self-reference, trespassing and the ownership, repair and composition of the outer skin of buildings.
The second engages heavily with problems of the distribution of urban density, particularly with regards to the subjective parameters of territorial space and acceptable “widths” and predictability of paths for various animals. There’s also: Permeability vs security, especially in areas with large predators. Over-rigourising transport networks via seeking efficiency in crossing points in such a way as to make totalitarian control more effective. Etc.
The third relates to the relationship between noise and human expression, what to do in situations of mutual incomprehensibility, differences in “energy levels” between ages and individuals, overlapping routines, and again some of the problems of empathy, separation/insulation, protest and disruption.