The Time of the City

Politics, philosophy and genre

Michael Shapiro, Michael J Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136977862
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Time of the City is a trans-disciplinary work with a focus on genre-city relationships as they articulate the micropolitics of urban life in diverse cities. Shifting the territorial emphasis of political studies from the mosaic of states to the global network of cities, the book draws on urban theory rather than traditional forms of official city politics. Deriving their methodological approaches from aspects of urban theory and philosophies of aesthetics, the chapters deploy concepts from philosophy, political theory, literary studies, cinema studies, poetics and aesthetic theory on diverse cities, among which are Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

Investigating a wide variety of urban formations, and developing a geophilosophy appropriate to urban space, this multi genre approach to urban life provides stunning insights into the micropolitics of ethnicity, identity, security, subjectivity and sovereignty.

1
Introduction

Geophilosophy, aethetics, and the city

The majority of the writers who have concerned themselves with really modern subjects have tended to content themselves with the certified, official subjects. Charles Baudelaire²

Introduction: Dickens, genre, and the city

Chapter I of Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865), begins with a scene on London’s River Thames:

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.³

Although one might suppose that the class coding of the city, which Dickens makes apparent in scene after scene in London’s streets, homes, and public houses, is held in abeyance on its river, the description of the boat as “dirty” and “disreputable,” makes it immediately apparent that the two figures in it belong to a class of bottom feeders (literally in a sense because they are fishing for the corpses of downing victims). And just as is the case in the streets, the scene contains a signature event in city life, a chance encounter. A competing boat of another corpse-searcher, Rogue Riderhood’s, pulls alongside at one point and provokes a conversation about the morality of robbing the dead versus the living.

In Chapter 2, the reader is introduced to a wholly different class venue. In contrast with the river scene, where the boat is “allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface by reason of the slime and ooze with which it is covered,”⁴ is the “spick and span” cleanliness of the abode of the Veneerings, which is described as the chapter opens:

Mr. and Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a brannew quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new….⁵

The diversity of London’s class settings are thus made evident early in the novel. Thereafter, encounters that link the venues are enacted as the novel’s composition shows itself to be homologous with aspects of nineteenth-century urban life. Dickens’s writing reproduces a city of aleatory events of encounter by imitating London’s architectural and labyrinthian structures and temporal flows with the oft-repeated tropes and “syntactical structures” of his prose.⁶ In London, this genre effect was pervasive. By the time the Victorian novel appeared – and Dickens was the most read novelist – “the city [had become] synonymous with modernity and the novel was…a surrogate through which the reader could enter and identify with the experience of [urban] modernity…”⁷ Because Dickens haunts almost every aspect of this writing project – an analysis of genre-city relationships as they articulate the micropolitics of urban life in diverse cities – I will be summoning his contributions throughout this chapter, even as I begin with a cinematic rather than a novelistic moment.

In Carl Franklin’s film version of Walter Mosley’s first detective novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), set in Los Angeles in 1948, his main character, the laid-off-airline-worker-turned-reluctant-detective, Ezekial (Easy) Rawlins (Denzel Washington), refers at one point to the mayoral election taking place: “The newspapers was goin’ on and on about the election…like they were really going to change someone’s life.” As the film proceeds, a series of micropolitical events ensue. Easy finds himself caught between political and criminal conspirators and policing agents, as he tries to survive economically and keep his body out of prison. Managing his situation, as he finds himself hired to find a missing woman, sets his body in motion and produces an investigatory trajectory with images that map much of mid twentieth century Los Angeles’s racial-spatial order. Thematically, Easy’s problem is reminiscent of the Dickens character, Magwich, in Great Expectations (1860–61), who is pursued both by the police and by Compeyson, a former partner in crime. And Easy’s attempt to negotiate the contentious racial-spatial order of mid twentieth century Los Angeles, while hounded by malicious characters and helped by friends, bears comparison with another character in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Pip, who has to negotiate London’s mid nineteenth century, contentious class order while hounded by malicious characters and helped by friends.

Dickens’s and Franklin’s stories bear comparison genre-wise as well, for as the Russian filmmaker/director, Sergei Eisenstein, has pointed out, Dickens’s novelistic style was the primary inspiration for the parallel editing, montage techniques pioneered in the films of D. W. Griffith.⁸ Eisenstein shows how Dickens’s writing is strikingly cinematic in its composition, a montage style (which Eisenstein demonstrates with sequences from Oliver Twist) that is well attuned to illuminating modern urban life. Dickens, a “city artist,” as Eisenstein puts it,

was the first to bring factories, machines, and railways into literature [and his] ‘urbanism’…may be found not only in his thematic material, but also in that head-spinning tempo of changing impressions with which Dickens sketches the city in the form of a dynamic (montage) picture; and this montage of its rhythms conveys the sensations of the limits of speed at that time (1838), the sensation of a rushing stage coach.⁹

As a result of Dickens’s cinematic style, screen adaptations of his novels have managed, with subjective shots and compositions of images, to achieve “the kind of technical inflection of Dickensian prose” that renders his narratives compatible with the cinematic genre. For example, in David Lean’s film version of Great Expectations (1946), there is “an ambitiously distilled moment of subjectivity… . Succumbing to fever after the death of Magwich, Pip is disoriented in the London street by a heaving sea of glinting satin top hats.”¹⁰ Martin Scorsese seems to have picked up on that imagery. In his film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1993), there is a very similar scene. As the employees in the financial institutions on Wall Street pour out of their offices to head for lunch, Scorsese shoots them from the front. Approaching his still camera is a “sea of glinting satin top hats.” Scorsese, like Lean, exploits cinema’s spatial orientation and temporal play of moving images, which makes that genre even more apposite than literature for reproducing urban dynamics.¹¹ Cinema’s special capacity for capturing the city’s spatial structure and temporal flows are also very apparent in Franklin’s screen adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, to which I now return.

City politics versus urban theory

The “limits of speed” in Franklin’s Devil are based on twentieth century “automobility” because cars, rather than “a rushing stage coach,” are the primary conveyances throughout the film.¹² Franklin’s montage and sequence shots capture much of the rhythms and racial order of Los Angles, just as Dickens’s similar novelistic composition captures much of the rhythms and class order of London. The way the film captures that order is treated below. At this point, I want to extend the significance of Easy’s remark about the irrelevance for him and African Americans in general of a mid twentieth century Los Angeles mayoral election, an observation that challenges the “city politics” literature that emerged in the mid twentieth century in the discipline of political science. That literature (my initial introduction while a graduate student to analysing the city) was concerned with civic actors and was articulated as a series of behaviorally-oriented investigations that achieved widespread recognition during the 1960s growth period in the main approaches to cities by political scientists. The overall context for those studies was the then dominant political imaginary, a focus on the processes located in and flowing from a small space within the city, the mayor’s office, and on a limited model of political action, voting and other conventional forms of “political participation”.

In short, civic life for mainstream political scientists investigating power relations in cities in the mid twentieth century was largely quarantined within a politics associated with city governments. Banfield and Wilson’s influential text, City Politics (1963), which was centered on the mayor’s office, helped to inaugurate that tendency. Accompanying such city politics texts were the investigations and political and methodological quarrels in the “community power” literature, initially provoked by Robert Dahl et al.’s Who Governs (1961), which was in part a response to Floyd Hunter’s earlier Community Power Structure (1953). Dahl’s investigation addressed the issue of the city’s democratic performance, and it shaped many of the subsequent approaches to both democratic theory and city politics. The primary partisans on both sides of the “community power” debate, a controversy that was both ideological and methodological, featured those who saw a democratic pluralism emerging after investigating key decisions versus those who saw elite domination after investigating reputations. However, both sides retained an emphasis on the official politics involved in contests for office and influence over the policies emerging from those offices. Certainly the field has since broadened, as political scientists have focused increasingly on the activism of urban minorities.¹³ However for the most part, that discipline has remained committed to a narrow (often de Tocqueville-inspired) participatory model of politics. The struggles of marginalized people to manage their life worlds and the rhythms of moving bodies (often those that are politically disenfranchised) in, through, and out of urban spaces fail to gain disciplinary recognition as aspects of politically-relevant problematics.¹⁴

In juxtaposing novels, films, and “the arts” in general to the political/social science genre, I am offering an alternative approach to the power-city relationship. Although, as Jacques Rancière puts it, “literature [like the arts in general] does not perform political action, it does not create collective forms of action, it contributes to the reframing of forms of experience.”¹⁵ In effect, the arts often render thinkable aspect of politics that have been ignored. Krzysztof Ziarek puts it another way, using the imagery of force to emphasize the art’s non-representational effect: “Art refashions force in a way that allows relations to gain a momentum free of power, thus opening up that space of non-power. It is a relationality that ‘un-produces’ forces, demobilizing them into a constellation that, more radically than any counterpower, calls power into question.”¹⁶ To specify how art can enact such a non-power/power, Ziarek turns to Maurice Blanchot’s observations about the power of speech, which Blanchot sees as “the place of dispersion, disarranging and disarranging itself, dispersing and dispersing itself” to function as a kind of power – “a non power that would not be the simple negation of power” but would manifest itself as a “poiesis” and thus as a “speech of detour,” the “poetry in the turn of writing.”¹⁷ Blanchot adds that as long as “speech doesn’t become “petrified” such that it “returns to order,” as long as it “flees” from simply reestablishing the language of the order, it retains power-resisting, revolutionary potential.¹⁸ In my terms, the arts, when they refashion force relations, oppose a politics that is mired in the official language of macropolitical institutions and thereby provide an opening to the micropolitics of everyday life. As applied to the city, what the arts provide is less “urban theory” than an approach to cities that generate ways to think “the political.”¹⁹

The focus on participation in or attitudes toward the macropolitical processes involved with governmental recruitment and influence (or power) over policy making persists for those political scientists who carry on the behavioral orientation fashioned in the mid twentieth century. Robert D. Putnam’s analysis of civic traditions in contemporary Italy, in which he is concerned with what he calls “civic engagement,” is an exemplar of that orientation.²⁰ A meticulously executed investigation of a wide variety of Italian cities and regions, Putnam’s investigation yields inferences about the attitudinal and participatory bases of regional democratic institutions. His subjects (700 interviewees subjected to elaborate interview protocols) include “regional councilors,” “community leaders,” bankers and farm leaders, mayors and journalists, labor leaders and business representatives, as well as voters.²¹

Without going into the details of Putnam’s conclusions about varying degrees of democratic proclivity and institutional success in the cities of alternative Italian regions, I want to draw inspiration from his characterization of his investigatory narrative as a “detective tale” and contrast his macropolitical approach with that of one of Italy’s best known crime fiction writers, Leonardo Sciascia, whose novels “refashion force relations” as they treat the micropolitics of daily survival rather than the participatory “civic engagement” associated with orientations toward official political institutions. Sciascia’s version of Italian politics provides an especially appropriate contrast to Putnam’s because while Sciascia’s first crime novel, ...

Table of contents

• Interventions
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The now time(s) of the global city
• 3 Managing urban security
• 4 Neo-Noir and urban domesticity
• 5 Gothic Philadelphia
• 6 Bodies and the city
• 7 Walt Whitman and the ethnopoetics of New York488
• 8 Inter-city cinema
• Notes
• Index