Narrating the city
Narration is the essence of life. The instruments which make narrative possible are rooted in a geographically situated world. A rich spatial lexicon provides the foundation for rich narrative, which in turn supports strong personal identity. Such identity is expressed through the characterization of the self, enriched by confrontation with an often radically different other. This is the essence of an urban environment. Our consumer world segments experience in a way which facilitates receptiveness to consumer stimuli appealing to a false sense of individuality. Giorgio Agamben (2007) urges us to take individual self-realization seriously, to go beyond superficial appearances. We must free ourselves from mass serialization. Richard Sennet (2008) notes that disorder is fundamental in allowing us to achieve a full personal identity. Cities provide the context for constructive disorder where real citizens strive to perfect their human condition. But modern cities represent an increasingly sanitized setting with weakened capacity to stimulate new reflection on the self and the other. Real cities instead revolve around experiences shared in the public arena. Yet these cities have long been under media attack: in modern cities fear, loathing and privatism all go hand in hand (Lofland, 2009:143).
Ingold (2002) provides compelling evidence of how the operation of viewing space and moving through it involves a visual praxis where cultural knowledge and operational activities are inseparable. Narration is a key element in this visual praxis. Space as an encoded medium allows us to externalize a situated understanding of ourselves in a world we can never understand in a detached way. In advanced industrial societies, our spatial vision is invariably naturalized in ways reflecting the society of the spectacle Guy Debord (1994) theorized. Multiple scopic frameworks shape our vision in ways that reflect ideological, technological, ethnic and other biases (Appadurai, 1996). Ed Soja (1996) notes that these forces lack spatial uniformity, being strongest at the socio-political center of urban environments, and weaker at the perimeter. This geographical reality liberates the spatial margins from governing stereotypes, freeing narrative's creative potential.
The dominant vision of the shared spatial world dissimulates its biases and naturalizes contrived claims. The capacity to resist the dominant vision is what this book explores. The setting is Rome viewed through multiple lenses. One lens is furnished by selected writings and films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, expressing a geographically nuanced narrative style sometimes referred to as environmental literature (Brown and Re, 2008). Strong attention to locational minutiae furnishes a means to evade the center's control, challenging dominant stereotypes, and encouraging reflection on how to interpret competing visions of the physically grounded world. The second lens is provided by the narratives of ordinary citizens living in the urban periphery. A final lens is provided by artists who celebrate perimetral cultural autonomy. These various lenses encourage us to question the idea that space is irrelevant. Ed Soja (1996) speaks of a three-dimensional human ontology: the historical, the sociological and the spatial. None exists without the other.
Life only exists in the telling
This book puts into words experiences gleaned in many years of studying Rome, especially the Roman periphery. I have taught an abundance of courses on urban ethnography, guiding students in exercises that document the experience of the city as a physical place (Smith et al., 2014; Smith, 2017). I have also taught a host of courses on the sociology of Rome, using a perspective drawing significantly from Pier Paolo Pasolini. In these years I have strengthened my conviction that difference in the manner of experiencing and narrating the physical world, between an ordinary citizen and a celebrated author and filmmaker, is one of degree not kind. The narrative strategies implemented by an acclaimed artist are more sophisticated than those deployed by the ordinary city dweller. But the structures of experience and narration are the same. The human trajectory unfolds in a physical world the characteristics of which constitute an active ingredient in narrative used to express experience and identity.
Narration is a universal human proclivity used to define the boundaries of shared consciousness (Ochs and Capps, 2009). Something that cannot be narrated has limited existential claim. Language is the privileged narrative vector, and numerous linguistic studies have devoted attention to the construction of space in narrative. One of the most impressive is Modan's (2007) linguistic ethnography showing how community members of an American inner city construct place through spoken discourse, structuring a moral and social geography with powerful political implications. In a similar vein, Scollon and Scollon (2003) furnish the outline for a discipline they term ‘geosemiotics.’ As the name suggests, the approach is concerned with the way spatial elements are given relevance in linguistic exchanges. Their interests embrace the language used to describe space, and the social dynamics involved in deploying these descriptions. They divide their investigation into various dimensions. Visual semiotics concerns a grammar of representing meaning potential within a scopic frame. Place semiotics pertains to the broader physical context, ‘mountains and rivers, oceans and deserts, cities and farms’ (Scollon and Scollon, 2003:19). Interactional semiotics describes negotiated interpretations of the objective world. All of these elements establish a sophisticated framework for orienting the exploration of geographically situated narrative.
These compelling linguistic studies describe the physical world as a reservoir of meaning potential given life through human agency. This is a classical orientation within the social sciences; things lack agency, and can only be given sociological life through human activity. An orthodox Marxist standpoint would view any effort to attribute agency to things as being the result of an over-determined relationship between the individual and the things possessed.1 This overdetermined relationship is a hallmark feature of advanced industrial society. Recent social theory, however, has advocated the necessity to go beyond this conceptualization, and posit a world where things have their own meaning-generating capacity, exactly as they have their own agency. I have in mind contemporary approaches to environmental studies, which reconfigure the conventional relationship between human actors and the physical world. Bruno Latour in particular suggests that a sociology of things can exist on the same level as a sociology of people. The social can denote ‘a type of connection between things that are not themselves social’ (Latour, 2007:5). Things and places can be connected among themselves, like they can be connected to people and communities. Seen in this perspective, the material world is not a passive object, but a social actor with independent agency and personality. This new sociology of people and things identifies the agents of social action as actants, which can be people, things or even concepts. Each element is an active ingredient in a shifting social configuration. Each is multifaceted, changing, quixotic; interaction among them yields multiple interpretations and outcomes. In this setting, it is impossible to separate society and things, subject and object. One is embedded in the other. In Latourian terms, the society of things is complementary to that of human subjects. Human language has no monopoly over meaning-generating potential; there is also the language of physical reality.
A useful concept to capture this complex and shifting relationship between people, places and things, is the assemblage, a term first used by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to denote a bringing together of apparently disconnected parts. The assemblage is an ever-changing entity fusing together the most abstract social forces with the intimate depths of human experience. The contemporary relevance of this concept in the context of the city has been explored by Colin McFarlane (2011), who writes of learning assemblages as fluid and mutually-reinforcing forms of knowledge and practices forged by modern reality dwellers. In the life of the city, there are no predetermined links, no fixed process; every momentary understanding is the product of a dynamic conflict-ridden process. The assemblage captures the fluid character of the context in which contemporary narrative must be assessed. It is a living element given a quality of apparent fixity through the interaction of people, concepts and things in a historically and geographically given setting. Assemblages are spatially grounded and strongly constrained by power relations and narrative structures (McFarlane, 2011:27). Territorialization is an important element, as is deterritorialization. This is precisely what we find here: the territory in all of its expressions has altered over long periods of time. In parallel with this transformation are changing patterns of narration with deep spatial roots. In Rome the narrative turning point occurred at the time of Pasolini's writings, when a new voice transfigured a long-standing negative assessment of the periphery. The modern celebration of the periphery emerges from the dynamics of this assemblage.
Citizens give expression to assemblages in their narrative constructions. These constructions include daily exchanges, stories and accounts, street art and musical production. A complex and enigmatic figure like Pier Paolo Pasolini fits well in the narrative context described here. He came from Bologna, but is widely acclaimed as the bard of the Roman periphery. He termed himself a militant communist, but was not a militant in any party. He defined himself as a Marxist, but had a strong idealist inspiration. He claimed to observe the world with scientific impartiality, yet simultaneously professed to be a poet. He enunciated a belief in a world of natural language, yet transformed our material understanding of the world through a combination of penetrating ethnographic documentation and the poetic redefinition of place. Pasolini is celebrated as a realist, but was no crass materialist. He is a supreme narrator and a master of the assemblage. He is a critical figure in our understanding of the Roman periphery, which has a complex life of its own, with an independent capacity to impose meaning on its residents. The periphery is an actant within a composite assemblage whose reception as a meaningful element in human experience has been decisively influenced by a poetic vision which Pasolini (2005) called a form of heretical empiricism.
The sacred as narrative trope
An idea of the civic sacred permeates the writings of Pasolini as it does the narrative of ordinary citizens when discussing the Roman periphery. One dimension of the civic sacred revolves around the intrinsic character of the human condition, also understood as a physical presence. Another dimension, linked to the first, concerns the sacralizing potential of human sociability. A third dimension is the sacrality of place. The idea of the sacred derives from a religious context, but goes beyond this realm in its civic expression.
Pasolini was an atheist with a fascination for religion, and was active in debate which surrounded the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s (Subini, 2007:63). The debate focused on definitions of the sacred. On the one hand was the notion of sacramental purity, whereby liturgical practices define the sacred. On the other was the sheer sacrality of the human condition, understood both as an individual outside of society, and as a person living their intrinsic social condition. The latter was an innovative contribution made by progressive forces in Catholic debate. Before Vatican II the sacred could be narrowly restricted to the confines of religious practice. Afterward, the church recognized humankind's inalienable social character. One of the key documents produced in the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes, identifies the sacred quality of the individual while also calling attention to the sacred quality of the human community (Pope Paul VI, 1965:10). Even more important, was John XXIII's Pacem in terris (Pope John XXIII, 2014), which sets out the terms of what would later become Liberation Theology, ultimately ushering in collaboration between Catholic and Marxist-inspired political philosophy.
That the sacred can attach equally to the individual or their social condition finds support in the philosophical writings of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben claims that the sacred in the absolute pertains to the homo sacer, the pure human living outside the congregation (cf. Vighi, 2003:108). Exclusion is the fou...
