Michael Shapiro -Geophilosophy Aesthetics and the City

8/22/2019 Michael Shapiro -Geophilosophy Aesthetics and the City

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Geophilosophy, Aesthetics, and the CityMichael J. Shapiro

Department of Political Science

University of Hawaii

The majority of the writers who have concerned themselves with

really modern subjects have tended to content themselves with thecertified, official subjects.

Charles Baudelaire1

Introduction: Dickens, Genre, and the CityChapter I of Charles Dickenss last complete novel Our Mutual Friendbegins with a

scene on Londons 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 SouthwarkBridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as

an autumn evening was closing in.2

Although one might suppose that the class coding of the city, which Dickens makes apparent in

scene after scene in Londons streets, homes, and public houses, are held in abeyance on its river,

the description of the boat as dirty and disreputable, makes it immediately apparent that thetwo 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

chance encounter, a signature event in city life. A competing boat of another corpse-searcher,Roger Riderhoods, pulls alongside at one point and provokes a conversation about the morality

of robbing the dead versus the living.

In Chapter II, the reader is introduced to a wholly different class venue. In contrast withthe 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,3

is the spick and span cleanliness of theabode 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 bran-new quarter of London. Everything about theVeneerings was spick and span new....

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The diversity of Londons class settings are thus made evident early in the novel. Thereafter,

encounters that link the venues are enacted as the novels composition shows itself to behomologous with aspects of nineteenth-century urban life. Dickenss writing reproduces a city of

aleatory events of encounter by imitating Londons architectural and labyrinthian structures and

temporal flows with the oft-repeated tropes and syntactical structures of his prose.5 In London,this genre effect was pervasive. By the time the Victorian novel appeared - and Dickens was themost 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 modernity...6

Because Dickens haunts almost every aspect of this writing project - an analysis of genre-cityrelationships as they articulate the micropolitics of urban life in diverse cities - I will be

summoning his contributions throughout this introduction, even as I begin with a cinematic

rather than a novelistic moment.

In Carl Franklins film version of Walter Mosley=s first detective novel,Devil in a Blue


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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 someones life. As the film proceeds, a series of micropoliticalevents 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 andproduces an investigatory trajectory with images that map much of mid twentieth century Los

Angeless racial-spatial order. Thematically, Easys 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 Easys 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 Dickenss main character in Great Expectations, Pip,

who has to negotiate Londons mid nineteenth century, contentious class order while hounded by

malicious characters and helped by friends.Dickenss and Franklins stories bear comparison genre-wise as well, for as the Russian

filmmaker/director, Sergei Eisenstein, has pointed out, Dickenss novelistic style was theprimary inspiration for the parallel editing, montage techniques pioneered in the films of D. W.

Griffith.7

Eisenstein shows how Dickenss writing is strikingly cinematic in its composition, a

montage style (which Eisenstein demonstrates with sequences from Oliver Twist) that is wellattuned 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 histhematic 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 itsrhythms conveys the sensations of the limits of speed at that time

(1838), the sensation of a rushing stage coach.8

As a result of Dickenss 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 Leans film version ofGreat 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.9

Martin Scorsese seems to havepicked up on that imagery. In his film adaptation of Edith Whartons 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 hisstill camera is a sea of glinting satin top hats. Scorsese, like Lean, exploits cinemas spatialorientation and temporal play of moving images, which makes that genre even more apposite

than literature for reproducing urban dynamics.10

Cinemas special capacity for revealing the

citys spatial structure and temporal flows are also very apparent in Franklins screen adaptationofDevil in a Blue Dress, to which I now return.

City Politics versus Urban TheoryThe limits of speed in FranklinsDevil are based on twentieth century automobility

because cars, rather than a rushing stage coach, are the primary conveyances throughout the


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film.11

Franklins montage and sequence shots capture much of the rhythms and racial order ofLos Angles, just as Dickenss 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 Easys remark about the irrelevance for him and African Americansin general of a mid twentieth century Los Angeles mayoral election. Easys observation can be

construed as a challenge to much of the city politics literature that emerged in the mid

twentieth century in the discipline of political science. That literature (my initial introductionwhile a graduate student to analyzing the city) was concerned with civic actors and was

articulated as a series of behaviorally-oriented investigations that achieved widespread

recognition during the 1960's growth period in the main approaches to cities by political

scientists. Framing those studies was the then dominant political imaginary, a focus on theprocesses located in and flowing from a small space within the city, the mayors office, and on a

limited model of political action, voting and other conventional forms ofApolitical 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 citygovernments. 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 textswere 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 earlierCommunity Power Structure (1953). Dahls investigation

addressed the issue of the citys democratic performance, and it shaped many of the subsequent

approaches to 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 Akey 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 fromthose offices. Certainly the field has since broadened, as political scientists have focused

increasingly on the activism of urban minorities.12

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.13

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

Ranciere puts it, literature [like the arts in general] does not perform political action, it does notcreate collective forms of action, it contributes to the reframing of forms of experience.

14As

a result, the arts render thinkable aspect of politics that have been ignored. Krzysztof Ziarek putsit another way, using the imagery of force to emphasize the arts non-representaiton effect: Artrefashions 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 unproduces forces, demobilizing them into

a constellation that, more radically than any counterpower, calls power into question.15

Tospecify how art can enact such a non-power/power, Ziarek turns to Maurice Blanchots

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 ofpower - a non power that would not be the simple negation of power but would manifest itself


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as a poiesis and thus as a speech of detour, the poetry in the turn of writing.16

Blanchotadds that as long as speech doesnt 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.17 In my terms, the arts, when they refashion force relations, oppose apolitics that is mired in the official language of macropolitical institutions and provide an

opening to the micropolitics of every day life.

The focus on participation in or attitudes toward the macropolitical processes involvedwith 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. Putnams analysis of civic traditions in contemporary Italy, in which he is

concerned with what he calls civic engagement, is an exemplar of that orientation.18

Ameticulously executed investigation of a wide variety of Italian cities and regions, Putnams

investigation yields inferences about the attitudinal and participatory bases of regional

democratic institutions. His subjects - seven hundred interviewees subjected to elaborate

interview protocols - include regional councilors, community leaders, bankers and farmleaders, mayors and journalists, labor leaders and business representatives, as well as voters.

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Without going into the details of Putnams conclusions about varying degrees ofdemocratic 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 Italys best known crime anddetective fiction writers, Leonardo Sciascia, whose crime 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. Sciascias version of Italianpolitics provides an especially appropriate contrast to Putnams because while Sciascias first

crime novel, The Day of the Owl, situates the political significance of the mafia,20

Putnam

devotes very little space to that organization (2 pages), treats it as politically irrelevant, and reliesprimarily on quotations from a variety of historical treatments, most which support his view that

the mafia thrives in places where trust and security is lacking because civic norms are weaklyarticulated.

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In contrast, Sciascia, who also writes a detective story (not metaphorically in his case),

and whose conceptual personae consist of a few invented characters, a police captain fromParma, and several Sicilians - police officials, political leaders, and others (some of whom are

mafia) who are implicated in a murder episode in a Sicilian city realizes that the mafia is a

politically relevant force, embedded within a complex set of opposing civic norms. Briefly, in

SciasciasDay of the Owl,a contractor who fails to pay mafia protection is murdered, and aCaptain Belodi from Parma in the North takes over the investigation, only to see the strong case

he has put together dissolve in the face of local resistance, as persons at various social levelsproduce fabricated alibis for those involved in the murder conspiracy.

In the process of inventing his detective story, Sciascia offers a more nuanced mafia-

implicated political account of Italian civic life than one can derive from Putnams brief and

dismissive inference that the mafia operates outside of civic culture rather than constituting partof it. For example, at one point in the novel, while Captain Belodi is interviewing an informer,

the reader is treated to the complex and contrasting political perspectives of Captain Belodi, an

Emilian from Parma [who by] family tradition and personal conviction [ is dedicated to] the law

of the republic, which safeguarded the liberty and justice, he served and enforced22

and his


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informer, Parrinieddu, who like others in his city is forced to balance mafia demands with thoseof the crime fighting establishment. Parrinieddu (nicknamed Little Priest...due to the easy

eloquence and hypocrisy he exuded)23

has a very different perspective on the law that Belodi

respects and zealously safeguards:To the informer the law was not a rational thing born of reason, but

something depending on a man, on the thoughts and the mood of

the man here [Belodi]...To him the law was utterly irrational,created on the spot by those in command....The informer had

never, could never have, believed that the law was definitely

codified and the same for all; for him between rich and poor,

between wise and ignorant, stood the guardians of the law whoonly used the strong arm on the poor; the rich they protected and

defended. It was like a barbed wire entanglement, a wall. The thief

who had done time, was involved with the mafia, negotiated

extortion loans and played the informer asked only to find a hole inthe wall, a gap in the barbed wire. If he did, he would soon raise

enough capital to open his little shop....24

By mobilizing an economically privileged public servant from a city in the more

prosperous North and staging an encounter between him and a mafia-serving former thief-

turned-informer from an impoverished, mafia-dominated city in the South, Sciascia provides aperspective on the political cultures of Italian regions that is fugitive within the interview

protocols that Putnam employs, region-by-region. Writing in a different genre whose method

involves imaginative inventions - in this case by one who has been experientially close to theobjects of analysis - Sciascias approach deploys an alternative political ontology. Instead of

locating the political within institutions and orientations toward those institutions, Sciascias

political ontology is founded on the centrality of encounter.25As a novel, a genre that M. M. Bakhtin has famously characterized in terms of its

heteroglossia (its contending voices), SciasciasDay of the Owl delivers a city whose moraleconomy is a subject of critical discursive contention and is thus an exemplar of a poiesis (a la

Blanchot) that flees from conventional or official versions of the life world.26

When Captain

Belodi arrests a mafia leader who is suspected of soliciting the murder, he is confronted by alocal interlocutor who challenges his model of the mafias role in politics and crime by

juxtaposing the discourse of justice as it emerges from centralized state authority with a sense

of justice, as it operates within his Sicilian city:...the Sicilian that I am and the reasonable man I claim to be rebel

against this injustice...Dyou know him [the alleged mafia head]? I

do. A good man, an exemplary father, an untiring worker...Certainmen inspire respect: for their qualities, their savoir-faire, theirfrankness, their flair for cordial relations, for friendship.... These

are heads of the mafia? Now heres something you dont know:

these men, the men public opinion calls the heads of the mafia,have one quality in common, a quality I would like to find in every

man, one which is enough to redeem anyone in the eyes of God - a

sense of justice...naturally, instinctively...And its this sense ofjustice which makes them inspire respect...

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Rather than staging such interactions, Putnams text, true to its social sciencemethodological conceits, essays a careful counting because, as he states, quantitative

techniques can correct misleading impressions derived from a single striking case or two.28

Putnams statistical rendering, which adds up his subjects to produce a view of the aggregatesupport for institutions, is nevertheless misleading. His approach glosses over the ideational

fault-lines that become evident when subjects are located within the densities of their regional

and city locales and are forced to defend their positions against alternative perspectives. Whileeach of Putnams subjects is a psychological/ideological subject, one with attitudes and beliefs,

Sciascias are aesthetic subjects, subjects that are invented less to reveal their psychic

orientations than to reveal the forces at work in the spaces within which they move and to

display the multiplicity of subject positions historically created within those spaces.29

Aestheticsubjects cannot be gathered arithmetically because their role is not to reflect individual attitudes

but to enact the complex political habitus within which they strive to manage responsibilities, to

flourish, or to merely survive.

Putnams analysis is thus insensitive to the politics of disparity that Sciascias novelisticapproach reveals. He employs what Ranciere calls a logic of identification, an arithmetic of

shopkeepers and barterers that equates the equality of anyone at all with anyone else.30

Incontrast, Sciascia - like Dickens whose London novels provided in-depth studies of the citys

diverse types over a century earlier - mobilizes a challenge to the statistical approach to citys

and regions civic life. As Efraim Sicher points out, the rival epistemologies, Dickenss in-depthtreatments of mobile characters and utilitarian-oriented statistical aggregations, were critically

evaluated by another 19th

century writer, George Eliot, who clearly sided with the former:

The tendency created by the splendid conquests of moderngeneralization, to believe that all social questions are merged in

economic science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors

may be settled by algebraic equations....none of these mistakes canco-exist with a real knowledge of the People, with a thorough

study of their habits, their ideas, their motives.31

Although, like Sciascia, Putnam is concerned with regional and local identities,

32he

derives those identities from homogeneously applied attitude scales of agreement or

disagreement with simplistic, preselected questionnaire protocols - for example the statement,In the distribution of income the workers are really in an unfavorable position (to which the

respondent can agree, disagree, etc).33

As a result, political culture for Putnam amounts to the

averages he derives by aggregating and scaling the responses. In contrast, Sciascias CaptainBelodis attempt to extract local support for his murder investigation leads him to an appreciation

of the fault-lines in Italian cultural politics, where the political culture of the southern city where

the murder takes place, a domain of political culture in which familial allegiance trumps state-sponsored norms, differs markedly from that in much of the North. Experiencing the contrast,Belodi comes to recognize that:

The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is

the family; counts that is to say, more as a dramatic juridicalcontract or bond than as a natural association based on affection.

The family is the Sicilians State. The State, as it is for us, is

extraneous to them. Merely a de facto entity based on force; anentity imposing taxes, military service, war, police.

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Rather than a survey of different levels of support for democratic institutions, where politics isderived from aggregating attitudes, Sciascias crime novel, with its Dickensian plot in which

what appears to be isolated and inscrutable is ultimately reseen as a web of connections,35

presents a critically-oriented politics of aesthetics, a metapolitical framing that points to a worldof competing worlds.

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If we heed the spatial mapping of Sciascias novel (its literary geography), we discover

that Sciascia, with a compositional strategy that Dickens helped to invent, unites spaces that inother genres remain disparate. As Franco Moretti has pointed out, in contrast with the nineteenth

century silver fork novels (e.g. those of Jane Austen) that generate a London whose dramas are

for the most part restricted to the West End, Dickenss stroke of genius [was to] unify the two

halves of London [the East and West Ends].37

For example in Our Mutual Friend(1865),Dickenss main character is caught between the fraudulent arrogance of the West End and the

physical violence of the docks [in Londons East End]. Similarly, Sciascias Captain Belodi is

caught between his northern habitus, a region governed by a respect for the laws impartiality,

and his Sicilian assignment in a political culture where the assumption is that authority hasnever had anything to do with justice or public service.

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Conventional political theorists have also failed to achieve an in-depth appreciation of themicropolitics of managing urban life-worlds that one can discern from the way novels treat

cities. Concerned like the community power partisans and neo-Tocquevilleans such as Putnam

with democratic performance, their paradigmatic model has been one inaugurated by Aristotleand recycled most famously by Hegel - the ancient city-state. Stephen Schneck summarizes this

tendency: A tacit Aristotelianism dominates most academic conceptualizations of the city and

constitutes an intellectual field within which questions of city are resolved. That field,constituted by a neo-Aristotelian focus on thepolis as a self-contained political community of

political animals, presumes that there are no [politically significant] persons beyond the walls of

the city. Incorporating this Aristotelian frame, many political theorists see as a historical crisisof the city, an attenuation of thepoliss constitutive solidarity, where once there had been a

purported harmony between civically-oriented human inclinations and collective well being.39

To cite an exemplary case, Richard Dagger construes the Greekpolis as the ideal political

community and suggests that the city-state was the proper breeding ground for citizenship

because it was an arena in which Aristotles conception of involvement in authority by agreeingto rule or be ruled was played out.

40By contrast, he sees the modern city as too large and

fragmented with no central locus of community that could provide citizens with a focus on their

civic responsibility. In addition, he laments the movement in an out of cities, which he sees ascontributing to a diminished sense of public responsibility.

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Daggers abstract Aristotelian ideals fails to engage a politics that one could realistically

apply to any modern city. His politics dwells in what Henri Lefebvre calls abstract space,which because it is formal and quantitative,....erases distinctions, as much as those which derivefrom nature and (historical) time as those which originate in the body (age, sex, ethnicity).

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Certainly Dagger is correct about the fragmentation to which he refers, but rather than

attempting to rethink the political in reaction to modernitys altered dynamics and topologies,he offers moral injunctions; his speculation turns to what he calls ethical citizenship. Instead of

analyzing the structures of inclusion and exclusion that are a consequence of the mobility that

creates the fragmentation in which many bodies are rendered as politically unqualified within thestandard citizenship discourse, he evokes a citizenship ethos that applies only to already qualified


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inhabitants and presumes a unitary referent; he suggests that as an ethical citizen, one shouldact with the interests ofthe community in mind

43(my emphasis). Such a citizenship, he adds,

would require a different city, one that is more settled and in some ways simpler than the

metropolis. Noting that citizenship may even presuppose some level of education and materialwell-being,

44Dagger effectively dismisses the political relevance of the forces producing and

sustaining inequality and the politics of survival associated with those who must cope with those

forces. In sum, he conjures away contemporary urban politics by seeing fragmentation as merelya pull away from the possibilities of an ethical citizenship whose referent is an ancient

regulative ideal that has no contemporary relevance.

A compelling contrast is provided by the way contemporary urban geographers construe

the fragmentation of the contemporary city. For example, recognizing that the contemporarycity is characterized by increasing divisions between rich and poor and the empowered and

disempowered, three urban geographers address the way those divisions are materialized, not

only in jobs, income, and residence, but also in the capacity of various groups to negotiate the

meandering corridors of healthcare, transport, pensions and other systemising networks. Theygo on to suggest a perspective on a politics from below that exceeds a narrow concern with

standard modes of political participation:Of course, to paint a broad-brush picture of the ruthless

socioeconomic outcomes that emerge out of present-day

inequalities vis-a-vis power, wealth-generating opportunity andsocio-spatial mobility could easily deny us the ontological capacity

to identify how some groups contrive spaces of escape or

counterspaces, whether economic, political, or cultural.45

The authors reference to an ontological capacity is central to the alternative to city

politics they offer, one that has been treated more elaborately by other urban geographers (for

example in urban theory, as it is developed by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift). Writing early inthe twenty first century, Amin and Thrift note that, In the last fifteen years, urban theory has

moved a considerable way towards recognizing the varied and plural nature of urbanlife...Contemporary urbanists, they write,

...note the juxtaposition of high-value added activities with new

kinds of informed activity, the co-presence of different classes,social groups, ethnies and cultures, the stark contrast between

riches and creativity and abject poverty, and the multiple

temporalities and spatialities of different urban livelihoods.46

As is the case with Amin and Thrift, my approach is inspired by the urban-oriented

geophilosophical idioms of Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre, as well as those of

contemporary urban theorists. Incorporating critical philosophies deployed on urban space, Iturn throughout my analyses to a variety of artistic genres in order to offer a geophilosophical,political ontology adequate to the modern city. A conceptual grasp of the politics of urban space

requires a distancing from the philosophical traditions from which the dominant political idioms

have emerged because the contemporary history of political philosophy has been intimatelyinvolved with state-level thinking. With notable exceptions, politically focused philosophical

idioms have tended toward what Jacques Derrida calls a Anational philosophism, a

preoccupation with the nation-state. Or as Pierre Bourdieu has put it, state thinking persistsbecause the state remains in the head of the theorist.

47In contrast, both Lefebvre and Benjamin


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focus on aspects of the life world that are outside of state-managed dynamics. They show howthe bodies within urban life exist and contentiously subsist within a dense and complexly

structured sensorium. To capture the urban dynamics to which their analyses refer, I am

concerned with literature, film, and other artistic genres within a politics of aesthetics orientedtoward body-city relationships, where some bodies (as Henri Lefebvre puts it) are engaged in

dressage, i.e., in merely conforming to the postures and routes officially prescribed, while

some are (in Deleuze and Guattaris terms) involved in lines of flight as they seek to escapethe authoritatively prescribed modes of urban subjectivity. I am also focused on particular sub

genres, for as Benjamin has shown, the movements of some exemplary bodies in cities (one of

his exemplars is the detective) best capture the rhythms and map the partitions of the city.48

For

example in his crime novel 32 Cadillacs, Joe Goress primary characters are gypsies and repomen whose clashes map San Franciscos divisive forces and render its diverse spaces and daily

rhythms intelligible.49

A perspective that analyzes rather than laments fragmentation must

recognize that within the urban milieu, there are (among others) two politically charged

dynamics at play in the citys partitioning: separations/barriers continually maintained bypolicing agents and events of repartitioning enacted by counter-agents - individuals and groups

involved in politicization and subjectification.One important contribution to a political framing of this force-counter force dynamic is

supplied by Ranciere, who offers a model of the political derived from events in which certain

expressive performances repartition experience, as formerly politically marginalizedassemblages engage in acts of subjectification, becoming political subjects by transforming

identities defined in the natural order of the allocations of functions.50

Their initiatives are

events in which a series of actions by a body and a capacity for enunciation not previouslyidentifiable within a given field of experience [results in a] reconfiguration of experience.

51One

of Rancieres most compelling illustrations of such a reconfiguration is in his investigation of

writing polemics inscribed in labor history in the nineteenth century France. He suggests thatworkers who stayed up late to write treatises about their work situation altered the sense of the

night while, at the same time, engaging in acts of subjectification. By using the night to writerather than rest, they effectively altered the identity within which the only the products of their

moving bodies were valued while their voices were deemed politically irrelevant: It [was]...a

matter of producing something other than the wrought objects in which the philosophy of thefuture sees the essence of man-the-producer being realized, at the price of losing some time in

the ownership of capital.52

Illustrationsof Intense, Politically Fraught Urban RhythmsAs Rancieres investigation of nineteenth century labor politics indicates, one need not

advance to a twenty first century urban formation to implement the kind of analysis described by

Amin and Thrift. Here, I return first to Carl Franklins film version of Walter MosleysDevil ina Blue Dress to treat the way a focus on Easy Rawlinss (Denzel Washingtons) moving bodyprovides a materialization of the urban theory to which Amin and Thrift refer. I return to the

film version of the novel because of the ways that film form - cross cutting, sequence shots,

montage, depth of focus, and facial close-ups (among other things) - is ideally suited to anurban-oriented mode of apprehending the political. Cinema can effectively reveal the

contingencies associated with what Nicolas Bourriaud (after Althusser) calls a materialism of

encounter53

; it can offer a visual dynamic that captures an aspect of the city that is central to theurban micropolitics with which I am concerned, animating a the city as a kind of force field of


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passions that associate and pulse bodies in particular ways.54

Thematically, as I noted earlier, Easy Rawlinss moving body inDevil effectively maps

the racial-spatial order of mid century Los Angeles. It is an order constituting what Robert

Crooks refers to as an urban frontier. Crooks suggests that the state violence that took place onthe U.S.s western frontier has shifted to urban frontiers - in his terms, a transformation of the

frontier from a moving western boundary into a relatively fixed partitioning of urban space....a

racial frontier, which he examines with readings of the African American crime stories ofChester Himes and Walter Mosley.

55If we consider the way Franklins version ofDevil

articulates that frontier cinematically rather than merely thematically, our attention has to be on

the way that frontier, articulated as a series of racial fault-lines, inflects Easys body rather than

on discursive representations of it.Amin and Thrift suggest that among the aspects of the body that articulate the city of

passions are hands and talk. With respect to the former, they state, Though we write

incessantly of a city of sight and screens, we forget the city of a forest of hands, picking their

way across keyboards, clicking mice, gripping steering wheels..., and with respect to the latter,they note that the city of a constant cacophony of talk....Cities hum with talk which is based on

shared conversational contexts in which categories and identities are constantly articulated.56

Certainly hands articulate important aspects of Los Angeles in FranklinsDevil,primarily as they

gripknives and guns. And just as certainly, talk is an important part of the film, for among other

things there is a diacritical crossing between black and white spaces where characters have toadjust their speaking styles as they recognize that discursive contexts are often not shared.

However, in order to show how Easys body negotiates that frontier or set of racial fault-lines,

my focus is on walking and other aspects of bodily comportment rather than on hands and talk.When the film opens, the first scene, after the credits are run, takes place in Joppys bar

in a black section of Los Angeles, where Easy is reading the want ads in the newspaper. Shortly

after he makes the already noted observation about the irrelevance of the mayoral election, Joppycalls to Easy to approach the bar to meet a Mr. Albright, a white guy who is seeking to hire an

African American to find a missing person - a presumably white woman (who it turns out isactually passing) named Daphne Monet who associates with African Americans and thus

frequents black sections of the city, where Albright cannot unobtrusively investigate. Clearly at

ease in black space, Easy walks toward the bar with a loose-limbed gate that is unambiguouslyidentifiable as a form of African American walking in spaces of comfort and safety.

Insert: Image of Easy Walking toward the bar

Easys walk to the bar to meet Mr. Albright has especially strong resonance when

contrasted with the posture he manifests in a flashback, shortly before that moment. While he isseated, reading the newspaper want ads because he has lost his job in a aircraft assembly plant,

there is a cut to his encounter with the plant foreman, a Mr. Giacomo, whose contemptuous bodylanguage contrasts with Easys importuning. Easy stands stiffly at attention, literally with hat inhand, as he tries unsuccessfully to convince Mr. Giacomo to give him back his job. In the novel

version of the story, Mosley has Easy describing the factory as a reproduction of the slave era

plantation. In the film version, the-factory-as-plantation-space is articulated through the bodylanguages of the foreman and his (former) employee. It is only once he is back in black space

that Easy moves in a loose-limbed, comfortable way.

Insert: Easy and Mr. Giacomo

However, after Easy decides to take on Albrights job, he is forced out of the comfort zones of


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black Los Angeles. Early in the drama, over Easys protest, Albright arranges a meeting at theMalibu pier, a quintessentially white space, where, upon his arrival, Easy, walks stiffly and

warily, with a turned up collar and eyes shifting right and left. Despite his wariness, Easy gets

into an ugly encounter with white racist teenagers from which Albright extracts him in a brutalsequence, drawing his gun and threatening and beating one of Easys antagonists.

Insert: Easy on the Malibu Pier

As Easy pursues the task of trying to locate Daphne Monet, he becomes caught betweenAlbrights brutality and that of the police, who charge him with a murder. However, once he

becomes aware of the capital he has because of his ability to move about in black space to find

Daphne Monet, who is sought by two mayoral candidates and Albright (who pretends to work

for one while actually working for the other), his walk, even in white space, takes on a differentcharacter. When he goes to visit Todd Carter, Daphnes estranged boyfriend, we see an Easy,

dressed in a sharp looking suit and tie, striding confidently into the mansion of the richest man

in Los Angeles (according to Easys voice-over), where he gains access to Carter after telling a

secretary, who initially tries to turn him away, that he knows the whereabouts of Carterschippie who dumped him.

Insert: Easy approaching Todd Carters mansionFinally, once Easy has found (and rescued) Daphne, solved the murder case, and put his life in

order (with the solvency he gains from Carters payoff for finding Daphne), we see again the

wholly comfortable Easy in the black space of his neighborhood, walking again with hiscomfortable, loose limbed gate.

Inserts: Easy back in his neighborhood

There is a particular force with considerable historical depth that motivates Easysdynamic mapping of LAs racial-spatial order. He is struggle to hold onto his property. As I have

noted elsewhere, both the novel and film versions of MosleysDevil in a Blue Dress are

addressed to a crucial historical shift in the African American experience as it is reflected inAfrican American aesthetic productions. In addition to the black-white encounters that the story

enacts is the encounter with economic signs. As Houston A. Baker Jr has insisted: All AfricanAmerican creativity has addressed itself to a crucial historical shift.

57The characters in their

stories seek to effect the historical transition from having been, or having descended from

people who were commodities to being economically effective actors who can managecommodities,

58While the African American struggle to remain economically viable in U. S.

Cities remains a dominant reality of urban politics, there are other struggles that have been and

continue to be pervasive aspects of political encounter in urban space. Treating a literaryexample, Philip Fisher suggests that a classical nineteenth-century form, the novel of entrance

[features] the individual immigrant biography [in a way that] condenses the slower, less

recordable transition of the society as a whole. And once again, it is Dickens who pioneers suchan illustration; Fisher refers among other works to Dickenss Great Expectations, as a novel ofentrance.

59

In order to register the way the immigrant experience is also a significant aspect of

contemporary urban micropolitics, I turn here to a second film, which effectively updatesDickenss London by cutting between spaces of economic and legal marginality and spaces of

privilege, Stephen FrearssDirty Pretty Things (2002). Dirty is a film that articulates an

immigrant experience with the multiplicity of life worlds that constitutes the micropolitics ofurban space. Rather than the flows from the English countryside into London, which are among


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Dickenss primary story vehicles, the flows inDirty are from outside the UK. InDirty, it is aflow of refugees whose illegal statuses render them vulnerable to exploitation. The difference

between the two flows is made evident inDirtys opening and closing scenes. While Dickens

novels often focus on domestic train travel - for example in Dombey and Son (1946), whichfocuses extensively on the way the railway alters aspect of city life - Frearss opening and

closing scenes take place at Londons Heathrow Airport. Two refugees in particular become

implicated in a structure of exploitation, Okwe, a Nigerian Doctor, who drives a cab by day (andis seen hustling taxi customers at Heathrow in the opening scene) and works as a hotel desk clerk

at night with no legal status, and Senay, a Turkish hotel worker who has resident status but no

work permit, share an apartment where they have to hide from immigration authorities. Learning

of their illegal statuses and about Okwes medical expertise, the hotel manager, Senior Juan (akaSneaky), offers to trade them valid looking passports in exchange for Okwe harvesting one of

Senays kidneys which Sneaky wants to sell as part of the illegal organ trade he runs from his

hotel. Senior Juan trades legal identity papers for assistance in harvesting organs, which he then

sells to privileged clients. Leaving London, where they are pursued by immigration authoritieshad become a necessity for Okwe and Senay. As Moretti points out, a very large number of

characters leave London at the end of Dickenss novels because London cannot provide aplausible setting for a happy ending.

60The situation is the same for Frearss characters inDirty.

AndDirtys rendering of London is reminiscent of the way the city is produced in nineteenth

century Victorian novels such as Dickenss Our Mutual Friend. A complex set of relationsdevelop spatially and temporally as characters from diverse parts of the city are brought into

encounters. Moreover cinema has a special capacity with respect to space, which is well utilized

by Frears. Its moving images are such that space loses privileged directions and thus exceedsany particular locus of perception.

61In Deleuzes terms, the cinemas screen is superior to the

brain as screen because it allows for the recovery of what individual perceptions tend to

evacuate.62Visuality is also as central to the Dickens aesthetic as it is to film. Thus, as in some

Dickens novels, for example hisBleak House (1852-53), the realism that is obtained in FrearssDirty is the kind achieved by Dickens, who effectively remov[es] housetops in order to see the

private lives played out beneath them [a feature that] register[s] their presence in the world

through sight.63

Just as in film, whose primary vehicle for rendering reality is images, so withDickens, it is images that are a primary aesthetic. As Nancy Armstrong points out, by the mid

nineteenth-century, Dickenss novels had begun to offer certain kind of visual descriptions as

the most direct access to the real (and her primary example here is Bleak House).64

TheDickens text, she adds, offers the reader a truth that is hidden and must be seen before the

world can become legible as such.65

What becomes legible in Dirty are the exploitation

opportunities taken by those who prey on a vulnerable labor force of illegal migrants. Theconcept of the hidden has special resonance when one compares the Dickens text with FrearssDirty. At one point in the film, Senay says to Okwe, were invisible. Along with Juliette, a

Jamaican prostitute who works in the hotel at night (and says at one point, I dont exist), they

represent a segment of British life, swelling in proportion yearly, that exists on the exploitablemargins of the nation.

66And similarly, after Okwe discovers the illegal organ trade operating in

the Baltic Hotel where he works and ponders a possible reaction, his friend, the forensic

mortician, Guo, reminds him of his situation: Okwe, you dont have a position here. You havenothing; you are nothing.


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The macropolitical reaction in the UK (as elsewhere) to refugees is well known. As thewriter/director ofDirty, Stephen Frears, puts it, the government sort of whips up fears in the rest

of England, as though these people have two heads or something, theres no attempt to explain

the problem...its just assumed that theyre crooks or terrorists.67 Frearss film is effectively acounter-power event. Its images and a storyline delivers compassion and critical insight, while

showing that the London that offers hospitality to tourists and business travelers obscures a

London that exploits vulnerable in-migrants. That part of London is revealed primarily by thetrajectory of Okwes moving body. Because he is a cab driver by day, his daily trajectory of

movement, shown with sequence shots of street scenes, back allies, and commercial

establishments, provides some of the contrasts and interconnections of Londons marginal and

privileged venues. However, the scenes in the Baltic Hotel, where Okwe works nights are moretelling with respect of the contemporary political reality of a global city that harbors illegal and

thus exploitable immigrants and refugees. By effectively taking the roof off the Hotel (just as

Dickens does with his houses and other buildings), Frears displays the stark contrast between the

two London flows to which I have referred - that of privileged travelers and that of exploitablerefugees. On the one hand is the hotel lobby, a space in which privileged travelers congregate

without having to worry about the hotels surveillance cameras, which function (at least in part)to guarantee their security. On the other are the surveilled spaces of the employees where video

and other modes of surveillance constitute threats (Frears emphasizes the hotels surveillance by

including shots taken through the surveillance cameras).After one of Okwes daytime encounters at the minicab office that employs him, the film

cuts to his other London place of employment and begins with a framing shot of the front of the

Baltic Hotel, complete with a uniformed Slavic doorman, Ivan, who greets guests during the dayand helps to manage the more clandestine operations of the hotel at night. It becomes clear as the

film narrative progresses that what is out front is only one presentation of ethnicity and one

aspect of the architecture of a hotel whose different spaces involve an ethnic and classpartitioning. Okwes movements within the hotel map the more hidden spaces of the staff, for

example the basement, where the lockers for the non white staff - maids and deskman are. Thoseless visible parts of the hotel - some of the rooms, the basement, the kitchen, and the parking

garage - provide the telling contrast with the lobby where guests are seen freely entering and

leaving, in contrast with Okwe and Senay, who are constantly hiding from raids by immigrationofficials.

Here again, we can note a parallel with the Dickens aesthetic. For Dickens, buildings are

often a character in his plots (most notably in hisBleak House) and, more generally, the

intelligibility of Dickenss London is partly articulated through his architectural foci, forexample the way he disrupts the fixed, and with it that identity of domestic stability, with

images of the house in transition (in Our Mutual Friend).68 Similarly, the composition of shotsof the Baltic Hotel, which separate the relatively freely moving bodies of the guests from thesuborned bodies of vulnerable refugees and immigrants, makes the hotel a key character in the

plot. By heeding Sergei Eisensteins observations of the articulation between architecture and

cinematic montage, we can become sensitive to the role of the hotel in which much of the actionin the film takes place. Like Eisenstein, for whom architecture ...is one of the underlying motifs

in [his] films. ...,69

for Frears, the Baltic Hotel is at least as important a character as is its

manager, Senior Juan.In the case of Dickens, whose London novels were sent chapter-by-chapter through the


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mails, his nineteenth-century writings were effectively serial events through which Londonreaders got images of a city that showed aspects of class immiseration about which they were

only slowly becoming aware because the age of photography had arrived.70

Frearss film is a

contemporary event that reveals up-close images of exploited and endangered lives in the city -in this case connected to global trajectories of movement - that are not apparent to most

residents, tourists, and business visitors who sample only the more upscale services of the city.

Among what is shared in Dickens novels and Frearss film is the way the city imposes whatJonathan Crary calls a crisis of attention resulting from the emergence of a social, urban,

psychic, industrial field, increasingly saturated with sensory input.71

As is well known, it was

Georg Simmel who famously described the psychic demands that the modern city levies on its

inhabitants:The rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in

the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing

impression. These are the psychological conditions which the

metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempoand multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city

sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life withreference to the sensory foundations of modern life.

72

However, Simmels formulation, which focuses on a generalized psychological

condition, is insensitive to the inequalities of positioning within the city. A political grasp of themanagement of the citys hyperstimulating sensorium requires us modify Simmels general

ascriptions with respect to mental life within the city by recognizing that different characters face

different levels of demand for attention. Dickenss Our Mutual Friendconveys such a politicalgrasp at the very outset. In Chapter one, the corpse-seeking boatman, Gaffer Hexam, whose

economic survival depends on the demanding task of finding bodies in a large murky river where

the bottom is not visible, is described as looking with a most intent and searching gaze, as wellas having to be on the lookout for competing corpse searchers, who threaten both his livelihood

and well being.73

In contrast, the attention stakes for the characters in Chapter Two, assembled ata dinner party thrown by the Veneerings, are considerably lower. Risking only social

embarrassment, they have to be alert to those whom they are addressing in order to deliver the

appropriate levels of recognition and deference. For example, arriving as one of the guests, Mr.Podsnap mistakenly and very deferentially greats Mr. Tremlow, assuming that he is the host, Mr

Veneering. Seeking to save the situation, Podsnaps wife, unable to originate a mistake on her

own account...does her best in the way of handsomely supporting her husbands by looking

toward Mr. Tremlow with a plaintive countenance and remarking to Mrs. Veneering [the onlyother witness to the gaff] in a feeling manner, that she fears he has been rather bilious of late..

74

FrearssDirtyprovides a similar juxtaposition. The attention stakes are very high for theOkwe and Senay. In their apartment, at the Baltic Hotel, and moving about the city, they have tododge encounters with the surveillance personnel from the immigration authority and must hide

their statuses to employers (who exploit them, once their backgrounds and statuses are known).

In the scenes at the Baltic Hotel, we see a striking contrast. On the one hand are the illegalworkers, Okwe and Senay, who have severe demands on their attention to their environment.

They have to be furtively on the lookout for danger, while masking their fear with expressionless

social presentations. On the other are the hotel guests passing through the lobby, who need beattentive only to social forms. They can, as Siegfried Kracauer puts it, comfortably disappear


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behind the peripheral equality of social masks.75

Thus just as Dickenss juxtapositions providesa micropolitics of urban survival for differentiated class characters in Our Mutual Friend,

FrearssDirty provides a micropolitics of urban survival for differential flows of types in and out

of London. The issue I want therefore to pursue is the realism afforded by such artistic genreswith respect to disclosing a politics of urban space.

Realism and GenreGeorge Levines observations on the real effect in Dickenss novels, discerned from a

reading ofSketches by Boz (where Dickens remarks, in the first sketch, How much is conveyed

in those two short words - The Parish) capture much of the Dickens aesthetic. Levine suggests

that it is in that particular piece that Dickens can be seen learning his craft by learning how to

give the particular and ordinary resonances traditionally to be found in the universals of anearlier philosophy and literature. Levine continues, referring to Dickens impatience with

limits (i.e., with small details that must be transcended to derive a larger significance) and

stating:

Crude as Dickenss method may be, the means of transcendinglimits is the exploration of the known as though it were unknown.

Dickens will not merely copy the parish; he will see it with afreshness and clarity that will at once make it recognizable to the

new popular audience who might take it seriously as a subject, and

transform it. The particular, under the pressure of intense andoriginal seeing, gives back the intensities normally associated with

larger scale, traditional forms [e.g., the relationship of religious

organization to other social formations].76

Recalling the opening chapters ofOur Mutual Friend, it is evident that the close-up

details of Dickenss treatment of Gaffer Hexam and his daughter, Lizzie, on the Thames, and the

immediate juxtaposition of the dinner party at the Veneerings, speak to a larger scale issue, theinequalities of economic positioning in London. Dickenss rich and detailed descriptions of his

characters - the shabby and the genteel (to use his words)77

- provide such colorful imagerythey can distract the reader form the larger significance of his juxtapositions. At the beginning ofOur Mutual Friend, the corpse fisher, Gaffer Hexam, a strong man with raged grizzled hair,

and his daughter Lizzie, a dark girl of nineteen or twenty,78

engage in a tense standoff that isinstructive about the coercively paternal nature of their family economy. Lizzie, who dreads the

nature of their work, refuses to move near the body at the stern of the boat so Gaffer can take

over the rowing. He resumes his seat and says, Its my belief that you hate the sight of the very

river, to which she responds, I - I do not like it father. He then rejoins with a reminder abouttheir livelihood: As if it wasnt your living! As if it wasnt meat and drink to you!

79

Cut to Chapter 2, where the Veneerings are throwing a banquet (in which, among others,there are fish and rice pudding courses), and where the genteel guests are not among those whohave to wonder where their next meal is coming from. As the banquet scene unfolds, the reader

is treated to another kind of economic frame that unties a father and daughter. Mortimer

Lightwood, a young solicitor and attorney is in attendance, telling a story about a man namedHarmon, who had chosen a husband for his daughter, entirely to his own satisfaction and not in

the least to hers, and proceeded to settle upon her, as her marriage portion I dont know how

much Dust [Harmon is a dust contractor].80

Although Mortimers point is about morality - herefers to how Harmon had anathemized and turned her out on learning that she had already


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gotten secretly engaged to Another81

- what Dickens achieves by dint of the contrast in thefather-daughter economies of Chapters 1 and 2 is a gloss on the alternative forces shaping the

familial economies among the shabby versus the genteel. The shabby, Hexam, had struggled

to survive on human remains, while the genteel, Harmon, had made a fortune as a contractor onanother form of refuse, dust. And in the case of the former, the daughter works within the family,

for as was typical in the poorer classes at the time, family space and work space tended to

coincide and constitute the only economic option for grown or growing children. In the case ofthe latter, a daughter is to be married off in order that she might maintain the level of class

privilege she enjoyed as a child while, at the same time, helping through a within-class marriage,

to maintain the familys reputational standing, which is crucial to class maintenance.

Ultimately, if one attends to the compositional strategy of the novel, Dickenss London isshown not only to contain different types of characters but also to contain different kinds of

family economies, both operating within a micropolitics of patriarchal constraints. What is

added, given that it is a city novel, is that the dramas attending the structurally constrained fates

of the characters are also affected by the shocks of uncontrolled and unanticipated encountersthat urban life affords. In Our Mutual Friendthe Thames River is the one of the primary spaces

of encounter. The body that Gaffer Hexam finds is thought to be that of John Harmon, who wasto inherit the Harmon fortune. That (false) discovery drives some of the novels narrative

threads. In the case of FrearssDirty, the Baltic Hotel is the space of the most significant

encounters. Senior Juans traffic in illegal organs creates the connections between the exploitablehotel workers and the privileged classes his trade serves. Therefore, as is the case with Dickenss

novelistic version of nineteenth-century London, Frearss cinematic strategy transcends its

particular characters to provide instruction about the micropolitics of twenty first-centuryLondon. In both cases, a city novel and a city film, the yield is a politics of aesthetics that, like

the city itself, privileges the encounter.

Yet there is a significant difference between the way politics is figured in FrearssDirtyas compared with Dickenss Our Mutual Friend. In the latter, as in all Dickenss novels,

characters remain in character, and political instruction results from the way Dickens articulatesthem with the city as a stratified entity where cross-class relations take on a reality that is

fugitive in other novelistic genres. In FrearssDirty, a politics emerges as a result of the way his

characters, Okwe, Senay, Juliet and Guo step out of their character roles to collaborate. Okwe,with the others help, drugs Senior Juan and harvests his kidney to sell instead of following the

arrangement in which it is Senays kidney that is to be traded for the passports that will allow

Okwe and Senay to leave their entrapment in London, where they have no legitimate presence.

As I put it elsewhere:The action by Okwe and his collaborators constitutes an event of

what Ranciere calls subjectification. They become politicalsubjects by transforming identities defined in the natural order ofthe allocation of functions,

82because politics (as opposed to the

policing by those who control policy) occurs during those events

that involve a series of actions by a body and a capacity forenunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of

experience [with the result that the action creates a]

reconfiguration of experience.83

Conclusion: Poiesis as Method


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About a world you dont construct some theory but your own poem.Jacques Ranciere

The story is just a little song, and its the way its played thats important.

Robert Altman (about his film Kansas City)

Although neither Charles Dickens nor Stephen Frears is known as a political philosopher,

both their versions of London go well beyond merely reproducing the citys characters and thebundles of sensations they experience. By dint of their composition of images, their texts think

politically. In this conclusion, I want to provide some instruction on the way my strategy works

in summoning and analyzing such artistic texts, here and in subsequent chapters, in order to

illuminate the politics of urban space. At a general level, my approach accords with NicholasBourriauds concept of relational aesthetics within which the city is treated in terms of the

states of encounter it proposes.84

However, because my treatment of the aesthetics of

relationships in the city are politically and philosophically framed, I want to note the relationship

between that framing and the literary and cinematic readings I offer. To do so, I am borrowingthe concept of philopoesis developed in Cesare Casarinos methodological manifesto, where

he writes, Philopoesis names a certain discontinuous and refractive interference betweenphilosophy and literature.

85

To elaborate on that refractive interference, Casarino, following Deleuze and Guattaris

classification of the functioning of genres, sees philosophy [as an] art of forming, inventing,and fabricating concepts, while the arts, literature among others, involve the production of a

bloc of sensations...a compound of percepts and affects.86

The interference concept belongs

to Deleuze, who puts it this way, reflecting on the philosophy-cinema relationship (at the end ofhis second cinema book):

...philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object.

It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts,and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which

it interferes. A theory of cinema is not about cinema but aboutthe concepts that cinema gives rise to....It is at the level of the

interference of many practices that things happen, beings, images,

concepts, all the kinds of events.87

How can we render the methodological concept of interference politically? Casarino states that

in questioning each other, philosophy and literature put the whole world into question. This is

why a philopoetic discourse is at once a political and ontological investigation....88

And he goeson to suggest that both Marx and Melville inquire into the political nature of being precisely

because the former found it necessary to depart from the practice of philosophy and the latter

from the practice of literature in order to experiment with whole new worlds of writing andthought.

89Turning to Deleuzes observations on the disjunctions between forms of

knowledge, Casarino notes the way thinking becomes possible precisely because the

interference between the genres opens up emergent potentialities that disrupt the status quo of

the history of forms.90

Ranciere offers a similar gloss on the interface of philosophical andartistic genres. For him, a politically oriented aesthetics of knowledge requires indisciplinary

thought,91

the kind of thought that breaks disciplines in order to deprivilege the distribution of

(disciplinary) territories that control who is qualified to speak about what.92

The indisciplarityor poetics of knowledge that Ranciere invokes, like Casarinos philopoesis, disturbs the


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familiar divisions of knowledge.For my purposes, two implications derive from the two forms of poiesis, Casarinos

philopoesis and Rancieres poetics of knowledge. The first impacts on my object of analysis, the

city. Inasmuch as, like the city, the arts are bundles of intensities and sensations, to interfere, i.e.,to impose politico-philosophical concepts on those intensities and sensations (for example my

imposition of the concept of attention to Frearss film and Dickenss novel) is to invite thinking

about urban micropolitics. The second locates my method, which is already implied in theRanciere epigraph to this conclusion. I am not offering a theory of the city. Rather, I am offering

a poetics of the city, a series of interventions that figure the city by composing encounters

between artistic texts and conceptual frames - effectively art-knowledge encounters. A remark by

Deleuze offers continual inspiration for that task: Something in the world forces us to think.This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.

93My poetic

encounters - the ways I figure and compose the materials in diverse genres - are attempts to

illuminate aspects of the actual encounters that constitute the micropolitics of urban life worlds.


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1 The Baudelaire quotation is in W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, trans. H. Zohn (New

York: Verso, 1997), 78.

2 C. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend(New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1.

3Ibid.

4Ibid., p. 6.

5 The quotation and general suggestion of the parallel between city-as-event and writing-as-

event is indebted to J. Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to

Dickens (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), 143.

6 The quotation is from E. Sicher,Reading the City, Rereading Dickens: Representations,

The Novel, and urban Realism (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 11.

7 S. Eisenstein, Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today, in Essays in Film Theory, trans.J.

Leyda (New York: Meridian, 1957), p. 214.

8Ibid., pp. 216-217.

9 The quotations are from G. Stewart, Framed Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2007), 259.

10 See for example D. B. Clarke ed. The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), in M.

Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice eds. Cinema and the City: Film and urban

Societies in a Global Context(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice eds.

Screening the City (London: Verso, 2005), and B. Mennel, Cities and Cinema (London:

Routledge, 2008).

11 On contemporary automobility, see N.Thrift, Driving in the City, Theory, Culture &

Society 21(October, 2004), 41-59 and J. Urry, The System of Automobility, Theory,


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Culture & Society 21: (2004), 25-39.

12 This tendency, at least in the political science discipline, is exemplified in R. P. Browning, D.

R. Marshall, and D. Tabb, Protest is not Enough: The Struggle of Blacks and Hispanics for

Equality in Urban Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

13 Exemplary of this orientation is Robert Putnams well known analysis in his Bowling Alone to

which I have rendered a critical response. See M. J. Shapiro, "Bowling Blind:

Post-Liberal Civil Society and the Worlds of Neo-Tocquevillean Social Theory," Theory

& Event1:1 (1997). In contrast with Putnams requirement for civic activism is the approach

of Stephen Haymes, who argues that the mere "territorial maintenance and integrity of black

settlements" has been a form of "civic association." S. Haymes, Race, Culture, and the

City (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 70.

14J. Ranciere, A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Ranciere, Parallax 15 (2009), 122.

15 See K. Ziarek, The Force of Art(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 51.

16 See M. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1993), 23.

17Ibid.

18 R. D. Putnam,Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

19Ibid.,p. 13.

20 See L. Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, trans. A. Colquhoun and A. Oliver (New York: New

York Review, 2003).

21 Putnam,Making Democracy Work, 146.


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21

22 Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, 30.

23Ibid.

24Ibid., 29.

25 The quotation is from A. Amin and N. Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Malden.

MA: Polity, 2002), 31. They note that their ontology of the city resists the static

conception of community characteristic of much of the urban literature, treats

communities in process which cannot be entirely fixed in space, and operates within a

moral economy that assumes such a space.

26 For Bakhtins treatment of the novel, see M. Bakhtin, Discourse and the Novel, in The

Dialogic Imagination,trans. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259-

422.

27 Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, 62-63.


29 I treat the aesthetic versus the psychological subject elsewhere. See M. J. Shapiro, Cinematic

Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 2009), 12.

30 See J. Ranciere, Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization, October61 (992), 15.

31 George Eliot, quoted in Sicher,Rereading the City, Rereading Dickens, 6.


33Ibid., 31.

34 Sciascia, The day of the Owl, 95.

35 The quotations are from Philip Fishers treatment of the way the city emerges in Victorian

novels: P. Fisher, City Matters: City Minds, in J. Buckley ed. The Worlds of Victorian


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Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 375.

36 The quotation is from J. Ranciere, The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and

Aesthetics, Paper presented at the conference, Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques

Ranciere and the Political, London, Goldsmiths College September 16-17, 2003, 6. I refer to

the framing as metapolitical in agreement with Rancieres remark that the politics of

aesthetics is not true politics, it must be distinguished from the form of political

subjectivization. But on the other hand, this metapolitics continuously interferes in politics

and contributes to weaving the fabric of the political its words, images, attitudes, forms of

sensibility, etc,: Ranciere, A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Ranciere, 122.

37 F. Moretti,Atlas of the European Novel: 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 16.

38 The quotation is from G. Scialabia, Introduction to Sciascias The Day of the Owl, ix.

39 See S. Schneck, City and Village, in Urbanization and Values, J. Kromkowski and G. F.

McLean, eds. http://www.crvp.org/book/Series01/I-5/chapter_xv.htm (8.8.2007).

40 See R. Dagger, Metropolis, memory and citizenship, in E. F. Isin ed.Democracy,

Citizenship and the Global City (NY Routledge: 2000), 27.

41 Ibid., 32.

42 H. Lefebvre, The production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA:

Blackwell, 1991), 49.

43 Ibid.

44Ibid., 39.

45 G. Macleod, M. Raco and K. Ward, Negotiating the Contemporary City: Introduction,

Urban Studies 40 (2003), 657.


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46 A. Amin and N. Thrift, Cities:Reimagining the Urban (Malden. MA: Polity, 2002), 8.

47 See P. Bourdieu, Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,

in Practice Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 40.

48 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 42-44.

49 See J. Gores, 32 Cadillacs (New York: Warner Books, 1992). For an extended analysis of

Goress crime novel, see M. J. Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity:National Culture and

the Politics of the Family (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 68-71.

50 J. Ranciere,Dis-agreementtrans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1999), 36.

51 Ibid., 35.

52 J. Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth-Century France , trans.

J. Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 8.

53 N. Bourriaud,Relational Aesthetics, trans. S. Pleasance and F. Woods (Paris, les presses du

reel, 2002), 18.

54 The quotation belongs to Amin and Thrift,Reimagining the Urban, 84.

55 See R. Crooks, From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester

Himes and Walter Mosley, College Literature 22 (1995), 68-91.

56 Amin and Thrift,Reimagining the Urban, 86-87.

57 See H. A. Baker, Jr. Figurations for a New American Literary History, in S. Berkovitch and

M. Jehlen eds.Ideology and Classic American Literature (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 1986), 160.

58 The quotation is from M. J. Shapiro,Deforming American Political Thought: Ethnicity,


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Facticity, and Genre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 46.

59 Fisher, City Matters: City Minds, 372.

60 Moretti,Atlas of the European Novel, 123.

61 The quotation is from J. Ranciere, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (New York: Berg,

2006), 265.

62 See G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres, 1986), 58.

63 The quotation is from Peter Brookss remarks about the nature of Balzacs and Dickenss

versions of novelistic realism in P. Brooks,Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2005), 3.

64 N. Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography,Narrative 7: 1 (January, 1999), 38.

65Ibid., 40.

66 The quoted remark is from a review of the film: The citys secret heartbeat, on the web at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/12/13/bfss13.xml. Obtained

6/30/07.

67 From an interview conducted by C. Lucia in Cineaste 28, 2003, quoted in S. Gibson, The

Hotel Business is About Strangers, Border Politics and the Hospitable Spaces in Stephen

FrearssDirty Pretty Things, Third Text20, (2006), 698.

68 The quotation is from Wolfrey, Writing London, 145.

69 The quotation is from Y-A. Bois, Introduction to Eisenstein, Montage and Architecture in

S. M. Eisenstein, Montage and Architecture, trans. M. Glenny, Assemblage 10 (1989), 13.

70 See Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 40.


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71 J. Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1999), 47.

72 The quotation is from G. Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, in K. Wolff ed. The

Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: The Free Press, 1950). I am quoting it from

a contemporary analysis on modernitys hyperstimuli: B. Singer, Modernity, Hyperstimulus,

and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism, in L. Charney and V. R. Schwartz eds. Cinema and

the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 73, which

acknowledges its debt to Simmels original formulation of the phenomenon.

73 Dickens, our Mutual Friend, 1.

74Ibid., 8.

75 S. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 19995), 181.

76 G. Levine, The Realist Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady

Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 13.

77 See C. Dickens, Sketches by Boz ed. M. Slater (Columbus: Ohio State University

Press, 1994), 261-64. In this section, Dickens is referring to characters who are

peculiar to London, those who combine class appearances and are shabby-genteel.

78 Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1.

79Ibid., 3.

80Ibid., 13.

81Ibid., 3-4.

82 The quotation is from J. Ranciere,Dis-agreement, trans J. Rose (Minneapolis:


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University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 36.

83 The quotation is fromIbid., p. 35. The passage as a whole is from Shapiro, Cinematic

Geopolitics, 106.

84 Bourriaud,Relational Aesthetics, p. 16.

85 C. Casarino, Philopoesis: A Theoretico-Methodological Manifesto, boundary 2 (2002), 86.

86Ibid., 67. The internal quotations are from G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is

Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994).

87 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2 trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1989), 280.

88 Casarino, Philopoesis, 78.

89Ibid., 79.

90Ibid., 73. The quotation from Deleuze is from G. Deleuze, Foucault, trans. S. Hand

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 86.

91 See J. Ranciere, Thinking Between Disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge,

Parrhesia 1 (2006), 1-12.

92 See the interview with Ranciere inArt & Research 2 (2008), on the web at

http://www,artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1jrinterview.html. Obtained 6/23/2009.

93G. Deleuze,Difference and Repetition trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1994),139.

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Michael Shapiro -Geophilosophy Aesthetics and the City