Reviewed by Catherine Scheelar, University of Alberta.

In Sound, Space, and the City, anthropologist Marina Peterson explores the process of center-making in Los Angeles through multicultural performance in public space. Positing her work as an ‘anthropology of the center’, of the city rather than in the city, she traces how meaning is made in and around public performances. Based on ethnographic research from 2001 to 2003, her study observes embodied musical practices that constitute the imagining and making of a multicultural city. A free concert series, Grand Performances is situated in the contexts of historical and contemporary urban planning, artistic programming, and the city as lived and imagined.

Acknowledging that ideas of the social sciences seep into everyday life, she challenges the situatedness of disciplinary knowledge and the locations in which anthropological theory has been developed and applied. Grand Performances came into being as a multicultural arts and music project including ethnicity (but excluding class and political affiliations) for the construction of a general, neutral ‘public’, an audience as both a representation and a synecdoche of the city. She draws links between international performance and downtown development, exploring the politics of multiculturalism as part of wider social and political frameworks enacted on municipal, state, and national levels. In recounting her personal experiences of working in the organization and performing onstage with the DaKAH hip hop orchestra, she uses personal narratives and sensual descriptions of experiencing California Plaza.

The concerts are representations of a city imagined and made in practice, as Los Angeles has been perceived as a city lacking real civic life and a central space where people can come together as a public. The history of the space highlights the dynamics of gentrification; the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project removed unruly bodies, replacing particular people with a general public, both activating and cleansing the urban space. California Plaza now exists as private property on public land, the area’s former blight covered with modern sculptures. With ethnicized neighbourhoods surrounding it, the purported neutrality of downtown is brought into being through practice which supports diversity as a normative feature of city. As a civic institution, Grand Performances creates audience members as civic subjects as spaces of belonging are created through inclusion and exclusion. Peterson cites Lefebvre in discussing the urban public as both sonic and spatial processes of the city, as social and musical rhythms are heard and felt in the body.

Are the arts integral to urban growth in the twentieth century? Pederson places Grand Performances in the context of historical American debates about art as an educational medium for the public good and worthy of state support. In analyzing the practice of centre-making through the arts, she acknowledges the imagined public of the city, the interests of the corporate plaza, and the reality of government grant guidelines. Defining the free concerts as nonprofits for the education of the public good shapes meanings of art through intersections of programming, funding, and marketing. Performances are always planned, wavering between a public openness and fear of the public. Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is invoked to discuss the disciplining of bodies, construction of consensus, and exclusion of class necessary for a multicultural audience watching a performance of ethnicity. Political performances are also generally excluded for divisive potentialities in the civic space of consensus.

The global city is sounded through media with translocal media spaces acting as motivators of activities, allowing ethnic media to market international programming. The city is in motion, as people and sounds circulate within and between neighbourhoods. Neighbourhood names act as code for social groups in an ethnicized geography, and the success or failure of performances is largely based on the range of ethnic diversity in the audience.

In looking at the tenents of democracy such as representation, recognition, and participation, Peterson explores the relationship between performance and politics, as the neoliberal trope of diversity shows openness to difference, helping to alleviate violence and tensions. While music is a medium for belonging, signifying race, politics, age, etc., cosmopolitanism allows for shifting affiliations in identity-in-process. Modernist notions of neutrality allow for multiple interpretations and claims to higher abstractions. Peterson devotes much space to hip hop orchestra DaKAH, which she purports exists as a musical and social mixture, embodying Los Angeles through the diversity of its members. She asserts that the musical group fosters intergenerational understanding through combining hip hop and orchestra. Civic performance aims to foster spatial and social proximity through music. Genre is negotiatied over musical and social boundaries, with identification understood as mobile processes of becoming.

In a movement from the self to the collective, an audience is constituted through an embodied experience of listening and dancing together, fulfilling urban ideals of diversity through affective, participatiory, and sensory channels. Through sound engineering, sonic and spatial intimacy and proximity are felt in the body. Durkheim’s theory of ritual designates the body as the subjective site where experience generates a collective. Peterson asserts that utopic versions of society are drawn from and necessary for the social; the ideal society is not outside of society but rather already a part of it. Foucault is mentioned in the discussion of the individual body as the locus of aspirations, through which beliefs must be continually performed in order to sustain social beliefs. At Grand Performances, a dancing audience is a sign of approval, as individuals engage in the public performance of a private, affective response.

In concise and accessible language, Peterson successfully highlights parallels between actual multicultural performances and the ideal global city. While she briefly mentions that Grand Performance’s events are outside of everyday life and time, an ideal, ephemeral state counter to the norm, she makes no mention of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s anthropological theories of liminality. Overall though, this work is beneficial to both students and scholars interested in social relations and diversity, public space, urban revitalization, civic life, privatization, suburbanization, and economic and cultural globalization.

- Catherine Scheelar

Reviewed by Randi Nixon, University of Alberta (Canada).

Affect has been used in increasingly diffuse ways in various academic discourses; cultural studies, feminist theory, postcolonial theory and several other theoretical strains interested in the social realm have been exploring the possibilities and implications of theorizing affect. However, while affect indeed possesses great theoretical possibilities, elaboration into exactly how the term can be put to work as an analytical tool in theorizing social and political phenomena has largely been absent from the discussion. In Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, John Protevi attempts to ground affect by developing the concept using a variety of theoretical resources. In doing so, he adds insight into how affect can be used to delve deeper into understanding the interconnectedness of the social, the political, the physiological, and the personal.

An impressive and somewhat daunting theoretical complexity is established early on in the book. The first part “A Concept of Bodies Politic” is dedicated to carefully defining and clarifying his concepts. Part II “Bodies Politic as Organisms” further situates his analysis within a long philosophical history by putting Deleuze’s assertion, “the organism is the judgment of God” into a metatheoretical conversation with the work of Aristotle and Kant. The last section of the book “Love, Rage, and Fear” is where the reader finally begins to see the application and relevance of his theoretico-philosophical concepts.

Suffragettes Vote, New York 1917 (thanks to joshiejuice.com).

Protevi bases his analysis around four key concepts which he continuously weaves throughout his case studies: affective cognition, bodies politic, political cognition and political affect. The term affect has many usages; however, in good Deleuzian faith, Protevi follows Spinoza and stresses the ecosocial embeddedness of affect by defining it as a “body’s ability to act and be acted upon”, both in the sense of physiological change or being affected by an encounter with an object, as well as a “felt change in the power of the body” (49). Drawing from work in affective neuroscience, Protevi utilizes the term “affective cognition” to stress that affect does not work alone, but constitutes bodies politic, and is thus inherently political and wrapped up in relations of power (50). The term “bodies politic” means to capture the emergent, embodied and embedded character of both subjects and other systems; in other words, it encompasses how systems (including subjects) are simultaneously produced, bypassed and surpassed in the workings of somatic and social systems (33). While the concept of the “bodies politic” conceptualizes systems (individual, social or other) as tending toward stereotyped behaviour patterns, Protevi stresses the openness of these systems, and their mutual capacity to break and develop new patterns of behaviour. We see this best illustrated in his discussion of the bodies politic Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris (the Columbine shooters) created, which enabled them to maintain their subjectivities throughout the act of killing (158).

Through utilizing “political cognition” the author can to refer to the ways in which affective cognitions of individuals are triggered and shaped through politically shaped categories (ie. race, class, gender), reiterating the complex interconnections that exist between subjects, groups and politics (33). Lastly, the term “political affect” stresses the historically and socially embedded aspect of affective cognition, through acknowledgment that individual bodies politic understand situations through collective political categories, thereby connecting the sense-making of both the individual and larger social networks (35). Protevi maintains the sheer complexity of events such as Hurricane Katrina and takes nothing for granted; the elements (sun, wind, water), history (histories of slave revolt and racial tensions), politics (how the state and media responded and triggered these racial fears), and physiology (how both the people of Lousiana and the rest of the nation affectively responded) all impacted the events that led up to and took place after the hurricane.

Protevi draws on several disciplines to ground his cases. While this may result in what some would consider metatheoretical incoherence, the very nature of his problematic necessitates the usage of several ways of knowing as conceptualized by various disciplines. What is noteworthy about this work is the authors’ ontological standpoint, constructed by altering Deleuze’s thermodynamic register in order to make it compatible with complexity theory (11). His Deleuzian materialism is evident in his insistence on open systems, processes and social practice. The poststructural approach to subjectivity indicates that he is cognizant of the ways that embodied subjects are historically formed through discourse, which indicates that he does not believe that there is an ultimate “truth” within or about the subject. His focus on unconscious affective processes (within the subject, group and polity) further indicates his resistance to perspectives that equate experience/emotion with Truth.

By carefully distinguishing affective cognition and political affect from emotion, he exposes the ways that the social and discursive are implicated in the constitution of our thoughts and feelings. That being said, this does not mean that we are completely predetermined (both complexity theory and Deleuze stress the importance of “the new”, “becoming” and “lines of flight” specifically to avoid this kind of reductionism), but that our personal “truths” are in part a function of complex discursive, historical, political and physiological formations.

The book carries an urgency, which is clearly indicated by the case studies examined; choosing to discuss group affective cognition through the Columbine High School shooting and civil affective cognition using Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that for Protevi, the implications of being unaware of the workings of affect can have devastating human consequences. Reference to Fransisco Varela’s “Reflections on the Chilean Civil War” reiterate the point that without the possibility of emergence or the capacity for mutual recognition, many lives can be lost in horrific ways (44). In order to avoid such circumstances, Protevi asserts that adopting “relativistic fallibility” is vital. The notion of “relativistic fallibility” delineates the ability to maintain one’s perspectives while at the same time acknowledging that they are only one of a multitude, are not the Truth, and ultimately have the capacity to be undone. Protevi states that “we have to beware of the tendency toward fixation, especially when we are being forced into stereotyped roles that make possible the regulation and reproduction of unjust social dynamics” (45). Political affect then, is intimately tied up with ethics. Thus, asking how power is tied up in our collective affects may illuminate several aspects of how our social world is organized, and how appalling inequalities can be justified and maintained.

Political Affect is an ambitious work that does not compromise its complexity in an effort to increase readership. Protevi puts Deleuze to work with relevancy and vigour rarely seen by tending to the multiplicity of forces that simultaneously play a role in actualizing events (for example, in his analysis of Hurricane Katrina, not only does he examine the role played by racial triggers and the mainstream media, but also the forces of the sun, river, man-made levees, and the history of Haitian slave revolts). For those interested in Deleuze, affect, or the ways bodies are implicated in and connected to several seemingly disconnected forces, this book is a must read. While the multidisciplinary focus of the book works to strengthen the analytical potency, it could also potentially alienate readers first approaching such topics. However, for the reader looking for depth and a challenge, this book is worth the work.

- Randi

Reviewed by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Department of Sociology, University of Trento (IT)

After the catastrophic events that hit Japan, and particularly in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, a large scale debate about the sustainability of our energetic, economic and even civilizational model is badly needed. Such a huge task which is before us, and which calls for a general rethinking of our ecological approaches and aspirations, could perhaps start from some spatial and environmental insights that Japanese thought itself has transmitted to us.

The collection of short essays reviewed here provides an excellent introduction to the work of the French geographer and orientalist Augustin Berque (born in 1942), who has devoted most of his life to an exploration of Japanese thought and culture, with particular reference to its peculiar spatial and environmental attitudes. Not much of Berque’s oeuvre is available to English readers, yet his major theoretical works (Berque 2000a, 2000b) can be said to engage a dialogue with Japanese philosophical tradition in order to develop reflections that are more widely applicable to the contemporary world, rather than a merely philological reconstruction of certain sources – an intellectual project that somehow recalls what François Jullien has done with Chinese thought.

[CC image credit: Traditional houses in Ogimachi by Guillaume Brialon]

In a larger work that appeared nearly at the same time as the collection on milieu and human identity, Berque (2010) has explored the notion of the ‘ideal habitat’ and has questioned the contemporary transformation and sustainability of that ideal. In these shorter essays, written during the last ten years, the focus is rather on the notions of landscape, milieu, common heritage and identity. Starting from the acknowledgement that western modernity has produced a grave disequilibrium in the relation between the human species and the world – as landscape devastation, waste of natural resources and the many aberrations in the design of the urban built environment testify – the author advances a distinction between a western conception of landscape, pivoted around the subject, and an eastern conception, which instead focuses on the predicate–the latter logic being best represented by Nishida Kitarô’s basho no ronri, or logic of place, a text from 1966.

On the one hand, the author observes, an analysis of the Chinese Zong Bing’s (375-443) classic treaty on landscape painting (Shan Shui) shows a rising awareness of the spiritual dimensions of landscape many centuries before the western notion we employ was conceived during the Italian Renaissance period; on the other hand, in Japanese haiku poetry not only is the subject implicit, but there are verbal forms without a veritable subject. This latter fact should not be taken as a sign of abstraction of space from place; quite the contrary, Japanese sensibility remains extremely grounded in the ‘emplaced’ presences that ‘people a place’. For one of the most important Japanese philosophers of the twentieth century, Watsuji Tetsurô (who was born in 1889, the same year as Heidegger and Wittgenstein), the crucial notion of fûdo, or human milieu, can be found. To stress the fact that, contrary to a superficial impression, Watsuji’s notion does not entail a deterministic approach (i.e., the idea that the climate determines the mores and ethos of a people), Berque proposes to translate fûdo as médiance, meaning something that simultaneously mediates and is in the middle of the relation between a society and its environment. To be true, Berque also rejects the notion of environment as too objectivist, and prefers to speak of milieu, a concept which inherently entails a point of view from within on such a relationship.

The major argument running through the various essays of the book is that it is all the more urgent today to retrieve our perception of the horizon that surrounds us in order to give meaning to the scale of our actions. From this perspective, Berque speaks of ecoumène to address the phenomenon of the birth of a plurality of life-worlds through progressive unfolding and development of milieus. Hence, if the médiance is an always local and ‘emplaced’ relation between humans and their milieu, a reciprocal ‘absorption’ between a place and its inhabitants, the ecoumène is the human relation to the geographic extension of the planet at large. The ecoumène can be contrasted to the ‘cyborg landscape’, which the author criticises as landscape based on a mechanistic view which determines a detachment (débrayage) of people from their household (foyer), their horizon, and ultimately from the earth. Some further important insights ‘for a surpassing of modernity’ might also come from a comparative examination of the notion of heritage (patrimoine) in the East and in the West: in this respect, the author reflects, the traditional Japanese approach might help us to escape from the false alternative between mummification versus demolition of landscape which has characterised the Western approach to common heritage.

Perhaps Berque’s approach remains in many senses stuck to certain overall dichotomies, which might ultimately undermine his arguments. However, as suggested at the outset, a serious discussion on the human ecological relationship to the environment is so necessary today that all contributions attempting to open new perspectives – for instance, as in this case, through cross-cultural analysis of spatial concepts – should be greeted as most welcome.

References
Berque, Augustin (2000a) Écoumène. Introduction à l’étude des milieux humains. Paris: Belin.
Berque, Augustin (2000b) Médiance. De milieux en paysages. Paris: Belin.
Berque, Augustin (2010) Histoire de l’habitat idéal. De l’Orient vers l’Occident. Paris: Félin.

More information about Augustin Berque
Augustin Berque, Directeur d’études, EHESS
Augustin Berque – Wikipédia
Ecoumene

Reviewed by Patrick McLane, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta (CA)

François Cooren’s masterfully synthetic Action and Agency in Dialogue brings Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory together with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction to generate a unique perspective on discourse analysis. From Derrida (1988) Cooren takes the ideas that figures of speech cannot be isolated from their literal meanings and that action cannot be reduced to actors’ intentions. From Latour (2005) he gets the notion that humans are not the only actors.

[Image credit: Patrick McLane]

This combination leads Cooren to focus on how nonhumans (institutions, texts, principles, objects, etc.) are active in dialogue. He argues that when people say ‘the memo dictates’ or ‘the lights alerted the burglar’ researchers should not supplant the memo with its author or disregard the lights in looking for the person who turned them on. The way action is attributed makes a difference with regards to findings of responsibility and opportunities for intervention. For example, to say ‘the hot coffee burned Denis’ invites inquiry into the temperature of the beverage and the way it was served (as in the notorious case of Liebeck v. McDonald’s). To say ‘Denis burned himself with his coffee’ still reports that Denis was burned and that a cup of coffee was involved but invites evaluations of Denis’ wakefulness and competence (162-163).

Likewise, saying ‘the jealous wife killed him’ is not the same as saying ‘jealousy struck again.’ As such Cooren writes that we should attend to how things like jealousy, scalding coffee and other people become present and active in our conversations (61, 76). How does jealousy take credit for something like a murder, lifting the burden off psychosis, culture and perhaps even the murderous lover? How is poor Denis made a klutz who needs his coffee served cold?

Action and Agency in Dialogue speaks to the importance of space and culture in understanding attributions of responsibility by prompting us to consider how material objects, virtual actors and human agents support, excuse and implicate one another. The book would be an excellent text for an advanced qualitative methods course. Students will be encouraged to think critically about what it means to act and how agency is distributed while being introduced to major thinkers ranging from John L. Austin through Harold Garfinkel and Michel Foucault. It is also a must read for those of us who think Latour and Derrida should be put to work together.

The book’s only fault is in its choice of examples. Cooren relies on fragments of talk recorded during ethnographic research with Medecins sans Frontiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These call for more comprehensive analysis than is accorded to them as illustrations of the book’s theoretical points. For instance, commentary on the role of racial or colonialist prejudice in conversations between MSF administrators and African hospital staff is absent. Cooren explains that his three days in the field did not allow him to grasp subtle forms of discrimination (120) and he compensates for this with a useful discussion of the ways other authors have studied ethnocentrism through conversation analysis (113-121). However, it seems to me that by applying his novel ideas on action and agency to issues like prejudice Cooren would better show their applicability to everyday talk and utility for sociological research.

References

Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stella Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, P.T.S., Inc. and McDonald’s International, Inc. 1995 WL 360309 (D.N.M. 1994).

Reviewed by Marcel LaFlamme, Department of Anthropology, Rice University (US)

On the first Monday of September, the townspeople of Hegins, Pennsylvania would assemble in the park to kill pigeons. Birds rounded up in the railyards of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were transported to Hegins by the crate, where they would be blasted out of the air by shotgun-toting sportsmen. By the early 1990s, when anthropologist Hoon Song began his fieldwork in Hegins, animal rights activists were descending on the pigeon shoot in droves; the apparent senselessness of the killing inspired in them a passion, Song writes, “unmatched by the plight of a million cows” (19). Yet the fervor of the protesters and the ensuing media circus seemed only to fuel the brutality: as the television cameras rolled, ecstatic onlookers decapitated the wounded birds with a flick of the wrist, squashed their bodies underfoot, and even smeared their children’s upturned faces with fresh pigeon blood.

[cc photo credit: Mohd Hafizuddin Husin]

The field, as Song finds it in Pigeon Trouble, is already mediatized, spectacularized, and Song’s informants are powerfully aware of their presence in the representations of others. The protesters have no illusions about winning converts in Hegins; rather, their yearly appearance allows them to gather visual and narrative “raw material” (33) for an audience of supporters who are understood to be elsewhere. The resulting newsletters and direct mailings make Hegins available for consumption as an otherwise inaccessible space of rural depravity. Meanwhile, the working-class hooligans who delight in baiting the out-of-towners also run home during the shoot to monitor the news coverage as it unfolds. Song emphasizes the lapse of time between the moment of being seen in the park and the moment of mediated seeing on the TV screen, a temporal lag that might have been eliminated if the shoot had continued into the smartphone era. As it is, the shoot was canceled in 1999 under threat of litigation, meaning that Pigeon Trouble is, among other things, a record of historically and technologically contingent modalities of “seeing oneself seeing” (205).

Anthropology, as a discipline, fancies itself particularly savvy about the politics of seeing oneself seeing, and the so-called reflexive turn of the 1980s did usher in a new attention to the positionality of the fieldworker. Yet Song is openly skeptical about reflexivity as a textual technique that, by offering some additional context, somehow renders representation unproblematic. “The gaze of power is confessed to have been…coincident with the anthropologist,” he writes, “and the reflexive anthropologist volunteers to capture the heretofore invisible anthropological eye ‘from behind’” (208). But where is this “from behind,” he wonders, and what are the ethical and ontological stakes of occupying it? Song’s rejection of such a space of transcendence both informs and grows out of his own experience of foreignness in Hegins: as a Korean in a mostly white community with little enthusiasm for immigrants, as a shy, birdphobic intellectual more at ease with “people of the kitchen” (68) than the gruff, homosocial world of the pigeon killers. Song does gain a remarkable degree of access to the private gun clubs and drinking establishments where the sportsmen would congregate. Yet he remains, irredeemably, an outsider, and he uses this experience of apartness to link the problem of the ethnographer to the problem of the animal.

Song acknowledges the appeal of a “representationalist” reading of the Hegins pigeon shoot, in which racial violence or economic malaise are displaced onto the body of the pigeon. This, in a sense, was the logic mobilized by then-candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he infamously suggested that people in small-town Pennsylvania “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…as a way to explain their frustrations.” The line was political poison for Obama, but Song suggests that this line of thinking also reifies the very social formations that anthropologists are out to understand. To that end, Song sets out to ask “not what animals are ‘about’ positively and legibly but what they are negatively and illegibly; not the end product of how we render them legible with human meaning but the illegible gulf or difference that facilitates such a reading in the first place” (149). Indeed, Song concludes that this gulf may separate ethnographer and informant just as surely as human and animal. Therefore, for Song, sociality consists not in a shared experience of intersubjectivity or creaturely life. Rather, it consists in “a willing submission to dislocation and desubjectification, that is, a becoming-object to the Other’s gaze” (212). This radical renunciation of the subject’s sovereignty is, for Song, the beginning of ethics. It is a measure of what we owe one another.

Pigeon Trouble suffers, at times, from theoretical digressions that stray far from the lifeworld of Hegins, Pennsylvania. It is as though Song’s dense prose threatens to give way to the “ruins of speech” (119) that he ascribes to his conspiracy-minded informants. Still, the book remains an ethnographically rich and formally ambitious account of a rural community caught in broader webs of signification. It also comes as close as any book I know to offering a phenomenological account of a bird in flight, drawing on Song’s apprenticeship with an enigmatic pigeon trainer named Monk. Through Monk’s eyes, across the species divide, we glimpse the darkness of the trap into which the pigeons are placed, the murmur of the crowd, and then the release into a violent, dazzling brightness.

Reviewed by Andrew Karvonen, Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester (UK)

In past three decades, actor-network theory (ANT) has infiltrated a wide range of theories, methods, and empirical studies throughout the social sciences and humanities by rejecting conventional ontological and epistemological assumptions in exchange for a relational perspective. And at long last, a compendium has arrived that is solely devoted to ANT and the study of cities. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, edited by Ignacio Farías and Thomas Bender, includes twelve chapters by scholars in geography, sociology, anthropology, and science & technology studies, as well as brief interviews with three noted urban theorists. The book’s strong theoretical emphasis is underpinned by empirical findings from cities and regions throughout the world to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges of supplementing urban studies methodologies and approaches with key insights from ANT. Reflecting on the changes that ANT presents, Farías (pg. 1) writes, ‘The city and the urban do indeed look quite different when explored with symmetrical and radically relational eyes.’

[cc photo credit: Darcy Zhou]

The first section of the book (‘Towards a Flat Ontology’) critiques conventional spatial and scalar interpretations of cities. Manuel Tironi uses the avant-garde music scene in Santiago, Chile to reveal a ‘liquid spatiality’ that is performed rather than pre-given, consisting of decentred and multiple configurations. Likewise, Alan Latham and Derek McCormack study internationally renowned marathons that define unconventional spatial morphologies based on connections rather than scale. Richard Smith critiques the conventional containerized notions of space by describing the actor-networks of legal services in Singapore that transcend a priori categories of local, national, and international. And Don Slater and Tomas Artztía examine the spatial achievements of a virtual cultural centre in northern Spain, arguing that it functions as a ‘scaling device’ to subvert global knowledges and ideas to suit the needs of local actors. The section concludes with an interview with Nigel Thrift who urges urban researchers to follow currents rather than scalar, territorial, and bounded categories to reveal the lived conditions of cities.

Contributors to the second section (‘A Non-Human Human Ecology’) focus on notions of hybridity and the role of materiality in the co-production of cities. Andrés Valderrama Pineda analyses Bogota’s mass transit system to demonstrate how politics are inscribed in the materiality of the city. Anique Hommels uses a contested Dutch highway proposal in Maastricht to compare and contrast three dominant traditions from science & technology studies – ANT, the social construction of technology, and the large technical systems approach. Michael Guggenheim considers buildings as quasi-technologies and argues that from this perspective, they are ‘mutable mobiles’ because they occupy a fixed location that exposes them to many user groups and they are singular in that they cannot be standardised. Israel Rodríguez Giralt, Daniel López Gómez, and Noel García López highlight an aspect of cities that is often overlooked – sound landscapes – and use a Barcelona blackout incident to examine sonorous practices of protest that shape urban relations in indelible ways. The section concludes with an interview with Stephen Graham in which he emphasizes the importance of materiality to ongoing processes of urban development.

In the third section (‘The Multiple City’), Ignacio Farías examines tourist buses in Berlin to argue for an increased emphasis on the virtual, an element of cities that he argues is neglected in ANT approaches. Michael Schillmeier presents Georg Simmel’s work on urban modernity as an early form of ANT and examines the intermediation of money practices to understand how bodies, senses, and things connect or resist connection. Caitlin Zaloom also focuses on monetary flows but in the form of financial markets and the architecture of the trading floor in Chicago that links the virtual and the real. And Rosalind Williams demonstrates the plurality of cities by comparing the nineteenth century writings of Charles Baudelaire and Jules Verne in Paris and their creation of a second world through language. The final section concludes with an interview with Rob Shields who argues that the virtual is as important to cities as the physical.

As a whole, the collection engages with an enormous breadth of urban research traditions and topics, demonstrating the multiple ways that ANT is influencing the study of cities. It is doubtful that the collection will convince newcomers or critics of ANT to embrace a flat, relational ontology; instead, the book serves as a useful stopping point to reflect on some of the ways that ANT is currently being applied in urban studies. As Thomas Bender (p. 317) summarises in the postscript, ‘Perhaps what ANT offers is an unusually rich heuristic device rather than a formal method for studying cities….It is a sensibility that encourages one to think past the outer surface of the urban world.’ It is this sensibility that connects the contributions to this compendium, revealing the promise for richer approaches to urban research that can embrace the multifaceted, messy character of cities.

Reviewed by Melanie Lombard, Global Urban Research Centre, University of Manchester (UK)

[cc image credit: eflon]

The authors of this edited volume make a worthwhile and timely contribution to the field of Latin American urban studies, which will help to fill the current gap in literature on the Latin American city. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to “reimagining the informal in Latin America,” with an emphasis on architectural and urban design perspectives, but also incorporating themes from cultural studies, human geography and anthropology. Interrogating the contemporary conditions of informality in Latin American cities, the authors present ‘the informal’ as a complex set of processes embracing spatial, social, cultural, political and economic aspects. The contributions suggest that we need to rethink our understandings of informality if we are to deal with the informal and particularly “with an urban informality that has become constitutive of the urban condition itself” (Hernandez et al. 2010: 184).

Eleven chapters are organised into two sections, Critical Perspectives and Critical Practices, according to whether contributions are theoretical-historical, or more practical and intervention-based. In fact, both sections present current work by scholars, practitioners, and government institutions, meaning both will have a broad appeal to theorists and practitioners alike. The collection will also hold more a general attraction for those interested in urban issues in the global South, as it provides a useful introduction to some of the key debates in this area, particularly relating to urban informal settlements and housing. Most notably, Chapter 1 takes readers on a whirlwind tour of developments in approaches to urban informal settlements from the 1960s to the present day. Starting with the widespread policies of eradication that characterised responses in the 1950s and 60s, it then touches on the Habitat I conference that took place in Vancouver in 1976 and the self-help debate that precipitated this, discusses the shift in the role of the state from housing provider to enabler, and ends with the ‘return of the slum’ (Gilbert 2007). This chapter will be of particular use to those unfamiliar with these debates, while other chapters discuss specific approaches in more detail, depending on their particular focus.

Despite the proclaimed theoretical bent of the first section, illustrative case studies are employed throughout. The first three chapters discuss Brazilian cities, and are united by a concern with the relationship between informality and modernism. Chapter 2 argues that the influence of modernist architecture can be seen throughout Brazilian favelas, based on Le Corbusier’s Domino template. Chapter 3 explores the informal within the formal, through the activities of urban social movements in Sao Paulo’s public spaces. Chapter 4 offers an interesting exploration of the encroachment of informality in Brasilia, an “exceptional” modernist city. The focus of the next two chapters is on Chile. Chapter 5 explores issues around quality of life in low-income settlements, showing how formal housing policies do not necessarily offer a comprehensive solution. Chapter 6 discusses showing how good design, participation and government subsidies can mitigate the effects of gentrification, using the case of Santiago.

In the book’s second section, contributions focus more heavily on the material outcomes of practice. Using case studies from Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil and Argentina, the authors explore some of the successes and failures of upgrading, urban design and architecture in this context. Chapter 7 offers an excellent discussion of the pragmatic realities of working with informality, based on the experiences of the Urban Think Tank in Caracas. Chapter 8 takes a similarly grounded view on informality as a means of survival in a socialist society. Chapters 9, 10 and 11 return to the Brazilian example, offering diverse reflections on the Favela Bairro upgrading programme. In particular, Chapter 10 makes a convincing and highly engaging case for incorporating both spatial and social elements into planning for informality, arguing that the social emphasis which has dominated upgrading programmes would benefit from a stronger urban design element, enabling the connection of informal areas with the rest of the city – for example through walkways and multi-level platforms – rather than seeking to ‘resolve’ informality.

The authors’ central argument is that the informal and the formal have become entrenched categories within the urban setting, but that these categories must be rethought if policymakers and researchers are to succeed in understanding and addressing informality. They call for an understanding that goes beyond reductive categories of formal and informal to engage with the multitude of factors that shape Latin American cities, emphasising in particular the agency of settlement dwellers as city builders. The introductory chapter posits an innovative postcolonial theoretical framework as an alternative means of understanding informality, which is implicitly rather than explicitly engaged with by most of the book’s contributors. Despite calls for a ‘postcolonial urban studies’ (Robinson 2006), such a perspective is as yet under-utilised in the Latin American context. Here, the postcolonial approach encompasses both a historical dimension – based on the parallels that exist between today’s urban informality and precolonial urban forms – and a conceptual one, inverting entrenched categories and narrow understandings equating informality with poverty and marginalisation, to celebrate the urban informal.

Indeed, the celebration of the informal is one of the book’s main themes, and this is something it does extremely convincingly. In the most part, the authors avoid ‘favela chic’ stereotyping – in other words, the romanticisation of life in urban informal settlements – as ‘the daily violence of economic exclusion’ (Davis 2006: 202) is always present as context. Indeed, as this book suggests, such places cannot be reduced to symbols of either urban crisis or heroism; they contain everyday struggles, but also complexity, and immense creativity on the part of their residents who construct them in extremely constrained circumstances. The holistic treatment applied here, from a diverse range of perspectives, serves to highlight the prevailing narrowness of most contemporary understandings of the informal city. Given the diversity of approaches, the volume would have occasionally benefited from greater editorial input: for example, some chapters contain a large amount of historical detail that eclipses the extremely interesting case study and empirical material. Most importantly, a concluding chapter would have helped to bring together the disparate threads from across the book’s two halves, and draw out some of the cross-cutting themes arising from the variety of case studies presented. However, despite these minor weaknesses, this book’s major contribution is in its exploration of the social, spatial, cultural and aesthetic processes which constitute the informal city, which is (re)presented as fluid, dynamic, and most importantly, as part of the city. This aspect should ensure its interest to scholars of space and culture; as in rethinking the informal city, we are forced to re-evaluate our understandings of the city itself.

References

Davis M, Planet of Slums. Verso: London, 2006.

Gilbert A, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 31:697-713, 2007.

Robinson, J., Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development, London: Routledge, 2006.

Reviewed by Paul Crosthwaite, English Literature Research Group, Cardiff University (UK)

This outstanding study explores the engagement of Anglo-American women writers of the modernist period with a global capitalist system increasingly orientated towards the consumption of desirable commodities. Situating the authors she analyzes against a meticulously sketched backdrop of early twentieth-century socio-economic history in Britain and the United States, Alissa Karl shows how long-prevailing theorizations of modernist culture as high-mindedly antagonistic towards the vulgar machinations of the marketplace (such as those associated with Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School) misrepresent the ambiguous blend of attraction and repulsion that characterizes many modernist encounters with the seductions of consumer capitalism.

Window shopping at Marshall Fields, Chicago, 1910

One of the chief strengths of Karl’s book is its insistence on approaching commodity consumption not as an autonomous activity contained by the four walls of the grocer’s shop or department store, but as an economic phenomenon inextricably woven into the global capitalist network and determined by an array of power structures. In the introduction, Karl describes how her thinking on these issues evolved over the course of her research:

When I began this project, I set out to examine the conceptualization, function, and impact of consumer capitalism in women-authored modernist texts …. I soon discovered that it was not possible to discuss adequately the ideologies and operations of consumerism without considering the ways that consumerism and modernism alike interfaced with procedures of capitalist economies more broadly, with the classed hierarchies that organize capitalist cultures, with shifting but still active nation- and empire-building, and with racial and ethnic dynamics of societies in demographic flux.” (4)

The four chapters that follow make good on the ambitious terms of the project’s remit. The first chapter considers how the fiction of Jean Rhys registers the ways in which “consumerism links the evolving strategies of actual colonization (economic, military, political) with those of the metaphorical (but no less material or real) colonization of women’s bodies through commodification, fetishization, and visual appropriation” (17). Karl shows how Rhys’ heroines – émigrés to London or Paris from colonized territories or other exotic locales – attempt to utilize consumption and display in order to fashion what they imagine to be metropolitan identities; the effect, however, is to turn themselves into commodities to be possessed and exchanged by domineering, paternalistic men. The book then turns to Virginia Woolf, to examine the co-construction of consumerism and imperialism in The Voyage Out (1915) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Here, Karl argues that Woolf sees the practices of British imperial domination as not merely confined to the upper social echelons – in the exercise of state and corporate power – but as continually replicated and intensified ‘on the ground’ in the everyday consumption of goods that bear the imprint of distant exploitation. Woolf’s response, however, is a complex – and symptomatic – combination of complicity and critique.

Chapter 3 analyses two prominent memoirs of modernist literary culture: Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company (1956). Karl skilfully articulates the ways in which Stein, the avant-garde poet, and Beach, the pioneering bookseller and publisher who first brought James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into print, did not simply reject the consumer marketplace, but rather challenged a standardized mass culture from within the market itself, positioning their wares as radical, daring commodities for a discerning, niche audience. The final chapter focuses on Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand, the loosely autobiographical tale of an American woman of white European and black West Indian parentage. Karl argues compellingly that Larsen’s protagonist, Helga, uses consumerism as a strategy through which “to negotiate the discrepancies of racial identification and class positioning in order to forge a unique position for herself” (120). Commodities and consumerism “appear to offer the latitude of choice against the economic formations of race” (120), but, proving in fact to be inseparable from rigidly hierarchical social structures, they turn out to merely embed Helga’s predetermined place on the social scale.

Drawing on the detailed readings of modernist texts offered in her four chapters, Karl’s concluding Coda makes persuasive and intriguing connections to contemporary culture, indicating how many of today’s anxieties and debates about consumption, commodification, branding, and corporate power were rehearsed during the modernist period, and asserting a strong case for the relevance of modernist texts in understanding the intoxicating and troubling consumer landscape of the twenty-first century.

As Karl notes in her introduction, there has been a recent turn in modernist studies towards “geography and transnationalism,” a turn which troubles “the national and temporal parameters of modernism” (3). Modernism and the Marketplace, with its deftly rendered panorama of globalized economic relations and spatially expansive modernist texts, makes a brilliant contribution to this vibrant field of study. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel write influentially of modernism’s “geocultural consciousness” (qtd. in Karl 4); Karl’s book provides one of the best analyses yet of this mode of writing, thought, and experience.

Works Cited
Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Eds.) 2005. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP.

Reviewed by Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Department of Sociology, University of Trento (IT)

“Marching Piece” performance by George Maciunas. Flux Snow Event, New Marlborough (Massachusetts), 1977.

Contemporary artworks have addressed space in a variety of ways, often subtly and thought-provokingly, yet these important interconnections between art and spatial conceptions have not always been adequately recognised or explored in depth. As both an art critic and an art practitioner, Marta Traquino advances an original reflection on the construction, use and meaning of space in contemporary art. Indeed, Ms Traquino’s book illuminates a series of significant visible and invisible similarities between, on the one hand, a series of geographic and social theoretical conceptions of space and place and, on the other, a series of artworks belonging to the traditions of installation, performance, site-specific artworks and what is commonly, although vaguely, referred to as ‘public art’. In this context, the notion of ‘public’ plays a crucial role. Examining quite a few art exhibitions and events, one notices in them a complex co-presence of a ‘space of the public’, i.e. the space occupied by the audience (which includes how the artwork ‘reaches out’ the audience, and how the latter relates or reacts to the artwork), and a ‘public space’, i.e. the heterogeneous, visible and living space that hosts the art event, in which the artwork locates itself and upon which it seeks to act.

In order to explore the interweaving of art and space, Marta Traquino brings together a scholarly genealogy of spatial theorists and some of the most important art movements of the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century. By doing so, she reveals how a fruitful dialogue between these two streams of thought and practice might be developed. In the first part of the book, she draws on the spatial theories of Henri Lefèbvre, Marc Augé, Anthony Giddens, Yi-Fu Tuan, David Harvey and John Urry, stressing how the elements of ‘excess’, ‘compression’ and ‘mobility’ transform contemporary spatio-temporal experience. However, these same characteristics also seem to confirm the centrality of experience in the definition of social spaces and places. From this point of view, art and experience form a well-established couple. Yet while theoretically this intimate connection had been already noticed by pragmatists philosophers, it is in art movements such as Fluxus that the integration of the spectator into the process of creation of the artwork itself reaches its logical end-point.

The experiential perspective thus enables us to observe the inherent dynamism in the constitution of social space. A series of artworks from the late 1950s through the 1960s, which include for instance Allan Krapow’s ‘environments’ (1957-58), Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966), Douglas Huebler’s Location Piece #2 (1969) and Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969), are discussed in details by the author, who notices that these artists reflexively highlighted how space is performatively produced and discursively represented. Other recent artists who have critically worked on what Lefèbvre used to call ‘spaces of representation’, specifically through large-scale artworks, are also reviewed: these include for instance Lawrence Weiner (Smashed to Pieces, 1991), Krzysztof Wodiczko (The Tijuana Projection, 2001), Susan Hiller (The J-Street Project, 2002-05) and Beat Streuli (with his late 1990s and early 2000s series of huge photographs of ‘strangers’ in public places).

One of Traquino’s central claims in her book is that place corresponds to an inhabited and lived type of space where the body represents the measure of an emplaced subjectivity always imbued with memory. A range of artists have elaborated on such an insight, focusing on either the body at a small scale, like Bruce Nauman in Square Dance (1967-8), or outdoor interventions on a larger scale, like Ian Hamilton Finlay at his Little Sparta garden (1966) and Gordon Matta-Clark with his famous house cuts (Splitting: Four Corners, 1974). According to Traquino, the Fluxus movement in particular has set an ‘open path’ in contemporary art as regards the reflection on the experience of emplacement. Fluxus’ motifs of ‘globalism’, ‘experimentalism’, ‘humour’, ‘simplicity’, ‘specificity’ and ‘presence’ all seem to revolve around a relational and phenomenological take on the artistic event. In particular, Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Brecht, Mieko Shiomi and Ay-O instantiate the search for new types of ‘relations in public’ – to employ Goffman’s category – which question official and institutional definitions. This way, Fluxus art was designed to operate inside ‘social interstices’ which would challenge the common – and, mostly, taken for granted – ordering of space.

Contemporary artists such as the Istanbul-based Oda Projesi collective and the Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk inherit many of the Fluxus’ early insights and resolutely proceed along a trajectory Traquino describes as ‘from public space to lived places’. But the institutional context in which contemporary artists operate and the public funding of site-specific artworks, installations and performances also give rise to contentious actions, in some cases even self-defeating ones. In the last sections of the book, Traquino critically reviews a series of cases in which some more or less pronounced ‘detachment between theoretical presuppositions and actual practice’ became visible. The case of Lisbon’s Expo ’98 is extensively discussed. In this as well as other cases, the limits of contemporary public art’s self-legitimation can be ascertained. As the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko acutely put it: ‘To attempt to “enrich” this powerful, dynamic art gallery (the city public domain) with “artistic art” collections or commissions – all in the public’s name – is to decorate the city with a pseudo-creativity irrelevant to urban space and experience alike; it is also to contaminate this space and experience with the most pretentious and patronizing bureaucratic-aesthetic environmental pollution’.

About the author as critic:
História da Arte: Marta Traquino
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea I
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea II – Do espaço ao lugar: Fluxus
Da Construção do Lugar pela Arte Contemporânea III – A arte como um estado de encontro

About the author as artist:
Que cor tem agora o céu?
Guest Artist – Marta Traquino
What colour has the sky got now?

Reviewed by Nurri Kim, Do Projects

My first significant personal exposure to Mexican culture (and Mexican people) was after I moved to the United States in 2003. As a Korean educated in Japan, and with no previous experience of America beyond what I knew from popular media, I remember wondering what these bright yellow “Piso Mojado” signs were supposed to mean and, from there, slowly unfolding the enormous significance of this culture for Californian and American life. I was especially fascinated by those Mexican men with big cowboy hats I saw standing in groups by the side of the highway, waiting stoically for day jobs that might or might not come.

Five years of living in New York have taught me that these men and the millions of other Mexican men and women in similar positions are an indispensible part of the American economy. The flows of the city are hugely dependent on their delivering, making, operating, or fixing things, in a way that reminds me of Do-Ho Suh’s sculpture series. It’s hard to imagine passing through any commercial service in New York that doesn’t depend on these efforts in some way. You name it: even the most downhome-looking Korean restaurant in Koreatown, with the ajumma cooking handmade tofu in the storefront to show off its authenticity, has a line of Mexican guys busy in the steamy hot back of the kitchen cooking and delivering the bulgogi and kimchijigae to the tune of salsa music. But especially as compared to their ubiquitous contributions to the culture, they’re virtually invisible in it — the mainstream, anyway, will never help you understand who these people are, where they’re from, how they got here and how they survive on the interface of two (or more) cultures.

[cc image credit: Nathan Gibbs]

That’s why I was so curious to discover Fiamma Montezemolo, René Peralta and Heriberto Yepez’s “Here Is Tijuana!” Of course, Tijuana is literally and figuratively an edge case within Mexico, but as a node of transition between cultures and the first place on Mexican soil physically encountered by many visitors, I thought a book about the city would be an excellent place for me to begin my investigations, its title announcing the reader’s arrival like a tollgate traffic sign at the borderline.

The format of the book and the content

“Here Is Tijuana!” is organized in three chapters (”Avatars,” “Desires,” and “Permutations”) written by authors from three disciplines (an anthropologist, an architect, and a writer/psychotherapist) with three different relationships with the city (having either been born, studied, or currently living there). I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to write this book. From the preface:

“One afternoon three friends were discussing nothing else, but Tijuana. The three of them conducted one of those discussions that ultimately tend to abolish friendship. At the end of the discussion, there were two very clear issues: one, that the three of them would never be in agreement about Tijuana; and the other, that it was necessary to produce a book that would reunite the different postures about the city in order to extend the conflict to others as well.”

And so it seems that the process of making the book itself reflected the nature of its subject. Instead of writing an anthology with separate signed contributions, they apparently decided to let the city tell its own story through a succession of static images juxtaposed against quotations, statistical data and other figures, short interviews, and correspondence (e-mail, letters, notes, etc.). It’s very ambiguous as to whose viewpoint is being expressed at any particular moment, or if the authors even wish to endorse a specific viewpoint at all, and the overall effect is to emphasize that whatever opinions or impressions one holds about Tijuana, however jumbled or even contradictory, they might all simultaneously be true.

Emerging codependences

Often this use of supposedly neutral “data” requires some knowledge of origins — the name of an institution, for example, or a URL — to decode the meaning apparently intended by the authors. At first I had a hard time reading between the lines, often helped where an image added texture and flesh to the flattened “facts” and figures (a price list of services provided by prostitutes in Tijuana, a schedule of assembly-plant salaries, counts of inbound and outbound passengers at the airport and bus depot, and so on). I certainly don’t think you have to read this book linearly, but I followed the conventional page order, and by the time I was reading the “Permutation” section, all of these fragments had slowly built up, connected with one another and developed a weave that resembled narrative.

And something else slowly revealed itself, too: Tijuana’s conjoined twin city across the border. San Diego emerges from the trip into Tijuana like the other surface of a Möbius strip. It’s not simply that the Mexican city becomes the site of displaced industries and repressed desires, though this is inarguably the case. It’s that the two places depend on one another, each place made possible by certain kinds of flows across this most extreme of borders. And while voice after voice here are entirely correct to insist on the place’s singularity (”It’s not even Mexico, it’s Tijuana”), in the end it’s also clear that like the countries they belong to, both cities are part of a single binary system. And that is something I’ll remember the next time I catch a glimpse into a Korean-restaurant kitchen in Manhattan.