Psychogeographical Drift: Gentrification in Washington D.C.
by Steve Steve McClure
1. Constructing social worlds.
John Shotter in “Conversational Realities” suggests that reality is constructed through language- from conversation to discourse, itself structured in dominance (2002:22). A reader is situated and bounded by time and place, the circumstances and life experiences of a reader shapes how a text is read and linked to other texts and the lived experience of everyday life. A text contains “a closed set of intra-linguistic references” (Shotter 2002:25). Shotter calls for us to “cease thinking of the reality within which we live as homogeneous, as everywhere the same for everyone’ (Shotter 2002:17). Shotter finds that “images order and privilege one version of things over another” (2002:96); imaginaries are created through talk in a reciprocal process of dialogue. An imaginary is not a picture but a way of talking about incomplete, non locatable entities. Imaginaries exist in the “gaps between people” as categories in the social practices of the everyday.
2. A walk in Washington:
Reading the built environment as a text, reading Washington, both the ceremonial center and zones of a reshaped neoliberal urbanism echo historical reactionary modernisms. The World War II memorial and the streetscapes of revitalized downtown clusters suggest the unsettled questions of modernity, albeit in a one-sided conversation of stylistic conventions and discourses. Walter Benjamin found that “Fascism renders politics aesthetic, and communism responds by politicizing art” (Benjamin1970). The emerging built environment of Washington is scripted in a post modernism idiom, containing a-historical and yet historicized referents to both the beaux arts traditions of the classic nation state and to the futurist imaginings of Italian Fascism.
As a polycentric urban region, the Washington metropolitan area is symbolically unified by an urban imaginary of place. The monumental core is the point of reference and structuring element of a key node in the circuit of global power. The World War II memorial is situated between the two major constructions of the National Mall, framing both the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, symbolically connecting the two, locating the war as a project for the preservation and extension of the universal principles of the enlightenment. In choosing a neo-classical idiom, the designers made a clear choice to link the post war moment to the period of ascendance of modern nation states, rather than locating it in a system of functionalist references, or in a figurative, heroic representation of a stylized individual.
Figure a WWII Memorial 2006
Streetscapes are social constructions that reflect a specific historical moment as well as a factor in social reproduction. A close examination of a particular place illustrates these dynamics. Examining the built environment is an archeology of the present: as sedimentations of social forces, reproducing and producing social relations. The “spaces of places and the spaces of flows” (Castells 2000) exist in the everyday as a class, race and gendered geography of the public sphere. The street is a mirror, naturalizing dominance. Gentrification displaces entropy else where, infill development acts as a strategic embellishment in an asymmetrical binary, property owning classes occupy a privileged position. The stylistic references of new infill development in the residential zones of Northwest D.C. are scripted in a retro-modernist genre, evoking futurism.
Reminiscent of the architecture of Terragni, a comparison of the Giuliani-Frigerio and recent infill development on 14th street illustrates strong parallels. As icons, these constructions exude a crisp post-modernism which contrasts sharply with a grittier urban aesthetic of hip hop, punk and the humanist stylistic conventions of the cultural left referencing counter cultural motifs. Excluded from the world of the Mall and new urban enclaves are the voices and bodies of the dispossessed who nevertheless exert an unseen presence on the margins. As constructed in the discourses of Goffman Foucault, and Fanon the marginalized become the object of study and potential agents of change.
3. Deviance, marginality and grotesque inversions:
Modernist canons of the grotesque body as described by Bakhtin are presupposed in Goffman`s Stigma and Foucault’s The History of Sexuality” as a close reading of both texts shows. Viewing these writers from a specific vantage point, framing the words on a page reflexively, invokes other texts seemingly unrelated. Reflexively, Foucault and Goffman evoke themes revolving around the social imaginary of the grotesque. The grotesque body, the marginalized, and subaltern bring to mind concepts of degradation, inversion and transgression, and act as pointers to the work of Franz Fanon, himself a theorist of anti-colonial resistance and revolution.
The noir quality of Stigma, Wretched of the Earth and The History of Sexuality bring to mind other authors who touched upon the subject of deviance and marginalization such as William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet. Jean Genet opens his book Querelle with a metaphor of the ocean, where murder is compared to waves; criminality is a function of the sea, and a characteristic of sailors and seaports (Genet1974: 4). Genet speaks to the subjective meanings of marginalization and deviance from the standpoint of the marginalized, just as Goffman or Foucault write from the standpoint of a hospital administrator or psychologist. Literary forms often express the quality of reality, which also surface in the genre of scientific writings concerning marginality such as texts by Irving Goffman and M. Foucault.
In passing, it is also useful to note the poetry and films of Piero Pasolini which explore and create an imaginary of the subaltern, the marginalized, and the dispossessed. “Mamma Roma” and “Acattone” depict in the grainy texture of post war Italian neo-realist film the experience of the periphery, creating images that resonate with the subjective experience of neoliberalism felt by this writer at the most intimate scale of de-valorization of work and exclusion from the benefits of medical care. Manuel Castells writes of a “shadow economy”, of crime and criminality as a necessary by product of neo-liberal reforms in a networked globalized economy, Pasolini depicts in his films an Italian reality, an Italian vernacular expression of a social imaginary now projected globally, a life world of marginality, violence and crime. The construction of social worlds- through conversation, tracing categories, constructing imaginaries- is a hermeneutical process of dialogue. It is on this shadowy terrain where Goffman and Foucault play, a landscape shaped by many voices and subjectivities.
Each writer brings different assessments of the problematic of deviance but sharing a common set of presuppositions. Both writers share a modernist conception of the grotesque, a binary of body and mind, as separated from the world as described by Bakhtin, but diverge on their point of view about it. Recalling the introduction to Rabelais and His World, Nikail Bakhtin, writes that in the middle ages degradation, “…means coming down to earth, the contact with the earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time…” (Bakhtin1984: 21) Bakhtin goes on to write, that in renaissance and medieval thought “…contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the world…”and that the Romantic and Modern notion of the grotesque “usually expresses fear of the world” (Bakhtin 1984:39).
In Stigma, the subject that Goffman presents the reader is of a discredited other, painted in grotesque terms. The grotesque image of stigma emerges in contrast to the normal. Goffman locates the subject of Stigma in the romantic, modernist notion of the grotesque, not in the medieval or renaissance sense of the term. Goffman suggests the body in the idea of impression management, and the relationship between visual and verbal communication. The homemaker and grifter or con man practice the same strategies in the presentation of self, even as self can be considered a social construction, historically situated. In Stigma, Goffman describes the workings of the process of stigmatization, and suggests possible avenues for change on both a psychological and a societal level.
In the past few decades since his book was published, identity politics have pushed the boundaries of what is considered normative. One suspects that his text and his theory of fame analysis might have had something to do with these changes, an intended or unintended intervention in everyday life. Once in the public sphere, a text takes on an existence independent of its author. Rabelais writes, “…Do you actually believe in the bottom of your heart that Homer, writing the Illiad and the Odyssey, ever thought of the allegories pulled and tickled out of him by Plutarch and Heraclides Ponticus and Eustachius and Cornutus the Stoic—or by Politian, who stole his arguments from all the rest of them?….I solemnly swear that Homer no more dreamed of them than Ovid’s Metamorphoses are all about the mysteries of the Gospel, which the idiot Friar Lubin (a true parasite) has tried to prove…” (Rabelais, 1532 trans. Raffel 1990: 8). Goffman`s dramaturgical sociology, like Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey, might be a starting point for other investigations; his metaphor of the stage might be a useful device with which to study society and social behavior, like the scaffold and panopticon detailed by Foucault.
Foucault’s problematic is the question of knowledge, power and the legacy of the enlightenment. He creates a narrative of critical reassessment, using his words to vivisect the dominant narrative, de-naturalizing it, suggesting an alternative reading of the historical archive. Foucault interrogates the past, inverting the accepted binary oppositions between the body and mind, sublime and vulgar; twisting out a micro-theory of power and subordination in his work.
Like Goffman, he examines the discredited, debauched, and marginalized, but unlike Goffman, Foucault`s examination of the grotesque is a political weapon aimed at de-stabilizing the notion of science as a liberating force. Instead, Foucault finds science to be a newer more insidious form of totalizing control. He explores the metaphor of the panopticon - surveillance replacing the scaffold, the deployment of scientific discourse as a technology of domination replaces religious discourse, in the passage from the feudal order to industrial capitalism. The transition to modernity for Foucault, unlike Marx, is not a matter of economics or production, but rather a question of power and dominance.
In the History of Sexuality, Foucault proceeds to outline the repressive hypothesis, a hypotheses that stresses the idea that sexual freedom is a dividing line between the modernism of the current age and the modernism of the Victorian period. In contrast to proponents of the repressive hypothesis who stress the repression of sexuality and discourse during the emergence of urban industrial societies in the West, Foucault notes the explosion of discourse about sexuality. In Counter Reformation Church documents, he finds that discussion becoming more specific, classifying sins of the flesh in ever more explicit terms. The repressive hypothesis stresses the silence surrounding sexuality during the transition to modernity, equating revolution with sexual freedom, with science in the lead which Foucault deconstructs.
Foucault constructs a counter- narrative of the Enlightenment, one in which the unblinking gaze of science- classifying, codifying, and analyzing sexuality- is a tactic of control; displacing the body with the “soul”, and sin with an essentialist reading of perversion. In this reading, sex and sexuality become forbidden fruit, more enticing and more desirable, precisely because of this denial. The construction of sexual normalcy as adult, genital, heterosexual, and procreative is cited by Foucault as evidence of the repressive logic of the Enlightenment, more totalizing, and more encompassing than mere physical, bodily repression that preceded it, a strategic maneuver by an army of learned professors, experts, and doctors harnessing desire to the demands of the machinery of states, conceived in monarchist, absolutist terms, even in Republican, secular forms. For Foucault, the illusion of secular humanism is a mask behind which this more intrusive pattern of power and domination hides, ringed by the ideology of a kinder gentler scientific rationality, buttressed by surveillance and classification, a Taylorism of subordination.
He writes, concerning childhood sexuality, “What was actually entailed, throughout this entire campaign that mobilized the adult world around the sex of children was using these tenuous pleasures as a prop, constituting them as secrets (that is, forcing them into hiding so as to make possible their discovery) tracing them back to their source, tracking them from their origins to their effects, searching out everything that might cause them or simply enable them to exist” (Foucault1978: 42 In the section of the text entitled Scientia Sexualis, Foucault finds that a science of sex is a tactical deployment of knowledge/power, not as a “negative mechanism of exclusion” but as an “operation of a subtle network of discourses, special knowleges, pleasures and powers”(Foucault1978: 72).
According to Foucault, “power is not an institution, not a structure, nor is it strength, but rather it is the name of a complex strategic situation in a society: unbalanced, heterogeneous unstable force relationships…. Power is not something that is seized, but exercised from innumerable points in interplay of unequal and changing relations…. Power comes from below, not a binary opposition between rulers and the ruled.” (Foucault1978: 92). He writes that” Power is intentional and non subjective, but where there is power there is resistance. There is a plurality of resistances, distributed over time and place-nodes of various densities distributed in an irregular fashion, a shifting pattern of alliances and cleavages”(Foucault1978).
There is no single one deployment but rather four basic “strategic unities….a hysterization of women’s bodies, a pedagogization of children’s sex, a socialization of procreative behavior, and , a psychotrization of perverse pleasure”(Foucault 1978:104-105) He distinguishes two types of power, ,a judicial form -the power of subtraction, and the power of deduction.
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault details a divergent reading of the repressive hypothesis, finding that representations of a dialectic between a repression of sexuality and sexual freedom is in itself an illusion, as pleasure and desire are an inherent aspect of control. “Between each of us and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth: it is up to us to extract the truth of sex, since this truth is beyond its grasp; it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what it holds in darkness. But is sex hidden from us…kept under the bushel by the grim necessities of bourgeois society? On the contrary it shines forth; it is incandescent” (Foucault1978: 77). Foucault finds that at the dawn of modernity “our societies moved from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality” (Foucault1978:148) his conception of power distinguishes between the politics of the body, what he terms anatomo-politics and bio-power at the level of the total society.
Foucault`s work is powerful, disturbing and disruptive, an exploration of the malignant underbelly of the Enlightenment. As the West careens off into a dis-topia of mechanized eco-cide, the idea of progress loses it luster. Grand theories of society with sweeping generalizations and panaceas for the solution to alienation and atomization found in industrialized mass societies have resulted in the universalization of Jacobin terror, not in human emancipation. For Foucault, the discourse of liberation surrounding the Enlightenment project directly contradicts the logic that leads directly from torture and brutality on a human scale to the industrialized violence of the ovens of Auschwitz and Hiroshima under the regime of scientific enlightenment (Foucault1978). Foucault’s work expresses this disillusionment, and is an effort to reformulate a much more specific and limited theory; with a real if limited emancipatory potential. Foucault suggests praxis with transgressive rather than transformative potential.
Foucault’s work stands in negation of the scientific rational assumptions assumed by Goffman, but linked inseparably to that same set of understandings- there is no escaping the panopticon, except by the deployment of bio-power which is only sketched out in caricature. A reader senses his disillusionment with the socialist project as a subset of the Enlightenment, an intellectual expression of the exhaustion of the October Revolution and failure of the May Events of 1968. One has to look elsewhere for a theoretical approach applicable to the context of a neoliberal, uni-polar world system which places the marginalized and dispossessed at the center of an emancipatory project, and a reintegration of the grotesque body with the world. A re-reading of Fanon suggests a solution to this unsatisfactory binary of the grotesque body.
Emancipatory potential is the subject of Fanon’s work, locating in the practices of violence the means for liberation. Fanon articulates a vision of the necessity of collective violence in the anti-colonial struggle. He traces a perspective on the historical role of the lumpen proletariat in the context of the Algerian independence movement of bombs and terror. Fanon embodies double consciousness, at the crossroads between colonized and colonizer, a participant in the discourse of the enlightenment but also a theorist of resistance and struggle. As such his work is particularly useful in considering casualized and precarious workers in the context of hypermodernity and the moment of neoliberalism. The conditions for restorative justice might be set by the cathartic practices of collective violence, changing and shifting the dynamic balance of power in favor of the marginalized.
Speculating further, Fanon’s notions in themselves might be insufficient, just as the reductionism of Marx and Lenin was insufficient. In might be that emergent imaginaries of multiple modernisms expressed in the slogan of the World Social Forum, “another world is possible” might provide an organizing principle and way out of a war machine careening towards barbarism. One regrets the necessity of violence but the possibility and hope exists in that the power of bodies in motion might in themselves be a fleet in being, a counter balance to the explicit use of force in effecting change.
Globalized production processes have blended core and periphery; have destabilized the nation -state as primary unit, and deterritorialized conflict. Traditional spaces of resistance and representation, unions and communities have been bypassed by governance. In the margins a parasitic shadow economy has emerged in a symbiotic relationship with privatized entities performing functions once under the domain of the state (Castells: 2000). Transgressive rather than transformative, these entities are ambivalent manifestations of the unexpected outcomes of the master narrative of the new world order, itself evidently reaching its limits. In such a context, an inter-textual reading of Fanon provides a strategic orientation in a period of imperial decline, ecological crisis and endless war.
4. Drifting
A walk in Washington and a walk through literature, film, and philosophy are not so different, both are an exploration of the world that ultimately is shaped and classified by talk. What is seen and unseen, the voids and the spaces between are bounded by language and every act is an act of communication, some of which have more agency than others.
“The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” (Situationist International)
In much the same way a wandering through texts is a derive or drift. Drift is a starting point for a process of social investigation , a mapping of the terrain of struggle in the Nations Capital, exploring gentrification, resistance and sites of struggle scripted in gender race and class.
References:
Benjamin, Walter. (1970) “The Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction”, trans. Harry Zohn.London: Jonathan Cape, pp 219-53. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Republished in “The Continental Aesthetics Reader”. (2000) Edited by Clive Cazeaux. London, New York: Routledge.
Castells, Manuel. (2000) “The Networked Society” Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Eisenman, Peter D.(1971) “From Object to Relationship II: Casa Giuliani Frigero: Giuseppe Terragni Casa Del Fascio” Perspecta(13)36-65
Foucault, M. (1978) “The History of Sexuality, an Introduction” Volume I. New York.
Vintage Books.
Bakhtin, Nickhail. (1984) “Rabelais and His World” Bloomington Indiana: Indiana
University Press.
Genet, Jean (1974) “Querelle” New York: Grove Press
Goffman, Irving (1959). “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” New York: Doubleday.
____________ (1963). Stigma. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rabelais, Francois (1990) “Gargantua and Pantagruel” trans. B. Raffel” New York: Norton.
Shotter, John (2002) “Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language” London: Sage