MAYHEM REDUX
Transcript of panel presentation on the occasion of publishing Bracket 4 [Takes Action] co-edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Mason White.
Thanks to editors for putting this together, and inviting me to participate and thanks for this unbelievably ambitious charge:
Bracket is situated at a critical point in history where the who, what, where, and how of action need to be re-conceptualized to relate to who we are, how we live, and how we communicate today. The role of design and the agency of the designer are at stake in facilitating or stifling action.
Even though my essay was written in 2014, this statement aligns to its core conviction. That conviction concerns the relationship between ourselves (both individually and collectively) and the objects that we make. This subject/object relationship sounds simple enough but, as shown in the essay, its apparent simplicity masks a good amount of political complacency and inaction.
This is how the subject/object relationship is expressed in Mumford’s 1938 Culture of Cities…
The city is a conscious work of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind. For space, no less than time, is artfully reorganized in cities: in boundary lines and silhouettes, in the fixing of horizontal planes and vertical peaks, in utilizing or denying the natural site, the city records the attitude of a culture… the fundamental facts of its existence. The open avenue or the closed court tell the story, not merely of different physical accommodations, but of essentially different conceptions of human destiny. The city is both a physical utility for collective living and a symbol of those collective purposes and unanimities that arise under such favoring circumstance. With language itself, it remains humanity’s greatest work of art.
This passage sounds a bit naive today because it is very difficult for us to see how our world — including, parking garages, franchised kiosks, endless housing tracts, or big box retail — could ever be a reflection of ourselves. Even harder to see how these urban forms represent, in Mumford’s words, “a conception of human destiny.” Can we speak of freeways and strip malls as humanity’s greatest work of art?
I would answer this question with a supposition: that there is no getting around this subject/object dynamic. I am convinced that forms influence our actions as much as actions influence our forms and that, despite the banality of our urban production, there is a direct relationship between who we are and the things that we make.
In this regard, when I heard of a “call to action,” the first thing that I asked was not who or how, but where? The urgency of the question is owed to the fact that we no longer build the kind of urban spaces that support public action, and we have not done so for the past six or seven decades. What we do instead is borrow the streets and plazas of our urban past, spaces that were built in the image of our ancestors’ urban cultures. My hypothesis in the essay is that we not only borrow our ancestors’ urban spaces, we borrow their political identity as well. The “street protestor,” upon whom we invest so much of our hopes and energies, is a political identity that was forged in a different place for a different time and for political problems that were different from our own.
Coming from this perspective, a key question emerges. What political identity can be made from the environments that we ourselves build?
In my essay I used the example of Hong Kong, where the public spaces of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution took place in Central, the urban core that was first laid out in the nineteenth century, and not in the New Towns where Hong Kong has been built over the past fifty years and where the majority of its population now lives. This is because, apart from a few large markets and a few large subway platforms, there are no spaces of public assembly in the New Towns.
The Umbrella Revolution was largely staged in the massive street caverns of Hong Kong’s urban core. Just a few metro stops away is the New Town, Sha Tin, whose urban core is a rectangular canal, a product of land reclamation. The core of Sha Tin is not made of form, it is made space, and that space is not occupiable. What is so interesting about the new town is there is a centralized effect, but there is no representative political space, only its palpable absence.
Had I the time, I could dwell on the same absence of collective accommodation in practically every city that has been economically viable over the past seven decades … but instead I will simply restate: if the forms we build influence action as much as actions influence forms, who is the characteristic political actor that arises out of the urban forms that we have produced over the past half century?
In the essay, I raised the fact that the urban spaces that we have produced do not support public assembly… today we build mass housing tracts, office and industrial parks and commercial centers, that are distinguished by the absence of traditionally formed, anthropomorphically scaled, streets and plazas. They are instead built, like Sha Tin, to accommodate, if not celebrate, individual rather than collective life.
Recognizing the subject/object link — the link between who we are and what we make — forces us to see that the spaces of the past were made for different economic, political and cultural actions that resulted in entirely different outcomes.
Today, the demonstrations that take place in our inherited urban spaces provide a form of public catharsis, but they rarely effect change, as they did in the past. Sadly, the protests of Hong Kong and Black Lives Matter are not the October Revolution. Ferguson Missouri is not St. Petersburg and this is not 1917… In 1917, we were still building streets, public squares and even palaces. Today, the only palace we can hope to storm are consumer palaces (and this is, of course, called looting). So while the public catharsis is real, its political efficacy is not.
The point is not to eliminate protest, however, but to fashion our modes of political efficacy. This can be done by questioning the modes of protest we have inherited. In the essay, I contrasted the effectiveness of the woman or man on the street — Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong — to the isolated man or woman behind the computer — Edward Snowden — a political actor that did not even exist twenty years ago.
The ineffectiveness of political protests against the fossil fuel industry are a better case in point. The Keystone Pipeline Protest in Washington and the 2014 and 2017 People’s Climate March in New York remain inconclusive because the target of the protest remained elusive. I would argue that these protests employ the unreconstructed logic of Vietnam era politics that were revived in Occupy Wall Street, to little or no effect. The simplistic, us-versus-them finger-pointing of sixties politics does not work today, largely because we live in a different political moment and face entirely different problems. Regarding climate change, WE are the problem, and solutions will not come until we are able to point a finger, individually, at our own patterns of consumption and emission. While the oil companies are the target of these protests, they are, at best, a proxy for our culpability in changing the climate. While certainly culpable, pointing fingers at the oil companies is a distraction from that fact.
From the perspective of climate change, far more interesting was the wonderful David and Goliath narrative that sprung from the protest of the so-called “kayaktavists.” While they were still engaged in finger-pointing, they suggested a newly aware political actor. They used the harbor of Seattle, not its streets, to take on Shell’s mammoth drilling rig that was being towed through the harbor on the way to the drill in an ice-free Arctic. The punch line was, of course, that oil was used to mass-produce the plastic kayaks. This correlation created a real affinity between the Lilliputian boats and the behemoth that brought them into existence. And, most important, I don’t think that the irony that these kayaks are a petroleum product was lost on anyone… and, more importantly, the protest did not keep anyone from producing or buying more kayaks..
While Vietnam era politics have their place, today, they play out as occasions for political theatre rather than political action, and this is really the point. The recognition that protesting is a particular form of public theatre does not mean that it cannot have an effect. My own idea of a political “actor” comes from an actual Vietnam era activist, Abbie Hoffman, who questioned the efficacy of the street protestor in his own day.
Free speech is the right to shout ‘theatre’ in a crowded fire. — Abbie Hoffman
His critique, which you may know, was summed up in a simple phrase: “Free speech is the right to shout ‘theatre’ in a crowded fire.” (I like the way we have to stop, for a second, and figure out what that means.) The point is that we have to develop a form of (cultural) protest that is far more sophisticated than a Molotov Cocktail or looting, to confront our enormous social and environmental problems. We have to figure out a way to get over the us versus them finger-pointing and search out a political actor that is capable of pointing a finger at him or herself. This self — the highly individuated subject of contemporary urbanism — is already reflected in the things of this world. How we expand that sense of self to the point of effective political change is the urban question of the day. While I do not know how to get there, I do know that it will not be as easy as running roughshod back into our grandparents collective living room.
And this is where I can return to the subject/object dynamic and try to imagine what is to be done within the urban spaces that we will build tomorrow. It’s a way of saying that nineteenth century spaces will not cut it, for so many reasons. We cannot go back to premodern urbanism. It seems so absurd to have to argue against relying on urban paradigms that predate the world of freeways and airports, that predate the world of endless tracts of mass housing and commercial floor plates the size of football fields. It is a world that our ancestors could not imagine, let alone accommodate. Furthermore, our backsliding into a more comfortable mode of political action often suggest that the spaces and forms we build today are lacking in political significance. Rather, it is the urbanism made by our own hand, an urbanism that is no longer built on the substrate of blocks and streets, that constitutes the viable point of departure in our search for political identity. And I am as sure about this as I am about the fact that forms influence our actions as our actions influence our forms.
Thanks again.
END….
