Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for February, 2009
Urban Semiology – Fieldnotes #1
[Notes in progress...]
London. Last night I pulled out a slim volume from the shelf of unused books in the spare room where I am staying. On the spine it had read ‘Discover South America’ – it turned out to be a Reader’s Digest publication. I thought it might help me think about my hopeful trip to Bogota. I have been invited to submit an article to a new journal, Culture Unbound. This is the abstract proposal I submitted:
Amateur Dramatics: Barthes, Blogging and Bogotá
The article presents a close-reading (and re-writing) of Roland Barthes’ ‘Semiology and Urbanism’ (1967). Despite talk of a ‘scientific leap’ beyond a metaphorical ‘language of the city’, Barthes is clear about a changed ‘semiotic landscape’. The task, he suggests, ‘is not so much to multiply investigations or functional studies of the city as to multiply the readings of the city’. He positions himself as an ‘amateur’ of signs; status he later ascribes to ‘the subject who makes something, and no longer of the subject who speaks about something’. His methodology, however, remains open: ‘if we seek to undertake a semiology of the city, the best approach … will be a certain ingenuity on the reader’s part. It will require many of us to attempt to decipher the city … beginning, if necessary, with a personal report’. Today, we can reappraise the post-structuralist principle in light of our lived experience of a wired world, with its profusion of amateur writing (e.g. blogging and other related forms). Taking a contemporary perspective, and building on previous collaboration regarding place and the writing (of) place (Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2005, Vol.4, No.1, pp.19-27), the authors combine their own field notes on Colombia’s vibrant, yet under-represented capital city, Bogotá, with film and literary sources, as well as fragments of online writing. In this way, the paper (1) interrogates the spectre of Barthes’ ‘hopeful’ methodology; (2) makes theoretical consideration of the mediated, inter- and hyper-textual city; and (3) asks after a ‘language of the city’.
But they want the piece by May 15 and – due to current circumstances – I can’t see how I can get to Bogota before then. What do I do? Perhaps I forget the whole thing. Perhaps I write a theoretical piece, and/or get R. to contribute materials to help supplement the city bit. But I can’t help feeling this is all a great loss.
As it turned out, the Reader’s Digest book had little about Colombia (I wasn’t too surprised), but there was a nice paragraph on Bogota itself:
Santa Fe de Bogota (to give the city its full name) is the South American experience in caricature. The capital of troubled Colombia was once the Indian village called Bacata, which was razed by a conquistador who had a keen sense of location. In colonial times, it was the seat of Spanish viceroys ruling an area that also included modern Ecudor, Venezuela and Panama, but the exponential growth that drove its population to over 6 million by 2000 all came in the second half of the 20th century. The people of Bogota live in the clouds, 8670 ft (2642m) up in the misty northern Andes, taking pride in their culture and the purity of their Spanish accent. But the polluted, traffic-jammed metropololis is an explosive mix of extremes – futuristic skyscrapers and vast shantytowns, vibrant intellectual life and rampant crime, opulent resturants and bands of homeless children (Reader’s Digest, Discover South America, 2001, p.103)
I have been really asking myself, not so much ‘what is urban semiology?’, but more fundamentally, what is the point of an urban semiology? The line about the people of Bogota living ‘in the clouds’ is of course highly evocative. It could be the beginnings of a either an imaginary semiology (a chart of these clouds and their different layers), or it could be a semiology of dissapating – Barthes would surely have approved.
So, for now, I remain in England. I will work from texts, not from the streets. Sitting in the British Library right now, I have a copy of Richard Sennett’s edited volume from 1969, Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. It offers a useful reminder of the then growing discourse around urban studies – a discourse Barthes was surely aware of when he gave his lecture on urban semiology.
Urban studies is a very recent field of study, yet cities are one of the oldest artifacts of civilized life. The reason for this is that up to the time of the Industrial Revolution, the city was taken by most social thinkers to be the image of society itself, and not some special, unique form of social life. In the ancient world this identification occurred in the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Augustine; during the reemergence of city life in the late Middle Ages it could be found in the work of Machiavelli; during the 18th century this merging of city and society was powerfully stated in the social theory of Rousseau. Occasionally the city was treated as a special society, in the work of the 17th-century philosopher Jean Bodin, for instance, but the authority of the greater social theorists overwhelmed the view of those who felt as did Bodin. Thus, until quite recently, the field of urban studies had no real meaning of its own; the city was taken to be the mirror of a broader reality, more appropriate as a focus of thought. (Sennett, 1969, p.3)
The identification of society and city ‘changed during the Industrial Revolution of the last two centuries because the cities themselves changed’ – they became so much larger, due mainly to migration from those outside of the cities. In turn this led to the ‘process of orderly capital formation’ becoming more institutionalised and up for debate:
But holding sway over all these particular discussions and experiments was what Karl Polanyi has called the “grand idea” of the 19th-century intellectuals, that all these urban traits could be related in one way or another to society as a huge market place in which individuals or groups struggled with each other for gain. This system, generating the social conditions of cities, was thought to be perfectly clear an idea, and useful new knowledge would be gained, supposedly, in discovering the good and evil of the system in practice. (Sennett, p.4)
The authors Sennett collects together in his edited volume – Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Oswald Spengle of the ‘German School’; and Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Robert Redfield and Milton Singer of the ‘Chicago School’ – offer a critique of this ‘mechanical idea of a market economy generating urban social conditions’. This was too simple and reductionist a view to account for the complexity of urban experience:
Significantly, none of these new thinkers challenged the rightness or wrongness of the market idea as such, but rather sought to show that the economic life of the city was shaped in part by, or had at least a symbiotic relation to, noneconomic conditions peculiar only to urban areas. In this way, these classic urban theorists established themselves by enlarging the genera, the creatice forces, that men understood to have produced the specific conditions of city culture. (Sennett, p.4-5)
Remembering You Have Forgotten Something…
…given the way things are, it is not easy to return to writing here. It feels late in the day, but I did always promise to write something about Perfume and today, of all days (though whilst in the grand scheme of things needing not to be significant), seems as good as any to get this out.
The last time I was in London I did two things. I collected my copy of Classen et al. (1994) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell and I watched the film of Perfume. Both were in preparation to write something about Süskind’s novel. Amongst other things I think I was going to say something about the complication of trying to find words for the unsayable of scent. And I had thought the film would struggle even more than the book. I think in a sense it did, but I much preferred the ending, which visually – sculpturally even – was rather nicely done and importantly managed to undo the somewhat clumsy messiah routine of the book. I had always been primed for the film to be like a feature length Christian Dior advertisement. But, in fact, I was reminded of one of those Stella Artois advertisements. Something of the mise-en-scene, the milieu, the class of people perhaps, but also the film of the book is similarly over dramatic and funny for all of that. (Although the wit of the beer commercials – contained within 3 minutes – is inevitably much shaper).
But this all seems superfluous now (and perhaps it always was). If before I had wanted to ’say’ things here, now I am not so sure; hence my growing absence. My words have severely depreciated over the months, which is doubly sad: I don’t like to lose them, but equally I don’t like what I lose because of them (because here they just continue in all emptiness…)
Those who know me will understand when I say I had to ‘rescue’ Aroma from the smoke-dust climes of my family home. Ironically, then, my copy of the book carries its own potent aroma (though the time it has taken me write something has been sufficiently long for my eyes to stop watering as I turn its pages). To my surprise the book contains a direct reference to the novel:
Peter Süskind’s enormously popular book Perfume is a case in point. The keen-scented protagonist of the book, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is both ’idiot’ and ‘pervert’ – as well as an offspring of the ‘degenerate’ lower class. Grenouille exercises his abnormal passion for scent by murdering maidens in order to sniff up their sweet fragrance. In the end, through his de-scenting of maidens, Grenouille is able to invest himself with an odour so attractive that he is torn to pieces and eaten by a frenzied crowd.
If Perfume makes for a ‘good read’, it is not only because of its unusual topic and engrossing story line, but also (and perhaps more fundamentally) because of its confirmation of the validity of many of our most cherished olfactory stereotypes – the maniac sniffing out his prey; the fragrant hapless maiden; the dangerous savagery inherent in the sense of smell. (p.4)
I can’t say I recognise any of these ‘olfactory stereotypes’ – at best they seem obscure and a little harsh; at worst they conveniently establish something the authors wish us to believe need debunking. The novel is indeed a ‘good read’ because of its story and story-telling (barring a few didactic sections, particularly a middle section in which Grenouille retreats to the mountains and returns like some pesudo-Nietzschean Zarathustra), but for me the real (and only) impetus to read the book (and read it quickly) came from the hands that gave it to me. The book was an offering, with the potential to know something about myself and another. Sadly, I don’t think we ever really discussed it. Never the right occasion.
…the words of Aroma leave me cold, but the words that fell out of the book (on a scrap paper I inserted back when I had my initial idea for an entry here) seem – where at least I can read my own writing – a little more poignant:
There was a day when you mentioned in email that you were having trouble getting hold of your usual perfume (and you might try another). I never said anything at the time (perhaps because one ought not say these things), but I was struck in terror at your words. …I was doubly affected. Perhaps I wouldn’t get to experience that brush of your perfume again, which was sad enough, but added to which I was struck with the thought I had no idea what it was I was missing. I don’t have a memory of your scent, I just know/knew it because of you… and these unaromatic words simply take me further away…
The strangest of things: to remember something you have forgotten - ‘it is on the tip of my tongue’ we tend to say (what a lovely phrase). The hint of a perfume of someone you long for is a delicate thing. You stand there next to them and that is everything (so you think); but then, just occasionally, playing on the tips of the invisible boundaries between one another, the faint curls of a scent you can only know as being them, when with them. And no sooner does it reach you, it dissolves too.
Perhaps the moment of such scents and of words need not be so different. In A.S. Byatt’s Possession there is a line about people’s handwriting: ‘Certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years’. Here the sentiment is negative, but equally it can be the other way. The mere hint of another’s writing – like a scent you recongise in them – can have an immediate, overflowing sensation.
In writing about the ‘presence’ of her own writing, Cixous notes:
I need writing; I need to surprise myself living: I need to feel myself quiver with living: I need to call myself into living and to answer myself by living: I need to be living in the present of the present: I need double-living: I need to come into life: I am afraid that writing will take the place of living: I need writing thinking of living: I write celebrating living: I need to accompany living with music: I need writing to celebrate living: this morning, I perfumed myself with essence of orange flower water: on the phial of essential oil there is the original label covered with Arabic signs that spirit me away on their sweeping curls to an unknown but imaginable neighbourhood in Baghdad: I adore scripts: and the two most beautiful scripts in the world are Hebrew and Arabic, languages I neither read nor speak… (Cixous, ‘(With) Or the Art of Innocence’)
The infusion here of writing and perfume seems particularly sweet. The to and fro of those delicate languages we barely even read or speak need not be unfathomable scripts – they can the senses of scents or all those messages we pass between one another over the days, months, years… Again, I think of lines from Possession: ‘Letters … are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure … Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going. [...] Letters … exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader, they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader’. But… but, I know… I sense it… I’m afraid I don’t adequately ‘answer myself by living’, even if that is not how it feels right now.
Imaging a painful outcome (renouncing, leaving, etc.), I intone, within myself, the exalted hallucination of closure; a vainglory of abnegation seizes me (renouncing love but not friendship, etc.), and I immediately forget what I would then have to sacrifice: my madness itself – which by its very status cannot be constituted as the object of my sacrifice: who ever saw a madman “sacrificing” his madness to someone? (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
…and it is surely the little indefinable and beautiful moments - like the near remembrance of another’s scent – that keeps awake the madness that would be a true madness to sacrifice.
Once the exaltation has lapsed, I am reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance (the natural dimension of real fatigues). I suffer without adjustment, I persist without intensity: always bewildered, never discouraged; I am a Daruma doll, a legless toy endlessly poked and pushed, but finally regaining its balance assured by an inner balancing pin (But what is my balancing pin? The force of love?). This is what we are told by a folk poem…
Such is life
Falling over seven times
And getting up eight(Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
In the vernacular I know it to be a ‘Weeble-Wobble‘ which never falls down. How mad they must have felt all those times so nearly hitting the ground, yet recovering due to an irrepressible balancing pin. I am due to go to London again next week, though I really wonder what I will do, how I will remain on a level. This time I carry with me another book. I’ve kept it wrapped in the manila envelope in which it arrived. It bore no note, nothing. I only know it was obtained by its owner (with the fabulous handwriting) in 1999. And I know also, because it was one of the last things we said (and in such a matter of a fact kind of way, which was odd given it was the last time we allowed ourselves to be together), that it had been remembered it had been forgotten, having previously been placed next to a copy of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-between (which of course seemed so apt at the time). But what is this time in which I have to read it?
…keeping in mind that Perfume is a murder story of sorts, I sense myself being on the run. I am a criminal, a thief in the night of my own thoughts and feelings: ‘The sentiment of an accumulation of amorous sufferings explodes in this cry: “It can’t go on…” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse). Indeed these words must stop…
…the remembering of something forgotten is a perpetual loss; only ever remedied by the ‘thing’ itself, that which goes beyond any words to describe it…
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