CSA TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES 6880 Urban Matters and

CSA TOPICS IN CULTURAL STUDIES 6880
Urban Matters and Media: the cultural politics of
how people, technology, things and feelings
connect in contemporary urban life
Coordinator: Professor AbdouMaliq Simone
TIME:
Monday 9-12
Friday 9-12
PLACE: Room AS3-02-07
subject description
Contemporary cities embody critical challenges about how to consider relations among
people, things, atmospheres, spaces, and immaterial tools. New reflections and
analytical devices are, in turn, affecting how cities themselves are considered.
Clear differentiations between internal and external, local and global, self and other,
time and space, human and non-human—long critical vehicles of orientation—are
simultaneously intensifying and waning, becoming more sharply drawn as they are also
being folded into each other. With categories, tools, and sites becoming more mobile
and mutable, with the supposed discreteness of things constantly being recalculated and
repositioned by virtue of their enrollment into highly divergent networks of use, and
with sociality lived through a continuously diffracting spatial montage, how do residents
put together a working knowledge of their cities?
A proliferation of notions—such as globalization, assemblage, complexity, hybridity,
virtuality, topology, actor-network theory, implicate orders, polyvalence, flow
architecture, screens, hypermedia, transmutation, and risk—have been generated to
mark out often remarkable changes in urban life. Yet how do we investigate these
changes, their imprints, ephemeral traces, provisional configurations, and institutional
modalities—particularly when the sensoria of researchers and residents are remade? In
some sense the fundamental characteristic and dilemma of urban life has persisted for
some time: in spaces and times of potentially complex intersections of materials and
matters that exceed any particular set of analytical devices, vantage points and controls,
what amongst these heterogeneous elements actually connect, and how? What kinds of
proximities and distances of connection are possible, and how are they affected?
The common assumption is that urban residents now live within constant connectivity—
with the increasingly capacity to reach anything, consume anything. Still, cities become
more segregated and polarized. The often-remarkable ways in which residents from all
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walks of life were able to have something to do with each other, to negotiate some kind
of passage across various divides are being both marginalized and enhanced by new
media and technologies. How is it possible to think this simultaneity—of increasing
marginalization and precarity with the persistence of devices and techniques that have
long been put to work by a “majority” of urban residents?
Both contested and systematic elaborations of making things visible, of categorizing,
defining, counting, and distributing things have regularized a wide range of transactions.
Grids, governments, infrastructures, subject-making, design, and control techniques
produce a sense of predictability and order. Cities are also full of various kinds of media
and mediators that steer the transactions of defined positions, interests and grievances.
Still, the efficacy of the city, its productivity has also depended upon the “decisiveness”
of unanticipated intersections—the actualization of the countless virtual arrangements
embodied by and constitutive of urban life. While elaborate theoretical formulations, as
well as empirical and ethnographic work, have ascertained the importance of these
intersections, they are too often subsumed under notions of “informality” “network” or
“ecology”. Where these are partially useful constructs, this seminar focuses on urban
matters. The notion of “matters” combines the sense of agendas and concerns with
specific sites—the convergence of the material, symbolic, infrastructural and
ephemeral—where unanticipated, unpredictable, and eventful interactions take place. It
is possible to think of these sites as critical matters where the work of the city—its acts
of recomposing, shifting gears, carving out and moving along singular trajectories of
gathering up various materials and spaces—is intensified.
subject aims
To be able to engage hybrid institutions in order to work with hybrid urban populations
on agendas and concerns which are simultaneously material, political, and symbolic—
where connections and distances have to be modulated, things included and left out, as
well as bringing different things together without it looking like this is what is taking
place. For much of the ability of cities to hang together is to create connections among
things without the nature of the connection dominating people’s attentions, interests or
conflicts.
subject assessment
Hurdle assessment consisting of seminar attendance, seminar presentation and
multimedia project presentation. One essay (5000 words) (100%)
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seminars
Seminars provide an opportunity for different orders of dialogue. You are expected to:
• attend all seminars
• read at least all the required reading
• present one seminar presentation
• make constructive contributions to the group
• workshop your essay plans
• present your research project in a multimedia presentation
There is considerable flexibility in what can be done in a seminar and we will negotiate
these will be conducted at the start of the semester.
All readings are provided in pdf files or accessed on-line.
program
session 1: The worlding urbanization of the planet: expanding and empty
cities
This session provides an overview of the course, and introduces some of the central
theories, issues and disciplinary approaches we will be covering throughout the
semester. What happens when urbanization becomes a process of connecting
everything everywhere and where do cities fit into this process.
Key concepts: worlding, postcolonial urbanism, urban change
set reading
•
Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne 2011 Introduction: Urban Theory Beyond the
West. In Tim Edensor and Mark Jayne (eds.) Urban Theory Beyond the West: A
World of Cities. London; New York: Routledge
•
Timothy Morton 2011 Unsustaining. World picture
•
China Miéville http://www.londonsoverthrow.org/onepage.html
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recommended reading
•
FILM: Jia Zhang-ke The World http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UentCQ98n4
•
Ananya Roy 2011 Postcolonial Urbanism: Speed, Hysteria and Mass Dreams. In
Aihwa Ong and Ananya Roy (eds). Worlding Cities; Asian Experiments and the Art
of Being Global. Oxford: Blackwell.
•
Stephen Graham 2004 Postmortem Cities: Toward an Urban Geopolitics. City:
analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 8: 165-196.
session 2: Media and Digital Cities: the urbanization of the technical and
the technical dimensions of urban life
This session provides an succinct synopsis of the concepts and instruments constituting
the urban as a more extensively and intensively mediated environment, and looks at the
entanglement of the technical in the prolongation of the city.
Key concepts: technicity, media-zation, digitality
set reading
•
Antoine Picon 2008 Towards a City of Events: Digital Media and Urbanity. New
Geographies 8: 32-43.
•
Benjamin Bratton 2012 On the Nomos of the Cloud: The Stack, Deep Address,
Integral Geography. http://bratton.info/projects/talks/on-the-nomos-of-thecloud-the-stack-deep-address-integral-geography/
•
Asne Kvale Handlykken 2011Digital Cities in the making: exploring perceptions
of space, agency of actors and heterotopia Ciberlengenda
25 http://www.uff.br/ciberlegenda/ojs/index.php/revista/article/view/492
•
Matthew Gandy 2005 Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and Monstrosity in the
Contemporary City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29: 26-49.
•
Scott McQuire 2006 Technology Theory, Culture and Society 23: 256-269.
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recommended reading
•
Saskia Sassen 2008 Reading the City in a Global Digital Age. In Scott McQuire,
Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer (eds.) Urban Screens Reader. Amsterdam:
Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 29-44.
•
Leonidas Anthopolous and Panos Fitsilis 2010 From Digital to Ubiquitous Cities:
Defining a Common Architecture for Urban Development. Proceedings of IE
‘10’ of the 2010 Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Environments, IEEE
Computer Society, Washington D.C.: 301-306
•
Friedrich Kittler 1996 The City Is as Medium. New Literary History, 27: 717-29
•
Michael Crang, Tracie Crosbie, and Stephen Graham 2006 Variable Geometries
of Connection : Urban Digital Divides and the Use of Information Technology.
Urban Studies 43: 2552-2570
session 3: Infrastructures and infrapolitics of cities—the ways in which built
and social environments constitute and contest each other
The question, “what is that we can do together?”—whoever and wherever that “we”
may exist—is largely a question of what is in-between us; what enables us to reach
toward or withdraw from each other. What is the materiality of this in-between—the
composition and intensity of its durability, viscosity, visibility, and so forth? What is it
that enables us to be held in place, to be witnessed, touched, avoided, scrutinized or
secured? Infrastructure is about this in-between.
Key concepts: infrastructure, materiality, socio-technical life
set readings:
•
Martin Coward Between Us and the City: Materiality, Subjectivity, and
Community in the Era of Globalization. Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 30: 468-481.
•
Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant 1998, 2006 Paris: Invisible City. Paris: La
Découverte-Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond. The English translation is
included in the pdf reading files, but it does not contain the necessary images.
For these images—which you will need to make sense of the text-- you will have
to go to Bruno Latour’s website, retrieve the French version and have both
documents open at the same time. http://www.bruno-latour.fr
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•
Dan Hill 2008 The Street as Platform. City of Sound February 11, 2008.
recommended readings:
•
Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin 2001 Introduction and Prologue. Splintering
Urbanism. London; New York : Routledge
•
Luciana Parisi 2013 Digital Design and Topological Control. Theory, Culture and
Society 29: 165–192.
•
Michiele de Lange and Martijn de Waal 2012 Ownership in the Hybrid City.
http://virtueelplatform.nl/english/news/ownership-in-the-hybrid-city/
session 4: restless imaginaries and circuits of time in city making
What are the imaginaries at work in propelling new/old intersections amongst things,
bodies, events, materials and spaces in the reworked materialities of urban life? What
are the dreams, memories, projections, and ruptures at work in processes of remaking?
set readings
•
McKenzie Wark http://1000littlehammers.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/warkmckenzie-beach-beneath-street.pdf
•
Mark Jackson ''Live the Way the World Does'': Imagining the Modern in the
Spatial Returns of Calcutta and Kolkata. Space and Culture 2010 13: 32-53.
Space and Culture 2010 13: 32
•
Thomas Bender 2006 History, Theory and the Metropolis. Center for
Metropolitan Studies, Berlin, Working Paper 005-2006
•
Reinhold Martin 2011 Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City.
Grey Room 42:60-79.
recommended readings
•
FILM: Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong
Kong http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4orEvBZiq2k
•
Lauren Bernault 2007 Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La
Promesse and Rosetta. Public Culture 19: 273-301.
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•
Ross King 2008 Bangkok, space, and conditions of possibility. Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space 26: 315-337.
•
Bülent Diken, ’City of God’, published by the Department of Sociology,
Lancaster
University,
Lancaster
LA1
4YL,
UK
at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/diken-city-of-god.pdf
session 5: Affecting urban life: the constellations of body politics
How do people affect and are affected by urban lives in ways the directly impact the
relational spaces between consciousness and action? How does the technical
distribution of sensibility in a pre-cognitive domain create new atmospheres of human
operation?
Key concepts: affect, sensation and sensibility, urban atmospheres
set readings
•
John Protevi 2009 Hurricane Katrina. In Political Affect: Connecting the Social and
Somatic. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press.
•
Gilles Deleuze 2003 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London; New York:
Continuum. Chapter 3 and 17.
•
Shannon Mattern 2008 Silent, Invisible City: Mediating Urban Experience for the
Other Senses Frank Eckhardt, Jens Geelhar and Laura Colini (eds.) Mediacity:
Situations, Practices and Encounters. Frank & Timme
•
Patricia T. Clough 2008 The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and
Bodies. Theory, Culture and Society 25: 1-22.
recommended reading
•
Tiziana Terranova 2012 Attention, Economy and the Brain. Cultural Machine 13.
•
Yael Navarro-Yashin 2009 Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and
the production of anthropological knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute 15: 1-18
•
Mark B.N. Hansen 2012 Engineering Pre-individual Potentiality: Technics,
Transindividuation, and 21st-Century Media SubStance #129, 41: 32-59
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session 6: urban modalities of action, reassembling collective life
How do contemporary trajectories of urbanization reform collective existence and
action? What kinds of concepts are capable of addressing the constantly mutating
configurations of the social? Through what instrumentalities is it possible to register
effects on urban conditions?
Key concepts: democracy, assemblage, machinic, social movements, transversals
set readings
•
Mark Purcell 2013 The Right to the City: The Struggle for Democracy in the
Urban Public Realm. Policy & Politics 43: 311–27
•
Teresa Caldeira Imprinting and Moving Around: New Visibilities and
Configurations of Public Space in São Paulo Public Culture 24: 385-419
•
Colin McFarlane 2011 Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Chapter 2-3
recommended reading
•
Dimitri Papadapolous, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos 2010 Escape
Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century. London; Ann Arbor: Pluto Press.
Read pp. 206-221.
•
Keith Woodward, John Paul Jones 111 and Sallie Marston 2012 The Politics of
Autonomous Space. Progress in Human Geography 36:204-224.
•
Ole B. Jensen 2008 Networked Mobilities and Performative Urban
Environments. Keynote Paper for the Conference Space, Interaction, Discourse
Aalborg University Denmark November 12-12,2008.
•
Morten Nielsen 2011 “The Politics of Transversality: On a-centered Urban
Planning in Maputo, Mozambique”Paper presented at the
ECAS 2011 4th European Conference on African Studies. Uppsala, Sverige, 15
18 June 2011
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session 7: Enduring urban change: deconstructing resilience,
resourcefulness, efficacy and survival
If communities and institutions are to endure, they must constantly draw bridges
between what they do and what others are doing. This is not a bridge that links distinct
entities into a common purpose, resemblance, or mutuality. For, bridges also point to
breaks and frictions in putting to work different operating systems. Without such
frictions there is little motivation to work out ways of associating things that have no
overarching reason to be associated. Endurance means to conjoin ourselves with
others in the possibility of “saying something” that need not be summed up, that need
not have specific parameters of efficacy or objectivity, something that keeps people
going in and through transformations that are without precedent in the sense that they
need not represent the culmination of a goal or necessity. It means the capacity to risk
what is familiar, because what is familiar may not be what it seems to be; every ground
and appearance is deceptive.
Key words, flat ontology, volatility, incommensurable relations
set readings
•
Ash Amin 2013 Surviving the Turbulent Future. Environment and Urbanization D:
Society and Space 30: 140-156.
•
Elizabeth Povinelli 2012 The Will to be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance.
South Atlantic Quarterly Summer: 453-475.
•
Claire Colebrook 2012 A Globe of One’s Own: In Praise of a Flat Earth.
SubStance #127, 41: 30-39.
recommended readings
•
Didier Fassin 2010 Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of
Life. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and
Development, 1: 81-95.
•
Ben Woodard 2013 On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards of New Geophilosophy.
Brooklyn, N.Y.: punctum books. Chapter 3
•
William Connolly 2013 The”New Materialism” and the Fragility of Things.
Millenium: Journal of International Studies 41: 399-412
•
Nigel Clark 2011 Exorbitant Generosity: gifts of love in a cold
cosmos. Parallax. 16: 80-95.
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sessions 8 and 9: Creating new “land”—place-making in the new
urban, part one
How are notions of territory, land, property, and place changing in the remaking of
urban life? How do we refer to specific locations and entities in constantly mutating
sets of relations? How are subject positions affected through new technologies of
accounting and control?
Key concepts: publicity, immaterial production, pre-emption, expressive
Infrastructure, the interoperable
set readings (part one)
•
Nigel Thrift 2012 The Insubstantial Pageant: Producing Untoward Land. Cultural
Geographies 19: 141-168.
•
Keller Easterling 2012 The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft. Places: The Design
Observer Group http://places.designobserver.com/feature/zone-the-spatial-softwares-ofextrastatecraft/34528/
•
Jordan Crandall 2011 An Actor on the Street: Events, Agencies, and Gatherings.
SubStance #126 40: 49-66.
set readings (part two)
•
Andrea Mubi Brighenti 2010 The Publicness of Public Space. On the Public
Domain. Quaderno 49
•
Adam Fish, Luis F.R. Murillo, Lilly Nguyen, Aaron Panofsky and
Christopher M. Kelty 2011 Birds of the Internet: Towards a field guide to the
organization and governance of participation. Journal of Cultural Economy 4: 157187.
recommended reading
•
Swati Chattopadyay 2012 Fungible Geographies. In Swati Chattopadyay
Unlearning the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
•
Jussi Parrika 2011 Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions,
Contractions, and Foldings. Fiberculture Journal 17: 34-50.
•
Michael Dieter 2011 The Becoming Environmental of Power:Tactical Media After
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Control. Fiberculture Journal 18: 177-205
session 10: Inhabiting the unworldly: the specters of urban existence
What kinds of urban residents are left out of the normative trajectories of urban
change, or whose existence pushes our concepts of the cities outside the bounds of
intelligible apprehension? Whose marginality becomes critical in the capacity to discern
new modalities of urban action yet to come?
Key words: marginality, spectral, blackness, mediums, culture
set readings
•
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts 2004 Lenox Terminal Transitions 95: 4-33
•
Deborah Thomas 2009 The Violence of Diaspora: Governmentality, Class
Cultures and Circulations. Radical History 103: 83-105
•
Rafael Sanchez 2008 Seized by the Spirit: The Mystical Foundation of Squatting
among Pentecostals in Caracas (Venzuela) Today. Public Culture 20: 267-305.
•
AbdouMaliq Simone 2011 Deals with Imaginaries and Perspectives: Reworking
Urban Economies in Kinshasa. Social Dynamics 37: 111-124.
•
Guy Baeten 2002 Hypochondriac geographies of the city and the new urban
dystopia: Coming to terms with the “other” city. City: analysis of urban trends,
culture, theory, policy, and action 6: 103-115
recommended reading
•
Mario Luis Small, David Harding and Michèlle Lamont 2010 Reconsidering
Culture and Poverty Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
629; 6-27.
•
William Sites 2012 Radical Culture in Black Necropolis: Sun Ra, Alton
Abraham, and Postwar Chicago. Journal of Urban History 38: 687-719
•
Sanjay Sharma 2013 Racial Twitter” Racial Hashtags, Networks, and Contagions.
New Formations, a journal of culture, theory and politics 78: 46-74
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session 11: Inventive methods for engaging urban processes
Key words: mapping, aesthetics, affective collectivity,
set reading
•
James Corner 1999 The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention.
In Dennis Cosgrove (ed.) Mappings. London: Reaktion Books.
•
Steve Goodman 2010 Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Chapters 29-34.
•
Jussi Parikka 2013 Critically Engaged Wireless Politics. Culture Machine 14.
•
Jacques Rancière 2004 The Politics of Aesthetics. London; New York: Continuum.
Excerpt.
recommended reading
•
Co-design Lab 2011 Living the (CoDesign) Lab. Nordic Design Research
Conference, Helsinki.
session 12: Student project multimedia presentations
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