to think about space is to experiment

To Think About Space is To Experiment:

Reconstructing The City Through Subjectivity

Betty Nigianni, University of East London

To think about space is to experiment

My research has been focused and so far developed around the theme of the subjective experience of architectural space and in particular urban space. It started as a speculation on space, subjectivity and literary narratives trying to investigate how the intertwining relations of those terms may inform and transform the way we experience the contemporary urban environment.

My research was initially inspired by a certain ‘condition’ of architectural space that appears repeatedly in modern history and theory of architecture: that is its being thought of as having a transgressive potential when related to human activity. A strictly metaphysical and philosophical concept until the late 19^th century, space was firstly recognised as an element of architecture in the German aesthetics of the 1870s, deriving from a combination of Hegelian thought and the new born science of perceptional psychology; the roots of the new concept were expressed in the German word for it: ‘raum’ (comes from the teutonic ‘ruum’ and leads to ‘room’ in English), which is different to the more abstract term ‘space’ (coming from the classical term ‘spatium’). However, the notion of space as something abstract and scientific has been sustained throughout modernity in architectural discourses favourising its representation as a Cartesian three-dimensional extension[i] or depriving it of its materiality. As soon as space is considered in terms of a subject’s experience or activity, it becomes unfamiliar: it has been associated with the modern mental diseases of agoraphobia or claustrophobia, with an ‘essential’, spiritual fear of man for it, the so called ‘horror vacui’[ii]; also in a broader epistemological framework, space has been traditionally underpvrileged, since in dualistic epistemologies it has occupied the debased side of the bipolar pair Time/Space, along with other underprivileged notions such as emotion, the body, and the feminine (in opposition to Reason, mind and male)[iii]. Its lived reality therefore is one of disquietness in contrast to its abstract conception of ‘purified’ tranquility.

One way thus to approach that ‘uncanny’ relation between space and the subject was for me to look at literary texts: opposing to the scientific perception of space as a geometrical entity, narrative has demonstrated the dynamic relationship between space and human action. I set out to re-examine urban space through literary texts using them as ‘other’ narratives that may represent the ‘subjective’ experience of the city: the embodied, emotional, imaginative experience, usually ignored or suppressed by the dominant discourses on the city (by architects, planners or social scientists). Proceeding with my research, I was further interested in how literary narratives may influence our experience of the city, and also in what degree a subjective narrativisation of urban space may be a transgressive operation in terms of taking control, of appropriating space and in this way turning the subject into an agent in everyday urban reality.

In the framework of contemporary architectural history and theory, I would see my research as coming from of a quite recent tendency to consider (quoting architectural historian Iain Borden) ‘…architecture… [as] not itself space, but only a way of looking at space’ and ‘so the history of space… [as] also not the (traditional) history of architecture.’ (Borden: ). From that perspective, there has been a need to consider equally space, time and social being, with particular regard to political goals, everyday life, the human subject, the body and its various actions. Thus I am interested in (go on quoting Borden) ‘a kind of architectural history that does not focus on things, effects, production, authorship or exchange, but upon process, possibilities, reproduction, performance and use’ (Borden: 265). From that perspective, I wish to go beyond thinking about architecture as objects, to thinking about architecture as processes; beyond ‘conceptions of space… to consider the production of space’ (Borden: 9), in Foucault’s and Lefebvre’s sense of space as constituted by the discourses and practices of social life; and further to consider the reproduction of space as ‘a site of imagination, of experience, of critical re-examination’ (Borden:). I am therefore not examining (in feminist architectural historian’s, Jane Rendell, words) ‘space as it has traditionally been defined by architecture – the space of architect-designed buildings – but rather space as it is found, as it is used, occupied and transformed’ (Rendell: 101).

In a broader postmodernist theoretical context, where all histories are considered to be partial and reliant on the relation of historian and reader (Rendell: 19), and where issues such as the construction of the subject and understanding systems of representation play a significant role in historiography (Rendell: 20), I believe that exploring subjectivity as a form of knowledge of architectural space[iv] could raise some interesting questions.

- 2. Subjectivity, the City and Literature

No space of representation without a subject, and no subject without a space it is not’ (Victor Burgin – ‘Geometry and Abjection’)

I therefore started by looking at a number of highly personalised literary writings, in which urban elements (e.g. the street, the avenue) are described as directly related to subjective experience (e.g. the body, emotion); I focused my research on a particular city (Athens) and a particularly modern/postmodern Greek literary production, with the intention to discuss the above spaces and texts in a larger critical context of modernity.

My research has drawn so far from three theoretical levels, between which I have tried to reveal and establish interconnections:

_ On the level of space and subjectivity: my discussion on the subject has largely drawn from a psychoanalytic context and vocabulary so far (mostly influenced by Freud and Lacan), which I have tried to combine with perceptional psychology and phenomenological ideas on the relation between subject and space: e.g. Bachelard’s discussion on the experience of space through reverie and memory, but also his proposal for a topo-analysis in accordance to psychoanalysis; or Caillois’ and Minkowski’s work on schizophrenics perception of space as interrelated with the subject. I have also been influenced by most recent discussions on urban space that draw form a psychoanalytic context by so called psychogeographers, like Steve Pile’s discussions of the city as psychic and social space.[v]

_ Moving on then to the second level of urban space and the city, I have been mainly concerned with modernity and the everyday; my discussion has drawn so far largely from Lefebvre’s critical theories on modern capitalist space as abstract space, characterised by homogeneity and deprived of qualitative differences. I have concentrated in particular on Lefebvre’s discussion of the human subject – and specifically the body – as one of the primary sites of any revolutionary activity that would subvert abstract space[vi]. For Lefebvre, there are ‘bodies which actively do something, which have dynamic operation in the city’, but their ‘actions are important not for their production of things, but for their production of meanings, subjects, relations, uses and desires.’ (Borden: 12)

More recently, I have started looking at other theoreticians of modernity and the everyday like Simmel, Benjamin and a more later thinker, De Certeau, who all see the sphere of everyday life as essentially urban (Highmore: 74); and further suggest an investigation of the everyday as a non-conscious realm that may contain a transgressive potential (Highmore: 59). In epistemological terms, the above thinkers including Lefebvre, reject a ‘rationalist’, traditionally ‘scientific’ approach to the city and the everyday, suggesting instead the possibility of a science of everyday life that would operate in the areas of myth and ritual (much like the Surrealists had suggested). (Highmore: 47) Without employing a fully psychoanalytic framework, they attempt to attend to a side of everyday modernity that is not simply contained (or containable) by consciousness[vii]. (Highmore: 73)

_ That approach to everyday modernity takes me to the third level of my research which deals with space and literary narratives. I have approached that area again through a psychoanalytic – phenomenological context trying to trace links between narration and the experience of space; according to phenomenologist literary theorist J. Hillis Miller, there is a fundamental relation between narratives and space: (quoting) ‘Space is perceived through an action that takes place in it…our perception of space is inherently narrative’ (Hillis Miller:); similarly memory has also been discussed in phenomenology as a form of narrativisation of space (Bachelard). Further, post-structuralist theorists, like Roland Barthes, have explored the impact of textual narratives and representations on our experience of the city influenced (apart from Marxism and structuralism) by Bachelardian phenomenology and Freudian psychology; Maurice Blanchot, Michel De Certeau and more recent cultural theorists, like James Donald, have been preoccupied with tracing connections between narratives, events and space; e.g. Blanchot has written discussing the surrealistic novel Nadja set in Paris, that ‘The tale is not the narration of an event, but an event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen’ (Highmore: 52); Donald has argued that narratives do not just represent spaces or events, but they rather project events onto space, generating in this way a kind of narrational space[viii]; ‘narratives about cities imagine events taking place in an urban topography; they conjure up the space of the city through the projection of these narrative images’ (Donald: 123); and De Certeau has further pointed at the transformative operation of that projection, which for him continuously redefines urban space; he writes: ‘Stories… traverse and organise places; they select and link them together…Every story is a travel story – a spatial practice.’ (De Certeau: 115)

In a broader cultural theory context, I have also drawn from Benjamin’s discussion of storytelling as a way to reconnect with ‘experience’ (not as simply lived through, but also as something that can be accumulated, reflected upon and communicated) in the modern world, and also his appeal for new poetic forms that will allow the partly inchoate experience of the modern city to be articulated (Highmore: 66-67).

_ In terms of methodology, I am first of all focusing on the micro-level, examining a series of specific ‘micro-environments’ in the city (e.g. the street, the avenue, the square); this methodology complies with my intention to approach architecture as something more than the product of the architect/planner (as I already mentioned), but instead as created through appropriation and use: thus I am looking at the city as ‘a series of micro-spaces, rather than comprehensive urban plans, monuments or grand projets’ (Borden: 217). There has been a certain tradition in modern architectural and urban history (from the 1930’s till up to the 60s and 70s) to break down the city into neigbourhoods, or squares, streets etc., in order to analyse and examine city life (in an attempt to see the modern city as a community that still operates on the level of the neighborhood, as in Jacob’s or Unwin’s studies of American cities) (Forty)[ix]; however, more recent projects like Borden’s study of skateboarding’s relation to ‘elemental’ urban spaces (boundaries, doors, windows, bridges), spaces that might have a topological or generic form (Borden: 267), focus on the micro-scale as a counterargument against traditional urban schemes that approach the city as a planned total.

In the more broad context of cultural theory, I am influenced by Simmel’s and Benjamin’s examination of urban life and culture also on a micro-level: through ‘fragments’ (in the case of Simmel), or through the ‘junk’, the ‘left–over’ objects and spaces of modernity (Benjamin).

Finally I employ a ‘montage’ methodology and structure, by bringing into the discussion on the separate urban parts a variety of mediums (like text, photos, architectural plans); and then by examining the city as constituted by fragments and juxtapositions; again here influenced by Benjamin’s idea of collage practice as a critical practice, that through the constellation (montage) of different elements, produces a ‘spark’ that allows for recognition, for legibility, for communication and critique. (Highmore: 73)

- 3. The street is a state of mind[x]

The urban terrain is an emotional concrete condition

(Adam Caruso ‘La Ville Emotionelle’)

In the above context then, I have discussed so far literary texts by two writers, whose stories develop in two different urban spaces, the street and the avenue; these texts are highly personalised narratives, which represent space as indispensably linked with the subject – more vividly in the case of the avenue, with which the narrator identifies – and as a continuum in which physical and the psychical intermingle – in the case of the street, that happens through the narrator’s walking journeys. I will very briefly take you through these narratives now; and I will start with a short story by the writer V. Raptopoulos, in which the street is experienced through emotional states and fantasy; quoting from ‘In the bottom of the sea’:

We decided to go for a walk without talking about it first… I got into that old mood again for a night walk in underwater Athens. A strong feeling, to get away with you, to swim again in the night, to cross the city with you beside me… Just after Omonia square, at the beginning of Athenas street, we met that blind man, sitting in the same old corner, with a black mask on, diving suit, flippers, oxygen tank and a little tin box for our charity. That incident must have seemed funny to you, because I think you laughed. You were anyway right, because how could we give him any money trapped in our suits?... We were already arriving at Kotzia square and were reaching the Town Hall. Then I noticed that on its roof two seaweeds had grown, big and silent…Near the end of Athenas street, I stepped on a big oyster which broke into pieces. I started feeling cold, looking at the shining of a thousand pieces… So when you rested your hand on my hair, when you held me tight there near Metropoli, I wasn’t cold then, I got warm… In Syntagma square…we squeezed inside the phone booth… outside the moon was sinking little by little behind the big buildings,[…]bleeding, scratched, you smiled as you hang up the phone and I kissed you guiltily.... Your lips had a bitter taste, a certain saltiness, and as we were now walking towards the Royal Garden, behind my mask I was licking that saltiness with immense pleasure… (R: 73-77)

I have discussed that story by Raptopoulos as a ‘remapping’ of urban space through the creation of alternative routes of subjectivity through the planned fabric of the city. The narrator/walker re-appropriates the official space of the city by inscribing his personal narrative on it; he ‘reverses an established distinction between public and private spaces’, between official history and personal memory, and further destabilises their hierarchical signification; much like the nineteenth-century Parisian flâneur who, while walking in the public city created by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, was however more attracted to ‘the trivial, fragmented aspects of street life’[xi]. In other and especially later stories by Raptopoulos, his narratives of journeys in the city transform familiar streetscapes into uncanny structures that often host moments of disruption of the everyday (leading sometimes to extreme events, such as violence or death). Urban spaces intermingle with the narrator’s psychic world to reconstruct the city as a ‘collage’ of places re-interpreted through effects, perceptions, fantasies, memories. That dream-like environment constantly irrupts through its ‘other’, the planned city-symbol, which in the case of Athens has been the result of an imposed 19^th century Western European utopianism[xii]; in this way, urban space is revealed as a terrain of passion and subjectivity that defies all calculation.

- 4. An avenue that looks like me

Cities have always represented and projected images and fantasies of bodies, whether individual, collective, or political

(E. Grosz – Architecture from the Outside)

That becomes even more apparent in the short story ‘I think that Syngrou avenue looks like me’ by Manos Kontoleon, which I am moving on to now: that story describes the gradual attachment of the narrator with an Athenian high-speed avenue that connects the centre of the city to its coastline. Initiated by and experienced through an embodied approach of space, and further related to an erotic incident that happened during one of the narrator’s visits to the avenue as a child, the emotional attachment to the road triggers off a wish for identification with it (quoting from the story description of incident):

…- that same woman led me to the big hall, through huge automobiles, full of shining nickel and perfectly round lights and bumpers…

I asked what was the name of that road in front of the big hall which was full of cars. A straight, wide road, and even though I was on my toes, I couldn’t see its end…

‘Tell me, how is this road called?’

‘Syngrou avenue’, the lady with the red lips smiled and bent over me. ‘Do you know where it leads to?’

My eyes started their journey by laying first on her neck’s dimple, then jumped over the multicoloured obstacle of a little cross, and soon followed the line which seemed to go in-between her two breasts.

‘To the sea!’ and her arm stretched over the wonderful deep blue of a car and showed towards one direction…Under her short sleeve, her armpit had such a scared pink colour…

I shivered.

Syngrou avenue – similar to my gaze – started almost from the place I was standing and was lost towards an unknown beach.

And so, I decided that I should look like this road.

What is most interesting is that the narrator identifies with a certain ‘double’ life of the road as he admits later on; Syngrou avenue is an office area during the day and then it is transformed into a place of entertainment and prostitution at night; (quoting):

During the day, the road dresses the clothes of an absolutely respectable employee and locks itself up in air-conditioned offices or sparkles behind the rectangular well-washed window displays.

Ah, how right I was – I say to myself – on my choice of the road that looks like me. Everything this road does, I perform as well… And I support these actions wholeheartedly.

But then there is always the night’s falling. And the return of the remorse.

Looking at this highly psychoanalytic piece, I focused on the relation between body and space, to argue that the writer, through his representation of space as closely related to the embodied subject, succeeds in depicting a particular ‘all-inclusive’ quality of the space of the avenue: Syngrou avenue is presented as a multi-layered environment, which allows for the interpenetrating of different, contrasting uses and is produced by ‘juxtapositions’ and ‘dis-locations’; therefore a particularly modern space, such as a high-speed avenue, is however called into question by transgressions, but also works further as a site for transgressions (e.g. attracting transvestite prostitution). The writer reconstructs the avenue as such a space, by demonstrating the body-city relation through the narration of an erotic event, in which the distinctions that separate the body and the city dissolve, and then also by revealing the central role that sexuality plays in experiencing space.

Moreover, again in this story, as much as in the one discussed previously, space is represented as being marked by a personal story. That is an additional act against the homogenising space of abstraction: in opposition to the planners’ dehumanised cityscapes, Kontoleon treats urban space as a psychic content, offering a spatial representation ‘haunted’ by subjective experience.

- 5. The poetics of transgression

Indeed, it is possible to analyse urban spaces as if they had been dreamt.

(S. Pile, 1996: 213)

To take that discussion a bit further and to sum up, I would like to comment on the idea of the subjective narrativisation of the city as a transgressive operation. From the perspective of an ideology of resistance that does not rely so much on acts, but on the meanings that social actions may take on in the practice of everyday life (Pile, 1997: 14), ‘urban planning as a spatial technology of domination’ (Pile, 1997: 3) can be perhaps resisted through the creation of new meanings out of imposed meanings, succeeding in this way a re-working of space (Pile, 1997: 16); for geographer Steve Pile this re-working happens at all scales (the body, locality, region, nation etc.) (Pile, 1997: 13), therefore subjectivity plays an important role in such processes. In architectural terms, the modern city’s ‘poverty of daily life’ (in Lefebvre’s sense) derives from the failure to replace the symbolisms, times, rhythms and different spaces of the traditional city with anything other than dwelling units and the constraints of traffic. (Borden: 190); that is why the modern city is experienced as banal monotony, having lost the characteristics of the creative oeuvre and of appropriation. Personal narratives and literary texts may bring back the dream, imaginary and ‘poetic being’ in the city; and further they may provide us with an urban politics of poetics in Kristeva’s sense[xiii] that could reconceptualise the city through encouraging, instead of architectures of use, ‘architectures of pleasure’ (Borden: 10).

However, although concerned with the possibilities for social change, because of its subject matter, this research ‘does not claim to consider changes in material conditions but only changes in experience of material conditions’ (Borden: 2). From that perspective, I suggest that there could be a space of transgression in the contemporary city, which may not only consist of the ‘real’, physical space of the avenue-street-square-house, but it could be a ‘hybrid object’ in psychoanalytic terms (Burgin: 59), created out of materiality, narratives and psychic space; something like Bhabha’s ‘third space’ that ‘intertwines not only place, politics and hybrid identities, but also the real, the imaginary and the symbolic’[xiv]. In these terms, a transgressive being in the city may rely (as Colin MacCabe observes discussing films) on ‘the ability to rework image and dialogue’ which could be ‘the key to both psychic and political health’ (Burgin: 110). I would like to close this presentation by quoting artist and visual theorist Victor Burgin, whose artwork has been particularly inspired by cities; he writes: ‘History may mark us in advance with a hollow for the handcuffs, but the capacity to dream, to reconfigure the inherited world in terms of unforeseen and perhaps illegitimate relations, determines whether they will be worn.’ (Burgin: 106)

Indicative Bibliography

_ G. Bachelard. The Poetics of Space.

_ G. Bachelard. The Poetics of Reverie.

_ R. Barthes. The Pleasure of the Text.

_ R. Barthes. Image-Music-Text.

_ W. Benjamin. ‘The Storyteller’. In Illuminations

_ W. Benjamin. The Origin of German Tragic Drama.

_ M. Blanchot. The space of literature.

_ I. Borden. Skateboarding, Space and the City. Architecture and the Body.

_ I. Borden.

_D. Bouchard. Language, Counter-memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault.

_ M. Christine Boyer.

_ S. Buck-Morss. The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project.

_ V. Burgin. The Remembered Film

_ V. Burgin. In/Different Spaces. Place and Memory in Visual Culture.

_ V. Burgin. Some Cities.

_ I. Calvino.

_ M. De Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life.

_ J. Donald.

_ A. Forty. ‘The city without qualities’. In

_ S. Freud. Art and Literature.

_ S. Freud. ‘A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis’. In The Standard Edition.

_ E. Grosz. Space, Time, and Perversion.

_ E. Grosz. Architecture from the Outside.

_ D. E. Hall. Subjectivity.

_ B. Highmore. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. An Introduction.

_ J. Hillis Miller. Topographies.

_ T. Moi. The Kristeva Reader.

_ J. Lacan. Ecrits

_ H. Lefebvre. The Production of Space.

_ H. Lefebvre. Writings on Cities.

_ G. Perec. Species of Spaces and Other Writings.

_ S. Pile. The City and the Body. Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity.

_ S. Pile.

_ J. Rendell, B. Penner, I. Borden. Gender, Space, Architecture. An interdisciplinary introduction. London, N. York: Routledge: 2000.

_ S. Sadler. The Situationist City.

_ R. Shields. Lefebvre, love and struggle. Spatial Dialectics.

_ G. Simmel. ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’. In

_ G. Simmel. Simmel on Culture.

_ M. Tafuri. Theories and History of Architecture.

_ A. Vidler. Warped Space.

_ A. Vidler. The Architectural Uncanny.

_ D. Winnicott. Playing and Reality.

_ Maurice Blanchot.

_ Empathy, Form and Space.

Notes