links to related posts referred to in the essay: 1. gridiron subject, 2. superblock subject, 3. cul-de-sac subject, 4. itineraries, 5. individuation. 6. multitude
‘Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “deindividualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.’ -Michel Foucault
SUBJECTIVITY
It has long been argued that society constructs individuals. Simply stated, we construct the world and the world constructs us. The study of ‘subjectivity’ attempts to understand how society constructs individuals by analyzing the individual itself. In the language of the human sciences, this individual is referred to as the social ‘subject’. When the study of the subject is extended to the study of cities, it becomes clear that the unique environment of cities constructs unique individuals. From this perspective we can easily see how individuals in medieval cities would be shaped by experiences in an entirely different way than the individuals in industrial cities. Moving forward, we can apply the analysis of subjectivity to modern urbanism, specifically the Radiant City urbanism that emerged in the 1920s and was codified in the 1930s and exported worldwide following the Second World War. Like all cities before it, the Radiant City was imagined to create a unique subject. This subject — the ‘universal subject’ of Modern architecture and urbanism — was a subject like no other.
In the 1920s, the advocates of Modern urbanism saw technical, economic and political change of such magnitude as to require the reorganization of the city at an existential level. Out of this reorganization, it was imagined that an entirely new mode of subjectivity would emerge. This led to the notion that the urban subject could be both anticipated and designed for. In other words, the constituent of the modern city did not yet exist, but it would be the ultimate result of its construction. This anticipation of a truly universal subject was hardly defensible, and the early-1970s critique of it was definitive. Such a subject did not, and could not, exist but as a figment of a utopian imagination. With 50 years’ hindsight, the universal subject was seen as an agent for the emergence of a brutal and oppressive mode of urbanisation. It was perhaps Manfredo Tafuri who offered the most unyielding postmodern critique arguing that the real effect of modern urbanism was not to reinvent the subject, but to eliminate it. He wrote that: ‘The problem was to plan the disappearance of the subject, to cancel the anguish caused by the pathetic (or ridiculous) resistance of the individual to the structures of domination that close in upon him, to indicate the voluntary and docile submission to those structures of domination as the promised land of universal planning.’ (Tafuri, 1976, p.73) Suffice it to say that the universal subject of modern urbanism was a relatively naive attempt to establish an unknown and unrecognizable subject against all subjectivities that came before.
This naivety regarding an urban subject was largely overcome through the writing of French historian Michel Foucault. In the mid-1970s, Foucault redefined subjectivity around two key innovations – historicising the subject and individuating it. The first pursued an understanding of subjectivity as a historical phenomenon. Before Foucault, the social was defined in ‘essentialist’ terms. What this means is that the social had been interpreted as the ‘essence’ of community or the ‘essence’ of humanity that was distilled down through the ages into an idealized subject position that transcended its many historical manifestations. In architecture, this essentialist subject was most often referred to as a modern, ‘universal’ subject, a position that is still promoted (however unwittingly) today. Foucault undermined all such essential positions through a detailed study of the historic record, and put into its place a subject that was historically defined. The second way in which Foucault reinterpreted the social was to shift the emphasis from an incorporated or collective subject to an individual one. Traditionally, the historical study of an individual subject was limited to the reign of a king or another such significant person and would ultimately constitute the ‘great man’ theory of history. Like these historians, Foucault focused on an individual subject. Instead of writing the history of kings and generals, however, he studied the factory worker lunatic, the schoolchild, or the prisoner and the so-called ‘disciplinary regimes’ that made them exactly what they were. In other words, these subjectivities were socially constructed by specific disciplinary regimes that constituted and regulated society by targeting individuals. His celebrated study of the penitent criminal in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is the premier example of Foucault’s focus on these individuated disciplinary regimes.
The implication of a historical, individuated subject on the discourse of architecture and urbanism should have been significant, for it answered much of the critique that modern urbanism was undergoing at virtually the same time. The Postmodern critique, however, became a polemic, condemning not only the universal subject, but the notion of projecting subjectivity altogether. It can be argued that the problem of Radiant City urbanism was not that it projected subjectivity, but that it projected subjectivity devoid of recognizable features. Over the past 30 years, this outright rejection of subjectivity has had drastic consequences that can be summed up in a few simple questions that are rarely asked and almost never answered, even today. Who, exactly, is the subject of contemporary architectural and urban design? Who are our discourses (such as this one) targeting? For whom do we presume to speak? Given that subjectivities are the inevitable outcome of historical forces, what is the role of urban form in their construction? Ever since Foucault’s cogent argument, the prospect of a modern universal subject has been substantially diminished, but the question of ‘who’ nonetheless remains.
It is clear that Foucault’s conception of a historically grounded subject could help answer the contemporary question of ‘who?’. His conception of an individuated subject, on the other hand, was far more problematic. If architects and theoreticians conceive of the subject at all, they usually conceive of it in collectivist terms. This devotion to the collective subject is nearly second nature to architects and urbanists, and it has all but eliminated any obvious alternatives.
It is generally understood that urban spaces such as the agora, the parvis, the royal square and the village green all created the constituencies they contained. These constituencies and others continue to exist in enduring urban form to this day. These historical forms notwithstanding, more recent examples of collective subjectivity exist – ‘the people’, the working class or mass society, to begin the list – they are rarely associated with contemporary urban form. For a whole host of reasons we are unable to account for a collective subject in the practice and discourse of contemporary urbanism leading us to further discount the projection of subjectivity. This begs the question of whether Foucault’s analysis of an individuated subject might point the way to an alternative subject position. It will be the contention here that individuated subjectivity is more relevant to contemporary urban form – specifically infrastructural form – than its collective counterpart. The substitution of the universal subject for a historical, individuated subject and the encoding of that subject in the concrete form of the city will be the primary objective of the text that follows. This rise animates the evolution of recent urban history as the emphasis of forms has shifted from a validation of the collective to a validation of an individuated subject.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Subjectivities are found encoded at all levels of the built environment. Foucault found them encoded in various institutions such as prisons, asylums, schools and factories. And while he rarely speculated on an urban scale, it is nevertheless true that powerful subjectivities are encoded, not only at the level of individual building, but also at the base level of urban organization. I am referring to the subjectivities constructed by street infrastructure. By street infrastructure I mean the layout of water and sewage lines, electrical and communications grids, mass transit, pedestrian walks, drainage capacity, along with unpaved or paved roadbeds. While largely a matter of civil engineering, the significance of street infrastructure goes far beyond its technical specification. I would like to argue here that street infrastructure – both historical and contemporary – embeds social organization at the deepest levels of urban existence. Infrastructure provides the baseline to the elaborate choreography of social organization, whether it be the convergence, for example, of a large group of people upon a stadium or the retreat of a far-flung commuter. There is, in other words, a fundamental relation between infrastructural form and the construction of urban subjectivities.
It is, at first, counterintuitive to imagine that street infrastructure would have a greater impact on subjectivities than those buildings that take social organization as their aim (prisons, factories, schools). This difficulty in understanding, however, demonstrates what is perhaps infrastructure’s greatest strength, its ‘subliminal ubiquity’. Infrastructure is literally everywhere. It exists all around us, even where you are right now. You can see it when you sit at your desk, look out your window and when you watch television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church, or go to school. Urban infrastructure is there every time you walk out the door. It operates, without effort, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Infrastructure cannot be put down like a newspaper or a book, shut off like a computer or radio, or walked out of like a film or a building. It determines if you walk fast or slow, left or right, up or down. It determines, actually, if you walk at all. Infrastructure is a more potent means of encoding social organization precisely because it operates subliminally. As opposed to a work of architecture, infrastructure leaves us largely unaware of the mechanisms of social organization that surround and define it. It allows us the very necessary fiction of unfettered agency that most modern societies require.
Because infrastructure is everywhere, we take it for granted, and because we take it for granted we fail to acknowledge its importance in the constitution of the lived world. This is unfortunate because urban infrastructure has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past half-century. A major shift from open, gridiron cities to closed, cul-de-sac cities has irreversibly changed the course of urbanisation. Street infrastructure is one of the oldest and best demonstrations of the autonomous evolution of urban form. By autonomous form is meant form that follows prior form in succession over time, ultimately creating a stable typology. The grid form typical of street infrastructure has existed since antiquity. It has evolved since that time through numerous variations in pattern including regular and irregular syncopation, larger- and smaller-scaled spacings, orthogonal and curvilinear geometries, but the logic of the grid form has endured. This autonomous evolution was abruptly terminated following the Second World War when the gridiron form of the Western city was eclipsed by a new pattern of organization. Since the late 1940s, no gridiron street infrastructures have been produced in western cities. Instead, closed, cul-de-sac organization has define megalopolitan development, creating decisive existential transformations. Because this change is so recent, and so profound, it is especially illuminating with regard to the relation between infrastructural form and social organization. This radical shift in form begs the question of whether social imperatives gave rise to form, or whether formal transformation brought about profound social change. In either case, we are situated at the nexus of a social and formal negotiation.
What follows are the diagrammatic descriptions of the three infrastructural configurations that marked the transformation of infrastructure in the 20th-century city. The three stages – gridiron, superblock and cul-de-sac – reveal a change in the interaction between infrastructural form and social organization. The diagrams are arranged in a split-screen format that directly juxtaposes the formal and the social. The line patterns on the left-hand side represent the planimetric base form of the infrastructure. The diagrams on the right-hand side represent the familiar icons of statistical analysis. Such figures often depict the quantities of a statistical sampling representing 1X, 10X, 100X and so on. This is the case here. But it is also the case that the figures suggest a specific place, as if it were a literal image of a large number of people occupying Times Square on New Years Eve or a single individual occupying a foreclosed Las Vegas cul-de-sac.
What this three-stage transformation reveals is a progressive fragmentation that continues to the point at which the part is isolated from the whole and the whole is lost to cognitive awareness. One of the most important characteristics of gridiron urbanism was that it allowed various subgroupings to be taken as a single, undifferentiated, non-hierarchical mass. It is not a coincidence that the gridiron underlies the most celebrated form of 20th-century urbanism – the metropolis. The ability for the gridiron to encompass the whole is what allows it to support the metropolis’ most characteristic subjectivity: an industrialized mass society. This subjectivity was encoded directly in the urban infrastructure, specifically in the open and infinitely extensible gridiron street. In other words, a mass society was as open and infinitely extensible as the street infrastructure that supported it. The systematic disassembly of a mass society by a global consumer economy is nowhere more evident than in the recent transformations of infrastructural form. These transformations will be referred to as a process of ‘individuation’.
ITINERARIES
It is apparent from the first three diagrams that the relation between the social and the formal is far more than utilitarian, especially in a time of dramatic urban change. The correlation between social organization and infrastructure is apparent in the historically specific subjectivities that rose and fell throughout the 20th century. It is clear that changes in form affected the dynamics between these subjectivities, including the ability to isolate and control them as well as the ability to understand them as a whole. These observations in themselves may be sufficient to theorise a relation between social life and urban form, yet there is something banal (read behavioral) in the equation of social organization to a circle. Planimetric circles limit us to mapping the social as a group. Furthermore, they privilege collective subjectivities as opposed to that individuated subjectivities that are more characteristic of contemporary cities.
It is important to remember that the organizational logic of any given urban system is not identical to the logic of its form. What this means is that the analysis of form alone does not yield the decisive characteristics of urban organization. This is made clear in the next pair of diagrams that trace habitual paths of movement, or ‘itineraries’. Itineraries are sketched on top of the infrastructure diagrams and are often at variance with the forms that support them. We can proceed with a mapping of itineraries by locating six destinations marked by the small circles on the diagram (see Diagram). These small circles represent individual destinations rather than the large circles that represented social groups. With regard to gridiron urbanism there exists a near-infinite number of paths that connect any of the six destinations. If each destination represents home, office, school, market, then the daily routines that connect them are almost infinitely variable. This diagram of gridiron itineraries is meant to contrast with the itineraries generated by the cul-de-sac. To this end, the same six destinations are drawn on top of the cul-de-sac infrastructure. As opposed to the infinite number of routes or circuits created between the six locations on the grid, the cul-de-sac drastically reduces the connections between the six centres. Any connecting path must move several levels back up the hierarchy, often returning to a primary axis (such as an urban freeway) before descending again to one of the specific locations. Unlike the infinite number of itineraries between all possible points on the grid, the points on the closed system allow only a single connection between any two points. This drastic reduction of choice from near infinity to one is not revealed by the direct juxtaposition of the circle and the grid. As a diagramming technique, the itinerary is interesting because it lies between the social entities and the formal infrastructure, eliminating the direct (deterministic) correspondence and potentially tying the two together.
Once again it is clear that the relation of social organization to urban infrastructure far surpasses functional considerations. The increasing isolation of the cul-de-sac destination due to the systematic elimination of connecting paths is clearly revealed by the itinerary. Here the drastic elimination of choice is so severe that it is in danger of cutting the analysis short. Putting judgement aside, temporarily, and focusing on the analysis at hand, we realize that the difference being marked is between urban systems that are open and urban systems that are closed. Open urban systems are made up of networks characterized by circuits, loops and nodes of continuation. Closed urban systems, on the other hand, are made up of networks characterized by hubs, spokes and nodes of termination. The difference between the nodes of continuation that characterise open urban systems, and nodes of termination that characterise closed urban systems, cannot be overstated. What is important to remember is that these network nodes form utterly opposed subject positions. Nodes of termination forge a highly individuated subject position encoded at the ubiquitous level of urban infrastructure.
INDIVIDUATION
While the integration or separation of social entities is important to the working of a city, it is not the only effect of infrastructure. It is possible to take the analysis of itineraries one step further in order to understand these patterns of movement beyond their already significant implications. It is possible to push this analysis into the existential realities that are the result of the ubiquitous nature of urban infrastructure. In other words, the impact of urban form extends beyond the issue of interconnected parts to the construction of subjectivity at an existential level.
In order to extend the analysis, it is important to understand how discrete locations are established in the extended urban field of the cul-de-sac city. As mentioned, cul-de-sac cities are made up of networks characterized by nodes of termination. Terminal nodes are unlike the nodes of continuation that characterise gridiron urbanism. The path to a specific place in the cul-de-sac city will always terminate in an exclusive destination or endpoint (see Diagram), The path on the open grid, on the other hand, will never terminate because the gridiron is infinite in all directions. As opposed to the cul-de-sac's termination of movement, the grid offers only a series of arbitrary stopping points often described as coordinates in space: for example, 239 East 339th Street. The organizational logic of a grid produces points that are connected by an infinite number of circuits or loops. The organizational logic of a cul-de-sac produces, on the contrary, a distribution of terminals or terminal distribution.
The ability of the cul-de-sac city to establish fixed endpoints has significant implications for urban subjectivity. This is best revealed in another itinerary diagram. In the cul-de-sac city, the pattern of movement through urban space traces the figure of a discrete SPIRAL through a succession of the overlaid structural hierarchies described above. This path might begin on a primary urban freeway and from there turn inwards towards a singularly defined place. This in-turning spiralling path – from freeway to feeder to collector to development spine to driveway – forms the trajectory of a closed urban system. Turning inwards on itself, the path configures a series of discrete segments each more exclusive than the last. We no longer live on an anonymous grid coordinate, but stop instead at the end of a particular path, on a specific driveway, on a specific cul-de-sac, firmly positioned in a city whose extent is unknowable. In the cul-de-sac city we are right where we have always wanted to be, at the very origin of the spiral, each of our delicate egos seated, not alongside some outbound vector, but located at a decisive endpoint — a terminal destination. This exclusive, spiralling inwards constitutes the mechanism of individuation. It is this mechanistic movement that creates the existential reality of nodes of termination.
The manner in which the cul-de-sac city defines a destination speaks volumes for the magnitude of change seen in urban infrastructure over the past century. This is not, however, so much a change in urban form as it is a change in urban subjectivity. Viewed from this perspective, there can be no greater contrast between the collective subjects the gridiron street produces and the individuated subjects the cul-de-sac produces. I would argue that the gridiron did ultimately sustain a collective subject even if that subject was defined as an undifferentiated mass society. In the cul-de-sac city, this mode of subjectivity is no longer possible. The cul-de-sac city privileges individuated subjects at the expense of any massification or incorporation. This is its historical uniqueness as well as the historical uniqueness of the city in our time. Whatever characteristics of gridiron urbanism we may admire, or even prefer, we are not able to ignore the fact that gridiron urbanism cannot support the individuated subjectivities that are prevalent today. More important, perhaps, is the need to update the Modernist conception of the ‘universal subject’, bringing to modern urbanism a workable alternative. This is to say, finally and without equivocation, that urban form is historically unique as are the subjects it produces.
At this juncture it is possible to provide a tentative answer to the question of ‘who’. Who, exactly, is the subject of architectural and urban design? For whom do we presume to speak? A first, tentative answer to that question is that we speak for the highly individuated subject of the contemporary city. While such an answer is certainly not definitive, nor does it suggest that individuation is an inevitable or even a desirable outcome, it does provide a less-than-arbitrary starting point for continued analysis.
In a short text dating from 1972, Foucault made the following remark about the construction of an individuated subjectivity. He wrote: ‘Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “deindividualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.’ (Foucault, 1983, p xiv, my italics). This quotation does a lot in four sentences. It offers two opposing types of ‘individuals’. The first type is one that Foucault claims to be the product of power. The implication is that power produces a ‘hierarchised’ individual that is ‘organically’ bonded into the unity a larger group. The six-level hierarchy – FREEWAY/FEEDER/BOULEVARD/SPINE/STREET/DESTINATION – revealed in Diagram A2.3 allows us to readily identify this type of individual. Against this hierarchised, or ranked, individual, a second type of unranked, non-hierarchised individual is offered by Foucault. This second type of individual is ‘deindividualised’ by a process that actively undermines the organic bond that traditionally ties it to a larger group dynamic. This process is accomplished ‘by means of multiplication and displacement’ and by replacing the organic unity of assimilated individuals with ‘diverse combinations’. The individual is therefore not seen as something that is ‘restored’ with reference to a series of ‘essential’ (philosophically defined) rights. It is instead seen to be constructed by the multiplication and displacement of itself. Such specific procedures suggest not the shoring up of an essential integrity, but an individuation that is accomplished by a multiplication of individuality – a hyper-individuation. In this regard, the group becomes not a hierarchical encoding of individuals, but a ‘constant generator’ of multiplicity, and this multiplicity produces a kind of unranked individual that is not subject to the type of disciplinary technologies that Foucault’s work reveals. Following Foucault, we can thus identify a process called ‘deindividuation’ that is the means by which an individual that is ranked into a unitary hierarchy is unranked into a form of organization that can be described not as a group or a mass, but as a multiplicity. This multiplicity shares a resemblance to a new form of global political subjectivity that has been recently been defined as ‘multitude’.
Seldom do we question the fundamental value of the individual. It is as if our liberal heritage safeguarded the existence of our humanity in a world defined by the encroachment of mass society. It has been suggested that the liberal conception of the individual is as dated as the conception of mass-society itself and that, today, it may be the case that individuality or ‘difference’ constitutes as much a threat to our humanity as it does to its safeguard. This unique understanding comes to us as designers who recognise the concealed logic of urban infrastructures and how it may unwittingly block or accelerate the development of the social. (end)
link to all associated diagrams
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