Category: 2020

As the pandemic vise tightens, urban histories and visions lose their dye. Awkwardly subdued, cityscapes turn in confusion, groping for the spatio-temporal straws upon which they used to thrive. Even the urban present, that sensational salad bowl that we used to enjoy, is tainted, or perhaps overly sanitized, replaced by new and not only promising blends of reality and myth. 

Recent courses of events have put urbanity in a new and revealing light, exposing not only a virological vulnerability, but a susceptibility to all kinds of more or less contagious, more or less grounded infections. If the polis also previously both relied on and suffered from a factual-fictional friction, the current plague has come to enhance this irritation in the weirdest and most conspicuous of ways, occasionally as bizarrely naked moments of empirical clarity. 

One such moment of urban geographical intelligibility occurred recently on the outskirts of Philadelphia, more precisely in an industrial area aptly squeezed between the Amtrak railway yards and the eight-lane Delaware Expressway. Here, on a quiet November Saturday, as if arriving from outer space, a motley crew of political campaigners pulled into the backyard of a local landscaping firm to stage a press conference targeting national and international media. While realizing this was not the fancy hotel context they had expected, but a somewhat rougher setting, the team made the best of the situation, covering garage doors with campaign banners and posters, mounting microphones and loudspeakers in strategic positions, and hiding landscaping equipment behind politically adorned vehicles, hence giving to the site at least a touch of generic mediascape. And so it happened that Four Seasons Total Landscaping haphazardly came to figure in a political play whose stated aim it was to trim and prune reality to fit its grandiose phantasms.

The political conspiracy dealers might have gotten their message through, but what they forgot to account for was what we might call ‘the total landscaping effect.’ As opposed to a political tactic of zooming in, landscaping has to do with zooming out. And this is what eventually happened. The stage might have been set, however not strictly enough as to prevent gazes from seeking their way outwards, towards the beyond. And as many commentators fondly noted, in this case the back-drop was really the best of it. Rather than a neatly redacted atmosphere, what protruded through the expanded media frame was a messy small business urbanity, besides the backyard of a gardening firm including also other vital segments of that spatial assemblage called ‘reality.’ Unable to perform a check-up in situ, I immediately turned to the online streetview application, which confirmed what the throng of reporters had already pointed out. Beyond the political mirage, besides the Four Seasons facilities, the pruned spruces of Delaware Cremation Center, the yellow awning of Fantasy Island Adult Books; the inobtrusive entrance to the Brazilian Shalom Pentecostal Church, the Zoom Baseball Academy, and further beyond, Rosetti’s Collision Service, Forever Marble and City Wide Roofing. An ordinary streetscape, tucked away but nevertheless breathing.  

What came into view was a repressed and disputed urban present, an infrastructure justified only implicitly, sporadically, in moments of collapse. Yet entangled with everyday life, it is a here-and-now that tends to return, again and again, haunting those who thought they left it behind. It is also a reminder of the energy it takes to shift perspective and to allow for the gaze to seek its grounding beyond flash lightings. The total landscaping effect then, rather than a cover-up, arises from the insistent and recurring questioning of the present as a real, always different from itself, both ahead of and lagging behind the fictions to which it gives rise, yet at times, appearing in its full width. It is a traumatic real, as described by among others American cultural theorist Hal Foster, knowable only in relation to a rupture or a slippage cutting through the layers of representation, yet returning again and again. As political subjects in an urban landscape, we are in fact beholders of our gazes, even armoured with views. Yet at the same time, as spectators, we are obliged to abide by scenic frames, touched only by selected glimpses of the wider landscape. While the real is there, it protrudes only in parallax,as gazes run amok, out of control. And as I roam the screened streetviews of the Philadelphian periphery, it strikes me that I have been here before, that I have in fact slowly pulled into this specific urban landscape through its expanded backdrop, and this on a slow ride with the Amtrak Crescent towards the south. While the total landscaping of that voyage was different, it now returns full force, as the troubled and repetitive line-up of scattered urban presents, pointing towards a future out of control.    

”Tis strange—but true; for truth is always strange/Stranger than fiction, if it could be told” 

(Lord Byron, Don Juan, 1823)

(The text is also published by SLU Urban Futures in their Urban Readings series)

I got a message from my friend and colleague in Belgrade. As in large parts of Europe, outdoor movement is restricted, and completely banned between 5 pm and 7 Am. Violation means a 1500 Euro fine or 150 days in jail. For some, these regulations might just add to arbitrary measures of control. For others, like me, situated as I am in a privileged corner of the world, even small restrictions come as a shock. While still being able to move relatively freely, the limitations appear as hollows, offensive depressions in the texture of the everyday, provoking postponements, deferrals, suspensions. From my point of view there seems to be no sense to what is happening – a reaction that – I reluctantly have to admit – might be due to what commentators now frequently refer to as “our collective unpreparedness.” Spared from crises and wars, embedded in welfare rather than warfare, “we” seem to have developed not immunity but a pathological innocence.

What comes to mind is arbitrary, but also telling. From within my relative confinement, I am hearing the eerie voice-over of the Situationist movie Critique de la séparation (1961):

“ON NE SAIT que dire.”

“WE DON’T KNOW what to say. Words are formed into sequences; gestures are recognized. Outside us. Of course some methods are mastered, some results verified. Quite often it’s amusing. But so many things we wanted have not been attained; or only partially and not like we thought. What communication have we desired, or experienced, or only simulated? What true project has been lost?”

Something, everything, is paradoxically unsettling. But amusing? While we ‘ought to’ do something (and I am thinking now of the aspirational dimension of this notion and the way even my relation to it is unsettled); we should indeed turn this sinkhole into a ‘music’ source of energy. What would it mean to not only ‘make use’ of the situation but to ‘muse’ on it – to acknowledge the paradoxical amusement of being locked  up in one’s own artifactual construction, to face the irony of having to accept the introduction of a curfew for humanity, to recognize the burlesque of a ban on embodied encounters, to make the best out of the absurdities upon which ‘our civilisation’ now seems to put its faith?

It is in a way paradoxically logical. Yet, “so many things we wanted have not been attained; or only partially and not like we thought…” The spatial sickening that my friend expresses in her message is amusing only in the negative sense. What does it do to us? Can the flickering glow from endless numbers of screens replace an extinct horizon? Everyday life is drooping, and it makes it hard even to articulate questions. I do indeed lack a language, a vocabulary, to cover experiences that do not at all correspond to preexisting imaginaries of crisis. While the imposed curfew and our obedient shelter-in-place might give the environment out there a break, some respite, I wonder what it does to our ability to interact. In the midst of this, the very performance of questioning the blind spots presented to us as infectious, is such a decisive activity – a matter of self-respect. And yet my friend’s questioning reaches me as a translocal echo, the direction of which escapes my grasp, reverberating beyond location.

It comes down to some basic ‘issues.’ We could for example ask what nature means in this situation of total distancing, or what the ‘music’ art of formulating meanings or translating divides into bridging movements. In the message, my friend raises such questions but hesitates to answer. How does it even sound, she asks, to pose such questions?

Contagious, secluded, surveilling, imprisoning, diverting, austere, transitional, retarded, serious, pleasurable, arresting, confusing – I DON’T KNOW what to say.

I have always been prone to drifting. A few months ago, however, the circumstances were other and the motivation for drifts across borders different. As it happened, back then, before the virus outbreak, I published an overview of the discourse on translocality. Together with colleagues, I explored current spatial thinking across borders, and across the fields of migration, culture and urban studies (https://www.mistraurbanfutures.org/en/publication/translocality-and-translocal-subjectivities-research-overview-across-fields-migration). Our aim was to shed light on emergent cultural and conceptual shifts – potentially also emergent controversies – of mobility and belonging. Two weeks ago, I even managed to submit a related research application on translocal poetics, similarly challenging what I and my artist colleagues have come to see as an increasing fixation with borders, origins, and grounds. The transversal, and in spatial terms, the translocal, we wrote, presents “a different idea of shared space; non-dualistic, non-categorical and non-hierarchical.” Furthermore, in a global political context, the translocal might offer “a new model of dissent” (Genosko 2009:18), prompting a recognition of more politically articulated localities and subjectivities. Translocality, we stated, occurs when attention to local circumstances is intensified and multiplied, co-created and distributed.

All of a sudden, the context has shifted and the entire idea of transversality and translocality is electrified. Crossing borders is now perilous and risky in new and highly ambiguous ways. And perhaps more importantly, reaching across whatever limits has now become a highly questionable practice, object to new forms of regulations and – suspicion. Sticking to one’s place is now not only either privilege or punishment, but a fundamental societal virtue.

There are indeed many different ways of understanding the new situation, the new state of emergency or the new confinement, and being embedded within does not make it easier. While the virus threat is only partly obvious, only palpable or concrete in some geographical locations, it still demands from all of us positioning and distancing. In a newspaper column this morning, a Swedish poet emphasised his conviction that despite involuntary isolation, it is possible “to care for distances.” Following this thought, I am thinking that paying attention to distances, developing a sensibility to distances, making distances matter, or through language establishing relations across distances, is what translocal poetics is about. Turning to quarantine, addressing the situation of spatial arrest, then means evoking a sensitivity as concerns the micro-locations of the everyday. While the current arrest appears out of coercion, it also draws attention to the intimate distances, or distancing intimacies, inherent to symbolic expression. The voyages of Xavier de Maistre comes to mind, his joyful travelling around his room in 1871, that year of unrest, while placed under house arrest somewhere in northern Italy:

“Of these joys, none, to my thinking, is more attractive than following the course of one’s fancies as a hunter follows his game, without pretending to keep to any set route. Hence, when I travel in my room, I seldom keep to a straight line. From my table I go towards a picture which is placed in a corner ; thence I set out in an oblique direction for the door; and then, although on starting I had intended to return to my table, yet, if I chance to fall in with my armchair on the way, I at once, and most unceremoniously, take up my quarters therein. By the by, what a capital article of furniture an armchair is, and, above all, how convenient to a thoughtful man.”

Looking out of the window, I follow the movement of obscuring clouds. While socially distanced, isolated, quarantined, cut off, what comes to mind is the “latitude and topography” that de Maistre was rambling about, the fundamental transversality of location; a quality that, despite dark skies, if taken seriously, can always become even further pronounced.

These are virus times, borderless times, times of contagion. The viral, a poisonous secretion, smoothly ignoring or simply suspending a border that always appeared absolute, secured, unsurmountable. From a virus point of view that border never existed more than as a matter of permeability, transition, propagation. Yet from another perspective that only occasionally – we have to admit – appeared to be other than reliable, this border always seemed plausible and sustainable and, should it tear, it would be due to our own transgressions.

The most frequent comment these days is a question: What is really happening? While many of us have become increasingly sensitive to limits, to the fact that current ways of living are approaching the absolute threshold, there is still the lingering reliance upon the nature-culture divide. Nature-culture; a frontier line that has provided and still seems to provide an ontological foothold of sorts, without which existence would simply slip between our fingers.

So, while the border is suspended, we submit ourselves to quarantine, a state of exception by the very disintegrating border. What are the implications of this self-inflicted emergency situation? As humans, we shelter within our own constructions, within our bounded spaces, within forms of our own creation. In quarantine, we dread the conditions under which it would be possible to step outside.