ceci est une pipe

Lianhua Apartment Complex, Beijing, 2001

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Valentine’s Day, as we all know, is a holiday not of love, really, but of stuff: of stuffed Teddies clutching heart-shaped pillows, pack of saccharine Sweethearts, pink fizzy bath salts, or perhaps a boxed rose bearing the message “I Love Us.” This year, we asked ten photographers and artists to respond to the kitschy commodification of romance that takes place each February, utilizing whatever Valentine’s ephemera caught their eye.

The ashen colors and strange geometry appear otherworldly, like the surface of a distant planet. But David Maisel’s unusual landscapes in The Fall are aerial views of mining, agriculture and construction sites in central Spain. Maisel has spent 30 years documenting how humans have marked and scarred the earth.

So Kendrick Lamar just dropped his latest masterpiece the other day, To Pimp a Butterfly. Running 80 minutes it seems that it is all there.  Everything that needs to be said about the city.  It seems too much; it doesn’t leave anything out. It beats the city up.

Cities store and erase. They accumulate increasingly large volumes of stories, populations, symbols, and energies. If the present requires an order to render things as more or less past, more or less present as objects to be paid attention to, taken into consideration, then the urban “now” does not seem to know how to “let things go.”  Urban life is inundated with things to pay attention to, things that are potentially relevant for the ability of inhabitants to organize their lives.  At the same time, cities also are adept at elimination, making buildings, lives and ways of life disappear. For the ability to make things, to harness and consolidate the energies of dense interactions are, at the same time, always taking things apart, detaching them from their “life support systems”, digging and filling in land with enormous volumes of waste, as well as extracting from waste something that might live-on.  It is all there.

In a relationship between plenitude and absence, what do we in the city pay attention to, particularly in times where the provisioning of basic services and welfare have been parceled out to profit-making ventures, and where security is offered to the highest bidder, no matter what degrees they have. When individual inhabitants are largely on their own through various registers of self-governance it is difficult to not pay attention to the intricacies and particularities of the larger surrounds. What accounts for the specificities of my experience, what enables me to continuously reshape my performance in more efficacious ways? Addressing these questions means that little can be left out; everything becomes a potential matter of concern.  

What does it mean, then, that particular facets of city are over “before their time”, or that certain of these facets are worthy of being preserved? In these comings and goings—of buildings, lives, experiences, and histories—the arbitrariness of violence seems wired into the fabric of everyday urban transitions. If cities represent some kind of pinnacle of human life, and if the thought that has emerged from cities is a thought that incessantly enjoins the city as its conceit and confidence in the ability to handle any problem, to outpace any damage done with expanding intelligence, engineering, or at least computing power, are there ways in which black lives matter when its hard to make a case that human life does not?  This seems to be what Lamar is getting at in a different kind of “encyclopedia” of black beats—infusing the city with lives not anchored in any generalization or overarching concept—this is not a 35 minute record—not rooted, as James Joy puts it in “unending genocidal squabbles over who is ‘human.”

Violence looms as an atmosphere of all disjunctions and advances in urban form. Inventiveness can be a hedge or prophylactic against violence, as violence can either put a sudden stop to invention or to come up with rules of the game or mechanisms of control that seem to come from nowhere.

Violence and invention stretch and impede each other.  The difference between figure and ground can be maintained but their relations are continuously deformed and remade.  As such, both violence and invention need not be what they appear to be, there is always something else they could be in order to do what they in the end do anyway. While the volatile natures of urban life can go either or both ways—toward violence and invention—intensive volatility may not have any direct connection with violence.  Rather, violence could emerge from prolonged inertness, just as invention could be amplified as that which sustains things as they are, not as a default condition, but as the remarkable prolongation of sameness in turbulent conditions.

The density of the city is not just that of human bodies.  The logics that have informed urbanization were predicated on density as a mode of efficacy through variation, as the intermixing of devices—measures, angles, calculations, impulses, hinges, screens, surfaces, soundscapes, exposures, folds, circuitries, layers, tears, and inversions.  All are instruments for associating things, bringing things into association, where things get their “bearings” by having a “bearing” on each other. City life was propelled by this possibility of creating sets of “bearings” by things having a bearing on each other.  Bearing down of things as an impression, as the impact of force, could walk a thin line between the incitement of adaptation, and thus new capacities, and a wearing away of desire and ability.

But the difference between inhabitants “getting their bearings” and being rendered “bare” is not always clear, and this reflects a persistent conundrum in urbanization. Urbanization is a process that has been caught in crossfire since its inception. On the one hand it makes possible a circulation of things across any border that would delimit them—such as habitats, niches, territories or scales. Bodies, things, machines, and institutions brought together in dense interactions not only operate as a gravitational force, drawing materials inward, but also constitute platforms for making materials move, whether in the shape of resources, commodities, or information. For the widespread interaction of things not only creates different kinds of space, and thus multiple fields of attraction, but changes the potential and values of those things that are put in motion.  

Throughout urban worlds today these interactions are changing at unprecedented speeds and in ways that are difficult to track. Like butterflies. Clearly most everything circulates more extensively and rapidly, while, at the same time, the available platforms on which to make use of that circulation—to plan, to settle, to cultivate over time, to trace an ongoing story of a coherent life—diminish, or become formatted in narrower terms.  Cities everywhere may begin to look more alike, but urbanization itself weaves its way across multiple strange patchworks connecting what we used to consider to be rural areas, forests, deserts, oceans, and so forth to population centers of various sizes and economic concentrations.