Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: alexy titarenkov, anthro, art, cities, future gutter status, georg simmel, russia, shadows, the man who lived underground, the uncanny
I came across these gorgeous images from Russian photographer Alexey Titarenko‘s City of Shadows series some time ago, and was reminded of parts of an old anthro essay. A year later, the mad doubling ad tracings remind me of Freud’s Uncanny too. There’s smoething very paradoxically comforting about swathing/draping yourself in grey, no? I’m thinking of a very specific collection, but can’t for the life of me remember which.
Georg Simmel has suggested that individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation. Man, to him, “is a differentiating creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it” . So too city. Like a riverbed, it is carved out by impressions; like a worn chair it adopts the dented shape of those who last sat in it. Its personality, then, is formed not in the present but in the immediate past. It is constantly re-enunciated by those who walk its streets. Like New York, “its present invents itself from hour to hour, in the art of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future”. It is from these stimulations that the city springs forth and acquires a character of its own.
A city can be thought of as an unconscious entity that is shared by all those who belong to it. Yet like culture, it is shaped largely by the outsiders who visit it, leaving behind an accumulated web of perceptions along with a hefty, if somewhat guilty, gratuity. Like a factory that defamiliarises even as it assimilates and re-familiaries, the city can be seen as a site for the production of myth. It is at once both a mausoleum and a natal ward. It is where dreams come to die even as they are made. Indeed, it carries a certain sense of the body politic, in its constant sloughing off of old layers to reveal new ones. Its arterial streets meanwhile serve both as assembly lines and as neuron chains, at once ferrying resources and nervous information. This is the surface of its skin: the aboveground.
Yet the city’s echo is multisyllablic and multi-layered, both temporally and spatially. Below its industrial capillaries, “subway lines, like lifelines on the hand, meet and cross – not only on the map where the interlacing of their multicolour routes unwinds and is set in place, but in everyone’s lives and minds”. In this it can be thought of as being somewhat rhizomatic, replete with multiple points of entry and deterritorialisation. You may enter a city from different planes – through its tollgates or its airports or through its subway. You may equally enter a city without ever physically being present in it: through a history documentary or guidebook or simply in your own imagination. As Simmel continues, “man does not end with the limits of his body, or the area compromising his immediate activity. Rather is the range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from him temporally and spatially”.
Sometimes these effects exist physically, in both behaviour, and building structures. Other times they are imaginary, present in language, and in hearts and minds. The city situates itself in and as the intersection between the two. With regards to elevated structures, De Certeau posits, “to be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp”. Until the aboveground magnetism – and gravity– calls, that is. Even the former World Trade Center closes its doors sometimes; you cannot stay up there forever.
Underground, however is a different story. Going down the manhole is almost like going down Alice’s rabbit hole into another world. An unfamiliar world at first, but one which quickly becomes ever more real than the heaving city above it. Suddenly, every line of flight becomes an entrance into the imaginary. Such is the experience of Wright’s protagonist in The Man who lived Underground. In a series of fortuitous coincidences and with a seemingly neverending supply of squashed cigarettes, every emergence aboveground is into a site of mythmaking and affirmation. The church, the undertaker’s establishment, the cinema where people laugh at shadows of their own lives, the typewriter, the jewellery shop and finally, the police station.
And as time lapses, the city is unfamilliarised. Even though he knows all the city’s churches, he cannot quite place the one he spies on. His fingers “toyed in space like the antennae of an insect”, but in the darkness he is blind. In this darkness, he thus becomes an actor of sorts, stealing not objects, but memories, moments and possibilities. He can play at being a writer, and flirt at being a millionaire. Like the old man who has worked in the furnace room for so long that he had no need of light, he too has “learned a way of seeing in his dark world”. He has triumphed over the world aboveground, and he is free.
1 Comment so far
Leave a comment
these are creepy good…it’s weird thinking about all the people who’ve been in your subway seat. it’s a little like visiting old great places, cbgbs and whatnot, and feeling all the layers of history. nice feeling.
Comment by SRL October 30, 2008 @ 5:29 am