003 ON FIRST PERSON SINGULAR
more than a language – a sketch
Post 002 “ON sensibility” has started my “ON the Work” series of essays. They are meant to stack up in the ON +++ the Work folder, forming a spine of urbophilia.substack. The summaries of four key themes which underlie this project have set the scene for what is to follow. They point at an unintended yet pertinent aspect of my previous efforts to communicate beyond words. Namely, the titles of my books “urbophilia”, “eco-urbanity, “small Tokyo” and “infraordinary Tokyo” were all written in lowercase. To me that was an expression of the much-needed humility of thought when facing the urban. Sometimes, the medium indeed is the message.
The small vs. capital letters theme inevitably brings back our opening dialectical who am I < > who you are couple. It opens, and it will keep on reopening the Work, our explorations where urbophilia.substack might want to go. Post 003 will introduce a couple of brief, provocative (perhaps questionable, hopefully even annoying) digressions.
For highlights, I have to use insensitive, bold letters (until italics or colour, become available at Substack).
003 i the sensibility of small “i”
Touching the Self touches the very essence of our being in the World. We endlessly search for answers. Thoughts wanting to be(come) answers formulate new questions. Some of those questions will be introduced later, when we enter the East vs. West (and the Rest) debates, especially those provoked by François Jullien’s ways. Our search here navigates discussion of culture (thus, of cities) towards subjectivity, language, senses and sensibility, responsiveness and responsibility.
Urbanity. Let’s use that term, as if we (already, or at all) can agree on what it might mean (even only to us), here.
Urbanity implies complexity. Urbanity is – responsibility. Responsibility is always individual. I will place discussion of the ethos of urbophilia (as expressed by avoidance of capitalisation of the most potent concepts introduced here), in a broader context, pointing at lingua franca of the 20th century (the rudderless inertia of which we all suffer).
Capitalisation of the pronoun “I” in English language passes unnoticed by native and accustomed speakers. But, such distinction is unusual, to say the least, as it happens in only one of seven thousand languages spoken in the World! Standard explanation, that the first-person singular was capitalised in the 13th century England, to help avoid missing or misreading small letter “i” in proliferating, messily handwritten manuscripts could make sense – if it was consistent. But, it isn’t. The same, equally small (masculine plural) “i” was visible enough in Italy – where some handwriting was arguably going on at the same time (Dante comes to mind first) – as it was everywhere else.
Only in order to place that phenomenon in a truly global, not simplified context, I will briefly refer to Japan (which will feature prominently at urbophilia.substack, due to its importance in my re-forming life and work). My single aim here is to highlight divergence (Jullien’s écart) in understanding (of) the self, by referring to the Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura’s, author of “An I-Novel” who questions the very possibility of translation (a passion which, despite inevitable differences, we share). In her essay on translation, Minae reminds us how “the Japanese language does not even have personal pronouns as the European languages do. No word in Japanese is the equivalent of the English “I” - [which she calls] the most essential personal pronoun in European languages. Instead, Japanese has many variations of the word that means I
:to name just a few. Each connotes a varying degree of culture (or its lack), urbanity and rusticity, femininity and masculinity, or even pompousness and humbleness. As a consequence, a Japanese speaker must use different forms of “I,” each reflecting his interlocutor. And this floating “i” renders impossible the notion of universal subjectivity implied in the “I” of the European languages” [where, alas, from Mizumura’s distance Europe gets misunderstood as one, and all of its 200 languages “resembling” – English]!.
In any case, the first-person singular, regardless if written and pronounced in one or in many ways, as eγώ, أنا, aз, jo, ja, ฉัน, já, i, mina, je, ik, eu, ich, ég, mé, io, es, aš, jac, jeg, mi, jag, איך, Я, 私 or 我 ... – signifies the self, in Delphic sense. Whatever the reasons why native speakers of only one out of seven thousand languages had to stand out an elevate their own presence (in encounter with any of us, of “you”, or “them” in the text, or in life), that very fact invites thought about the power of words. Was that emphasis on own greatness intentional? Or, has own superiority been “simply” taken for granted? To that we will be returning in discussions of political character of the urban. It suffices here to link the size of “i” to Individualism, the worldview introduced by the 19th century English philosopher J.S. Mill, as “a social philosophy favoring non-interference of government in lives of individuals (opposed to communism and socialism)”. An arrogant ego sought to stand out, and so it/he did!
Etymology of individual(ism) makes another détournement hard to resist: the Greek word for an individual is idiōtēs (ἰδιώτης). It refers to a "private person", the one not taking part in public affairs, in – politics, as opposed to proper politikon zōon. To discuss that, we need Aristotle, Lefebvre, Nancy, Steiner ... and more.
But now, approaching the size of “i" with magnifying glass again, and reaching back to Lefebvrian understanding of cities, it is interesting to think about the ways in which power, his puissance, gets (un)consciously projected upon certain words, about motivation and consequences of empowering those, over other terms. There one can muse how word “capitalism” could be updated by capitalising not only the letter “C” but also “I”, transforming that term into a proudly simple, and honestly loud –
A couple of months ago, the richest man in the World has requested a 56 billion dollars pay package for 2024.
To count aloud continuously, in perfect, uninterrupted rhythm from 1 to 56 billion would take him 1792 years.
That condition will be in the focus of urbophilia.substack. But, here we will halt, introducing a couple of Debord’s well known, “prophetic” observations – first when as early as in 1967, in the seminal “The Society of the Spectacle” he identified that “the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign”, and then in 1988, when in his “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle” he lamented how over those two decades “the spectacle has spread itself to the point where it (…) permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory (…) that the globalisation of the false was also the falsification of the globe”.
Today Yanis Varoufakis defines emerging global system dominated by small, rich elites as Techno Feudalism. Bifo Berardi, taking off from Baudrillard’s thesis on semiocapitalism, finds us all entangled in neuro totalitarianism, and adds how “there is no time”!
All that is worth knowing but – how to (re)act? My politically correct and increasingly accurate spelling checker diligently replaces every small “i” with correct – capitalised “I’.
003 ii ethics of being with + being the other
I seek sensibility of small “i”, dialectisation of the modesty of vécu (Lefebvre), and immoderate totality of the urban (de Certeau).
Editorial summary of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Being Singular Plural” says how his fundamental argument “is that being is always ‘being with’, that ‘I’ is not prior to ‘we’, that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of being singular plural not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the ‘I’ and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a ‘society of spectacle’ nor via some form of authenticity.” That is where Nancy’s thought touches (with that unique insight which only Nancy could have) ethics of eco-urbanity, the world of love, urbophilia, the foundations of which are in desire, innate to design, planning and production of space, to create a better world, the world of equality.
The almighty, politically correct and increasingly accurate AI and its creators are – wrong. As in the case of love (which technology can endlessly fake, but never reach) the values, ethics and moral judgment can be only created and exist within human realm.
As, could there ever be anything simultaneously as human (thus, modest) and as immoderate as the feeling of love spontaneously is?!
003 iii placing urbophilia
urboPHILIA is – love. It implies a concrete sensibility, a personal, whispered “i" which paves path into the Work.
Two texts that follow are about the sensibility of the proposed method, understood as in Greek μέθοδος (μέθ – beyond + οδος – the way). Fragment (A) is from the paper published in 5th Great Asian Street GASS Symposium Proceedings (National University of Singapore, 2008), and (iv) from 3rd GASS Proceedings (NUS, 2004).
Bold highlights were added for urbophilia.substack.
These texts should be considered in continuity with discussion of the above four keywords which frame the Work.
A (from) “The greatness of small – a synopsis”
“It may be asked why is small (more) sustainable? In the context of or discussion, the answer seems to be twofold. In environmental terms, we could say: simply because it is small. Small demands less resources, less energy, less space. In cultural terms: smallness could be seen as a spatial projection of modesty.
Smallness is about density, about intensity of not only physical, but also of social fabric of the city. That intensity brings all kinds of challenges. We should never underestimate the conflictual aspect of the urban. “Urbanity is a phenomenon which causes, and at the same time is caused by, dialectic dialogue between people”, reminds Bobic (2004: 41), and refers back to David Harvey and his suggestion how “urbanisation has always been about creative forms of tensions, oppositions and conflicts. The fruit of this conflict, according to Sennett, is a paradox – that (hu)man will become more in control of themselves and more aware of each other” (ibid.).
[...]
This discussion opens further questions. What would be equivalent cultural assets in other parts of the world? What are those local nuances of difference, local sensibilities and responsibilities which have the potential to be universally relevant?
The quality and the character of everyday life, together with spatial expressions of ordinary activities are going to be the measure of success or failure on the road towards sustainable development.”
P.S. 11.3.2024
The title of this essay, The Greatness of small” has encapsulated my position and defined entry points into investigations of cities and architecture of Japan. It led to my first book about Japan, “Another Tokyo, places and practices of urban resistance” (2007).
B (from) “Midosuji Dori, Urbanity and toshisei of the Grand Boulevard of Osaka”
“… this place, Japan, where precisely is it?
… right at the end of the world.”
Alessandro Barrico, Silk
1. On theoretical frameworks
“In research on and design of Asian cities we usually see Western frameworks applied to the cultures of the East. Over the last century ‘the West’ has produced a number of intellectual tools, or theories, which help analyse and define many aspects of urbanity. Research implies objectivity, but it is often forgotten that the tools we use in research are not culture-neutral. Tuhiwai Smith (1999) in her Decolonizing Methodologies, Research and Indigenous Peoples rightly warns that ‘from the vantage point of a colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism”. The same applies for teaching and design practice. They are all based on strictly defined value systems, and are laden with cultural baggage. Theories are also personal; if not developed, they are at least chosen by the researcher. That is why qualitative difference between ‘I’ and ‘i’ needs to be recognised.
[...]
“I believe that contemporary translation theory provides a fertile body of experience and good guidance for development of broader culturally sensitive frameworks of ideas. Being positioned exactly at the cultural difference, between languages, literary theory by definition deals with the limits of communication and, at its best, recognises the dangers of cultural domination. Teaching, practice and research in cross-cultural urbanism should be grounded in what Antoine Berman describes in L'Epruve de l'étranger (Worton, 1998) as ‘the desire to open up the Stranger as Stranger to his own space of and in language [and] to recognise the Other as Other.
Compagnon’s (ibid.) summary of the relationship between literary criticism, studies and theory can be easily transposed to urbanism. We can claim how theory stands in contrast to the practice of urban studies (that is urban criticism and history) ‘and it analyses this practice (or rather these practices), describes them, exposes their assumptions – in brief, criticizes them.’ In that case we can also adopt his conclusion that ‘theory, then … would be the criticism of criticism, or metacriticism’ (ibid.), and see criticism as critical consciousness (a criticism of ideology), a self-reflection.
Our desire for synthesis in cross-cultural research, teaching and design demands firm, but balanced approach. I believe that it is necessary to combine foreigners informed gaze with insiders view, both of which may hold parts of the ‘truth’. Such is the dynamic approach exemplified long ago by Henri Lefebvre’s dialectique de triplicite. As a method it identifies defining urban tensions, opposing phenomena, contrasts them and develops a third alternative – the one that includes both. In our case, such method would dialecticise the insider’s and the foreigner’s insights, and generate one that casts synoptic light at the investigated phenomena.
Besides that, in research of urban situations, my desire is to allow the feelings and the narratives (even, if you want - the subjectivity) of both the researcher and the researched to enter the equation, to let hara complement reason. My position is that at least one of the subjectivities involved (most often one in the position of power, ie. researcher) is always present. It is better to acknowledge that fact and to dialecticise that ever-present subjectivity with those of the other, then to pretend an impossible objectivity. For, as Compagnon reminded us, like in literature in urbanism we are not dealing with the predictability of algebra of geometry.”
[...]
P.S. 11.3.2024
This project gave me courage to embark a challenging and rewarding phase of my life, a full immersion into cultures which reached far beyond professional and research interests and, over the years, evolved into an unexpected, improbable yet real, sometimes phantasmagorically profound vécu – as a radical other.
CUT!
