010 ON ESSAYISTIC SENSIBILITY, or – how to communicate the findings + THE EPOLOGUE
(segments 6+7 from "Subjectivities in Investigations of the Urban")
As suggested before, representation of subjective and sensual knowledges, when possible at all, does not necessarily demand precision and accuracy. Even when they allow elaboration, those knowledges do not inevitably lend themselves to explanation. But, as only true knowledge is shared knowledge, sensual findings need to communicate (the incommunicable). They have to trigger, to inspire, to help intuit further knowledges and action. Those are always singular knowledges, emerging from subjectivity of my own mind, sensuality of my own body. Representations of such knowledges need an essayistic sensibility, they have to keep doubt, enter aporias which highlight the non-finito nature of an intellectual (ad)venture – lived.
Theodor Adorno’s explanation of essay mentions speculative investigation of specific, culturally determined objects; intellectual and ludic freedom; childlike freedom that catches fire; aesthetic autonomy; own conceptual character; spontaneity of subjective fantasy; resistance to departmental specialization; realisation that there are ‘little acts of knowledge that cannot be caught in the net of science; etc. (after Sheringham, 2006). Importantly for us here, Adorno insists how essays refuse ‘airtight’ concepts and embrace the changing and the ephemeral. He argues that, while operating in essayistic format, “the thinker does not think, but rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual experience, without simplifying it’ (ibid.)”. For Georg Lukács, similarly, “the essay is a court, but (unlike in the legal system) it is not the verdict that is important, that sets the standards and sets the precedents, but the process of examining and judging” (ibid.). He emphasises simultaneous seriousness and lightness of essay. The culture in which knowledge is not the verdict, but the process, is the culture of tremendous intellectual generosity, one which allows ample space for the much-needed, and already emphasised, doubt.
Adorno also usefully reminds that “the essay’s ‘desire and pursuit of the whole’ echoes the way all thinking about the quotidian involves a sense of whole – not an abstract totality, but a lived manifold of interconnections” (bid.) – as in Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Oswald Spengler and many others. Perec, importantly, adds that essay rejects “the hostility to happiness of official thought’ which seals it off against anything new as well as against curiosity, the pleasure principle of thought.’ … In its constantly self-reflective and self-relativising progress the essay co-ordinates rather than deduces …” (Highmore, 2005). Proceeding ‘methodically unmethodically’, further provokes Perec, the essay becomes true in its progress, which drives it beyond itself, and not in a hoarding obsession with fundamentals” (ibid., and Radović, 2012).
As for Perec, for urban sensibility I advocate here: “Space is a doubt” (Highmore, 2005).
(materiality, or - how to represent the non-representable a segment of "Subjectivities in Investigations of the Urban" not included here)
THE EPILOGUE of "Subjectivities" (segment 7)
“'Every story is a travel story, a spatial practice,' writes de Certeau, and any theoretical system that tries to measure this story will inevitably exclude as much as it reveals. In this respect, de Certeau's theory of walking highlights the limitations of all systematic theoretical systems, psychogeography included, in accurately capturing the relationship between the city and the individual. … Beneath the fabricating and universal writing of technology, opaque and stubborn places remain, claims de Certeau but, in our modern technological landscape, increasingly homogenous and regulated, dominated by surveillance and hostile to the pedestrian, it is now the novelist and the poet, not the theorist, who are uncovering and celebrating these overlooked and forgotten corners of the city” (Coverley, 2006).
That is because the novelist and the poet do not operate under restrictions which suffocate urban research and practice. The urban needs to be liberated from the shackles of inappropriate practices which are abolishing some of the most essential qualities which make true cities – such as inclusion, equality, that very urban air which makes us free, the right to the city – in a word, urbanity. They transform proud citizens into passive subjects of globalised consumerism.
In order not only to better understand the urban, but to help sustain the endangered, cardinal practices of urbanity, to continue being able to live and make cities, we need to create epistemological frameworks which would allow us to properly address their full complexity. In that process, urban research needs to embrace the study of whole systems, in non-reductive and methodologically inclusive ways. In a way comparable to the refrom undertaken in life sciences, that means inclusion of emergence, contingency, dynamic robustness and deep uncertainly and – more. Let’s face it, urban complexity needs humility, well encapsulated in Franco Ferrarotti’s approach to the Other: “I decide that I prefer not to understand, rather than to colour and imprison the object of analysis with conceptions that are, in the final analysis, preconceptions” (Dale, 1986; Radović, 2002; and here, on urbophilia).
A much-needed radical departure from current, aggressively imposed orthodoxies includes recognition of the importance and multiplication of subjectivities, and celebration of diversity and difference generated by concrete social and physical contexts of each investigated situation. Urbanism has to struggle against the reductionist, simplistic solutionism (Morozov, 2013).
Good urban research needs to be
subjective / objective, this way ...