Civic Spaces and Desire

Charles Drozynski, Diana Beljaars, Charles Drozynski, Diana Beljaars

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351184113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Civic Spaces and Desire presents an original and critical appraisal of civic spaces for a novel theoretical intersection of architecture and human geography. The authors address civic spaces that embody a strong moral code, such as a remembrance park or a casino, in various places in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australia and Asia. The consecutive chapters of the book present these chosen spaces as the interconnection between the everyday and the ideological. By doing so the book reimagines the socio-political effects of the countercultural assemblages and ontologies of difference that these spaces produce, represent and foster, as presented through outcasts and nomads of various kinds and forms.

The book reflects on different interpretations of the key texts from primarily post-linguistic theoreticians, such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida. It will benefit students and academics in architecture, geography, philosophy and urban studies and planning, who seek to understand the politics of space, place and civility. By deconstructing normative ideological constructs, the book uses the concept of desire to explore the tensions between expectations of civic spaces and the disappointment and wonder of their immanent existence.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

Civic space—and desire—deranged

From Le Corbusier to Georges Perec

Marcus A. Doel

“Our space has strange effects. For one thing, it unleashes desire.” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 97)

“There is desire only if it is desire for the machine.” (Guattari, 2006, p. 184)

“… what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … so-called …” (Beckett, 1984, p. 220)

The titular phrase “civic spaces and desire” reminds me of the opening lines of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s wonderful book, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: “How can we enter into Kafka’s work?” they ask. “This work is a rhizome, a burrow… . We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, p. 3). How, then, can we enter the burrow or rhizome of civic spaces and desire? Besides the city gates, the main thoroughfares and the subterranean watercourses, the obvious points of entry are “civic spaces” on the one hand and “desire” on the other hand, but I hesitate to choose between them since it is not entirely clear which of them should come first, nor whether they are in fact even separable. My hesitation leads me to reread the opening lines of Le Corbusier’s foreword to his seminal text The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, penned in 1924, with an eye towards the stirring of civic spaces and desire:

A town is a tool. Towns no longer fulfil this function. They are ineffectual; they use up our bodies, they thwart our souls. The lack of order to be found everywhere in them offends us; their degradation wounds our self-esteem and humiliates our sense of dignity. They are not worthy of the age; they are no longer worthy of us.

(Le Corbusier, 1947, p. 13, italics in original)

This foreword—where towns thwart, offend, wound, degrade and humiliate our efficacy, our dignity, our bodies, our worth and even our souls—is prefaced by an aerial photograph of “a typical London suburb” that Le Corbusier admonishes with the words: “A charming picture which displays every vice of planning!” (Le Corbusier, 1947, p. 12, italics in original). Having foreshown his readers what is undesirable about extant civic space, Le Corbusier goes on to argue that the “City of Tomorrow” must be built anew according to what has been proper to Man since the advent of Homo Erectus—the straight line and the right angle, which are not only “sane and noble” and “the result of self-mastery”, he says (Le Corbusier, 1947, p. 30), but that are also truly sublime, especially when arranged to form crosses and iconostases, as in his own 1955 Poem of the Right Angle (Le Corbusier, 2012)—and which must erase the degraded, unworthy and ignoble “City of Today” that has emerged over millennia according to what is fundamentally alien to Man and only really fitting for beasts of burden: the crooked and errant “path of least resistance” (Le Corbusier, 1947, p. 23), whose disorderly and irrational topographic meandering he dubs the pack-donkey’s way.

Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance… . The Pack-Donkey’s way is responsible for the plan of every continental [European] city; including Paris, unfortunately.

(Le Corbusier, 1947, pp. 23–24)

Now, I wager that the phrase “civic space” will bring out the more or less latent geometer and geomancer in you, probably under the pretext of enforcing law and order, if only for the reason that “space lays down the law because it implies a certain order—and also a certain disorder” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 143). Even a barely trodden desire line or desire path lays down the law and commands bodies, as Robinson Crusoe discovered to his fright when he stumbled upon a man’s solitary footprint on the sandy shore of his supposedly desolated and deserted Island of Despair:

I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition… . [A]fter innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man.

(Defoe, 1791, unpaginated)

Indeed, “nothing and no one can avoid trial by space—an ordeal which is the modern world’s answer to the judgement of God or the classical conception of fate” (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 416). However, in these more fluid, flexible and flaccid of times, I suspect that the geometer and geomancer in you will be less fixated on the nobility of the straight line and the right angle, or the dignity of the square and the cube, than Le Corbusier was wont to do:

a modern city lives by the straight line, inevitably; for the construction of buildings, sewers and tunnels, highways, pavements. The circulation of traffic demands the straight line; it is the proper thing for the heart of a city. The curve is ruinous, difficult and dangerous; it is a paralyzing thing. The straight line enters into all human history, into all human aim, into every human act.

(Le Corbusier, 1947, p. 28)

After all, having debased, disgraced and dishonoured the straight line, the square and the cube, the onto-aesthetic taste of today seems to be much more curvaceous, rambling and feral; a derangement well-illustrated by the superimposition of the ludic Parc de la Villette on the post-industrial ruins of Baron Haussmann’s original City of Blood (Claflin, 2008; Tschumi, 1994), or even by the sweeping loops of the railway system that Le Corbusier somewhat incongruously proposed for his otherwise rectilinear City of Tomorrow:

It is 9 am. From its four vomitories, each 250 yards wide, the station disgorges the travellers from the suburbs. The trains, running in one direction only, follow one another at one-minute intervals… . The station square is so enormous that everybody can make straight to his work without crowding or difficulty. Underground, the tube taps the suburban lines at various points and discharges its passengers into the basements of the sky-scrapers, which gradually fill up. Every sky-scraper is a tube station.

(Le Corbusier, 1947, pp. 193–194).

Now, given the arrangement of the phrase civic spaces and desire, one may be forgiven for thinking that civic spaces should come first and desire second, as if the first-mentioned were our primary concern and the latter only insofar as it bears on the former: Civic Spaces—and Desire, as it were; where the “—and Desire” arrives belatedly as an afterthought or an after-effect, in keeping, perhaps, with the conviction that “man governs his feelings by his reason” (Le Corbusier, 1947, p. 23). We could then begin to enumerate and explore all of the ways in which desire may come to affect civic space. But what is desire? Understood naively, desire is the desire of a subject (as cause, origin, agent, truth and measure) for an alluring object (real, symbolic or imaginary). Such a desire is always in excess (and therefore both luxuriant and gratuitous) of so-called “needs” (i.e. necessities, use-values) on the one hand and so-called “wants” (i.e. decencies, sign-values) on the other hand, even when the desirable Thing is lacking, like a sinkhole, and precisely because it is lacking, like an aporia. A more refined understanding of desire would regard it as an insatiable, interminable and self-referential process of prolongation and procrastination that perpetually differs and defers (i.e. desire desires desire—not satisfaction, not fulfilment, not attainment, not completion, each of which would be fatal to desire and anticlimactic; but perpetuation, augmentation and intensification), or even as the desire for conscious or unconscious recognition—“the desire for a desirer” (Lacan, 2014, p. 24), the “desire for the desire of an another” (Macey, 2000, p. 95) and “the desire of the Other” (Lacan, 2008, p. 38)—that necessarily entails anguish and misrecognition (in short, the desire for desire). However configured, desire would come—belatedly, like a laggard—to affect civic space: from the inside out and the outside in. From the inside out in terms of specifically civic desires that find themselves expressed in civic space, such as those grandiose monuments and memorials that sprout up in public space, like Pyramide du Louvre, Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile and La Grande Arche de la Défense in Paris. And from the outside in in terms of all of those other desires that would find themselves “out of place”, so to speak, in civic space, as evidenced, for example, by the proliferation of all manner of more or less petty prohibitions, such as against ball games, skateboarding, loitering and other incivilities (e.g. spitting, smoking, littering, urinating, honking, heavy petting and suchlike). By folding the inside out and the outside in, civic space and desire would be like the unfathomable, invaginated house in Robert Coover’s short story, Playing House:

Once there was a house, the storyteller continues, which was struck by a hurricane and turned inside out, the outside closed within it, its own dimensions infinite and unknowable at what was once the core, more like the edge. Those within moved out, which of course was further in, and there they built a new house looking out in all directions upon the inverted old. Over time, they enlarged the house and as they added rooms, the old house gradually backed away and faded out of sight.

(Coover, 2005, p. 65)

In short, given any civic space whatsoever, one could enumerate all of the desires that could sweep over it, whether civic or not, and consider how they may affect and be affected by one another. Such an encounter between civic space and desire would play out like the “pure machinic filiation” (Guattari, 2006, p. 180) of the alluring orchid and the perverted wasp, each de-territorialising and re-territorialising the becoming of the other through solicitation, penetration and transformation. (For example, what became of Place de Grève following the arrival of the guillotine in 1792, and of the guillotine during its sojourn to Place de la Révolution for the Reign of Terror or even during its confinement to the penal “Houses of Horror” of Nazi Germany?) Naturally, some of these desires would sweep in from the side (i.e. from the realm of everyday life) or swoop down from above (i.e. from a would-be transcendent realm that would lord over everyday life), but many of these desires would surge up from below (i.e. from the “infra-ordinary”, as Georges Perec (1999) dubbed it). Beneath the paving stones lies the beach, as the famous revolutionary slogan from May ’68 poetically expressed the liberation of desire from under the yoke of capitalism and its stooges (teachers, parents, preachers, cops, bureaucrats, politicians, etc.); but beneath the beach lies the magma of the collective unconscious that periodically finds its mob expression: Civic Spaces (—and Desire), so to speak (Badiou, 2012; Bloom, 2012; Ross, 2008). I am reminded of James Cauty’s A Riot in a Jam Jar (2011), a series of 1:87 scale dioramas of riotous moments and public order overkill displayed within upturned jam jars.

Now, while one may be forgiven for thinking that civic space should come first and desire second, one may also be forgiven for thinking the converse, since desire was obviously in play long before the emergence of civic space, and indeed long before the emergence of any civility whatsoever. Civic space would be the expression, the repression or the perversion of certain more or less primordial desires, such as topophilia (a love of place) or topophobia (a hatred of place), for example, which have echoed down the ages. Desire would then be under the cosh of civility and under the cloche of civic space, and civic space would be a space of domesticated desires: tamed and docile; enslaved and servile; law-abiding and customary; cold and drab. Whence the continual need to revivify civic space with statues and fountains, banners and bunting, and pomp and ceremony. But all of this will have been in vain.

Order and civility, then, would not so much flow from the outside in, dissipating in the fragmentary space of the utterly chaotic, but would rather surge from the inside out: atomistic, cellular and modular. Here as elsewhere, the Devil is in the detail: doors, windows, handrails, handles, baths, lighting, worktops, etc. Indeed, Flora Samuels (2007, p. 1) argues that nowhere is Le Corbusier’s “desperate attempt to create order in what he perceived to be a fragmented and chaotic world … better expressed than in the realm of detail”. Le Corbusier’s buildings were equipped rather than furnished. For example, equipment for dwelling—such as sinks, showers, staircases and storage—enable a house to function as a “machine for living”. While many have since recoiled from such a seemingly cold machine, Le Corbusier warmed to its touch. And yet, such a space of quelled desire would no doubt remain haunted by the return of the repressed—wild, unbroken and unbridled desire. For when we speak of civic spaces and desire I wager that the first thing that is called to mind is a more or less violent outburst that shatters the ostensibly serene order of things, from the delirium of spirited haranguers on so many makeshift plinths to the uproar of riotous mobs surging through the streets—although I would stress that these spasmodic outbursts are often conjured up and orchestrated by the state and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Civic space—and desire—deranged: from Le Corbusier to Georges Perec
• 2 Single story building: the fairy tale failure of housing in the UK
• 3 Inside the backside: on labour and infrastructure of the casino lobby
• 4 Game of being state: encounter space and fictitious movements in prescriptive surveillance buffer zone village: Pyla
• 5 Archaeology of desire: urban palimpsest—unveiling invisible sites of Sarajevo
• 6 Hi-ro-shi-ma space: the pathways of post-memory
• 7 “Park Rats”: exploring a violent continuum of more-than-human indifference and post-humanity
• 8 Stygian dark: what the presence and architecture of sex clubs reveal about the politics of public and private space in a city
• 9 Folds of desire
• 10 Architecture, eros and civilisation
• 11 Re-membering desire: visual tracings of a billboard
• 12 Unidentified emotional object: when queer desire journeyed to Belgrade (but stayed in its closet)
• 13 Desiring-spaces: compulsive citizen–state configurations
• Index