Unmapping the City

_Jonathan Willett

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"

– Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)

We erect our structure in the imagination before we erect in reality

– Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867)

The Art of Critical Practice

A critical photography series will inevitably draw upon a wide spectrum of critical traditions in theorizing the complex relations between image, text and social practice. The assemblage of photograph and critical analysis is designed to produce a dialogue between knowing and seeing, a differential space where two systems of representation work not to determine each other but to expand a common horizon of possibility for photographic practice. The philosophical antecedents of the critical perspective can be found in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where mental structures are said to precede our experience of the world, as a basis for knowing how we come to know about things. De Certeau argues that in The Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant identifies an 'art of thinking ... a practical knowledge' (1988: 72) in the 'relation between the art of operating (Kunst) and science (Wissenschaft), or between a technique (Technik) and theory (Theorie)' (ibid.: 72). The 'Kantian channel' (Foucault in Raunig: 2008) in European Modernism has given rise to numerous critical philosophies, which themselves go beyond Kant's model for investigating the subjective limits of knowledge. Operating within the 'Kantian channel' Gerald Raunig re-evaluates Foucault's lecture What is Critique? (1971) to suggest an art and technique of the critical project as an effective poetics of social action, a productive mode of aesthetics emerging in spaces of 're-composition and invention' (Raunig: 2008); a place occupied by the resistant image in the art of the critical photograph.

This emphasis on the transformative power of thought resonates with Karl Marx's (1818–83) famous dictum 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it' (Marx: 1845), a material praxis that offers an understanding of the individual's subjectivity as the product of a collective social and historical situation. In Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (1867) Marx adapts Hegel's dialectical method to his philosophy of historical materialism, which argues that consciousness is determined by the socio-economic realities of work in the newly industrialized cities of modernity. Marx introduced philosophy to the political struggles of everyday life, and in the process provided the basis for the critical tradition in the social sciences. The critical theory that we associate with the establishment of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1923 has its origins in revisionist Marxist thought, and in particular the sociology of Max Weber (1864–1920) and Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel's essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) develops an early critical perspective on the urban experience of modernity by analyzing how the individual forms a sensory relation to the city, and in turn is reconstituted as the fragmented, alienated subject of modern life. Simmel's writings influenced the urban sociology of the Chicago School, in particular the work of Robert E. Park (1864–1944) who saw the city as a kind of laboratory for mapping the social ecologies of the urban environment. Contemporaneous with the Second Chicago School were the urban photographs of Harry Callahan (1912–99) who taught at the Institute of Design, Chicago from 1946–61. Callahan's images are the equivalent of Simmel's alienated perspective, their geometric repetition emphasizing the 'formal composition of the image [...] even to the point of distortion and beyond' (Rexer 2009: 103); the critical photograph reflecting the topographies of the modern city.

The social historians and philosophers of the Frankfurt School re-interpreted Marxist thought in modes of critical theory capable of apprehending the mediatization of life in metropolitan cities; with emphasis on the power of the image as ideological surface and cultural interface in the visual economy of capital. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in particular, saw a cultural convergence between politics and aesthetics, and sought to illuminate the dialectal character of images. Benjamin turned the production of critical histories into something of an art form, his 'open source' Marxism an attempt to grasp the cultural complexity of everyday life, where the fragmentary experience is like a crystal of our wider historical condition. In the art of critique, Benjamin induces a heightened awareness of the relations between technical processes of modernization, the lived experience of those processes and their cultural representation in modernist aesthetics. In One Way Street (1928) Modernism is pressed into action,

its constellations of images, aphorisms and juxtapositions are intended to be a form of thinking in pictures (Bilddenken) from which understanding emerges without having to be expounded (Macey 2000: 38)

It was no coincidence that Benjamin and his contemporaries perceived photography, and later film, as sites of cultural contestation, where the social function of images was open to historical modes of critique. Painters, poets, photographers and filmmakers alike were not simply representing the city, they were creating it in modern life. In all its dynamism and complexity urban experience could be sampled, filtered and synthesized through the intelligent surface of the image; 'thinking in pictures' becomes constructive criticism in the work of art, reverberating like visual feedback in the 'Kantian channel' of European Modernism.

In a photographic study developed over four years, Unmapping the City traverses the history of modernist aesthetics, connecting retrospective forms of abstraction to new perspectives in contemporary urban photography, a process shaped by the 'implicit recognition of a historical transition from the representational priority of "surface" to that of "interface"' (Burgin 1996: 157). In practice, Unmapping the City develops a flatness that shifts between modernist surface and the interface of post-modernity, as the contemporary city is conveyed (transported) through multiple layers of sensation. The photographic effect is to deconstruct the three-dimensional built environment in 'perspectives of flatness', which in turn re-construct a sensibility toward the concrete, rationalized spaces of urban cartography. The conscious representations of a particular place in all its architectural and geographical features are subsumed into a more suggestible surface of abstraction, as the photograph becomes a cultural index of the unknowable City. In the process, it re-instates a relationship between individual perception and the vast complexities of urban life.

The unknowable City exposes the established order of space as a cartographic fantasy of the rational mind ('everything in its right place'), is encountered in the 'actual' city that we...