Pratt x Invisible Cities

CITIES AND MEMORIES 

When one steps on the ground of Pratt Institute, one immediately notices the various sculptures. In every direction you turn, every way you glance, every color you see - there is a such a monument. This monument represents something to the one who created it. Pratt Institute is a city occupied only by artists. When one travels to Pratt Institute, they may not be an artist at first, but soon they find themselves participating in this sculpture garden. 

Where each sculpture lies, not too long ago, a different sculpture existed. A different monument of a different memory of a different time. Nobody quite remembers what used to be there, what it meant, or where it went. When the change first takes place, people take note of it. However, soon, people begin occupying the new sculptures, and soon the old ones are forgotten. Pratt Institute is a city of constant change and renewal. To the artists of this "city", this is necessary change. 

Continuous renewal and erosion 

Rodden spaces

4/12 Invisible Cities x Walking in the City

Ann Chai

Prof Sacha Frey

Due April 14, 2014

How does Calvino's Invisible Cities relate to de Certeau's "Walking in the City"? Pick at least two cities to discuss and analyze (through close reading) in your answer. Feel free to talk about the Kublai Kahn and Marco Polo dialogues as needed.

“It is the mood of the beholder which gives the city of Zemrude its form,” the experience of this city is determined solely by one’s perspective on the city (66,Calvino). The two perspectives Calvino outlines are from someone who walks through the city “whistling”, and one who goes by “hanging your head”. The whistler will always be looking up, seeing windows and scenery as they go. The one hanging his or her head will always only see the ground, dirt, and gutters. Similarly, De Certeau describes two kinds of perspectives, or people, as well. There is the walker and the voyeur. The voyeur is someone looking from above, in de Certeau’s example, from on top of the World Trade Cener. From this perspective, the voyeur sees everything about the map of the city and its circulation. The walker is a wanderer who travels within this map, focused on the immediate streets and paths. The two different groups of people see the city completely differently, and Calvino asserts, “you cannot say that one aspect of the city is truer than the other” (66). There is no right or wrong in how to view the city, the two groups merely illustrate two perspectives.

The voyuer’s role works in parallel with the “whistlers” who are always looking up. These are the people who see the city from above because they are aware of the larger picture and the urban map. The walker’s role on the other hand is similar to the people in Zemrude who are always looking down. Although in the city of Zemrude there is a negative connotation in “looking at the gutters”, in relation to de Certeau it is simply another perspective. These are the people who wander through the streets and experience it directly as they pass through because they do not look further than what is right in front of them. De Certeau describes them as walkers “whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it” (93, de Certeau). Hence, the walkers or ones who walk with their head hanging cannot read this urban text they are outining, while the voyeurs or whislters are the ones who read their movement. Yet, de Certeau also suggests that “the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language (97). Walking is what brings the city to life and reaffirms its purpose. Extending de Certeau’s metaphor, a walker would be someone who is illiterate yet fluent in speech, and a voyeur would be someone who is literate but mute.

In visualizing this urban text, Calvino’s city “Ersilia” offers insight into how a city can be mapped out. “In ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the house, white or black or gray or black-and-white accoding to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency” (76). When the city becomes obstructed with an overflow of these strings, the city abandons its location. They move as an entire city, taking away even the walls and leaving only the strings and supporting poles. When a traveler encounters Ersilia, first they pass by the multiple abandoned cities where nothing but the “footprints” of the connections that once existed still remains.

The job of walkers in de Certeau’s text is to create these connections, mapping out relationships and interactions in the city down below. They are creating a “labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain”, a “spiderweb of intricate relationships seeking a form”. What may seem like meaningless and chaotic strings actually once represented important relationships. Like the citizens of Erisilia, the walkers create these webs without realizing the spatial effects they create on the city. They as “as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms,” they are more interested in marking out these relationships but do not fully realize the spatial text they are writing (93, de Certeau). 

4/7 Invisible Cities

As you read, consider the "ageographical" elements of space that are evoked in the book. What features of space does Calvino consider in the various cities Polo narrates? Pick at a city to focus on and consider the defining features of the city according to its description. What facets of urban space does it suggest are important? How do travel and movement function in this definition of space?

Consider the following questions as you read

1.      How would you characterize the structure of Calvino’s Invisible Cities?Does it seem to fit into your definition of a “novel”? Why or why not?   Describe its form and consider the way it develops our understanding of urban space.

Invisible Cities is composed of a series of concise short stories of individual cities. There is no particular chronological order that can  be applied to the sequencing of the cities. However, the only chronological parts are at the beginning and end of each section- where the Khan and Marco Polo converse. The way all of these stories of the city are scattered emphasizes how there is no order to places. Each place exists in its own time and at the same time, there is no chronological order that may be applied. 

1. The cities Marco Polo describes fall into eleven categories (e.g. “Cities and Memory,” “Cities and Desire”). How are these categories reflected in their descriptions? What connections can you make between cities that fall under the same category?
   As one can learn from the categories, there is always a dominating trait that governs the description of the city. Cities that fall under the same category are always related to this descriptive word, though they may be related in diffrent ways. For example, "CIties and Memory" can refer to a city that is always dwelling on its past, or a city that evokes new memories each and every day. 

•       A dialogue (between Polo and Kublai Khan) begins and ends each section. How do they function in the work? How do they frame and/or inform each section?
  
  The dialogue between the two characters pull the reader back to a chonrlogical logic to the flow of the story. Through describing various distinct and separate cities, the beginnings and end of each section sets a rythmn back into the novel. Furthermore, the insightful conversation between the two further illustrate the mythical and magical quality of the city stories.  

•                 Do the cities Polo describes have a temporal or spatial locus? How does this inform your reading of the cities?
  
  I think Polo's descriptions satisfy both temporal and spatial aspects. Although the stories seem abstract and conceptual, there is a grain of reality behind what could be metaphorical comparisons of the city's traits. At the same time, spatially, the descriptions of the city successfully carry out tours and or maps of the space. 

•    In his description of “Olivia,” one of the “Cities and Signs,” Polo says a city should never be “confused with the words that describe it” even though there may be a connection between the two (61). How would you interpret this statement, and how does this inform your reading?
  
  Polo is drawing a distinction between what the city really is, and how it can ever be described in plain language. A city consists of much more than a map, list, or items. Every city has its own life and atmopshere. This may be why Polo always describes the cities through concepts, and the cities are sorted into categories. Words inform what a city is, but can only attempt to come close to its true essence. 

•    Polo says, “[c]ities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else” (44).  How does this inform your understanding of cities, in general, and Polo’s concept of the city specifically?
  
  Polo is outlining the complexity of the characteristics of a city. A city houses a large group of people, and the "desires and fears" of these people are directly reflected in the city's apperance. People define a city. With all the interaction and overlap between people, there are several layers of meaning and "concealment" in each city. 

•     Calvino summarized Invisible Cities as a book that offers more questions than solutions. He also maintains, in his essay “Exactitude” that it is the book

in which I managed to say most . . . because I was able to concentrate all my reflections, experiments, and conjectures on a single symbol [the city]; and also because I built up a many faceted structure in which each brief text is close to the others in a series that does not imply logical sequence or a hierarchy, but a network in which one can follow multiple routes and draw multiple, ramified conclusions. (103)

What kinds of questions does the book raise for you and what networks of connections  and conclusions can you draw from its texts?

Networks of connections are particularly drawn through the categories of cities. I recall flipping back and forth between cities from the same category, trying to find out what the connection was between them. Calvino's style of writing here creates a web that connects all these spaces which overlap, intersect, connect etc. These connections further clarify definitions of specific categories. 

•         What connections can you make between any of the work we've looked at in class so far? Be specific.
  
  Calvino's writing relates to de Certeau's interpretation of spaces, as in de Certeau's 'walking in the city". De Certeau illustrates the difference between voyeurs and walkers, and how these two serve as the language and speech of a city. Simiarly, Calvino tells stories from both of these perspectives, outlining the language of each city.
  

4/2 De Certeau - Walking in the City

1.     What doe de Certeau mean when he says, when a person sees Manhattan from the 110^h floor of the world trade center, “his elevation transforms him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world [. . .] into a text. [. . .] It allows him to read it; to be a solar eye” (92).

            This illustrates the difference between the voyeur and walker de Certeau points out. A walker is someone down below, who can only focus on the immediate paths in front of them. The voyeur sees a whole and complete view of what the city is, how it is mapped out, and how it is functioning. All of a sudden there is a logic to how the city is set up by urban planners, architects, etc.

2.     De Certeau states that “urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded” (95) and “spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining social conditions of social life” (96). Explain these statements and discuss how they relate to the title of this section-- “From Concepts to Practices.”

            De Certeau is emphasizing how important the work of urban planners and architects are. What they do, the concepts they develop, eventually become real buildings and real cities. The way a city is mapped out is integral to how each individual, or walker, navigates the city. Every daily path is therefore affected by these spatial practices.

3.     What is “the Chorus of idle footsteps” and why can’t “they be counted” (97)? Refer to the notion of “tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation” in your answer (97).

 They have qualitative characteristics and are singular units. They create and define spaces infinitely. In technical terms, one can trace how often a path is travelled, but these statistics do not include the qualitative act of passing by. De Certeau explains this as “window shopping” or “wandering”.

           

4.    De Certeau maintains that walking creates “one of these ‘real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city” (97).  What does this mean and how does it relate to hiss assertion that, “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language” (97)? What is he trying to establish by saying this?

           

            The city is essentially a language that must be spoken to be fully appreciated and utilized. Walking brings the city to life, it reaffirms the city’s purpose. Without people walking and using the city as it was designed, the city has no purpose in its existence. A language can exist as only a written language, but if it is not a spoken language it is known as a “dead” language because it can’t really be used to its full potential.

5.    Why can’t walking be “reduced to [a] graphic trail” such as you would see on a map or urban plan, according to de Certeau (99)?

                  According to de Certeau, he says that “walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects etc., the trajectories it “speaks’” (99). Therefore walking is important in the experience of itself. Every step and sequence is different in each moment with each individual, therefore it can never be drawn out like a path. Walking in the city is a continuous movement.

6.    What does de Certeau mean by “the long poem of Walking”  (101).

                  The “long poem of walking” describes how once again, walking is not as simple as it sounds. In fact, walking is an art that carries many implications. It refers to the city in terms of its culture and individuals. De Certeau suggests that it is like a “peddler”, which carries something that is surprising and interesting.

7.    De Certeau defines two “pedestrian figures” through which “rhetoric of walking” (100) is created: synecdoche and asyndeton. He notes that synecdoche “expands a spatial element in order to make it play the role of a ‘more’” (101). On the other hand, asyndeton, “by elision, creates a ‘less” opens gaps in the spatial continuum, and retains only selected parts” (101).  Explore and explain these terms and relate them to de Certeau’s larger argument.

Asyndeton creates a “less”, while synecdoche can replace a “more” with a “less”.
synecdoche: a small part made to represent the whole
asyndeton: the omission of conjunctions
De Certeau's larger argument is that walking serves as the speech of a language. These two terms play a role in the way that walking creates fragments in time, and omits certain spaces, it can never be perfectly connected as a trail. At the same time, a small part of walking can implicate so much more because of its "wandering" aspect. 

8.    De Certeau argues that the proper nouns which mark a city (naming streets, buildings, monuments) once were “arranged in constellations that heirarchize and semantically order the surface of the city . . .” (104) .  However, even though these words eventually lose their original value, “their ability to signify outlives its first definition” (104) and they function to articulate “a second, poetic geography  on top of the geography of the literal . . . meaning” (105). Explain what he means by these statements.

                  Fifth avenue is named the fifth avenue because it is the fifth in the sequence of avenues in Manhattan. However, overtime the avenue develops and grows its own definition of the term “Fifth Avenue”. Now, when people say fifth avenue it implies many things such as a shopping area, or a significant part of New York City. It is not simply the fifth avenue in Manhattan, but Fifth Avenue. De Certeau is suggesting that the way we explore the geography and pass it on through experience and memory actually gives geography another layer of meaning to their names.

9.    Explain de Certeau’s statement that “places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, [. . .] encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body: ‘I feel good here’” (108). How does this fit into the larger argument about the “habitability” of the city?

            Each place contains infinite stories and pasts belonging to each individual that no other will ever be able to experience or understand. They exist in the space, but cannot be reached by anyone else.

10. Explain the following quote, which occurs in the final paragraph of the essay: “the childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates, floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a “metaphorical” or mobile city” (110). How does this statement fit into the argument as a whole?       

            Childhood experience greatly affects the way we grow up to experience spaces. De Certeau says, “to practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood” where one is free to reinterpret what space is and how it works (110). It is how we are trained to “read” the city in our own way. This is how we create the new layer of poetic meaning above what the geography has been simply defined as.