Indeed, increasingly much modern knowledge, guided by cybernetic and similar principles, assumes a deficit of knowledge. Then again, many problems a city may face cannot be forced into a framework of organ
ized tasks, although it is often the case that it is assumed that this is possible, promoting an illusion of control.
There is one more point to make. Most of the activity that goes on in the city is unconscious (or rather conscious in different ways). One of the problems with writing the city has been that so much of that writing assumes that the city is a site of cognitive operations, motivated, planned, based on rules and principles, intent on accumulating knowledge. But so many of the relations in the city are unconscious. As we have pointed out, already there are all kinds of objects and devices whose efficacy is not cognitive but is, nevertheless, active. And perhaps
95
per cent of human action is non-cognitive. On a purely factual level then, most of human activity is cocooned in a system of practical knowledge which depends on bodily disposition rather than formal procedure. Then again, so much human activity does not require motives (attributions of intent, justifications, accounts) to be understood adequately. In other words, what we 'know' as the city is much more than we can tell (Polanyi1956).
However, this does not of course mean that no fixed knowledge exists in the city or that formal knowledge is unimportant. The problem is the assumption that knowledge is stored in human heads when, in fact, it is stored in devices which form a part of a transhuman system, an ecology of mind which is distributed around networks rather than being held in just one place. In the final section, we therefore want to consider these devices in more detail. We will argue that the modern city has been constructed in large part by two - or now perhaps three - great waves of 'devices' (mediaries and intermediaries understood as cultural practices) which have constructed much of the fabric of what we now regard as everyday life. This is not, of course, to argue that everyday life can be reduced to these devices. But it cannot exist without them, for they are what provide the rhythm of the 'everyday' in each and every day (May and Thrift
2001).
Nor is it to argue, as so many have done, that the manifestation of these devices represents a narrowing of experience: one could as well argue the opposite.The Engineering of Certainty
As the city grows in size and, more importantly, as it adds in new enti
ties, so its circulation becomes more complex, and s.o practices need to
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be invented to cope with the complexity of the uncertainty that is in
duced. These practices are clearly to do with the management of encpun
ters, especially as a settlement moves beyond face-to-face interaction as the only means of such management. Above all, this management of encounters requires the invention of new spaces and times that regiment and therefore direct bodily energies in productive ways.
Each and every day we make ritual gestures, we move to the rhythm of external cadences, we cultivate our memories, we plan for the future. And everyone else does likewise. Daily experiences are only fragments in the life of an individual, far removed from the collective events more visible to us, and distant from the great changes sweeping through our culture. Yet almost everything that is important for social life unfolds within this minute web of times, spaces, gestures and relations. It is through this web that our sense of what we are doing is created, and in it lie dormant those energies that unleash sensational events. (Melucci 1996: 1)
The invention of new spaces and times? In a world which we under
stand as events located in a container defined by space and time, this may seem an odd statement. But in fact, the comings and goings of encounters have had to be constructed and located through mediaries and intermediaries which register and are aimed at providing very differ
ent possibilities. As these spaces and times lie thicker on the ground, so they have produced what we tend to call everyday life, a space of to and fro which depends on the establishment of sites and means of return (Seigworth 2000).
The exact status and content of everyday life remains, of course, a matter of considerable debate (Gardiner 2000). After all, this is the space of the mundane in which nothing much happens - and yet an awful lot happens as well (Blanchot 1993). The realm of the quotidian has often been written out or underplayed and yet it is in this realm, perhaps more than any other, that cities have been so successful at rendering secure and securely rendering. In a sense, everyday life may be the city's great
est invention (Lefebvre 1991). But this realm includes so much that is familiar but not necessarily known (to paraphrase Hegel's maxim which Lefebvre was so fond of quoting) that we can only begin to list its characteristics: the lived experience of spatiality and temporality; the force of embodiment; the manifestation of subjectivity, affect and desire; the importance of the 'event'; the ethico-aesthetic movement of the encounter; and the importance of the precognitive, to name but a few (see Thrift 2000a, 2000c). And the realm forms a sense (or senses) that we find difficult to describe.
THE ENGINEERING O F CERTAINTY 95
But what sort of sense is constitutive of this everydayness? Surely, this sense indicates much that is not sense so much as sensuousness, an embod
ied and somewhat automatic 'knowledge' that functions like peripheral vision, not studied contemplation, a knowledge that is precognitive and sensate rather than ideational. As such it not only challenges all critical practice, across the board, of academic disciplines but is a knowledge that lives as much in the objects and spaces of observation as in the body and mind of the observer. What's more, this sense has an activist, constructionist bent; not so much contemplative as it is caught in media res, working on, making anew, amalgamating, acting and reacting. (Taussig 1992: 16)
Perhaps Lefebvre's notion of 'everydayness' (spaces of representation, the lived) best captures the necessary project, those modes of existence that come to 'precede (and recede and exceed) ... actualisation in repre
sentational spaces' (Seigworth 2000: 251) - an everydayness located in Lefebvre's other two terms of the equation of everyday life (spatial prac
tice, the perceived) and the everyday (representations of space, the con
ceived) which both embrace it and make it possible. Straightaway, the connection to more general notions of life that we have prefaced in this chapter becomes clear, for the vitality of the virtual to be found in everydayness can be equated with, for example, Deleuze's notion of the lived as a set of virtualities, events and singularities, endlessly making waves, the 'fiery line of the world's breathing' (Seigworth 2000: 252).
And it is the notion of life to be found in Guattari's notion of transversality and of 'being before being' (Guattari 1995, 2000). In both cases, life is a mutant, undisciplined creativity that is worked out through the proper
ties of existence. In other words, everydayness captures 'the desires that bleed out from within and around the repetitions and cycles of modern life' (Seigworth 2000: 255) - but also depends on those repetitions and cycles to provide the working material through which these devices can be generated.
Everyday life was born in the city through the invention of a world of objects and texts which could present and re-present the present in such a way as to make it (or at least make it seem) replicable, likely to pro
duce certain known outcomes. Of course, this process of the 'detailing of circumstances' (Sherman 1997) has been going on for a long time. Clanchy (1991) and Goody (1996), for example, note the growth of lists and the parallel growth of bureaucracies in the early medieval period. Later in history, in late medieval cities, we can make a tour of tally sticks, double entry book-keeping, account books, more and more sophisticated metrics, even simple maps, as means of providing replicable spaces and times.
But perhaps the first period in which the modern western city was clearly designed as a known and knowable entity was in the seventeenth and
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eighteenth centuries. Here, what we find coming into existence is a series of devices which enable the city's encounters to be recorded and ordered;
a new choreography and chronogeography thereby develops (Thrift 1996b).
To begin with, there are new means of marking time. The watch allows the inhabitants of the city to construct finer grained time. Though at first watches are largely ornamental objects, indicators of the wearer's power and wealth, as pocket watches telling minutes (not very accur
ately until the later seventeenth century) become widely available, so a truly accessible private source of chronometric information comes into being; one which produces in the likes of Samuel Pepys a wonderful glee for a new apparatus that can measure out his motion in time and space:
To the Change after office, and received my watch from the watch-maker;
and a very fine (one) it is . . . given me by Briggs the Scrivener. Home to dinner; and then abroad to the Attorney General . . . So home, and late at my office. But Lord, to see how much of my old folly and childishness hangs upon me still, that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what o'clock it is 100 times.
And am apt to think with myself: how could I be so long without one.
(cited in Sherman 1997: 77-8)
A few months later Pepys's glee has turned to a means of measuring out the city: 'up, and walked to Greenwich, taking pleasure to walk with my minute watch in my hand, by which I am now come to see the distance of my way from Woolwich to Greenwich. And do find myself to come within two minutes constantly to the same place at the end of each quarter hour' (cited in Sherman 1997: 79). The minutes became a means of measuring the city anew. Thus:
In Pepys's short record of his experiment, details of space become second
ary to those of time. Pepys names only his point of departure and of destination (and those confusedly; still unaccustomed to moving in those precincts, he begins his entry in the manuscript, 'Up, and walked to Woolwich', before crossing out the final word and replacing it with 'Green
wich'). Despite his opening announcement that 'I am now come to see the distances of my way', Pepys delineates no 'distances' reached as number of miles or the fixed points on the route. Instead, he tells time. What interests him both in the walking and the writing is the relation of his movement to that of the watch, which he gazes at continually as its hands advance steadily through large spans and small. Even for those durations he offers no absolute numbers, nor does he say how long the journey takes him; he recites them only relative to each other and to his progress, and gleans
THE ENGINEERING OF CERTAINTY 97
from them a layered self-knowledge: of the fundamental regularity of his pace (and by reciprocal influence, of the watch's), of the inevitable and idiosyncratic variations of tempo within that steady structure, and even of the exact range of those variations ('within two minutes'). By writing up 'the distances of my way' in minutes rather than in miles, Pepys manages both to make good on the odd plural in that phrase, and to give singular force to the possessive. The space he traces along the public road belongs to all, but the timing of his trek belongs to him alone. 'My' way consists of multiple temporal 'distances' that vary from each other from day to day and from span to span: some occupy thirteen minutes, some seventeen and some durations in between. (Sherman 1997: 89)
Then there is the invention of new means of recording time. For exam
ple, the diary was, in certain senses, a textual analogue of the watch, a means of gridding everyday life via a calibrated narrative with its im
perative to fill each dated blank space with prose. At the same time, the diary heightened skills of observations of everyday life, since the event now could be routinely noted down. The diary went hand-in-hand with items of textual comprehension like the memo books, the making of 'minutes' by clerks, and the use of shorthand ('tachygraphy' or rapid writing) to produce a textual comprehension much closer to that of the present, which, indeed, begins to produce a different kind of present, but compressed and, through these new possibilities now offered, opened out.
Then, finally, there is the invention of new means of circulating urban times. In particular there is the newspaper. From the time of the publica
tion of the first daily newspaper - at the beginning of the eighteenth century - we see running accounts of the public realm offered which in turn define the public realm as a sealed time and space in which an hour can profitably be spent keeping up with the print-out. The newspaper leads to another closely linked invention, the post. Until the end of the seventeenth century, most countries had no regular postal service other than the 'occasional' porter for hire, ready to carry what needed carry
ing. 'Now the post assured the papers a means of delivery, the papers guaranteed the post a steady source of income (then as now, there were special newspaper rates), and the symbiosis between the two affected not only the papers' timing, but also their form and meaning' (Sherman 1997: 120).
The net result of these inventions was to produce a city which could be attended to in new ways because of a layer of mediation which pro
vides new means of achieving immediacy (Bolter and Grusin 1999). In turn, it can therefore be argued that these inventions stimulated new cultural forms - like the novel. Thus:
98 THE M ACHINIC CITY
In 'Course in the Novel', his seminal account of novelistic heteroglossia, Mikhail Bakhtin established that what he calls the 'everyday genres' . . . 'diaries, confessions, journalistic articles and so on' - 'play an equally significant role' in the making of the novel, 'bring(ing) it into their own language'.
He posits a modern chronotype (i.e. a time-space matrix) grounded in 'everyday life' as a defining feature of the novel, 'such elements . . . as food, drink, the sexual act, death . . . enter everyday life, which is already in the process of being compartmentalised. (Sherman 1997: 211)
As a single word, the term 'everyday' operates as a kind of mass noun and (if such a thing existed) mass adjective; it identifies phenomena - habit, practices - which have become familiar by frequent use over extended time. When compartmentalised - separated into 'every day' - it points to something completely different: the successive but separate units of time in which such familiarity develops. It is in this form that the term best in
carnates the new compartmentalisations - in clocks, calendars, texts and consciousness . . . (Sherman 1997: 225)
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these kinds of devices were extended and made more complex by developments in communications like the coach, the railway and the telegraph, and by the organizational templates needed in order to cope with the more complex timings and spacings they made possible (and not least the railway companies themselves) (Thrift 1990). But we could argue that, for the bulk of the population, these developments only started to bite into the organization of everyday life in the latter part of the nineteenth century. From then on and into the early twentieth century there is a wave of re-mediation of everyday life, in which the very fabric of pres
ence and absence, departure and return is reworked into a new produc
tive banality. What Seigworth calls a new 'rhythmic soak' (2000: 255) comes into existence and defines what existence is. And this re-mediation takes place through the medium of cities which now begin to transform life in myriad ways (see Kern 1983; May and Thrift 2001). The spaces and times prefigured by the inventions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are now inculcated into networks of devices, thereby confirm
ing the existence of these spaces and times, extending them into more and more aspects of human activity and allowing human beings to be present in several activities at once. In other words, the city becomes a vast narrative structure that constantly re-presents itself. In particular, everyday life is distributed over a much wider area: the city thereby itself becomes a kind of clock and map writ large.
This distribution takes place through four main inventions. The first of these is the model of commuting that springs up at the end of the
THE ENGINEERING O F CERTAINTY 99 nineteenth century based on horse-drawn carriages and trams and then on the automobile (box 4.2). This phenomenon - which has enormous consequences in its impact on the growth of the city - produces a basic rhythm the length and breadth of the city, in the constant ebb and flow of people and traffic supported by continuous design innovations. (Take just the case of the humble roundabout, an idea that was invented in France and imported into Britain - to the garden city ()f Letchworth - in 1907. By 1925, there were 'gyratory systems' in London - at Parliament Square, Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch among other locations. In 1966, 'give way to the right' became mandatory in order to promote smooth flow, followed by new 'mini-roundabouts', designed to produce efficient flow on minor roads (Martin 2000).)
The second invention is the growth of reliable and fast means of trans
mitting and storing information. This was reflected in the rapid growth of the postal service (which already by the end of the nineteenth century, in larger cities at least, could mean eight or nine deliveries a day). The service inspired all manner of territories and temporalities. Then there was the use of the telegraph, which provided flows of information with unpreced
ented speed and regularity. And there is the growth of the telephone in the twentieth century, with its own particular rhythms and cadences (see de Sola Pool 1981; Thrift 1990; Katz and Katz 1998). But these devices were the tip of an informational iceberg. As important was the growth of means of analysing, recording and storing information, taking in a vast array of mundane devices that mechanized writing, the adding machine, the typewriter and also filing cabinets and card files (Yates 2000).
The third invention is the growth of reliable means of supporting everyday actors: the growth of gas, electrical and sewage networks, for example. These networks begin to produce a vast underground realm of urban services (Gandy 1997; Kajka and Swyngedouw 2000). Finally, there is the growth in the means of mass representation. The newspaper
�nd the novel are joined by the radio, the gramophone, mass photogra
phy, the cinema and television, producing an enormous symbolic economy
phy, the cinema and television, producing an enormous symbolic economy