The visual image creates a space for intuition, it has an affective property which allows
‘better’ to be understood and made. Through making present relations the image works as an aesthetic which “attach[es] values to experience” (Sharman 1997:178). Bringing different elements of data into direct relation to each other in one form, the image, creates a new experience of relations, it makes the invisible visible. This is then acted towards as a desired value and the material form of the suburbs are made through the delimitations of planning regulations turning image back into form. Through such work the suburb is known, made visible and crafted. The images produced are pivotal points of visibility that deposit and give out knowledge enabling judgements of relations to be made. As such, experts who can read the indexes of the images, advise as ‘intellectuals’
on the ‘good use’ of space allowing ‘better’ to occur and prevent bad design.
This aesthetic, which requires expert reading, allows the circulation of value, meaning and power into an effective trajectory. Academic expertise determines and confers the value of the built environment and in this sense we can assess Carr’s assertion that;
Expertise is also always ideological because it is implicated in semistable hierarchies of value that authorize particular ways of seeing
113 See the Portas Review: An independent review into the future of our high streets Portas, 2011.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/6292/2081646.pdf
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and speaking as expert. Expertise is arguably the exemplar of what Silverstein calls “second order indexicality” (1992, 2003)—that is, historically constituted and contingent metadiscursive practices (e.g., rationalizations, evaluations, diagnoses) that mediate between would-be experts and some set of cultural goods (2010:18 emphasis added)
The ‘social good’, as moral commitment to the process of knowledge production for the benefit of the population, allows the network to endure (see Green, Harvey & Knox 2005:807) as efficacious form. The ‘city as object’, the ‘network’, the ‘image’ work as what Carsten & Hugh Jones (1995) calls “illusory objects” in that they have the capacity, as coherent forms to resolve disparate social problems. As outlined above space syntax analysis proceeds through the idea of generative rules, these rules give rise to a structure which can be read or ‘got at’. The ASP makes particular relations visible as the phenomena of suburb, as image, and thereby able to be regulated and managed (see Vaughan et al 2008; Jones et al 2008, Griffiths et al 2008). This process acts as a form of language, which is neither mathematic nor linguistic, nor I argue morphic, rather it is aesthetic (following Sharman 1997). Value is attached and inferred from a sensorial relation to the image, it has an affective quality in that it produces a disposition about the value of a relation, indexes can be traced up and down from image to form, from universal to particular by the expert. Through this better can be made within a mutually recognisable ontological moral good, but only by those who can make and trace the indexical links.
The aesthetic provides a material affective bridge between the worlds of the seen and the unseen. Through the traceable index, desired value can move from a policy utterance such as “what sort of spaces they need to encourage” (ASPM1) down to a material crafting of the suburb. Conversely it can move from a material form, such as the need to understand place boundaries through a feeling of an edge, into an utterance such as the need for a boundary in a business directory. In his discussion of the ways in which the Sumbanese examine the entrails of chickens for marks which represent the words of the spirts, Webb Keane (2013) notes how the marks bring the world of the invisible into the realm of the visible. The ontological orientation, is of utterance preceding the material form of the word, into which it is made. Derrida (1978) conversely posits that perhaps a material or visible entity such as a mark on a wall or another human may have given rise to the need for utterance. These orientations have particular political trajectories in that:
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Transductions among different semiotic modalities are practical analogues for relations between phenomenal and non-phenomenal worlds. But they are not merely representations. They derive their efficacy, impart, from their manifest manipulation of the relationship between two domains by operating within the world of perception”
(Keane, 2013:13)
The line, as aesthetic, draws its efficacy from its ability to ‘re-distribute the sensible’ (see Ranciere 2010) from matter to representation and vice versa in an ongoing flow up and down. The key focus of analysis here is not the order of semiotic relation but rather what the production and flows of making relations is doing in shaping subjectivities, such as experts, and material arrangements such as ‘the city’. In her discussion of René Descartes, Broadsky Lacour draws attention to the onto-epistemological114 notion of the line through which the world is made. The line, when drawn creates an ‘other’, “a sign which thinks”, which in a Descartian frame is the self ‘I think therefore I am’. The line is an enabler; it is both the basis and the articulation of language through which the world becomes. However the world becomes through particular lines (see Deleuze &
Guattari 1987), the drawing of the line is the temporary recognition of a sign needed to bring about an instance of a relation through which order can adhere. The line is stabilising and assembling. Its visualisation produces a coherent and moral generative structure, making better. As such the line does not simply show, but produces the relations and the consequential action towards them. Anthony Vidler, in his work on diagrams asserts that “operating between form and word, space and language, the diagram is both constitutive and projective; it is performative rather than representation” (Vidler 2000:6) and with particular reference to digitised imaginary Vidler states;
More fundamentally, the intersection of diagram and materiality impelled by digitalization upsets the semiotic distinctions drawn by Charles Sanders Peirce as the diagram becomes less and less an icon and more and more a blueprint or, alternatively, the icon increasingly takes on the characteristics of an object in the world. The clearest example of this shift would be the generation of digital topographies that include in their modelling "data" that would normally be separately diagrammed the flows of traffic, changes in climate, orientation, existing settlement, demographic trends, and the like (Ibid: 17)
114 Whereby the world is made through the process of knowing.
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The digital diagram acts like a semi-stable-object, in that it is a latent manifestation of multiple possibilities. There remains, through the re-ordering of buried data a potential re-articulation of the relation. Following Châtelet
diagrams are not static but project virtuality onto the space which they seek to represent" they are "lines of force" which are incitements to provoke space, as diagrams, as dotted-line experiments alluding to real experiments that manifest latent actions (1993:166)
In short, they make suburbs.
2.7 Conclusions
The technical procedures that academic experts (with skilled ways of doing) undertake, in order to produce images that have an affective quality, occur through an objective paradigm of procedure. Data outputs, as an image of alignments, are read as aesthetics which transfer value through their revelation of relations, where new potentials can be seen. The ASPs expertise gives the academy an ability to know and as such an intellectual position with authority and moral character, through objectivity, to make suburbs. This objectivity must be maintained, managed and regulated to allow traceable phenomena to endure as real, rational and of value, as it moves. Universal certainty and epistemological clarity are enabled by, and enabling of, moral action and consistency.
Further, through the maintenance of objectivity, enabled by the gaze of peer review, trust in the hierarchies of regulation is enabled. Any contradiction, break in the chain or pollution to objective, traceable procedure would result in the expertise being discountable.
Returning to the ‘moment’ (chapter 1) the ASP’s refusal of the Seething story can be understood as a moral act in order to maintain clear and traceable knowledge in the Community Map at a particular scale (more than local). Presenting a mountain as destroyed by a giant as “fact” would have polluted this clear line of communication.
This clear, traceable and rational knowledge emerges within a paradigm of objectivity.
In building the tools that enable knowability across space, experts must maintain the traceable line. This is the basis of deliberative democracy, where communication is clear and understandable. However adding the story was also considered a moral act by
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Seethingers. In the next chapter I look at the social productivity of being “stupid”.
Unlike the ASP, where the index needed to be able to move scales of policy at a national level, in Seething localness is the key, in many ways ‘you have to be there’, the story is not to be known, clear or rational so that it can draw you in. In Seething, body and mind are aligned as Seething in a “state of mind” where a local subject, as citizen (see chapter 5) is the moral or ethical substance that asserts a form of citizen.
Ethical substance is maintained in the ASP through the removal of subjective experience, as Boyer points out intellectual professionals tend to absent the body from intellectual activity (see 2005). It had been agreed that the ASP would be included in my ethnography from the start. As I typed during a meeting a joke (ish) was made “as long as you don’t start all your notes about cake”. I did however and had been doing for some time115 as cake was productive of team work, commensality and maintained moral relations amidst concessions in data use116. The request that it be excluded as not-relevant, and of no sense to the objective making of images117 was a request to maintain a representation of the ASP as rational, objective and without any subjective idiosyncrasies (see Daston & Galison 1998). The body is present in the production of data, in the speed in which work is done in crap rooms and how boundaries are made through walking and feeling. The eye emerges as something conceptualised as extraneous to the body in that it is a tool through which to sense and see rather than to feel. The procedures of being expert also produce an ethical substance, the moral coherency of the sober and rational practitioner; the trained expert is a particular subjectivity of the disciplined rational actor, a moral intellectual body, who eats cake.
In this chapter I have looked at how to make a suburb. This is done through aligning data that can move and transfer value extensions of particular potentials of the landscape to advance a particular social project. The next chapter looks at the extension of the values of a particular social project through not aligning data, but rather making disjuncture’s in alignments, through being “stupid”, which involves making cake, talking about it, but not necessarily eating it.
115 With permissions given.
116 Made through walking around in the rain and after sitting in shit rooms.
117 the absence of sense is the definition of Stupid I the OED
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/stupid accessed 3/3/15
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3
Come fail with me:
The Social Productivity of Being “Stupid”.
Chapter 2 looks at the mechanisms and procedures of producing objective, knowable data - the suburb, as a stable phenomenon. Returning to chapter 1 and the moment of refusal, whereby the Seething Villagers were unable to submit information, the refusal of information to the map can be understood as a moral act. The refusal enables the data to remain clean and coherent at a particular scale of commutative clarity. This chapter focuses on the social productivity of the story that was refused, which in the words of the Villagers (and the moderators) was daft, funny, silly and “stupid”118.
Stupid, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the lack of sense”119. The Seething events are nonsensical in that they appear incomprehensible at first encounter.
As one starts to learn the stories, mechanisms of invention and play they start to make a particular sort of sense. A way into sense occurs through the ways in which the stories closely align with common discourses and tropes such as social movements (Seething Guilds), the heritage of suburbs (ancient legends) and biblical events (fishing and feeding the crowds). The term ‘almost-stupid’ may be more appropriate as it is the close alignment of Seething events to the dominant discourses and symbols that allows an obviation, that is, a supplanting of a relation. However I use the term “stupid” as this was a term used by informants to describe the events. ‘Stupid’ works through aligning and creating a small twist, playing in the gap, this alignment to existing tropes with a twist results in different outputs through the involuntary mechanism. As the flow between meaning and matter is constantly being transferred, alignments and twists can re-orientate meanings, associations and affects.
118 This is an ethnographic term used by my informants, both Seethingers and the map moderator.
119 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/stupid accessed 3/3/15
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‘Stupid’ is different to failure in that failure comes as a result of a moral accusation levelled at a unfulfilled trajectory of a possible future, - it was meant to happen but it did not. Whereas ‘stupid’ has a productive element in regard to what that future should be and how the conditions of life in that future are set out. Seethingers occupy a ‘not this, not that’ position, that is they are neither outside life nor do they accept the current trajectory of it, they are on the threshold. They push at the boundaries of normative culture in order to make a swerve. ‘Stupid’ refuses moral accusations of suburban and late liberal subjectivities by rendering the accusations incapable of cohering to the subject through this play. Seethingers, through being ‘stupid’, are not this or that because they are not trying to be this, or that. The giant puppets, improbable guilds, which mimic those from the neighbouring area of Kingston, (the regional centre of governance) draw an analogy that says 'we can't possibly be this'. They apply the normative rule to themselves to show how it does not fit, they create a gap and new forms of life emerge.
Figure 29: Seething Parade fronted by Thamas Deeton the giant.
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