I’ve always had an amateurish interest in cities: how they work, how they’re built, what makes one likeable and another not. Walking around a new place, seeing new types of buildings and how things are organized, is one of my favorite things to do.
In college, I came across Guy Debord and Situationism, and became interested in the concept of the dérive, which gave a cool, avant-garde, and sort of subversive edge to walking around. My closest friends at the time and I actually spent most of our time walking around the small city where we we went to school.
A providential education on the tao of capital
Providence (Rhode Island), in the late 90s, was home to a new countercultural style that was unique from the aesthetic of grunge, punk, hip-hop, and retro-Vermont-hippie that more or less mapped the “alternative” options to the “mainstream” that I had learned in high school. It was a scene, one with shows in minimally repurposed warehouses, art was closely tied to music as a project, producing a new aesthetic that celebrated in form creativity as a resistance to power. Noise was every detail. Its politics were a reworked anarchism, wholly anti-globalist, anti-progress, anti-consumerist, and embracing of difference. I went to Providence totally unaware of many words, including “postmodernism” and “bourgeoisie.” I remember having only read the latter word in The Communist Manifesto, never having said it out loud for lack of people in high school to talk about it with my age or otherwise. When I finally had the chance to in Providence, I pronounced it “boor-go-see” until my friend corrected me. I had been to punk shows, so knew that intentionally degraded aesthetic, but in Providence it felt like a new approach, not a nostalgic look back to the seventies or Spanish Civil War-era politics.
I was only ever on the periphery of what was going on, but I liked going to the shows and learning about the ideas being shared. Today I see how a lot of it drew on the Pop Art scene in New York City, as much as the Parisian counterculture of the same period. It was a rejection of the style of peace-sign, long-hair hippies to rediscover the political landscape of the sixties. The music and art styles were original, I think, since in the years after Providence I would meet people in far off places who knew about bands like Lightning Bolt and Arab on Radar, or wished they could have gone to see a show at Fort Thunder, a collective art space that served as the hub for the scene.
In between all the shows, the Food Not Bombs meetings, vegan potlucks, hats passed around to give the visiting band gas money, there were the higher education institutions that brought the architects of the scene to Providence: Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. The places where the growing population of avant-gardists lived were Providence’s poorer neighborhoods. I remember going to an ultra-minimalist café on Broadway—everything was white and no graphic branding. It was so different from the coffee shops I knew that had couches like in Friends and scones, cookies, and chai. There was a brunch-style restaurant, too, that had vegan options and became a sort of locavore, haute-cuisine for the evenings. All of this was welcome in a city that had, at that time, very little that wasn’t hanging on from its fifties heyday. (You could go to a diner get a full breakfast for $1.25.) Now these types of businesses, and the cultural production that goes with it, are ubiquitous. It’s hard to ignore the class politics in these places, where middle class youth drive business and urban development in such a way that today Providence is a completely different place. The empty downtown I walked around with my friends is now full of hip restaurants, art galleries, and locally owned shops.
Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life capture the critique of capitalism that I feel was most current in Providence in the early 2000s. This is a shoddy history of a time that deserves so much more attention and care than I am giving it. But I would say an important moment was when Fort Thunder was shut down by developers who saw capital potential in the warehouse complex where it was, a potential that the art scene itself no doubt helped illuminate (though not by itself). I learned a lot during that time and made some of my closest friendships.
Situationism understands capitalism as a quasi-mystical force that resists any attempt to subvert or overthrow it, consolidating any resistance into another tool it can deploy for its profit-making purposes. Capitalism, indeed, has a surprising mechanism for co-opting or reifying ideas and movements that emerge to end or, at least, weaken it as a determinant of how we live. However, I see something worrying when we treat it as though it were a consciousness of its own, as a system or ideology, in which its actors “know not what they do.” Yes, of course, ideology does exist and has subtle impacts on how we organize material reality—I agree with that—but, at base, the desire to accumulate massive amounts of wealth can be pinned down to people, whether it’s individuals, organizations, or a class.
Inner thinking as a form of populism (in a good way)
All I knew of architecture was from this countercultural, 1960s-influenced perspective, which is to say as an arena of resistance—it’s punk to think about how cities are designed, etc. Eventually that faded. Not my amateur interest in walking around cities, but there was no fresh input, really, any thoughts I had were largely determined by whatever I remembered from the Providence-Situationist mix in my head, itself mutating as life changed me. A few years ago, on a recommendation from my wife, I read Owen Hatherley’s A New Kind of Bleak.
Hatherley is prolific and focused. His tenacity is in conveying not so much a theory or platform but a way of considering a city. He doesn’t present a theory out and then show how what he sees expresses or confirms it. It’s hard to be empirical outside of the sciences, I think, but he achieves it in his navigations of cities throughout the UK, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. There’s a dialectical process in his writing that’s at work, but difficult to see completely as such, isolated from what he is writing about. He is open about his communist leanings, of a Trotskyist bent, but this doesn’t over-determine what he writes, though only someone who views the world with a Marxist lens would notice what he does.
As the Zizeks of the world fade, Hatherley offers what may be a more worthwhile experience. There is a larger trend, possibly reflective of the digital shift and social media, of writers who expose more rather than build up through more ornament (think Nabokov or, again, Zizek). These latter writers extend out into complex imaginative spaces, demanding readers to know a lot before they can understand (or enjoy) them. Hatherley reminds me often of Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose style and approach is widely known for its ultra-realism, a micro-confessionalism. The similarity is there only in that formal quality of being the necessary vehicles of what they write. In each, you have no doubt that what you are reading is the distinct experience of the author. Maybe it’s some reactionary turn against Roland Barthes and the Death of the Author school, or it’s a shift in our general interests as social media and new video-recording technology has reorientated what we expect of realism or naturalism. Knausgaard certainly feels more intentional in this regard. It’s clearly his project and one, as a fiction writer, that he has long worked to arrive at. (Which we can know because he writes about it.) Hatherley, on the hand, uses the hyper-personal mode more because he is a writer in the early 21st century and, possibly, because what he is writing about can be better done in this fashion. It seems less of a deliberate project for him.
Writing about buildings and cities from a formal perspective of authority, academic or even political critique, may not work very well anymore. What I enjoy about Hatherley is that he manages the effect of Knausgaard as a narrative experience —I feel I go somewhere and have concrete, real-life emotions and thoughts, the opposite of what I think or feel while reading something academic. Yet all of that is there, too. His work is not anti-academic in the way that Jack Keruoac could be read—it’s not countercultural. It’s also not journalistic in that he is overly concerned with uncovering something exceptional with every piece, something that can become formulaic and, in the end, futile. You can’t always be original in that way.
Reading Hatherley lights up some of what my younger self liked in Debord, but it feels much more real and down-to-earth, avoiding the weighty abstract theory that, depending on the day, is either insightful or just pretentious rubbish. Neither Knausgaard or Hatherley appeal to a populist sentiment explicitly, and because they use a very individualized mode, might be critiqued as championing individualism. But I don’t think that would be accurate at all. Somehow, by being deeply personal in their writing, they unveil what we usually think of as forever escaping capture, the real self, our innermost selves, etc. Postmodernism tells us that the signifier can never capture that signified, which in this case is the person writing the words. There’s truth to that, of course, but when we drop the idea that the inner life is so sacrosanct, we realize that we have much more in common than we think. Hatherley and Knausgaard make me feel less alone, reminding me that we’re all in our own ways looking at things, living in places, and making choices within spaces that other people have designed. A populism of the best kind because it serves to make us all a little less lonely, even if for a brief moment.