texts

Palimpsestuous. Poetics

 
I invented the word palimpsestuous and was very proud of it. And then I found from Jason Phillip's essay that Sarah Dillon had invented it a few years earlier. 

It is difficult for me to evaluate the theoretical significance of Jason Phillips' article Palimpsestuous Behaviour: Democracy, Resistance, Downtown, and Skateboards or How to Read Culture [Phillips], however it seems to be an interesting reading: The text is more than a part of a sociological research. Starting from its title, it talks about commercial privatisation of the urban public space and strategies of reclaiming it back to the people: resistance, Щеглов's and Debord's dérive, inhabiting alienated spaces, layered palimpsestuous inscription on the city layers, etc.

Phillips' article is worth re-reading as in its claims it plays an interesting and characteristic game of revealing and concealing. Something is really left behind, when it looks into resistance: the enemy is specified, but what does the word resistance mean at all, when  democracy gets defined via the power of public life (the latter etymologically a  synonyms of the former in fact) and commercialisation, compartmentalisation, privatisation of the city as a war on democracy. Therefore, this struggle still is a political tool for a fair and hopefully happy life for everyone; and thus, the article has something to do with one's life, too. That's why we would need to look beyond the politics into what the author says.

He starts with Sarah Dillon's distinction between palimpsestic and palimpsestuos reading applied to the city:

"A "palimpsestic" reading involves separating the different layers of the palimpsest" [this reading puts palimsest into its blind spot - V. V.] ... "A "palimpsestuous" reading, on the other hand, preserves the structure of the palimpsest and seeks to trace "the incestuous and encrypted texts that constitute the palimpsest's fabric. Since those texts bear no nesessary relation to each other, palimpsestuous reading is an inventive process of creating relations where may, or should, be none ... A palimpsestuous reading involves making sense of a tangle of patterns in motion..." [Phillips]

Meaning-making, reading, and inventive discovering are strong repetitive overtones of the essay, which promotes the methodological move from palimpsestic to palimpsestuous reading as more adequate and efficient in research and political resistance to commercial privatisation of the public urban space.

It is more than a theoretical statement, as it deals with values, as well as political means and ends:

"... Reading culture palimpsestuously reveals the diversity nesessary for healthy communities to develop" [Phillips], [as opposed to the space of commercial relations homogenised through the common denominator of money value - V. V.]

Therefore, it is not enough to see this text as another step in construction and production of academic knowledge (which also would restrict it to the economics of knowledge), but also as a practical note that has something to do with essentials (disclaimer: not essence) of human life.

Something is left behind here. It can be sensed already in the initial distinction between "palimpsestic" and "palimpsestuous" with most of the attention turned to the latter in the rest of the article. However, there is something special about approaching different layers in the palimpsestic, isolated way.

Also, as the cultural "texts bear no nesessary relation to each other", the author interprets this lack of relations in the layered, overwritten, situational, emergent, inscribed texture of palimpsestuous "patterns in motion" as a bearer of "an inventive process of creating relations". Once again, something is missing, in fact the same as in the author's initial methodological split.

The palimpsestic reading isolated itself from the gaps, moving in separate layers, but at least it left the gaps, between-spaces untouched, although invisible in the space of its discource. As a new twist, palimpsestuous reading builds its own fabric through constantly ranging the layered body of palimpsest, inscribing, erasing, scratching, stitching together, texturizing and bridging its patches and threads. It seems to use the fine structure of interlayered gaps and mutual erasures as a new raw material - like in Deleuzian layers - for its discourse.

However, before stepping straight to meaning-making, a reading of culture, or city, etc, what we find is the lack of relations, a differential gap, an interruption, disconnection, which we intend to bridge through constructing a new level or space of understanding. What quietly allows the palimsest to exist is the disconnections between the layers and patches, mutual overlapping, being collocated, play of covering and revealing, concealing and thus not only coersive silencing, but also preservation; interrupting one flow for sake of listening to another, or silencing for sake of quietude. Thus, we speak here about the poetics of the city (Phillips' article is about the city), about metaphorical qualities of its tensions and forces, metaphor also in its technical sense, since it is an interruption, a heterogeneous disconnection, gap. Without it, politics and economics of urban public space, academic research included, remain sophisticated sign-producing powertools.

If we dismiss in the very beginning the role of disconnections for sake of relations, the outcome of our discourse, however structurally fine and powerful, will consist in bringing to the light, admitting the gaps and spaces just as a part of the classical chiaroscuro for highlighting concepts, for which shadow serves only to emphasize the flowing interconnected forms: palimpsestuous reading as panopticon rebuild of optical fiber.

If we remain in these boundaries, the second part of the essay starts sounding somewhat strange, as it concentrates on resistance, and particularly, as a case study of a video sequence of a skater moving through Ottawa, on the resistance forces between two layers of the city palimpsest: the commercial space, a simulacrum of public space; and superimposed layer of skaters freely wandering through the city, intervening and leaving the marks physical and symbolic on the body of the city and scanning, literally and palpably reading the city surfaces.

Phillips sees the skater's movement through the city as Debord's dérive, "a technique of transient passage through varied ambience" [Chtcheglov]. On the other hand, he emphasizes it as a form of social resistance, antagonism with the [commercialized] urban space. Debord describes dérive as "the path of least resistance" [Debord]. Thus, here the real resistance is the least, weakest possible resistance, which just symbolically, differentially asserts the presence of the resisting and therefore is mutual writing (as well as reading: dérive is in acute touch with the ambience): it is also "the least resistance" from the opposite side, as the urban layers will destroy the scater physically in the case of accident, or legally if the security enforce the law. However, due to this least resistance negotiation, the movement of the mutual symbolic inscription restricts itself once again to the economics of writing: "resistance as an on-going re-negotiation of meaning, function, and behavior" [Phillips]

Dérive gets interrupted:

“The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition." [Chtcheglov]

Dérive takes the intellectual, political, and/or artistic opportunity, intervention of detournment as reclaiming the meaning and that is one of the purposes of its flow, just as in psychoanalysis the patient's flow offers an opportunity of interpretation, shift,  releasing symbolic meaning - the analyst's currency.

It seems that remaining in the exchange cycle of this economics of light and mutual least-resistance reading makes the author speak about the [social] resistance mostly in terms of palimpsestuous diversity opposing a homogenic single-layered or isolated representation. Phillips cites Alarcón: "the palimpsest structure of interlocking, competing narratives has the advantage of preventing the dominant voice from completely silencing the others": the supremacy of voice vs inferiority and misery of silence (how about luxury of silence?). Therefore, the essay seems to essentially miss the remaining strong connotation of 'resistance' as 'otherness, impenetrability, opaque and tactile quality of materials' (William Morris: "You can't have art without resistance in the material.") This is consistent with the above omission of gaps, and with knowledge production as the work of inventive bringing to the light. Poetics, poetry resists to reading and the poetic qualities of the city (poetics, 'poiesis' as opposed to 'production' or 'politics') resist to 'reading' and in this sense may be the opposite and underlying matter not only to the ultraconnected commercial spaces, but also to the dérive as a method of skating, gliding, or negotiative re-reading.

Although, it seems quite obvious, at this point I would like to make a clearer distinction: poetics and aesthetics are not synonyms, if not opposite, here, because the city discourse that tries to evade from simulative strategies (of commercialism; centralised or communalized urban planning; academic theorizing, and other types of economy: knowledge economy, language economy, power or money economy, sex economy, etc), often may choose art as its vehicle, which in its turn leads to looking at the city in the categories of aesthetic refinement:

"We [artists] are able to invest energy into architectural waste structures, creating a connection between beauty and utility where there previously seemed to be none ... which allows the broader property market to wake up to their potential for intensified commodification." [Ihlein, italics mine - V.V.]

Thus, the aesthetics, which etymologically appeals to the senses and academically built upon a continuity of theoretical discourse, may not be evil in itself, but does not seem to scale well to the task at hand: how to account for or stand in the necessary gaps in the palimpsestuous urban fabric, without - or maybe before - bridging them. In this sense, poetics comes as the special instrument, or stance, also involving a kind of aesthetic reduction or epoché, peering into the gap, stopping at it, keeping it tactile, following without crossing or pushing, but also without losing the touch. Those metaphoric gaps are sources of the art, but are not identified with it.

The city life is permeated not only by the spaces of exchange and communication, lines of resistance or mutual spacial re-negotiation and dialogue, but also by a silent impenetrable fabric of privacy, of which privacy of life, protection of human rights, or even harsh conflicts of interests are just coarse examples; privacy as opposing to being read; privacy of metaphor.

Here, let me touch the distinction between space and place, although such a brief note would be hopeless. The commercial value exchange, but also discourse or play of signification can happen only in space, or rather they constitute space as a degree of freedom, the possibility to move from one point to another: physically from one place to another, referentially from one sign to another, transformationally from one meaning or regime of signs to another, etc. Place is constituted by its meaning, things cannot move there, they can only take place. Place is rarely associated with freedom, whereas space almost always does.

This all suggests the necessity as well as deficiency of both notions, which seems to make the place-space language, which is one of the important tools of cultural geography ill-fit, having a blind spot for something Yovel calls 'territories' or 'anticities', the expanses that are devoid of placeness in a particular culture, but also acting as spatial obstacles with an archetype of Terra Nullius surrounding a city [Yovel]. It is interesting how the problem of 'territories' is solved in Japanese cities having the quality of oku and sacred hidden place unlike the Western cities built upon the strong opposition of centre and periphery [Maki].

The 'territories' or 'non-places' do not need to remain the products of colonialism and hyper-connected globalism. We face 'territories' every day. They do not need to be politically or geographically formidable. The gaps I was talking about above are exactly of this sort.

On the other hand, the limits of the degrees of freedom that constitute a space shape its placeness, reclaiming it from the unlimited chain of use.

Impenetrability makes the private a sacred place and the city a collection, an assemblage of sacred in large and small: a rock on the road, a patch of sunshine on the wall, the space between palms put together on a freezing day, time of waiting on a suburban train platform, a story of a house or neighbourhood, but also Augé's non-place [Augé], Yovel's 'territories' - impenetrable from the coloniser's point of view, 'possibly impossible to characterize' [Yovel], or a hypermarket as a monster and a mystery.

References

[Augé] Augé, Marc, Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity.

[Chtcheglov] Chtcheglov, Ivan, A letter to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord, 1963. -  reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #9, p. 38

[Debord] Debord, Guy, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.

[Ihlein] Ihlein, Lucas, Complexity, Aesthetics and Gentrification: Redfern/Waterloo Tour of Beauty // in There Goes the Neighbourhood, http://www.theregoestheneighbourhood.org

[Maki] Maki, Fumihiko, The concept of Oku in Japanese Architecture//The Japan Architect, 5, 1979.

[Phillips] Phillips, Jason, Palimpsestuous Behaviour: Democracy, Resistance, Downtown, and Skateboards or How to Read Culture - http://www.uel.ac.uk/ccsr/documents/PhillipsPalimsestuousBehaviour.pdf.

[Yovel] Yovel, Jonathan, Imagining Territories: Space, Place and Anticity - http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=950895.

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