Geophilosophy, Aesthetics, and the City Michael J.

Shapiro Department of Political Science University of Hawaii The majority of the writers who have concerned themselves with really modern subjects have tended to content themselves with the certified, official subjects. Charles Baudelaire1 Introduction: Dickens, Genre, and the City Chapter I of Charles Dickenss last complete novel Our Mutual Friend begins with a scene on Londons River Thames: In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.2 Although one might suppose that the class coding of the city, which Dickens makes apparent in scene after scene in Londons streets, homes, and public houses, are held in abeyance on its river, the description of the boat as dirty and disreputable, makes it immediately apparent that the two figures in it belong to a class of bottom feeders - literally in a sense because they are fishing for the corpses of downing victims. And just as is the case in the streets, the scene contains a chance encounter, a signature event in city life. A competing boat of another corpse-searcher, Roger Riderhoods, pulls alongside at one point and provokes a conversation about the morality of robbing the dead versus the living. In Chapter II, the reader is introduced to a wholly different class venue. In contrast with the river scene, where the boat is allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface by reason of the slime and ooze with which it is covered,3 is the spick and span cleanliness of the abode of the Veneerings, which is described as the chapter opens: Mr. And Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new....4 The diversity of Londons class settings are thus made evident early in the novel. Thereafter, encounters that link the venues are enacted as the novels composition shows itself to be homologous with aspects of nineteenth-century urban life. Dickenss writing reproduces a city of aleatory events of encounter by imitating Londons architectural and labyrinthian structures and temporal flows with the oft-repeated tropes and syntactical structures of his prose.5 In London, this genre effect was pervasive. By the time the Victorian novel appeared - and Dickens was the most read novelist - the city [had become] synonymous with modernity and the novel was...a surrogate through which the reader could enter and identify with the experience of modernity...6 Because Dickens haunts almost every aspect of this writing project - an analysis of genre-city relationships as they articulate the micropolitics of urban life in diverse cities - I will be summoning his contributions throughout this introduction, even as I begin with a cinematic rather than a novelistic moment. In Carl Franklins film version of Walter Mosley=s first detective novel, Devil in a Blue

Dress (1995), set in Los Angeles in 1948, his main character, the laid-off-airline-worker-turnedreluctant-detective, Ezekial (Easy) Rawlins (Denzel Washington) refers at one point to the mayoral election taking place: The newspapers was goin on and on about the election...like they were really going to change someones life. As the film proceeds, a series of micropolitical events ensue. Easy finds himself caught between political and criminal conspirators and policing agents, as he tries to survive economically and keep his body out of prison. Managing his situation, as he finds himself hired to find a missing woman, sets his body in motion and produces an investigatory trajectory with images that map much of mid twentieth century Los Angeless racial-spatial order. Thematically, Easys problem is reminiscent of the Dickens character, Magwich, in Great Expectations (1860-61), who is pursued both by the police and by Compeyson, a former partner in crime. And Easys attempt to negotiate the contentious racialspatial order of mid twentieth century Los Angeles, while hounded by malicious characters and helped by friends, bears comparison with Dickenss main character in Great Expectations, Pip, who has to negotiate Londons mid nineteenth century, contentious class order while hounded by malicious characters and helped by friends. Dickenss and Franklins stories bear comparison genre-wise as well, for as the Russian filmmaker/director, Sergei Eisenstein, has pointed out, Dickenss novelistic style was the primary inspiration for the parallel editing, montage techniques pioneered in the films of D. W. Griffith.7 Eisenstein shows how Dickenss writing is strikingly cinematic in its composition, a montage style (which Eisenstein demonstrates with sequences from Oliver Twist) that is well attuned to illuminating modern urban life. Dickens, a city artist, as Eisenstein puts it, was the first to bring factories, machines, and railways into literature [and his] urbanism...may be found not only in his thematic material, but also in that head-spinning tempo of changing impressions with which Dickens sketches the city in the form of a dynamic (montage) picture; and this montage of its rhythms conveys the sensations of the limits of speed at that time (1838), the sensation of a rushing stage coach.8 As a result of Dickenss cinematic style, screen adaptations of his novels have managed, with subjective shots and compositions of images, to achieve the kind of technical inflection of Dickensian prose that renders his narratives compatible with the cinematic genre. For example, in David Leans film version of Great Expectations (1946), there is an ambitiously distilled moment of subjectivity....Succumbing to fever after the death of Magwich, Pip is disoriented in the London street by a heaving sea of glinting satin top hats.9 Martin Scorsese seems to have picked up on that imagery. In his film adaptation of Edith Whartons The Age of Innocence (1993), there is a very similar scene. As the employees in the financial institutions on Wall Street pour out of their offices to head for lunch, Scorsese shoots them from the front. Approaching his still camera is a sea of glinting satin top hats. Scorsese, like Lean, exploits cinemas spatial orientation and temporal play of moving images, which makes that genre even more apposite than literature for reproducing urban dynamics.10 Cinemas special capacity for revealing the citys spatial structure and temporal flows are also very apparent in Franklins screen adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, to which I now return. City Politics versus Urban Theory The limits of speed in Franklins Devil are based on twentieth century automobility because cars, rather than a rushing stage coach, are the primary conveyances throughout the
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film.11 Franklins montage and sequence shots capture much of the rhythms and racial order of Los Angles, just as Dickenss similar novelistic composition captures much of the rhythms and class order of London. The way the film captures that order is treated below. At this point, I want to extend the significance of Easys remark about the irrelevance for him and African Americans in general of a mid twentieth century Los Angeles mayoral election. Easys observation can be construed as a challenge to much of the city politics literature that emerged in the mid twentieth century in the discipline of political science. That literature (my initial introduction while a graduate student to analyzing the city) was concerned with civic actors and was articulated as a series of behaviorally-oriented investigations that achieved widespread recognition during the 1960's growth period in the main approaches to cities by political scientists. Framing those studies was the then dominant political imaginary, a focus on the processes located in and flowing from a small space within the city, the mayors office, and on a limited model of political action, voting and other conventional forms of Apolitical participation.@ In short, civic life for mainstream political scientists investigating power relations in cities in the mid twentieth century was largely quarantined within a politics associated with city governments. Banfield and Wilson=s influential text, City Politics (1963), which was centered on the mayor=s office, helped to inaugurate that tendency. Accompanying such city politics texts were the investigations and political and methodological quarrels in the community power literature, initially provoked by Robert Dahl et al=s Who Governs (1961), which was in part a response to Floyd Hunter=s earlier Community Power Structure (1953). Dahls investigation addressed the issue of the citys democratic performance, and it shaped many of the subsequent approaches to city politics. The primary partisans on both sides of the community power@ debate, a controversy that was both ideological and methodological, featured those who saw a democratic pluralism emerging after investigating Akey decisions@ versus those who saw elite domination after investigating reputations. However, both sides retained an emphasis on the official politics involved in contests for office and influence over the policies emerging from those offices. Certainly the field has since broadened, as political scientists have focused increasingly on the activism of urban minorities.12 However for the most part, that discipline has remained committed to a narrow (often de Tocqueville-inspired) participatory model of politics. The struggles of marginalized people to manage their life worlds and the rhythms of moving bodies (often those that are politically disenfranchised) in, through, and out of urban spaces fail to gain disciplinary recognition as aspects of politically-relevant problematics.13 In juxtaposing novels, films, and the arts in general to the political/social science genre, I am offering an alternative approach to the power-city relationship. Although , as Jacques Ranciere puts it, literature [like the arts in general] does not perform political action, it does not create collective forms of action, it contributes to the reframing of forms of experience.14 As a result, the arts render thinkable aspect of politics that have been ignored. Krzysztof Ziarek puts it another way, using the imagery of force to emphasize the arts non-representaiton effect: Art refashions force in a way that allows relations to gain a momentum free of power, thus opening up that space of non-power. It is a relationality that unproduces forces, demobilizing them into a constellation that, more radically than any counterpower, calls power into question.15 To specify how art can enact such a non-power/power, Ziarek turns to Maurice Blanchots observations about the power of speech, which Blanchot sees as the place of dispersion, disarranging and disarranging itself, dispersing and dispersing itself to function as a kind of power - a non power that would not be the simple negation of power but would manifest itself

as a poiesis and thus as a speech of detour, the poetry in the turn of writing.16 Blanchot adds that as long as speech doesnt become petrified such that it returns to order, as long as it flees from simply reestablishing the language of the order, it retains power-resisting, revolutionary potential.17 In my terms, the arts, when they refashion force relations, oppose a politics that is mired in the official language of macropolitical institutions and provide an opening to the micropolitics of every day life. The focus on participation in or attitudes toward the macropolitical processes involved with governmental recruitment and influence (or power) over policy making persists for those political scientists who carry on the behavioral orientation fashioned in the mid twentieth century. Robert D. Putnams analysis of civic traditions in contemporary Italy, in which he is concerned with what he calls civic engagement, is an exemplar of that orientation.18 A meticulously executed investigation of a wide variety of Italian cities and regions, Putnams investigation yields inferences about the attitudinal and participatory bases of regional democratic institutions. His subjects - seven hundred interviewees subjected to elaborate interview protocols - include regional councilors, community leaders, bankers and farm leaders, mayors and journalists, labor leaders and business representatives, as well as voters.19 Without going into the details of Putnams conclusions about varying degrees of democratic proclivity and institutional success in the cities of alternative Italian regions, I want to draw inspiration from his characterization of his investigatory narrative as a detective tale and contrast his macropolitical approach with that of one of Italys best known crime and detective fiction writers, Leonardo Sciascia, whose crime novels refashion force relations as they treat the micropolitics of daily survival rather than the participatory civic engagement associated with orientations toward official political institutions. Sciascias version of Italian politics provides an especially appropriate contrast to Putnams because while Sciascias first crime novel, The Day of the Owl, situates the political significance of the mafia,20 Putnam devotes very little space to that organization (2 pages), treats it as politically irrelevant, and relies primarily on quotations from a variety of historical treatments, most which support his view that the mafia thrives in places where trust and security is lacking because civic norms are weakly articulated.21 In contrast, Sciascia, who also writes a detective story (not metaphorically in his case), and whose conceptual personae consist of a few invented characters, a police captain from Parma, and several Sicilians - police officials, political leaders, and others (some of whom are mafia) who are implicated in a murder episode in a Sicilian city realizes that the mafia is a politically relevant force, embedded within a complex set of opposing civic norms. Briefly, in Sciascias Day of the Owl, a contractor who fails to pay mafia protection is murdered, and a Captain Belodi from Parma in the North takes over the investigation, only to see the strong case he has put together dissolve in the face of local resistance, as persons at various social levels produce fabricated alibis for those involved in the murder conspiracy. In the process of inventing his detective story, Sciascia offers a more nuanced mafiaimplicated political account of Italian civic life than one can derive from Putnams brief and dismissive inference that the mafia operates outside of civic culture rather than constituting part of it. For example, at one point in the novel, while Captain Belodi is interviewing an informer, the reader is treated to the complex and contrasting political perspectives of Captain Belodi, an Emilian from Parma [who by] family tradition and personal conviction [ is dedicated to] the law of the republic, which safeguarded the liberty and justice, he served and enforced22 and his
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informer, Parrinieddu, who like others in his city is forced to balance mafia demands with those of the crime fighting establishment. Parrinieddu (nicknamed Little Priest...due to the easy eloquence and hypocrisy he exuded)23 has a very different perspective on the law that Belodi respects and zealously safeguards: To the informer the law was not a rational thing born of reason, but something depending on a man, on the thoughts and the mood of the man here [Belodi]...To him the law was utterly irrational, created on the spot by those in command....The informer had never, could never have, believed that the law was definitely codified and the same for all; for him between rich and poor, between wise and ignorant, stood the guardians of the law who only used the strong arm on the poor; the rich they protected and defended. It was like a barbed wire entanglement, a wall. The thief who had done time, was involved with the mafia, negotiated extortion loans and played the informer asked only to find a hole in the wall, a gap in the barbed wire. If he did, he would soon raise enough capital to open his little shop....24 By mobilizing an economically privileged public servant from a city in the more prosperous North and staging an encounter between him and a mafia-serving former thiefturned-informer from an impoverished, mafia-dominated city in the South, Sciascia provides a perspective on the political cultures of Italian regions that is fugitive within the interview protocols that Putnam employs, region-by-region. Writing in a different genre whose method involves imaginative inventions - in this case by one who has been experientially close to the objects of analysis - Sciascias approach deploys an alternative political ontology. Instead of locating the political within institutions and orientations toward those institutions, Sciascias political ontology is founded on the centrality of encounter.25 As a novel, a genre that M. M. Bakhtin has famously characterized in terms of its heteroglossia (its contending voices), Sciascias Day of the Owl delivers a city whose moral economy is a subject of critical discursive contention and is thus an exemplar of a poiesis (a la Blanchot) that flees from conventional or official versions of the life world.26 When Captain Belodi arrests a mafia leader who is suspected of soliciting the murder, he is confronted by a local interlocutor who challenges his model of the mafias role in politics and crime by juxtaposing the discourse of justice as it emerges from centralized state authority with a sense of justice, as it operates within his Sicilian city: ...the Sicilian that I am and the reasonable man I claim to be rebel against this injustice...Dyou know him [the alleged mafia head]? I do. A good man, an exemplary father, an untiring worker...Certain men inspire respect: for their qualities, their savoir-faire, their frankness, their flair for cordial relations, for friendship.... These are heads of the mafia? Now heres something you dont know: these men, the men public opinion calls the heads of the mafia, have one quality in common, a quality I would like to find in every man, one which is enough to redeem anyone in the eyes of God - a sense of justice...naturally, instinctively...And its this sense of justice which makes them inspire respect...27

Rather than staging such interactions, Putnams text, true to its social science methodological conceits, essays a careful counting because, as he states, quantitative techniques can correct misleading impressions derived from a single striking case or two.28 Putnams statistical rendering, which adds up his subjects to produce a view of the aggregate support for institutions, is nevertheless misleading. His approach glosses over the ideational fault-lines that become evident when subjects are located within the densities of their regional and city locales and are forced to defend their positions against alternative perspectives. While each of Putnams subjects is a psychological/ideological subject, one with attitudes and beliefs, Sciascias are aesthetic subjects, subjects that are invented less to reveal their psychic orientations than to reveal the forces at work in the spaces within which they move and to display the multiplicity of subject positions historically created within those spaces.29 Aesthetic subjects cannot be gathered arithmetically because their role is not to reflect individual attitudes but to enact the complex political habitus within which they strive to manage responsibilities, to flourish, or to merely survive. Putnams analysis is thus insensitive to the politics of disparity that Sciascias novelistic approach reveals. He employs what Ranciere calls a logic of identification, an arithmetic of shopkeepers and barterers that equates the equality of anyone at all with anyone else.30 In contrast, Sciascia - like Dickens whose London novels provided in-depth studies of the citys diverse types over a century earlier - mobilizes a challenge to the statistical approach to citys and regions civic life. As Efraim Sicher points out, the rival epistemologies, Dickenss in-depth treatments of mobile characters and utilitarian-oriented statistical aggregations, were critically evaluated by another 19th century writer, George Eliot, who clearly sided with the former: The tendency created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economic science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations....none of these mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the People, with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their motives.31 Although, like Sciascia, Putnam is concerned with regional and local identities,32 he derives those identities from homogeneously applied attitude scales of agreement or disagreement with simplistic, preselected questionnaire protocols - for example the statement, In the distribution of income the workers are really in an unfavorable position (to which the respondent can agree, disagree, etc).33 As a result, political culture for Putnam amounts to the averages he derives by aggregating and scaling the responses. In contrast, Sciascias Captain Belodis attempt to extract local support for his murder investigation leads him to an appreciation of the fault-lines in Italian cultural politics, where the political culture of the southern city where the murder takes place, a domain of political culture in which familial allegiance trumps statesponsored norms, differs markedly from that in much of the North. Experiencing the contrast, Belodi comes to recognize that: The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is the family; counts that is to say, more as a dramatic juridical contract or bond than as a natural association based on affection. The family is the Sicilians State. The State, as it is for us, is extraneous to them. Merely a de facto entity based on force; an entity imposing taxes, military service, war, police.34
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Rather than a survey of different levels of support for democratic institutions, where politics is derived from aggregating attitudes, Sciascias crime novel, with its Dickensian plot in which what appears to be isolated and inscrutable is ultimately reseen as a web of connections,35 presents a critically-oriented politics of aesthetics, a metapolitical framing that points to a world of competing worlds.36 If we heed the spatial mapping of Sciascias novel (its literary geography), we discover that Sciascia, with a compositional strategy that Dickens helped to invent, unites spaces that in other genres remain disparate. As Franco Moretti has pointed out, in contrast with the nineteenth century silver fork novels (e.g. those of Jane Austen) that generate a London whose dramas are for the most part restricted to the West End, Dickenss stroke of genius [was to] unify the two halves of London [the East and West Ends].37 For example in Our Mutual Friend (1865), Dickenss main character is caught between the fraudulent arrogance of the West End and the physical violence of the docks [in Londons East End]. Similarly, Sciascias Captain Belodi is caught between his northern habitus, a region governed by a respect for the laws impartiality, and his Sicilian assignment in a political culture where the assumption is that authority has never had anything to do with justice or public service.38 Conventional political theorists have also failed to achieve an in-depth appreciation of the micropolitics of managing urban life-worlds that one can discern from the way novels treat cities. Concerned like the community power partisans and neo-Tocquevilleans such as Putnam with democratic performance, their paradigmatic model has been one inaugurated by Aristotle and recycled most famously by Hegel - the ancient city-state. Stephen Schneck summarizes this tendency: A tacit Aristotelianism dominates most academic conceptualizations of the city and constitutes an intellectual field within which questions of city are resolved. That field, constituted by a neo-Aristotelian focus on the polis as a self-contained political community of political animals, presumes that there are no [politically significant] persons beyond the walls of the city. Incorporating this Aristotelian frame, many political theorists see as a historical crisis of the city, an attenuation of the poliss constitutive solidarity, where once there had been a purported harmony between civically-oriented human inclinations and collective well being.39 To cite an exemplary case, Richard Dagger construes the Greek polis as the ideal political community and suggests that the city-state was the proper breeding ground for citizenship because it was an arena in which Aristotles conception of involvement in authority by agreeing to rule or be ruled was played out.40 By contrast, he sees the modern city as too large and fragmented with no central locus of community that could provide citizens with a focus on their civic responsibility. In addition, he laments the movement in an out of cities, which he sees as contributing to a diminished sense of public responsibility.41 Daggers abstract Aristotelian ideals fails to engage a politics that one could realistically apply to any modern city. His politics dwells in what Henri Lefebvre calls abstract space, which because it is formal and quantitative,....erases distinctions, as much as those which derive from nature and (historical) time as those which originate in the body (age, sex, ethnicity).42 Certainly Dagger is correct about the fragmentation to which he refers, but rather than attempting to rethink the political in reaction to modernitys altered dynamics and topologies, he offers moral injunctions; his speculation turns to what he calls ethical citizenship. Instead of analyzing the structures of inclusion and exclusion that are a consequence of the mobility that creates the fragmentation in which many bodies are rendered as politically unqualified within the standard citizenship discourse, he evokes a citizenship ethos that applies only to already qualified

inhabitants and presumes a unitary referent; he suggests that as an ethical citizen, one should act with the interests of the community in mind 43(my emphasis). Such a citizenship, he adds, would require a different city, one that is more settled and in some ways simpler than the metropolis. Noting that citizenship may even presuppose some level of education and material well-being,44 Dagger effectively dismisses the political relevance of the forces producing and sustaining inequality and the politics of survival associated with those who must cope with those forces. In sum, he conjures away contemporary urban politics by seeing fragmentation as merely a pull away from the possibilities of an ethical citizenship whose referent is an ancient regulative ideal that has no contemporary relevance. A compelling contrast is provided by the way contemporary urban geographers construe the fragmentation of the contemporary city. For example, recognizing that the contemporary city is characterized by increasing divisions between rich and poor and the empowered and disempowered, three urban geographers address the way those divisions are materialized, not only in jobs, income, and residence, but also in the capacity of various groups to negotiate the meandering corridors of healthcare, transport, pensions and other systemising networks. They go on to suggest a perspective on a politics from below that exceeds a narrow concern with standard modes of political participation: Of course, to paint a broad-brush picture of the ruthless socioeconomic outcomes that emerge out of present-day inequalities vis-a-vis power, wealth-generating opportunity and socio-spatial mobility could easily deny us the ontological capacity to identify how some groups contrive spaces of escape or counterspaces, whether economic, political, or cultural.45 The authors reference to an ontological capacity is central to the alternative to city politics they offer, one that has been treated more elaborately by other urban geographers (for example in urban theory, as it is developed by Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift). Writing early in the twenty first century, Amin and Thrift note that, In the last fifteen years, urban theory has moved a considerable way towards recognizing the varied and plural nature of urban life...Contemporary urbanists, they write, ...note the juxtaposition of high-value added activities with new kinds of informed activity, the co-presence of different classes, social groups, ethnies and cultures, the stark contrast between riches and creativity and abject poverty, and the multiple temporalities and spatialities of different urban livelihoods.46 As is the case with Amin and Thrift, my approach is inspired by the urban-oriented geophilosophical idioms of Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre, as well as those of contemporary urban theorists. Incorporating critical philosophies deployed on urban space, I turn throughout my analyses to a variety of artistic genres in order to offer a geophilosophical, political ontology adequate to the modern city. A conceptual grasp of the politics of urban space requires a distancing from the philosophical traditions from which the dominant political idioms have emerged because the contemporary history of political philosophy has been intimately involved with state-level thinking. With notable exceptions, politically focused philosophical idioms have tended toward what Jacques Derrida calls a Anational philosophism, a preoccupation with the nation-state. Or as Pierre Bourdieu has put it, state thinking persists because the state remains in the head of the theorist.47 In contrast, both Lefebvre and Benjamin
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focus on aspects of the life world that are outside of state-managed dynamics. They show how the bodies within urban life exist and contentiously subsist within a dense and complexly structured sensorium. To capture the urban dynamics to which their analyses refer, I am concerned with literature, film, and other artistic genres within a politics of aesthetics oriented toward body-city relationships, where some bodies (as Henri Lefebvre puts it) are engaged in dressage, i.e., in merely conforming to the postures and routes officially prescribed, while some are (in Deleuze and Guattaris terms) involved in lines of flight as they seek to escape the authoritatively prescribed modes of urban subjectivity. I am also focused on particular sub genres, for as Benjamin has shown, the movements of some exemplary bodies in cities (one of his exemplars is the detective) best capture the rhythms and map the partitions of the city.48 For example in his crime novel 32 Cadillacs, Joe Goress primary characters are gypsies and repo men whose clashes map San Franciscos divisive forces and render its diverse spaces and daily rhythms intelligible.49 A perspective that analyzes rather than laments fragmentation must recognize that within the urban milieu, there are (among others) two politically charged dynamics at play in the citys partitioning: separations/barriers continually maintained by policing agents and events of repartitioning enacted by counter-agents - individuals and groups involved in politicization and subjectification. One important contribution to a political framing of this force-counter force dynamic is supplied by Ranciere, who offers a model of the political derived from events in which certain expressive performances repartition experience, as formerly politically marginalized assemblages engage in acts of subjectification, becoming political subjects by transforming identities defined in the natural order of the allocations of functions.50 Their initiatives are events in which a series of actions by a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience [results in a] reconfiguration of experience.51 One of Rancieres most compelling illustrations of such a reconfiguration is in his investigation of writing polemics inscribed in labor history in the nineteenth century France. He suggests that workers who stayed up late to write treatises about their work situation altered the sense of the night while, at the same time, engaging in acts of subjectification. By using the night to write rather than rest, they effectively altered the identity within which the only the products of their moving bodies were valued while their voices were deemed politically irrelevant: It [was]...a matter of producing something other than the wrought objects in which the philosophy of the future sees the essence of man-the-producer being realized, at the price of losing some time in the ownership of capital.52 Illustrations of Intense, Politically Fraught Urban Rhythms As Rancieres investigation of nineteenth century labor politics indicates, one need not advance to a twenty first century urban formation to implement the kind of analysis described by Amin and Thrift. Here, I return first to Carl Franklins film version of Walter Mosleys Devil in a Blue Dress to treat the way a focus on Easy Rawlinss (Denzel Washingtons) moving body provides a materialization of the urban theory to which Amin and Thrift refer. I return to the film version of the novel because of the ways that film form - cross cutting, sequence shots, montage, depth of focus, and facial close-ups (among other things) - is ideally suited to an urban-oriented mode of apprehending the political. Cinema can effectively reveal the contingencies associated with what Nicolas Bourriaud (after Althusser) calls a materialism of encounter53; it can offer a visual dynamic that captures an aspect of the city that is central to the urban micropolitics with which I am concerned, animating a the city as a kind of force field of

passions that associate and pulse bodies in particular ways.54 Thematically, as I noted earlier, Easy Rawlinss moving body in Devil effectively maps the racial-spatial order of mid century Los Angeles. It is an order constituting what Robert Crooks refers to as an urban frontier. Crooks suggests that the state violence that took place on the U.S.s western frontier has shifted to urban frontiers - in his terms, a transformation of the frontier from a moving western boundary into a relatively fixed partitioning of urban space....a racial frontier, which he examines with readings of the African American crime stories of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley.55 If we consider the way Franklins version of Devil articulates that frontier cinematically rather than merely thematically, our attention has to be on the way that frontier, articulated as a series of racial fault-lines, inflects Easys body rather than on discursive representations of it. Amin and Thrift suggest that among the aspects of the body that articulate the city of passions are hands and talk. With respect to the former, they state, Though we write incessantly of a city of sight and screens, we forget the city of a forest of hands, picking their way across keyboards, clicking mice, gripping steering wheels..., and with respect to the latter, they note that the city of a constant cacophony of talk....Cities hum with talk which is based on shared conversational contexts in which categories and identities are constantly articulated.56 Certainly hands articulate important aspects of Los Angeles in Franklins Devil, primarily as they grip knives and guns. And just as certainly, talk is an important part of the film, for among other things there is a diacritical crossing between black and white spaces where characters have to adjust their speaking styles as they recognize that discursive contexts are often not shared. However, in order to show how Easys body negotiates that frontier or set of racial fault-lines, my focus is on walking and other aspects of bodily comportment rather than on hands and talk. When the film opens, the first scene, after the credits are run, takes place in Joppys bar in a black section of Los Angeles, where Easy is reading the want ads in the newspaper. Shortly after he makes the already noted observation about the irrelevance of the mayoral election, Joppy calls to Easy to approach the bar to meet a Mr. Albright, a white guy who is seeking to hire an African American to find a missing person - a presumably white woman (who it turns out is actually passing) named Daphne Monet who associates with African Americans and thus frequents black sections of the city, where Albright cannot unobtrusively investigate. Clearly at ease in black space, Easy walks toward the bar with a loose-limbed gate that is unambiguously identifiable as a form of African American walking in spaces of comfort and safety. Insert: Image of Easy Walking toward the bar Easys walk to the bar to meet Mr. Albright has especially strong resonance when contrasted with the posture he manifests in a flashback, shortly before that moment. While he is seated, reading the newspaper want ads because he has lost his job in a aircraft assembly plant, there is a cut to his encounter with the plant foreman, a Mr. Giacomo, whose contemptuous body language contrasts with Easys importuning. Easy stands stiffly at attention, literally with hat in hand, as he tries unsuccessfully to convince Mr. Giacomo to give him back his job. In the novel version of the story, Mosley has Easy describing the factory as a reproduction of the slave era plantation. In the film version, the-factory-as-plantation-space is articulated through the body languages of the foreman and his (former) employee. It is only once he is back in black space that Easy moves in a loose-limbed, comfortable way. Insert: Easy and Mr. Giacomo However, after Easy decides to take on Albrights job, he is forced out of the comfort zones of
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black Los Angeles. Early in the drama, over Easys protest, Albright arranges a meeting at the Malibu pier, a quintessentially white space, where, upon his arrival, Easy, walks stiffly and warily, with a turned up collar and eyes shifting right and left. Despite his wariness, Easy gets into an ugly encounter with white racist teenagers from which Albright extracts him in a brutal sequence, drawing his gun and threatening and beating one of Easys antagonists. Insert: Easy on the Malibu Pier As Easy pursues the task of trying to locate Daphne Monet, he becomes caught between Albrights brutality and that of the police, who charge him with a murder. However, once he becomes aware of the capital he has because of his ability to move about in black space to find Daphne Monet, who is sought by two mayoral candidates and Albright (who pretends to work for one while actually working for the other), his walk, even in white space, takes on a different character. When he goes to visit Todd Carter, Daphnes estranged boyfriend, we see an Easy, dressed in a sharp looking suit and tie, striding confidently into the mansion of the richest man in Los Angeles (according to Easys voice-over), where he gains access to Carter after telling a secretary, who initially tries to turn him away, that he knows the whereabouts of Carters chippie who dumped him. Insert: Easy approaching Todd Carters mansion Finally, once Easy has found (and rescued) Daphne, solved the murder case, and put his life in order (with the solvency he gains from Carters payoff for finding Daphne), we see again the wholly comfortable Easy in the black space of his neighborhood, walking again with his comfortable, loose limbed gate. Inserts: Easy back in his neighborhood There is a particular force with considerable historical depth that motivates Easys dynamic mapping of LAs racial-spatial order. He is struggle to hold onto his property. As I have noted elsewhere, both the novel and film versions of Mosleys Devil in a Blue Dress are addressed to a crucial historical shift in the African American experience as it is reflected in African American aesthetic productions. In addition to the black-white encounters that the story enacts is the encounter with economic signs. As Houston A. Baker Jr has insisted: All African American creativity has addressed itself to a crucial historical shift.57 The characters in their stories seek to effect the historical transition from having been, or having descended from people who were commodities to being economically effective actors who can manage commodities,58 While the African American struggle to remain economically viable in U. S. Cities remains a dominant reality of urban politics, there are other struggles that have been and continue to be pervasive aspects of political encounter in urban space. Treating a literary example, Philip Fisher suggests that a classical nineteenth-century form, the novel of entrance [features] the individual immigrant biography [in a way that] condenses the slower, less recordable transition of the society as a whole. And once again, it is Dickens who pioneers such an illustration; Fisher refers among other works to Dickenss Great Expectations, as a novel of entrance.59 In order to register the way the immigrant experience is also a significant aspect of contemporary urban micropolitics, I turn here to a second film, which effectively updates Dickenss London by cutting between spaces of economic and legal marginality and spaces of privilege, Stephen Frearss Dirty Pretty Things (2002). Dirty is a film that articulates an immigrant experience with the multiplicity of life worlds that constitutes the micropolitics of urban space. Rather than the flows from the English countryside into London, which are among

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Dickenss primary story vehicles, the flows in Dirty are from outside the UK. In Dirty, it is a flow of refugees whose illegal statuses render them vulnerable to exploitation. The difference between the two flows is made evident in Dirtys opening and closing scenes. While Dickens novels often focus on domestic train travel - for example in Dombey and Son (1946), which focuses extensively on the way the railway alters aspect of city life - Frearss opening and closing scenes take place at Londons Heathrow Airport. Two refugees in particular become implicated in a structure of exploitation, Okwe, a Nigerian Doctor, who drives a cab by day (and is seen hustling taxi customers at Heathrow in the opening scene) and works as a hotel desk clerk at night with no legal status, and Senay, a Turkish hotel worker who has resident status but no work permit, share an apartment where they have to hide from immigration authorities. Learning of their illegal statuses and about Okwes medical expertise, the hotel manager, Senior Juan (aka Sneaky), offers to trade them valid looking passports in exchange for Okwe harvesting one of Senays kidneys which Sneaky wants to sell as part of the illegal organ trade he runs from his hotel. Senior Juan trades legal identity papers for assistance in harvesting organs, which he then sells to privileged clients. Leaving London, where they are pursued by immigration authorities had become a necessity for Okwe and Senay. As Moretti points out, a very large number of characters leave London at the end of Dickenss novels because London cannot provide a plausible setting for a happy ending.60 The situation is the same for Frearss characters in Dirty. And Dirtys rendering of London is reminiscent of the way the city is produced in nineteenth century Victorian novels such as Dickenss Our Mutual Friend. A complex set of relations develop spatially and temporally as characters from diverse parts of the city are brought into encounters. Moreover cinema has a special capacity with respect to space, which is well utilized by Frears. Its moving images are such that space loses privileged directions and thus exceeds any particular locus of perception.61 In Deleuzes terms, the cinemas screen is superior to the brain as screen because it allows for the recovery of what individual perceptions tend to evacuate.62 Visuality is also as central to the Dickens aesthetic as it is to film. Thus, as in some Dickens novels, for example his Bleak House (1852-53), the realism that is obtained in Frearss Dirty is the kind achieved by Dickens, who effectively remov[es] housetops in order to see the private lives played out beneath them [a feature that] register[s] their presence in the world through sight.63 Just as in film, whose primary vehicle for rendering reality is images, so with Dickens, it is images that are a primary aesthetic. As Nancy Armstrong points out, by the mid nineteenth-century, Dickenss novels had begun to offer certain kind of visual descriptions as the most direct access to the real (and her primary example here is Bleak House).64 The Dickens text, she adds, offers the reader a truth that is hidden and must be seen before the world can become legible as such.65 What becomes legible in Dirty are the exploitation opportunities taken by those who prey on a vulnerable labor force of illegal migrants. The concept of the hidden has special resonance when one compares the Dickens text with Frearss Dirty. At one point in the film, Senay says to Okwe, were invisible. Along with Juliette, a Jamaican prostitute who works in the hotel at night (and says at one point, I dont exist), they represent a segment of British life, swelling in proportion yearly, that exists on the exploitable margins of the nation.66 And similarly, after Okwe discovers the illegal organ trade operating in the Baltic Hotel where he works and ponders a possible reaction, his friend, the forensic mortician, Guo, reminds him of his situation: Okwe, you dont have a position here. You have nothing; you are nothing.
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The macropolitical reaction in the UK (as elsewhere) to refugees is well known. As the writer/director of Dirty, Stephen Frears, puts it, the government sort of whips up fears in the rest of England, as though these people have two heads or something, theres no attempt to explain the problem...its just assumed that theyre crooks or terrorists.67 Frearss film is effectively a counter-power event. Its images and a storyline delivers compassion and critical insight, while showing that the London that offers hospitality to tourists and business travelers obscures a London that exploits vulnerable in-migrants. That part of London is revealed primarily by the trajectory of Okwes moving body. Because he is a cab driver by day, his daily trajectory of movement, shown with sequence shots of street scenes, back allies, and commercial establishments, provides some of the contrasts and interconnections of Londons marginal and privileged venues. However, the scenes in the Baltic Hotel, where Okwe works nights are more telling with respect of the contemporary political reality of a global city that harbors illegal and thus exploitable immigrants and refugees. By effectively taking the roof off the Hotel (just as Dickens does with his houses and other buildings), Frears displays the stark contrast between the two London flows to which I have referred - that of privileged travelers and that of exploitable refugees. On the one hand is the hotel lobby, a space in which privileged travelers congregate without having to worry about the hotels surveillance cameras, which function (at least in part) to guarantee their security. On the other are the surveilled spaces of the employees where video and other modes of surveillance constitute threats (Frears emphasizes the hotels surveillance by including shots taken through the surveillance cameras). After one of Okwes daytime encounters at the minicab office that employs him, the film cuts to his other London place of employment and begins with a framing shot of the front of the Baltic Hotel, complete with a uniformed Slavic doorman, Ivan, who greets guests during the day and helps to manage the more clandestine operations of the hotel at night. It becomes clear as the film narrative progresses that what is out front is only one presentation of ethnicity and one aspect of the architecture of a hotel whose different spaces involve an ethnic and class partitioning. Okwes movements within the hotel map the more hidden spaces of the staff, for example the basement, where the lockers for the non white staff - maids and deskman are. Those less visible parts of the hotel - some of the rooms, the basement, the kitchen, and the parking garage - provide the telling contrast with the lobby where guests are seen freely entering and leaving, in contrast with Okwe and Senay, who are constantly hiding from raids by immigration officials. Here again, we can note a parallel with the Dickens aesthetic. For Dickens, buildings are often a character in his plots (most notably in his Bleak House) and, more generally, the intelligibility of Dickenss London is partly articulated through his architectural foci, for example the way he disrupts the fixed, and with it that identity of domestic stability, with images of the house in transition (in Our Mutual Friend).68 Similarly, the composition of shots of the Baltic Hotel, which separate the relatively freely moving bodies of the guests from the suborned bodies of vulnerable refugees and immigrants, makes the hotel a key character in the plot. By heeding Sergei Eisensteins observations of the articulation between architecture and cinematic montage, we can become sensitive to the role of the hotel in which much of the action in the film takes place. Like Eisenstein, for whom architecture ...is one of the underlying motifs in [his] films. ...,69 for Frears, the Baltic Hotel is at least as important a character as is its manager, Senior Juan. In the case of Dickens, whose London novels were sent chapter-by-chapter through the

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mails, his nineteenth-century writings were effectively serial events through which London readers got images of a city that showed aspects of class immiseration about which they were only slowly becoming aware because the age of photography had arrived.70 Frearss film is a contemporary event that reveals up-close images of exploited and endangered lives in the city in this case connected to global trajectories of movement - that are not apparent to most residents, tourists, and business visitors who sample only the more upscale services of the city. Among what is shared in Dickens novels and Frearss film is the way the city imposes what Jonathan Crary calls a crisis of attention resulting from the emergence of a social, urban, psychic, industrial field, increasingly saturated with sensory input.71 As is well known, it was Georg Simmel who famously described the psychic demands that the modern city levies on its inhabitants: The rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impression. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of modern life.72 However, Simmels formulation, which focuses on a generalized psychological condition, is insensitive to the inequalities of positioning within the city. A political grasp of the management of the citys hyperstimulating sensorium requires us modify Simmels general ascriptions with respect to mental life within the city by recognizing that different characters face different levels of demand for attention. Dickenss Our Mutual Friend conveys such a political grasp at the very outset. In Chapter one, the corpse-seeking boatman, Gaffer Hexam, whose economic survival depends on the demanding task of finding bodies in a large murky river where the bottom is not visible, is described as looking with a most intent and searching gaze, as well as having to be on the lookout for competing corpse searchers, who threaten both his livelihood and well being.73 In contrast, the attention stakes for the characters in Chapter Two, assembled at a dinner party thrown by the Veneerings, are considerably lower. Risking only social embarrassment, they have to be alert to those whom they are addressing in order to deliver the appropriate levels of recognition and deference. For example, arriving as one of the guests, Mr. Podsnap mistakenly and very deferentially greats Mr. Tremlow, assuming that he is the host, Mr Veneering. Seeking to save the situation, Podsnaps wife, unable to originate a mistake on her own account...does her best in the way of handsomely supporting her husbands by looking toward Mr. Tremlow with a plaintive countenance and remarking to Mrs. Veneering [the only other witness to the gaff] in a feeling manner, that she fears he has been rather bilious of late..74 Frearss Dirty provides a similar juxtaposition. The attention stakes are very high for the Okwe and Senay. In their apartment, at the Baltic Hotel, and moving about the city, they have to dodge encounters with the surveillance personnel from the immigration authority and must hide their statuses to employers (who exploit them, once their backgrounds and statuses are known). In the scenes at the Baltic Hotel, we see a striking contrast. On the one hand are the illegal workers, Okwe and Senay, who have severe demands on their attention to their environment. They have to be furtively on the lookout for danger, while masking their fear with expressionless social presentations. On the other are the hotel guests passing through the lobby, who need be attentive only to social forms. They can, as Siegfried Kracauer puts it, comfortably disappear
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behind the peripheral equality of social masks.75 Thus just as Dickenss juxtapositions provides a micropolitics of urban survival for differentiated class characters in Our Mutual Friend, Frearss Dirty provides a micropolitics of urban survival for differential flows of types in and out of London. The issue I want therefore to pursue is the realism afforded by such artistic genres with respect to disclosing a politics of urban space. Realism and Genre George Levines observations on the real effect in Dickenss novels, discerned from a reading of Sketches by Boz (where Dickens remarks, in the first sketch, How much is conveyed in those two short words - The Parish) capture much of the Dickens aesthetic. Levine suggests that it is in that particular piece that Dickens can be seen learning his craft by learning how to give the particular and ordinary resonances traditionally to be found in the universals of an earlier philosophy and literature. Levine continues, referring to Dickens impatience with limits (i.e., with small details that must be transcended to derive a larger significance) and stating: Crude as Dickenss method may be, the means of transcending limits is the exploration of the known as though it were unknown. Dickens will not merely copy the parish; he will see it with a freshness and clarity that will at once make it recognizable to the new popular audience who might take it seriously as a subject, and transform it. The particular, under the pressure of intense and original seeing, gives back the intensities normally associated with larger scale, traditional forms [e.g., the relationship of religious organization to other social formations].76 Recalling the opening chapters of Our Mutual Friend, it is evident that the close-up details of Dickenss treatment of Gaffer Hexam and his daughter, Lizzie, on the Thames, and the immediate juxtaposition of the dinner party at the Veneerings, speak to a larger scale issue, the inequalities of economic positioning in London. Dickenss rich and detailed descriptions of his characters - the shabby and the genteel (to use his words)77 - provide such colorful imagery they can distract the reader form the larger significance of his juxtapositions. At the beginning of Our Mutual Friend, the corpse fisher, Gaffer Hexam, a strong man with raged grizzled hair, and his daughter Lizzie, a dark girl of nineteen or twenty,78 engage in a tense standoff that is instructive about the coercively paternal nature of their family economy. Lizzie, who dreads the nature of their work, refuses to move near the body at the stern of the boat so Gaffer can take over the rowing. He resumes his seat and says, Its my belief that you hate the sight of the very river, to which she responds, I - I do not like it father. He then rejoins with a reminder about their livelihood: As if it wasnt your living! As if it wasnt meat and drink to you!79 Cut to Chapter 2, where the Veneerings are throwing a banquet (in which, among others, there are fish and rice pudding courses), and where the genteel guests are not among those who have to wonder where their next meal is coming from. As the banquet scene unfolds, the reader is treated to another kind of economic frame that unties a father and daughter. Mortimer Lightwood, a young solicitor and attorney is in attendance, telling a story about a man named Harmon, who had chosen a husband for his daughter, entirely to his own satisfaction and not in the least to hers, and proceeded to settle upon her, as her marriage portion I dont know how much Dust [Harmon is a dust contractor].80 Although Mortimers point is about morality - he refers to how Harmon had anathemized and turned her out on learning that she had already

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gotten secretly engaged to Another81 - what Dickens achieves by dint of the contrast in the father-daughter economies of Chapters 1 and 2 is a gloss on the alternative forces shaping the familial economies among the shabby versus the genteel. The shabby, Hexam, had struggled to survive on human remains, while the genteel, Harmon, had made a fortune as a contractor on another form of refuse, dust. And in the case of the former, the daughter works within the family, for as was typical in the poorer classes at the time, family space and work space tended to coincide and constitute the only economic option for grown or growing children. In the case of the latter, a daughter is to be married off in order that she might maintain the level of class privilege she enjoyed as a child while, at the same time, helping through a within-class marriage, to maintain the familys reputational standing, which is crucial to class maintenance. Ultimately, if one attends to the compositional strategy of the novel, Dickenss London is shown not only to contain different types of characters but also to contain different kinds of family economies, both operating within a micropolitics of patriarchal constraints. What is added, given that it is a city novel, is that the dramas attending the structurally constrained fates of the characters are also affected by the shocks of uncontrolled and unanticipated encounters that urban life affords. In Our Mutual Friend the Thames River is the one of the primary spaces of encounter. The body that Gaffer Hexam finds is thought to be that of John Harmon, who was to inherit the Harmon fortune. That (false) discovery drives some of the novels narrative threads. In the case of Frearss Dirty, the Baltic Hotel is the space of the most significant encounters. Senior Juans traffic in illegal organs creates the connections between the exploitable hotel workers and the privileged classes his trade serves. Therefore, as is the case with Dickenss novelistic version of nineteenth-century London, Frearss cinematic strategy transcends its particular characters to provide instruction about the micropolitics of twenty first-century London. In both cases, a city novel and a city film, the yield is a politics of aesthetics that, like the city itself, privileges the encounter. Yet there is a significant difference between the way politics is figured in Frearss Dirty as compared with Dickenss Our Mutual Friend. In the latter, as in all Dickenss novels, characters remain in character, and political instruction results from the way Dickens articulates them with the city as a stratified entity where cross-class relations take on a reality that is fugitive in other novelistic genres. In Frearss Dirty, a politics emerges as a result of the way his characters, Okwe, Senay, Juliet and Guo step out of their character roles to collaborate. Okwe, with the others help, drugs Senior Juan and harvests his kidney to sell instead of following the arrangement in which it is Senays kidney that is to be traded for the passports that will allow Okwe and Senay to leave their entrapment in London, where they have no legitimate presence. As I put it elsewhere: The action by Okwe and his collaborators constitutes an event of what Ranciere calls subjectification. They become political subjects by transforming identities defined in the natural order of the allocation of functions,82 because politics (as opposed to the policing by those who control policy) occurs during those events that involve a series of actions by a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience [with the result that the action creates a] reconfiguration of experience.83 Conclusion: Poiesis as Method
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About a world you dont construct some theory but your own poem. Jacques Ranciere The story is just a little song, and its the way its played thats important. Robert Altman (about his film Kansas City) Although neither Charles Dickens nor Stephen Frears is known as a political philosopher, both their versions of London go well beyond merely reproducing the citys characters and the bundles of sensations they experience. By dint of their composition of images, their texts think politically. In this conclusion, I want to provide some instruction on the way my strategy works in summoning and analyzing such artistic texts, here and in subsequent chapters, in order to illuminate the politics of urban space. At a general level, my approach accords with Nicholas Bourriauds concept of relational aesthetics within which the city is treated in terms of the states of encounter it proposes.84 However, because my treatment of the aesthetics of relationships in the city are politically and philosophically framed, I want to note the relationship between that framing and the literary and cinematic readings I offer. To do so, I am borrowing the concept of philopoesis developed in Cesare Casarinos methodological manifesto, where he writes, Philopoesis names a certain discontinuous and refractive interference between philosophy and literature.85 To elaborate on that refractive interference, Casarino, following Deleuze and Guattaris classification of the functioning of genres, sees philosophy [as an] art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts, while the arts, literature among others, involve the production of a bloc of sensations...a compound of percepts and affects.86 The interference concept belongs to Deleuze, who puts it this way, reflecting on the philosophy-cinema relationship (at the end of his second cinema book): ...philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema is not about cinema but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to....It is at the level of the interference of many practices that things happen, beings, images, concepts, all the kinds of events.87 How can we render the methodological concept of interference politically? Casarino states that in questioning each other, philosophy and literature put the whole world into question. This is why a philopoetic discourse is at once a political and ontological investigation....88 And he goes on to suggest that both Marx and Melville inquire into the political nature of being precisely because the former found it necessary to depart from the practice of philosophy and the latter from the practice of literature in order to experiment with whole new worlds of writing and thought.89 Turning to Deleuzes observations on the disjunctions between forms of knowledge, Casarino notes the way thinking becomes possible precisely because the interference between the genres opens up emergent potentialities that disrupt the status quo of the history of forms.90 Ranciere offers a similar gloss on the interface of philosophical and artistic genres. For him, a politically oriented aesthetics of knowledge requires indisciplinary thought,91 the kind of thought that breaks disciplines in order to deprivilege the distribution of (disciplinary) territories that control who is qualified to speak about what.92 The indisciplarity or poetics of knowledge that Ranciere invokes, like Casarinos philopoesis, disturbs the

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familiar divisions of knowledge. For my purposes, two implications derive from the two forms of poiesis, Casarinos philopoesis and Rancieres poetics of knowledge. The first impacts on my object of analysis, the city. Inasmuch as, like the city, the arts are bundles of intensities and sensations, to interfere, i.e., to impose politico-philosophical concepts on those intensities and sensations (for example my imposition of the concept of attention to Frearss film and Dickenss novel) is to invite thinking about urban micropolitics. The second locates my method, which is already implied in the Ranciere epigraph to this conclusion. I am not offering a theory of the city. Rather, I am offering a poetics of the city, a series of interventions that figure the city by composing encounters between artistic texts and conceptual frames - effectively art-knowledge encounters. A remark by Deleuze offers continual inspiration for that task: Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.93 My poetic encounters - the ways I figure and compose the materials in diverse genres - are attempts to illuminate aspects of the actual encounters that constitute the micropolitics of urban life worlds.

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1 The Baudelaire quotation is in W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Verso, 1997), 78. 2 C. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 6. 5 The quotation and general suggestion of the parallel between city-as-event and writing-asevent is indebted to J. Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), 143. 6 The quotation is from E. Sicher, Reading the City, Rereading Dickens: Representations, The Novel, and urban Realism (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 11. 7 S. Eisenstein, Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today, in Essays in Film Theory, trans. J. Leyda (New York: Meridian, 1957), p. 214. 8 Ibid., pp. 216-217. 9 The quotations are from G. Stewart, Framed Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 259. 10 See for example D. B. Clarke ed. The Cinematic City (London: Routledge, 1997), in M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice eds. Cinema and the City: Film and urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice eds. Screening the City (London: Verso, 2005), and B. Mennel, Cities and Cinema (London: Routledge, 2008). 11 On contemporary automobility, see N.Thrift, Driving in the City, Theory, Culture & Society 21(October, 2004), 41-59 and J. Urry, The System of Automobility, Theory,

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Culture & Society 21: (2004), 25-39. 12 This tendency, at least in the political science discipline, is exemplified in R. P. Browning, D. R. Marshall, and D. Tabb, Protest is not Enough: The Struggle of Blacks and Hispanics for Equality in Urban Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 13 Exemplary of this orientation is Robert Putnams well known analysis in his Bowling Alone to which I have rendered a critical response. See M. J. Shapiro, "Bowling Blind: Post-Liberal Civil Society and the Worlds of Neo-Tocquevillean Social Theory," Theory & Event 1:1 (1997). In contrast with Putnams requirement for civic activism is the approach of Stephen Haymes, who argues that the mere "territorial maintenance and integrity of black settlements" has been a form of "civic association." S. Haymes, Race, Culture, and the City (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 70.
14

J. Ranciere, A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Ranciere, Parallax 15 (2009), 122.

15 See K. Ziarek, The Force of Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 51. 16 See M. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 23. 17 Ibid. 18 R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 19 Ibid., p. 13. 20 See L. Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, trans. A. Colquhoun and A. Oliver (New York: New York Review, 2003). 21 Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 146.

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22 Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, 30. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 29. 25 The quotation is from A. Amin and N. Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Malden. MA: Polity, 2002), 31. They note that their ontology of the city resists the static conception of community characteristic of much of the urban literature, treats communities in process which cannot be entirely fixed in space, and operates within a moral economy that assumes such a space. 26 For Bakhtins treatment of the novel, see M. Bakhtin, Discourse and the Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259422. 27 Sciascia, The Day of the Owl, 62-63. 28 Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 12. 29 I treat the aesthetic versus the psychological subject elsewhere. See M. J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 2009), 12. 30 See J. Ranciere, Politics, Identification, and Subjectivization, October 61 (992), 15. 31 George Eliot, quoted in Sicher, Rereading the City, Rereading Dickens, 6. 32 Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 18. 33 Ibid., 31. 34 Sciascia, The day of the Owl, 95. 35 The quotations are from Philip Fishers treatment of the way the city emerges in Victorian novels: P. Fisher, City Matters: City Minds, in J. Buckley ed. The Worlds of Victorian

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Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 375. 36 The quotation is from J. Ranciere, The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics, Paper presented at the conference, Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Ranciere and the Political, London, Goldsmiths College September 16-17, 2003, 6. I refer to the framing as metapolitical in agreement with Rancieres remark that the politics of aesthetics is not true politics, it must be distinguished from the form of political subjectivization. But on the other hand, this metapolitics continuously interferes in politics and contributes to weaving the fabric of the political its words, images, attitudes, forms of sensibility, etc,: Ranciere, A Few Remarks on the Method of Jacques Ranciere, 122. 37 F. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel: 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 16. 38 The quotation is from G. Scialabia, Introduction to Sciascias The Day of the Owl, ix. 39 See S. Schneck, City and Village, in Urbanization and Values, J. Kromkowski and G. F. McLean, eds. http://www.crvp.org/book/Series01/I-5/chapter_xv.htm (8.8.2007). 40 See R. Dagger, Metropolis, memory and citizenship, in E. F. Isin ed. Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City (NY Routledge: 2000), 27. 41 Ibid., 32. 42 H. Lefebvre, The production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 49. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 39. 45 G. Macleod, M. Raco and K. Ward, Negotiating the Contemporary City: Introduction, Urban Studies 40 (2003), 657.

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46 A. Amin and N. Thrift, Cities:Reimagining the Urban (Malden. MA: Polity, 2002), 8. 47 See P. Bourdieu, Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field, in Practice Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 40. 48 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 42-44. 49 See J. Gores, 32 Cadillacs (New York: Warner Books, 1992). For an extended analysis of Goress crime novel, see M. J. Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 68-71. 50 J. Ranciere, Dis-agreement trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 36. 51 Ibid., 35. 52 J. Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. J. Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 8. 53 N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. S. Pleasance and F. Woods (Paris, les presses du reel, 2002), 18. 54 The quotation belongs to Amin and Thrift, Reimagining the Urban, 84. 55 See R. Crooks, From the Far Side of the Urban Frontier: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes and Walter Mosley, College Literature 22 (1995), 68-91. 56 Amin and Thrift, Reimagining the Urban, 86-87. 57 See H. A. Baker, Jr. Figurations for a New American Literary History, in S. Berkovitch and M. Jehlen eds. Ideology and Classic American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 160. 58 The quotation is from M. J. Shapiro, Deforming American Political Thought: Ethnicity,

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Facticity, and Genre (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 46. 59 Fisher, City Matters: City Minds, 372. 60 Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 123. 61 The quotation is from J. Ranciere, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (New York: Berg, 2006), 265. 62 See G. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pres, 1986), 58. 63 The quotation is from Peter Brookss remarks about the nature of Balzacs and Dickenss versions of novelistic realism in P. Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 3. 64 N. Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, Narrative 7: 1 (January, 1999), 38. 65 Ibid., 40. 66 The quoted remark is from a review of the film: The citys secret heartbeat, on the web at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2002/12/13/bfss13.xml. Obtained 6/30/07. 67 From an interview conducted by C. Lucia in Cineaste 28, 2003, quoted in S. Gibson, The Hotel Business is About Strangers, Border Politics and the Hospitable Spaces in Stephen Frearss Dirty Pretty Things, Third Text 20, (2006), 698. 68 The quotation is from Wolfrey, Writing London, 145. 69 The quotation is from Y-A. Bois, Introduction to Eisenstein, Montage and Architecture in S. M. Eisenstein, Montage and Architecture, trans. M. Glenny, Assemblage 10 (1989), 13. 70 See Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 40.

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71 J. Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 47. 72 The quotation is from G. Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, in K. Wolff ed. The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: The Free Press, 1950). I am quoting it from a contemporary analysis on modernitys hyperstimuli: B. Singer, Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism, in L. Charney and V. R. Schwartz eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 73, which acknowledges its debt to Simmels original formulation of the phenomenon. 73 Dickens, our Mutual Friend, 1. 74 Ibid., 8. 75 S. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19995), 181. 76 G. Levine, The Realist Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 13. 77 See C. Dickens, Sketches by Boz ed. M. Slater (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 261-64. In this section, Dickens is referring to characters who are peculiar to London, those who combine class appearances and are shabby-genteel. 78 Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1. 79 Ibid., 3. 80 Ibid., 13. 81 Ibid., 3-4. 82 The quotation is from J. Ranciere, Dis-agreement, trans J. Rose (Minneapolis:

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University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 36. 83 The quotation is from Ibid., p. 35. The passage as a whole is from Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics, 106. 84 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 16. 85 C. Casarino, Philopoesis: A Theoretico-Methodological Manifesto, boundary 2 (2002), 86. 86 Ibid., 67. The internal quotations are from G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 87 G. Deleuze, Cinema 2 trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 280. 88 Casarino, Philopoesis, 78. 89 Ibid., 79. 90 Ibid., 73. The quotation from Deleuze is from G. Deleuze, Foucault, trans. S. Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 86. 91 See J. Ranciere, Thinking Between Disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge, Parrhesia 1 (2006), 1-12. 92 See the interview with Ranciere in Art & Research 2 (2008), on the web at http://www,artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1jrinterview.html. Obtained 6/23/2009.
93

G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),139.

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