Memory and Metropolis, Pt. 1
AMNESIA CITY
The metropolis is memory. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The city lives by remembering.” This remembering of the city may take various forms: the civic memory expressed by statues, plaques and dedications. (The buildings themselves serve as a kind of memory, a solid stillness that outlives the transitory passerby; think of photographs with long exposures where anyone or anything in motion disappeared and the only things represented in the photograph were buildings.) There is also the bureaucratic memory of governments and corporations enhanced a thousandfold by sophisticated digital technologies that enumerate and codify the urban population for political, social and economic control. However at the same time in the midst of this urban memory a powerful amnesia is at work; an amnesia that raises several questions. How does the metropolis engender forms of forgetting? What forms of remembering does the city enhance and what forms does it diminish or even abolish? Just as any city-dweller, in order to survive, must learn a wide range of responses and behaviors, what types of remembering and forgetting aid the city-dweller in her adaption to the modern city?
WHICH MEMORY?
There is no need to delineate the schema of a true, authentic memory that somehow has been lost in the city to a false, inauthentic one. Memory, like sexuality, is polymorphous. Memory lives in different forms: the memoire involuntaire activated by Proust’s madeleine; the remembrance specific to festivals, holidays or rituals; the anamensia or parapraxis of psychoanalysis; the voluntary recall of names and facts. However it is conceivable that within the metropolis socially antagonistic or economically unnecessary forms of remembering are crowded out of the city dweller’s experience. This suppression of memory is not accidental but benefits the existing urban order.
INTERNAL URBANIZATION
It will help if we understand the relation between the city-dweller’s memory and the city as part of a more general notion of internal urbanization as theorized by Gottfried Korff. The city dweller goes through a series of perceptual, cognitive and behavioral changes that corresponds with the urban environment. The urbanite on various levels must adapt herself to the demands of the metropolis. To a great extent this adaptation takes place in the communicative networks of the city; the metropolitan learns and makes use of a wide range of rule-bound technologies in the course of a day, some of which she selects and some of which are selected for her and all of which position her as a nodal point in a network.
The memory of the modern city is unlike the memory of earlier cities; the bureaucratic memory of the industrial city stayed in one place. The relative immobility of tomes and paper records stored in filing cabinets allowed for information to be transported physically. With electrification came the greater mobility of telegraphs and telephones. This older mobility however creeps in slow motion when compared to the instantaneous mobility of digital memory and internet communication. A memory that can be anywhere instantly via mobile computing devices. A memory which we own but do not possess.
NECROPOLIS
According to Lewis Mumford among paleolithic nomadic tribes, the dead were the first to dwell in fixed locations sharing a common burial ground. Despite their incessant wandering nomads maintained social contact with their dead ancestors. The precursors of streets and sidewalks grew out of the paths worn away by the nomads as they returned to their dead for rituals, initiations, and guidance. The paths or trails to the burial sites were a communal remembering in the form of geographical repetition. The earliest living settlements were built around the burial sites of dead ancestors. The living settlement was founded on the holding of the dead; a sustained contact built on the intimate remembrance of the dead. A necropolis of memory resting at the core of the city. The containment of the dead as a precursor to the city, as an early proto-city, initiates the primary metaphor of the city; the city as container that contains within itself all other containers. The city as a meta-container. The more we understand the city in terms of a metaphor of containing, the closer we are to the city as necropolis. The containment of the dead evolved over time into the containment of economic surplus. The necropolis of ancestors became the necropolis of commodities. Today the core of the metropolis is consumption, the circulation of money and commodities in the endless production of surplus value: from dead ancestors to dead matter at the core of the metropolis.
However, this metaphor of the city as container overlooks a newer, more important metaphor of the city as translator. More than containing, the city regulates and transforms the various flows of urban activity. It is the movement of people, commodities and information from one nodal point to another and their transformation into new forms that distinguishes the modern city. Furthermore forces within the city attempt to control these flows – mostly for the extraction of surplus value – but also for reasons of political and corporate governance.
