Health and Beauty in the Body Politic: Subjectivity and Urban Space

Polity

Volumn 33, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-23

  Farrar, Margaret E ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0034552434     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3235458     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. I am focusing on Washington, D.C. as the locus for exploring these issues of power and subjectivity in urban space for several reasons. Some might argue that Washington's atypical status among American cities makes it unrepresentative and therefore unsuitable for drawing general conclusions about space and power. However, I would argue that it is precisely its unique status as a capital city that makes Washington exemplary. First, D.C. represents the United States' first real attempt at comprehensive city planning. Twentieth century American cities from Cleveland to Denver took the McMillan Plan as at least a partial blueprint for their attempts at planning. Second, from a practical standpoint, since its management is a matter of federal concern, debates about D.C. occur in the most public of forums, the United States Congress, making the relevant historical material more easily accessible than in many cities. Finally, in Washington, D.C. - a city that was designed to represent the social body in its entirety, and planned to contain our most important democratic spaces - concerns about space, power, and identity are likely to be articulated explicitly in its city planning and public policy discourse.
2. Thomas Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 41.
3. One issue raised by philosophers and geographers in their discussions of the subject is the difference between "space" and "place," the relative value of each of these terms, and the problems with assigning definitions to both. See, for example, Edward Casey's The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) or Doreen Massey's Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994). For the purposes of this project, I will use "space" and "place" interchangeably to mean the material environments that human beings have organized for the purposes of work, family, leisure, commerce, and politics. Like Massey and Casey, though, I do not wish to oppose space to either "time" or "place," but rather show how (historically specific and plural) spaces reflect and create the conditions of possibility for the production of (historically specific and plural) subjects.
4. One issue raised by philosophers and geographers in their discussions of the subject is the difference between "space" and "place," the relative value of each of these terms, and the problems with assigning definitions to both. See, for example, Edward Casey's The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) or Doreen Massey's Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994). For the purposes of this project, I will use "space" and "place" interchangeably to mean the material environments that human beings have organized for the purposes of work, family, leisure, commerce, and politics. Like Massey and Casey, though, I do not wish to oppose space to either "time" or "place," but rather show how (historically specific and plural) spaces reflect and create the conditions of possibility for the production of (historically specific and plural) subjects.
5. Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, "Grounding Metaphors: Towards a Spatialized Politics," in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (New York: Routledge, 1993).
6. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 3.
7. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 5.
8. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 6.
9. See, for example, the highly charged debate concerning Jeffrey Isaac's indictment of political theory, "The Strange Silence of Political Theory, " in Political Theory 23 (Nov. 1995): 636-88. See also the more recent debates on "Left Conservatism" in Theory & Event (issues 2.2 and 2.3), and the exchange prompted by Martha Nussbaum's criticism of Judith Butler's work in The New Republic (February 22, 1999 and March 22, 1999).
10. See, for example, the highly charged debate concerning Jeffrey Isaac's indictment of political theory, "The Strange Silence of Political Theory, " in Political Theory 23 (Nov. 1995): 636-88. See also the more recent debates on "Left Conservatism" in Theory & Event (issues 2.2 and 2.3), and the exchange prompted by Martha Nussbaum's criticism of Judith Butler's work in The New Republic (February 22, 1999 and March 22, 1999).
11. See, for example, the highly charged debate concerning Jeffrey Isaac's indictment of political theory, "The Strange Silence of Political Theory, " in Political Theory 23 (Nov. 1995): 636-88. See also the more recent debates on "Left Conservatism" in Theory & Event (issues 2.2 and 2.3), and the exchange prompted by Martha Nussbaum's criticism of Judith Butler's work in The New Republic (February 22, 1999 and March 22, 1999).
12. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interrupts: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 152.
13. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 416-17.
14. Thomas Dumm's essay "Rodney King, or The New Enclosures" in united states (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) is an excellent demonstration of the benefits that can be reaped from undertaking a place-specific account of power and difference. Dumm shows how scientific racism, contemporary monitoring techniques, and a strategy of normalization operate to create "open-air carcerals" for young black men in Los Angeles. He argues that the conditions that produced the Los Angeles riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict contain the possibility of a "positive alternative": a politics of spatial practice, which contests the "enclosures, exclusions, and internments" that characterize our cities. Dumm asks a question which in many ways describes the motivation for my own project: "Can we who have run west so long to secure our united states, to maintain our innocence, can we, for so long lacking a need to think about space, begin to think in spatial terms? Can we begin to act upon those thoughts with our bodies?" (113).
15. Michel Foucault, "Space, Knowledge, and Power" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 247.
16. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) and Peter Bachrach and Morion S. Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
17. Robert Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) and Peter Bachrach and Morion S. Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
18. The World's Columbian Exhibition, as the 1893 fair in Chicago was called, celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World. The centerpiece of the fair was the White City, constructed as a temporary "model city" on the shores of Lake Michigan. Popularly named for both its incandescent appearance and for the optimism for urban renewal it conveyed, the White City is considered to be a turning point in American architecture. Made of steel frames, plaster, and spray paint, the White City featured uniform, neo-classical buildings, each of which housed a specific exhibit or served a particular purpose (e.g., the Transportation Building, the Administration Building, the Women's Building.) Moreover, every component of the city contributed to its total effect: street signs and street widths, plazas and walkways, lamp-posts and bridges, the shapes of the trees used in landscaping and the stones used in building -all of these were legitimately subsumed under the purview of civic art and city beautification. Rather than "mere units of an aggregation," the White City was "an organism," where each part of the city was functionally and spatially distinct from other parts, while each contributed to the life and beauty of the larger whole (John Coleman Adams, "What A Great City Might Be - A Lesson from the White City." The New England Magazine 14, 1896, 4). Modernist critics would say it set American architecture back fifty years, while supporters of the City Beautiful movement that emerged out of the architecture of the fair would hail its new commitment to municipal art and civic spirit. The men involved in both the White City and later the design of Washington, D.C. were Daniel Burnham (the Superintendent of Construction of the Exhibition); Charles McKim (the neoclassical architect who designed the Exhibition's Art Building), and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (the sculptor responsible for overseeing the White City's patriotic municipal art). Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., whose prominent father had been important in the White City plans, was also included on the Senate Park Commission as its landscape architect.
19. Howard Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 90.
20. Adams, "What a Great City Might Be - A Lesson from the White City," 4-5.
21. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 325.
22. Adams. "What a Great City Might Be," 6.
23. Charles Moore, "The Improvement of Washington City, Second Paper," The Century 63 (1902), 751.
24. Charles Moore, The Life and Times of Charles McKim (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1929), 116.
25. Quoted in Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 90.
26. John Reps, Monumental Washington: The Planning and Development of the Capital Center (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 53.
27. Edith Elmer Wood, "Four Washington Alleys," Survey 31 (1913): 43.
28. Charles Mulford Robinson, Modern Civic Art or the City Made Beautiful (New York: Arno Press, 1970 [1903]), 12.
29. George Kriehn, "The City Beautiful," Municipal Affairs 3 (1899): 599, 600.
30. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 220.
31. For example, one of the nineteen frieze panels in the Capitol Building depicts "The Death of Tecumseh" as part of the general narrative of progress in "our" American history.
32. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," diacritics (1986): 27.
33. This is not to say that monumental space is incapable of reflecting ambiguity. Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial is frequently cited as an example of monumental space that eloquently communicates ambivalence and ambiguity rather than certainty and finality. Moreover, the open space of the Washington Mall -occupied simultaneously by (for example) the Million Moms March and the Second Amendment Sisters -is a space that certainly resists a singular interpretation.
34. Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity (New York: Routledge, 1996), 212-13.
35. Another striking example of this in the space of the Washington Mall is the Jefferson Memorial. By altering or misleadingly juxtaposing diverse quotations from Jefferson's writings, James Loewen argues, the Memorial represents Jefferson as a proto-abolitionist who rallied for racial equality - instead of a slave-owner whose actions towards African-Americans often contradicted his otherwise democratic impulses. The Jefferson Memorial thus undoes the complexity of an important American problem - racial inequality in an ostensibly democratic system-and replaces it with a convenient and simplistic narrative of national progress. See James Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), especially 327-32.
36. "Civic Improvement a Phase of Patriotism," The Century 63 (1902): 793.
37. See, for example, James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty; Constance Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800- 1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); and Frederick Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution, 1977).
38. See, for example, James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty; Constance Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800- 1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); and Frederick Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution, 1977).
39. See, for example, James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty; Constance Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); and Frederick Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution, 1977).
40. See, for example, James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty; Constance Green, Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800- 1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962); and Frederick Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation (Washington, DC: The Smithsonian Institution, 1977).
41. In Washington, the first studies of the alleys were conducted by the Board of Health of the District of Columbia in the 1870s. After the Board was replaced by a less powerful Health Officer in 1878, other reports on health and housing were generated by the Civic Center and the Women's Anthropological Society (1894), the Committee on Housing (1897), and the President's Homes Commission (1908).
42. Quoted in George Sternberg, Report of Committee on Building Model Homes, (Washington, DC: The President's Homes Commission, 1908), 12.
43. Sternberg, Building Model Homes, 10.
44. U.S. House of Representatives, Certain Alleys in the District of Columbia (63 Cong. 2 session, 1914), 18.
45. U.S. Senate, Inhabited Alleys in the District of Columbia (May 7, 1914), 18.
46. Inhabited Alleys, 24.
47. U.S. House of Representatives, Certain Alleys, 17.
48. Certain Alleys, 5-6 (emphasis added).
49. Certain Alleys, 8.
50. Inhabited Alleys, 6.
51. "To Wipe Washington Alleys Off the Map," Charities 13 (1905): 960.
52. Charles Weller, Neglected Neighbors: Stories of Life in the Alleys, Tenements, and Shanties of the National Capital (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1909).
53. Inhabited Alleys, 22.
54. Inhabited Alleys, 22, 19.
55. Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 18.
56. Quoted in Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 45.
57. Mary Poovey, "The Production of Abstract Space," in Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality, ed., Susan Hardy Aiken et al. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), 72.
58. Certain Alleys, 22.
59. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Random House, 1990), 139.
60. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 205.
61. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 124-30.
62. Inhabited Alleys, 24. See also Wood, "Four Washington Alleys," 44-46.
63. Inhabited Alleys, 24. See also Wood, "Four Washington Alleys," 44-46.
64. Certain Alleys, 22.
65. Quoted in Sternberg, Building Model Homes, 13.
66. Inhabited Alleys, 12.
67. Sternberg, Building Model Homes, 14.
68. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 131.
69. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3.
70. Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 2.
71. Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 72, emphasis in original.
72. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 115.
73. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 4.
74. Certain Alleys, 13, emphasis added.
75. Poovey, "The Production of Abstract Space, 75.
76. Inhabited Alleys, 11.
77. Certain Alleys, 26.
78. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 193.
79. Daniel Burnham, "White City and Capital City," Century 63 (1902): 620.