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Sous Les Pavés...Les Halles

[10.1995]

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See www.souslespaves.info
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Sous les Pavés…Les Halles
(Social Narrative ?  Architectures of May, 1968)
The Impact of  Information Technology on the Culture of Cityform


Manuscript, 1994-96

1. Reading Social Space as Science Fiction
2. Sous les Pavés...La Plage, un
3. Sous les Pavés...La Plage, deux
4. Sous les Pavés...Les Halles
5. www.les_paves.fr
6. References and citations



0. Reading Social Space as Science Fiction

"Thesis is the act of putting something in a place."
                --Michel Serres, Genesis

    In 1994, Paris au XXieme Siècle, ("Paris in the Twentieth Century") a 'lost' early novel by Jules Verne was published for the first time, and soon attracted international curiosity not only because it presents Verne's most direct consideration of our contemporary circumstances, but also because of its uncharacteristically pessimistic vision of the future and the role of technology in that future. Like a long-lost postcard arriving just in time for its message to catch up with the march of history, Verne's future Paris became a marker against which to compare to the 'real' Paris of 1991 from a collective, if temporary, position of distance and reflexivity rare to the popular discourse of cities. At first, Verne scholars were skeptical that this could be the work of the man who made the equation of technological progress and social progress part of the national ideology. Specifically in terms of how communications technology has changed everyday urban life, the enthusiastic boosterism exemplified by Verne was forced, if only for a brief moment, to consider its own narrative from an irreducible 'outside': its past. His "future" Paris is alienating, cold and lost of its way. There, Parisians are themselves lost in a sea of virtualizing gadgetry which instead of freeing their labor and minds, extends the systematicity of arbitrary control. "Was Verne right?" read the New York Times headline for their story on the publication. Is the New Paris, beneath the fiberoptics, glass and steel, destroying itself through the progressive march of virtualization, under the new iconic sign of "communications technology?"
    Today plans are being laid to monumentalize in official festival the ideological power of that symbol, the Paris 2000 project. In this current instance of urban planning as science fiction (and vice versa) the spatial metaphor of the city-as-computer chip is initiated as a sort of national mascot for the transformation of the city's future in the terms of "pure information flows." In practice, the spatial energies of "communications technology as symbolic model" approaches the terrain of the moral order, a deep-structural measure of social self-representation. But how did communications technology come to represent a utopian sociality, and thereby to demand further implementation of its teleological vocabularies toward outcomes which while coded as 'inevitable' are still always cast into a receding 'future'? On one level, the 'imaginary' power of technology is a primary motor of the French social narrative. But how has this tradition defined the spatial experience of Modernity, as replayed by Paris 2000? Any technology casts the world for its user, changes how that user sees and lives in the world, especially  communications technologies which were the direct instruments of the Modern national and social narrative. More importantly though, the secular rituals of national and social politics have required and make possible the symbolic promotion of "communications technology" to the position of ideal symbol and symbol of ideality. Within the wide-ranging, if unsecurable,  context of the fragmented history of mediated space, this thesis recasts one period in the story of that promotion, of and how it has continually restaged itself across the virtualizing spaces of Paris -- a pre-history of Paris 2000, an era begun, on television and radio, in May of 1968.
    For a trajectory of thought that passes through Durkheim, Bataille, Victor Turner and others to post-structuralism, the liminal state of identity is the key to understanding the symbolic power of social ritual, and social meaning in general; for it is in these places of undecidable location, that the dynamism of social life is developed and reforged in contrast. Such moments of transformation, during which the capacity of a Structural order to contain the entirety of identity in a state of differentiated inertia is broken, also take place at the 'larger' level of entire societies, at the level of collective identity as well as individual identity. At such liminal points, deeply developed social and cultural principles are disrupted, severed from their power to order, experimented with in unprecedented and unpredictable ways, and re-formed (always partially) into 'transformed' social forces.
    One such moment was "May '68" in Paris. For over a month, the streets of Paris were filled with students, wildcat strikers and hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life who, in radically different ways and for different purposes, demanded foundational changes in French social life. Unlike the actors of many other large scale popular uprisings, 'les enragés' of 'May' demanded "the impossible," as one famous bit of street graffiti suggested. "The Impossible" being, of course, the perfectly vague banner under which to organize the disaffected. What was at stake in those few weeks was, explicitly and forthrightly, the very character of French social life and its discredited inability to satisfy the needs of individual and communitarian pleasure. Participants differed greatly in their understandings of the causes of this malaise. For some it was global capitalism, for some patriarchy, for some the “society of the spectacle.” The upheaval of popular enthusiasm for foundational changes was so decisive that, as future Prime Minister Edouard Balladur said at the time, "for those few weeks, the State, the nation, ceased to exist.... it disappeared." In other words, the practical and symbolic technologies of social order, "the State," had been let loose from their capacities to ordinate collective meaning. The 'identity' of the imagined community of France, and specifically Paris, had become liminal, though made so by traditional means of 'revolutionary' street occupation. It had been thrown up in the air. But where did it land, and how had it been re-arranged, transformed, by its liminal journey?
    The immediate structures that were made liminal in May have been exhaustively considered and bitterly debated. To decide what was thrown in the air, what were the technologies with which this throwing was able to take place, what tensions were at stake, and therefore 'what landed,’ is to decide what 'May' was. Most of the book length examinations of 'May' have concentrated on the historically and spatially proximate factors in the 'detonation' of the uprising, the blow-by-blow events as they took place, the transformation of the system of governance, and/or the changes in Leftist political theory that the 'failure' of 'May' made necessary. This project will take a different view, one which attempts to locate the 'liminal' character of the events in the broader trajectories of media, space and technology with which the French social identity came to be defined, disrupted and re-defined.
    Before 1968, Colonial and post-Colonial France came to Form in the structural relations of social vision and the technologies of media and public space that 'mutually emerged' with those discourses of vision, defining them and informed by them. The liminal moment of May marked, symbolically and materially, a fundamental change in the relations between these ordinating discourses, and in doing so, indicates a 'primal scene' for the logics of media, space and technology that are, to this day, crucial to the maintenance of change in the French 'imagined community' of 'society.' The trajectories of Colonial expansion in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries are extensions of the modes of mediation of space that made possible and were made possible by those trajectories. As the print medium made possible a community of readers that could, as a technologically mediated social group and through the standardization of linguistic differences, bring about the Modern nation-state, subsequent communications technologies made possible the incorporation of conquered lands and peoples into the management institutions of the nation. In colonial France, the development of the telegraph, military radio networks and later civilian radio networks brought the North African territories into the mediated national sphere of La Mission Civilatrice. These media, like the print medium, could bring colonial culture to areas previously 'outside' the purview of colonial administration, and in doing so, made pre-Colonial technologies of 'summarizing' social space obsolete to the new task. At this same moment, the science of Geography and its practices of writing supervisionary maps of the terrain was developed and made central to the political and cultural administration of the colonies. Now, with the standardization of cartographic technology, the scope of the Mission was translated into a visible and spatially obvious purposefulness.
    The colonial project also brought with it its discursive object of study, a regular and mechanically alterable "society." The experience of encountering areas of the world "without civilization," and the "mission" to bestow into those areas the blessings of Modernity, initiated a structural mode of reflexivity: to recreate "society" in North Africa (for example) it would be necessary to pre-model what would be built, what society "is." It was in the drive to fill these "empty" spaces that the practice of society building came to realization. As the practice matured, and its technologies of self-mapping become a complex science in its own right, the relationship between societies lived and societies planned become more complicated. The means by which societies-built were mapped, or summarized, become subsequent models for the further production of planning and building. In the French context, this dynamic brought the colonial project "back home" from the colonies and in the 19th century and transformed both the "rationality" of French society and, with the concurrent emergence of "social science," the means by which that rationality could measure itself.
    In same year that Verne's Ghost Paris was made public, Gilles Deleuze suggested in the essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" that mechanisms of social power have undergone a fundamental technological transformation. According to Deleuze, the architectures of power about which Michel Foucault wrote have been decisively augmented by ubiquitous, electronic modes of spatial discipline. In traversing the social world, the body no longer moves primarily from total institution to total institution ("this isn't school, you're in the army now!"), but through coded fields of electronically-enforced access and militarized 'security.' ("password incorrect, miss -- retry, yes/no?.") Naming that development is far easier than historicizing it, or even tracing the specificities of its movements. The contemporary France of control about which Deleuze wrote is now taken by an "CyberFever" (a true vulgarity) that, among the many changes it brings, pulls the civil, public sphere further into the infomatic domain of social organization, as the conservative State appears to reverentially dissolve into the globally dispersed networks of informational flows and their (seemingly) unaccountable mechanics of structural secrecy. Previously, in the political wake of May 1968, a succession of governmental agencies attempted to recast French society in the futurist-Humanist image of a Progressive, self-civilizing techno-utopia. The eventual results of that effort are only now coming into view for evaluation. To that end, the social history of French information technology must be understood as interior to the question of society-making, not as its participant appendage. From the old La Mission Civilatrice to the new Paris 2000, the activation of technical, mediational practices of control assumes a deep-grammatic priority. The inward turn of that national grammar after the empire's expiration (endocolonization) and the rise to preeminence of an infomatic consumption-culture is signaled by the liminal moment, "les évenments de Mai '68."  The technologies of power indicated by Deleuze include those which straddle the public and the private spheres, at both the social and individual levels. One of these, the most important to the immediate history of de Gaulle's broadcasts, is television, or more accurately the 'mode of televisuality.' As an apparatus, televisuality moves people's bodies, re-writes their purposes; confuses the domesticity of homes;  frames the meaning of public congregation, and, as considered here, motivates the "social narrative" while arranging the social, built environment of cities. The televisual performs the full duties of a Foucauldian technology, even also of a social "structure."
    Televisuality structures the social narrative of a "post-1968" era in the physical and symbolic built environment of Paris, and as that era comes to close it gives way to an infomatic order of the transspatial network  Televisuality is both the referent justification and the thematic means by which the transformation of Parisian cityform has been undertaken. As architecture maps and is mapped by dominating logics of social power, the televisual mandate reforms architecture in its own image(s). The content of the televisual is urbanicity; the city itself is the medium that has been overtaken by the successor medium of the broadcast image. This is an extensional mutation of an historical process of imaging cities and their production which has always been dependent upon the deep narrative logics of a discursive and symbolic technology of previsualization. This technology is "myth," in the Benjaminian sense. Parisian politics, thereby French politics, has been driven by narrative competition as to what sort of space the city will enform. For example, the Commune was precisely a theater of discursive barricades and historically abusive monuments, class warfare in the mode of the urban imaginary. The process of symbolic visualization is also component of the Colonial project. As said, "French Society" was to significant extent (re)invented and (re)discovered in the necessity of reproducing it in the colonies, as was the science of urban planning and its stories of spatial utopias. Accordingly, the globalization of colonial space came into account at the turn of the century at the Grand Exhibitions, where a global architecture of systematic urbanicity could be explained and recommended to the tourist/citizen as the meta-narrative of his situation in time; as precisely "The Big Picture." The task of previsualizing broad utopian reformulations of French society was taken up by architects (Le Corbusier and Hébrand most notoriously).and was undertaken as reformulations of the Parisian cityform. Until May 1968, Paris was "still Hausmann's." As de Gaulle had moved televisuality to the sacred center with the founding of what I call the "Fifth-and-a-Half Republic," that center remade the design of individual and group use of the urban architecture. The city was remade (and remade itself)  appropriate to a televisual society and its different needs. As La Mission Civilatrice mutated into new corporate 'endocolonial' forms with the fall of the Empire, the technology of the Exhibition did likewise. Today the race to refashion Parisian social space in the image of the computer network is in high gear. The driving teleology is no longer the military externalization of a national perfection (in Algiers, Saigon, etc...), now the desperate hope  is to catch up with the "future of technology" and to remake the cityform just-in-time for that meeting: when the Genitron clock in front of Beaubourg ticks away the final seconds before Paris 2000 is recycled as another as yet unnamed narrative deferral.
    It is in fact a deferral under examination and not an enclosure. To the extent possible, the architectural production of televisuality should not be understood through Althusserian heuristics  (that is, as a reconstructed State-Structuralism, however Leftist), but in regard of the Foucauldian Genealogy; as an 'archaeology' of May 1968, through which the 'genealogies' of technology, space, media and social narrative are written as ordinant forms, and later as the 'contents' of iconic measure. Moreover, any genealogy is finally enformed through spatial and temporal ellipses. It is impossible, for example, to display an entirely inclusive re-presentation of the societal chain of inheritance from the analogous levels from DNA to morphology, from subindividual and to supranational phenomena. Across a grounded infinity of interpretive plateaus, history (like space) can only be placed in juxtaposition and correspondence, not in comprehensive cartography. Accordingly, for purposes of affective understanding, not definitiveness, and for hope of scanning mutual emergences not mapping a monumental cause and effect, this thesis alternates its attentions between micro and macrological moments in the trajectories of mediated space, from  phenomenological to Geopolitical ecologies and back again. Attention is on the structural, textual exemplar, which is not necessarily the officially nodal event. Under that caution, rhetorical devices that play a passing resemblance to periodization, functionalism or boosterism should be read with appropriate ironies intact.
    That having been established, the formal structure of this thesis is developed in three parts. First, the critical literature on May 1968 is examined for its absence of any satisfactory treatment of the role of communications technology in its material and symbolic functionings. Toward correcting that misrecognition, the historical significance of de Gaulle's televisual address is considered in some detail. The context of that significance is recalled through exemplary moments in the French history of technological space, specifically as the French social narrative came to imitate its own deferred self-representations, and was formed in contestation with and by oppositional spatial practices, and also through the rise to prominence of televisuality as a social technology in the years immediately prior to 1968. Second, the disciplinary reasoning for a Sociological investigation of the architectural address is established. A detailed interpretation of several post-1968 architectural changes is presented as empirical 'evidence' of the outcome of 1968 as a decisive transition in the social narrative whereby the symbol of 'communications technology' became the preferred deep-model for social space. Third, the production of endocolonial social forms are located in the technological/cultural transformation of post-colonial France. Traversing these three sections is a theoretical and methodological synthesis (or hybridization) of questions traditionally posed to social space, mass media, nationalism, urban architecture, symbolic politics, post-colonialism, social theory, and the history of consumer society.
    
1. Reading Social Space as Science Fiction
2. Sous les Pavés...La Plage
3. Sous les Pavés...Les Halles
4. www.les_paves.fr
5. References and citations

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Tags: architecture, physical media, theory

Published: 10.24.2006

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