Citi.

The collective struggle for working class emancipation has never been separate from a new experience of individual existence and capacities, wrested from the constraint of old bonds of community. 

- Jacques Ranciere

The Emancipated Spectator

It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language.

- M.M. Bakhtin

The Dialogic Imagination

I must tell you of this . . . generalities will abound. I come from a savage place, and we don’t have much time.

- T.S. Eliot

in a letter to Ezra Pound

Cities are hard. You do not realize it till you are away from your own. Once you find what works for you, once you “know” it, “IT” changes. This “IT” works on two levels (there are more, but for the purposes of this small book, lets keep to the two). People change, and the landscape itself changes. Perhaps both react to changes in the other, change inspite of each other, change to better each other. But since change is not an either/or proposition we find ourselves beyond this point. 

We exist in opposition, our very creative essence (which I will define as an essential trait of humans) is in direct opposition to landscape. What is interesting about this dynamic when we discuss the Now - is how we have visited a life threatening devastation with our essential creative (opposition). We attempt to be revisionist in our response to it. As if we did not as a populace wish, or at the very least, benefit from the advancement.

The word advancement is problematic when used in this way for it sets our diametrically (thank you Ritesh) superior to the landscape - perhaps this is the fork in the road for the natural surface has been altered by our building (advancement) on it. It goes without saying that we have been altered by what we’ve built. 

Working/citi.

Lets extend the metaphor:

Perhaps at this moment we are trapped by what we’ve built, so the altered landscape (cities) are actually prisons, a punishment for our creativity. For want of convenience is a direct effect of our ingenuity. Humans seem to always look for ways to get what we need easier. So someone decides or perhaps more precisely the better “Fisherman” fishes for all, and the better “Planter” plants for all etc. They each agree on what each is worth and trade accordingly so and so on. Years later, maybe even 100 years, or 1000 years someone consolidates “Fishing” (all the fisherman under one grouping), these fisherman brings the catch to the “ONE”. The “ONE” makes the group trade gives each “Fisherman” their portion based on how much they bring in.

So and so on. 

(for the purposes of poetics we have rendered quotations to depict a meta-textual meaning)

As we build and our skill sets begins to individualize we find ourselves out of touch with the steps between us getting our needs conveniently and the labor it takes to get these needs to met. The more convenient, the more it begins to “cost”, the “ONE” becomes an industry and this industry begins to see great amounts to trade, and begins to charge more to make the deals for the “Fisherman”, industry then passes the growing cost to the convenient seeking individual who decides to find another “ONE”/industry who might offer the fish, and plants for less. Convenience. 

So and so on.

Taking us to the Now.

We are so closed off to anything, or skill other than our “chosen” ones that over time, as systems automate, as our need for convenience grows we have created invisible labor. 

The Normal

Our appearance is tied to our ability to earn a living. Aside from the well documented role our ethnicity/race/gender play in appearance, it is attractiveness that continues to be a controlling tool of a patriarchal, and colonial, but aging civilization. Since we are living in a digitized industrial age attractive[ness] has continued to equate “normal”. Our society/West controls what is considered normal (this control was inherited from a distinct colonial presence). We/West have become very good at the ways in which the “normal” is inferred. 

(It is important to not divorce ourselves from the prevailing status quo, for the purposes of implying that we are part of our own oppression for whatever reason/ or cause agent- I will refer to the “West” as we, or our “society)

The primary method for this control is increasingly visual for our society is increasingly visually defined, and simply because over time we have become savvy enough to understand that the totalitarian decree does not control nearly as well. From our very first breath the conditioning begins.

Lean

Light

Tall

Blue/Pale eyes

Strong chin

Over time these attributes have come to define what our society/West views as “normal” and as an aside what is “good”.

Heterosexual

Monogamous

White

English speaking

Patriot

Christian

The picture of the young, slender blonde- her face pointed just so toward the camera, her eyes blank, but twinkling like a child. The fair maiden of a storybook. She is our patriarchal inheritance (even though she is subjected to this very same patriarchal oppression). She is the model of beauty- considered non- threatening. Docile. She is given to us from our the moment our memory is no longer kept by our mothers. It is not that she is not beautiful. She is, but we all do not look like her, she cannot be the standard/ideal in a Just world.

It is at this moment that our sense of self is threatened. Controls are set in motion, we begin to feel a difference. As we grow this difference begins to play out. Clusters/social[ize] form- the slim children with fair (or close) features are grouped together. It is perhaps more sinister, and at the same time purely innocent, but it occurs, and we’ve all been subjected to it, in whatever form this is “IT” may take. And yes, there are instances of difference, but the dictum holds true -

Attractive is ____________________________

The less you possess these characteristics, the less you may have. 

[Generalities abound, and I am distinctly aware of them.]

Just how long has this mode of control existed, how does it connect to cities? How embedded has it become? When did we get to the point where we could no longer trace its inception?

Let us posit that it may have taken 2000 recorded years to get to this buildup of convenience, this control of the normal, and over this time we have learned methods of self protection, unconscious cloaks of rebellion. Perhaps these “cloaks” have also begun to be built in, predictable responses of our convenience? Our learned inclination is toward the individual, and this individuality is loved and loathed. We covet difference, and we abhor it, because it is outside of our knowledge base. Our human inclination is to be noticed, to appear different. So this difference is expressed in our uniforms (if I may) and points toward an individual identity (ies). 

We are now living at a time where these uniforms can be co-opted, and sold back to us as symbols of identities we already have. The culture of selling cannot be traced. Of course we know when the industrial age hit, and of course we know when humankind began to discern value and commodity. We exist at a time where there has been centuries of invisible labor, years revving up to the commodification of identity. Selling us the uniform of the “normal”. The NOW has become a culture of systems, and by proxy a system of symbols that allows for a lightning fast dissemination of information. A digital consequence. This “speed” is beyond our ability to process it fast enough. The symbols begin to have no discernable substance, no message. This causes us to feel unsure of which symbol is which individual, is which identity, which uniform. So we consume symbols like vocabulary, stacking words just in case. What was once earned rebellion is now commodified product.

Of course we still intuit this, and rhetorically push against it. Some of us manage to keep it out most of “IT”, but the system of commodified symbols invades history. Since we can no longer trace its origin, we hack at it with revisions, and those revisions become the myths we except as truth. Our learned consciousness. Are we to assume that there is nothing one can do? Are we to take these “systems” of control as another inevitability that must be navigated for convenience sake?

Take it a thousand steps further -

the systems of the “normal” convenience continue to create a culture of wanting. A culture that is ripe for crime, corruption, and alienation since the city/landscape has been built passed its functional capacity to be inherently just. Since it is populated in hierarchies, and because of a divisive culture of consumption/convenience the “poor”, those without the means to ignore the daily pressures of living are still bombarded with the “normal”, and its tools of visual control the city becomes a utopia of “daydreams”. It turns the “poor” into the bottom an hierarchy of humanized consumer prey.

This jacket will make me ____________.

This phone is all i need to __________________.

and, 

Why can’t I have __________________.

They have __________________.

The desperation of working, and only earning enough (perhaps) wage to barely survive, or worse yet never knowing work, and a wage to survive - leaves one in a state of constant want. The constant want leads to a “needing” desperately, an escape. This “escape” is as real, and painful as a bullet wound. For some, the sure method of escape is drugs. Over time the drug laws are built, and transform into a system of control- a protection tool of “normal”, a way for the “ONE” to keep “FISHING/PLANTING” consolidated, a way to turn more of a profit. The tool is prison. Where in the Now you may become free labor as more and more cities, municipalities, and governments turn to privatization as a means to bring down the cost of maintaining the convenience of an overbuilt landscape. Since it has been built beyond its capacity to function. There are two main areas where the industries of privatization are easy to implement - schools, and prisons. The prison population is hired at a near slave wage to do jobs that use to provide a living wage. We no longer can see the invisible labor all around us until our individualized skill, the one we have “chosen” becomes a part of that invisibility. The savings that comes from this imprisoned workforce allows for even more consumption/convenience. It removes a potenial earner from a home/family dynamic, and through the process described in the page before feed the cycle, a cycle so vast, and ancient that we can no longer trace its origin. 

Cities have grown past our ability to sustain a populace with its landscape. They have become a tool in the circle of convenience even as they were/are monuments to our ingenuity, testaments to our ability to command landscape for our own convenience. They have become prisons, the citadels of our “Normal”.

This review is part of our Theory and Society Series. The Theory and Society Series is meant to bridge the gap between academic critical theory’s mode of social analysis and everyday social criticism, creating a totally new discourse in the process.