The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Patrick Wright
called that—is one that has the potential for general application, or is it
something more precisely specific to yourself, or to this particular location?
PW: I wouldn’t call it a method, in the way that philosophers or social theorists
would talk about “scientific” method. I was trying to work out a way of
engaging with an urban reality that was undergoing very rapid transformation,
and I was doing it as someone who, having failed to get into academic
life some years earlier, had discovered certain advantages to being free from
the usual curricular attachments. One has to remember that during those
years, the whole postwar settlement was just falling to pieces. It was being
attacked by the government, but it was also dying of its own inertia and incompetence.
So everyday appearances were shaken out of their ordinary
routines; they really did seem to be “strangely familiar,” and I wanted to capture
some of that. I also felt growing reservations about the institutionalized
route that academic cultural studies had taken in the eighties. Some theorists
just headed into stratospheric abstraction. Others seemed content
merely to rush after the changes, affirming that they had indeed taken place,
and that they were probably “popular” and “pleasurable” too. I wanted to
stay close to concrete reality, and to do so critically. I was interested in engaging
with wider political developments like the privatizations of the eighties,
but I didn’t want to leave the everyday behind. It’s in everyday life that
people do their thinking, and where ideas are brought into expression. So I
was interested in picking up everyday events that seemed to reveal bigger
patterns. That’s the sort of exposition I admire in thinkers like Walter Benjamin—of
finding causality beneath the surface of small events, partly Talmudic
and partly political.
Beyond that, I should mention a certain feeling of defeat. In the
eighties anyone who didn’t like what was going on had a problem, because
there wasn’t any unproblematic alternative to espouse. Hackney may have
been able to muster a mariachi band and a whole spectrum of community
organizations thanks to Ken Livingstone’s GLC, but beyond those gestures
we were completely trounced by what was going on, and, if we were among
the new homeowners in East London, additionally humiliated by the fact that
Thatcher kept putting the value of our properties up! One couldn’t defend
the public sector in a total way, or the local state, least of all in Hackney,
where the whole story of local government can seem little better than one
farce after another. So, rather than falling back into moral disapproval, it was
much more interesting to find some event or presence that was obviously intriguing
and alive and alert—an episode, or some fragment of news—and
follow it through. Sometimes I felt like a demented hobbyist, but I was
amazed how many of my interests at that time could be addressed through
the apparently incidental details of one small location.