The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Jane Rendell
ing to personal, social, and cultural desires, and to relations of power, of
class, race, and nationality as well as sex, gender, and sexuality. The spatial
patterns composed between them, both materially and metaphorically, are
choreographies of connection and separation, screening and displaying,
moving and containing. These are relations of exchange, consumption, display,
and desire in which women move, or are moved, between men: as objects
of exchange and signs of exchange, as commodities, and as values.
Reading “Women on the Market” made a difference to the way in which I
conceived of the gendering of architectural space in early-nineteenthcentury
London.
And all my theories skillfully and gracefully took up position in my
own starry night. There was an order. They obeyed my wishes so
well that even though they came from me, they surprised and
taught me, and even though they were no more than hypothesis
and illusion, they always took me to a safe harbor as easily as any
real boat. In the end, going from illusion to illusion, one also comes
to understand the world. 18
I had discovered Irigaray through passion, through eros; but now,
out of the labyrinth of my personal desire, theory emerged. Theory told back
to me what I already knew, but in a different language—one of objectivity
not subjectivity, one that I considered could reasonably influence the way I
knew and understood events in the past, the way I did history. Before I had
looked at any primary documents, I knew why and how space was gendered
in early-nineteenth-century London. In theory. My desire to know was mediated
through logos. I pursued the ramble in abstraction. 19 But theorizing
the personal is one thing, historical textual analysis is another; the two are
in constant negotiation. Each document I chose to examine offered me a different
form of knowledge, held influence over what I could know.
RAMBLING: THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE
The verb to ramble describes incoherent movement, “to wander in discourse
(spoken or written): to write or talk incoherently or without natural sequence
of ideas” Rambling is “a walk without any definite route,” 20 an
unrestrained, random, and distracted mode of movement. In the early
nineteenth century, rambling described the exploration of urban space; only
later is the word used to refer to a planned rural outing. Despite its random
form, rambling is an activity with a focus, physical and conceptual: the pursuit
of pleasure, specifically sexual pleasure—“to go about in search of sex.” 21