The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Archaeologists love rubbish. The spoil heaps produced by human settlements
are a crucial source of information about material culture, the relationship
between human aggregates and the material world: the chicken
bones, the broken pots, and the abandoned half-made tools are made strange
by their miraculous resurrection, but also evoke the utterly familiar experience
of time wasted and things spoiled. The same goes for the archaeology
of cultural constructions such as luxury or worthlessness or the exotic; the
cultural dynamics of the lost city, in both its strangeness and its familiarity,
can be reconstructed only through the study of its cultural rubbish. Historians
of art and architecture, and even of urban form, have tended to study
those aspects of the workings of the lost city that have survived precisely because
they were made or received not as rubbish but as art. This chapter uses
one particular form of rubbish produced by the modern or modernizing city,
popular prints, to discuss some aspects of the construction and maintenance
of vital forms of urban culture, such as difference and anxiety. For more than
a century, almost all printed pictures of things have been so cheap and plentiful
that they have been consumed as disposable in the developed world.
Some of them, I have argued, have been produced and consumed specifically
as rubbish; this has been a constitutive aspect of modernity.
I concentrate here on the role of printed pictures in the developing
relationship between nation building, class formation, and popular culture,
a focus that necessitates some close discussion of iconography and the nature
of the commodities concerned. The prints are associated with the name of
José Guadalupe Posada, who was born in 1852. Posada worked as an illustrator
for periodicals, books, songsheets, and whatever else he was asked to
do; he died in 1913, the third year of Mexico’s protracted and destructive, but
largely agrarian, Revolution. 1 Posada’s response to the demands of representing
urban existence varied with his client. 2 In illustrations for upmarket periodicals,
Posada worked within an ideology of the city as a space of pleasure,
spectacle, and consumption. But Posada had other clients, including the
dominant producer of single-sheet imagery and cheap pamphlet literature,
Antonio Vanegas Arroyo. He printed and published many different sorts of
object: street-sold broadsheets, religious imagery, sheets to celebrate the days
of the dead, and small paperbound pamphlets of various kinds, from songbooks
to childrens’ stories to cookbooks. He printed newspapers, too.
Typically, modernist imagery and modernist ideology, inheriting
and developing a long Western tradition, emphasize the difference between
life in the city and in the country. 3 This mutually defining pair has been
loaded with changing moral, aesthetic, and political baggage, which has
tended to ensure that the evolving difference between the urban and the
rural has always been both clear and of fundamental cultural significance in