The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

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Borden, Rendell, Kerr, and Pivaro
of tastes and smells, of left-right and front-back orientations, of hearing
and touch. It resists the tendency of abstract space and its attendant domination
of the visual to replace sex with the representation of sex, to pulverize
the body into images, to erase history, to reduce volume to surface,
and to flatten and fragment the experience of space. 27
It is also a body that is ideational and mental. Although there is
an undercurrent of psychoanalytic thought in Lefebvre’s work, 28 it is feminists—specifically
Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—
who have most prominently used psychoanalytic as well as semiotic
models to discuss the sexual construction of the subject. They have critiqued
the phallocentric constructions of the subject developed by Sigmund
Freud and Jacques Lacan, which prioritize the male subject and
the visual, insisting instead that the female subject is constructed from a
position of difference, based metaphorically on the morphology of the female
body. 29 Here the female subject position is defined not by the visual
but by a spatiality that relates differently to concepts of surface, depth,
and fluidity. Critiquing the dominance of the visual allows us to understand
the city and the female as more than objects of the male gaze, 30
opening up possibilities both of self-representation for women and of new
ways to comprehend the experiential qualities of the city.
Once the human subject and its body have been introduced, we
see immediately that this is at once a physical and conceptual entity, being
and becoming, acting and thinking. It is to ways of urban knowing—
the various filters and tactics—that we now turn.
FILTERS TO TACTICS
Critical work is made to fare on interstitial ground. Every realization of
such work is a renewal and a different contextualization of its cutting
edge. One cannot come back to it as to an object; for it always bursts
forth on frontiers. ... Instead, critical strategies must be developed
within a range of diversely occupied territories where the temptation to
grant any single territory transcendent status is continually resisted.
—Trinh T. Minh-Ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation,
Gender, and Cultural Politics
Filters and tactics refer to the ways in which we negotiate the distance
between city and self. In the Strangely Familiar program we initially
thematized various relations to architecture and the city in terms of appropriation,
domination, resistance, memory, experience, and identity,