The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part IV: Tactical Filters
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Iain Chambers
24.1 | Naples.
directed upward toward secular and religious authority. Space rapidly becomes
an introspective expanse: the site of psychosomatic inscriptions.
Probably the aspect that most immediately strikes a visitor, a
stranger, is that Naples is a city that exists above all in the conundrum of
noise. Added to the constant murmur that a local intellighenzia spins in literary
melancholia and critical conservatism around urban ruin, nostalgia,
and decay are sounds that rise from the street between the interminable acceleration
of scooters and angry horns: the shouts of the fishmonger; the
cries of greeting; the passing trucks and megaphoned voices offering watermelons,
children’s toys, glassware, and pirated cassettes of Neapolitan song;
the fruit seller who publicly comments on his wares and their low prices in
the third person: “Che belle pesche. Duemila lire . . . ma questo è pazzo”
(What fine peaches. Only two thousand lire . . . but this guy’s crazy); the
itinerant seller of wild berries at seven in the July morning whose high cry
fills the empty alley. These lacerations of silence attest to the physical punctuation
of space by the voice, the body. And it is the body that provides
a fundamental gestured grammar in which hands become interrogative
beaks, arms tormented signals, and faces contorted masks. A prelinguistic
economy erupts in urban space to reveal among the sounds a deep-seated
distrust of words, their promise of explanation and their custody of reason.
The hidden plan of the city lies in an architecture of introspection
that is revealed not only in crumbling edifices and grime-coated facades, but
also in the taciturn faces and skeptical sentiments of its inhabitants. Here,