Theorizing

Ioan Davies

The spectres drift across the square in rows. How empire permeates! And we sit down in Nathan Phillips square, among the sun, as if our lives were real. Lacunae. Parking lots. Regenerations. Newsstand euphorics and Revell’s1 sign, that not one countryman has learned, that men and women live that they make that life worth dying. Living. Hey, the dead ones! Gentlemen, generations of acquiescent spectres gawk at the chrome on American cars on Queen St, gawk and slump and retreat. And over the square where I sit, congregating above the Archer they crowd in a dense baffled throng and the sun does not shine through (Lee 1972: 36)

Thus wrote the Toronto poet Dennis Lee in the early 1970s, contemplating the new Toronto City Hall and the installation of Henry Moore’s statue The Archer, which had caused a major civic upheaval when it was unveiled.2 It marked the moment when the city began to think seriously about its space, as the introduction of new forms of architecture took over from the old: the futuristic City Hall itself (commanding a space beside the red sandstone of the old gothic City Hall), Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto-Dominion Bank on Wellington street (a mass black-and-glass block replacing older, inter-war stone and brick offices), and the freeing of the old harbour and the railway lands beside Lake for commercial and public development. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the debates over the physical form of the future city centred on which older parts should be preserved, and for what use; where and for whom the new developments should take place; and what would be the pattern of transportation (expressways? public transport?). One of the great ravines (the Don Valley) had already been savaged by running an expressway down it, and another expressway blocked the city off from the lake: would more follow? Rapid growth in population (fueled mainly by immigration) and commerce was pushing the city further to the North and to the East and West: issues of governance, social class, ethnicity, gender, land use, architecture, technology and civility were major features of all discussions about the emerging character of the growing city of Toronto. 34 Ioan Davies

1. Viljo Revell was the Central features of these debates involved the exploration of notions of Finnish architect who culture, communication and the ‘character’ of the city, issues which have designed New City Hall. It was built it the become common to all cities in process of transformation, but perhaps more early1960s. Revell died strikingly pertinent in the case of Toronto because of the national discus- almost as soon as the sions within Canada of bilingualism and multiculturalism, of federalism and building was completed. provincialism, that took on a major dimension precisely during the same 2. Canadian composer, period. During the 1960s and 1970s, Montreal played host both to Expo and musician and theorist to the Olympic Games, and saw the ‘apprehended revolution’ of the Front de Glenn Gould Liberation Quebec in 1970, as well as the first separatist Parti Quebecois (Toronto: 410-11) wrote of this government. That Montreal might appear to be the focus for the image of controversy: Toronto, Canada in the world was surely not lost on the politicians, businessmen and at that time, was not urban planners who debated the future shape of Toronto, the largest non- exactly a hospitable French-speaking city in Canada.3 place for contempo- rary art of any sort, and the decision to None of this took place in a vacuum. Like most cities, Toronto was a set situate a large of palimpsests of cultures which settled on top of each other, from the sculpture of Henry earliest Indian settlements, the first French colonizers through to the Scottish Moore in front of the New City Hall was the and English who established the contours of the present city in the late straw that broke the nineteenth century. In parts of the old city the visual traces of earlier inhabit- political camel’s back. ants remained, as Rosemary Donegan and Rick Salutin (1985) showed in In fact, it was largely their book on Spadina Avenue, that road by which immigrants entered the responsible for the electoral defeat of the city from the ships or the trains, and established shops, factories, churches, mayor who supported synagogues, restaurants, theatres. What was noticeably the Jewish section of its purchase. His chief the inter-war years, with the garment trade, a street market, various syna- opponent proclaimed gogues and temples, is now Chinatown, though the Chinese community that ‘Torontonians do not want abstract art centre still has Hebrew inscriptions on its walls honouring the Jewish dead; shoved down their and Grossman’s pub, the centre of jazz and poetry readings decades ago still throats,’ and of holds its own between Vietnamese and Cantonese restaurants. course, won the subsequent election handily. Perhaps one But of course, where much of the contemporary city now stands, there indication of the were no such buildings; rather open fields and small hamlets, and wild remarkable change in ravines. And thus the sense of what to build, what to recover or preserve, Toronto’s outlook and what to destroy is built up of a set of conflicting notions of what is during the last decade is that we now possess significant and alive. I would like to argue that to understand the evolving the largest collection pattern of the city it is important to trace the ideas of culture and communi- of sculptures by Henry cation that have been generated both by an intellectual debate around it and Moore in the Western by the practices of the various people who inhabit it. To do that, I want to Hemisphere; oddly enough, in view of the preserve the notion of space (physically, kinetically, culturally) and of earlier fuss, the communication as an important part of our sense of community, and thus to collection was talk about the habitable city — both in the imagination and the everyday. initiated by a gift from This means for me, taking the imagined city as significant to our understand- the sculptor himself. ing as the ‘real’ city, and exploring the connection between them. Thus the

Anti-Methods Theorizing Toronto 35

Spectres of Lee’s poem must necessarily contend with the physical spectacle 3. ‘Non-French’ — commodified or otherwise. because by the early 1970s, the influx of immigrants - from The notion of theorizing that I wish to employ in understanding Toronto Italy, Central and — and indeed any city — does not involve providing a total vision of the Eastern Europe, India, city as a definable unit, nor indeed a set of hypotheses to be tested against China - had created a new city of people ‘facts,’ but rather as a series of probing interpretations into aspects of city many of whose first life and culture which provide clues to making sense of the connections language was not which (possibly) add up to an understanding of the city’s biography. In this I English. think I am one with Italo Calvino who, in Invisible Cities (1974), provides a ‘reading’ of Venice which is based on partial views of the city, but which ultimately provide clues for reading more than Venice. And yet, by discon- necting his various versions of Venice from each other, Calvino leaves us asking ‘So what is your Venice? Why is it important?’ I hope to lay the grounds for doing that in Toronto. This, it will be noted, is rather different from Walter Benjamin’s initial approach in his Paris - Capital of the Nine- teenth Century, which was written precisely to show why Paris was the Modern city par-excellence. I make no such claims for Toronto, and it would be futile to try to do so. More modestly, I hope, is to argue how thinking about various theorists helps us to understand Toronto and in understanding that process, how we learn more about ourselves. But like Benjamin, it seemed important to refer to those who had written in and around Toronto — whose worlds were galvanized by the city, even if they had wider con- cerns and influences — and weave their thinking into the great phenomenol- ogy, epistemology and semiology of being in the city.

In what follows, I discuss two aspects of writing from and about Toronto. Although I might also have discussed ways in which art has been theorized by, say, The Group of Seven, or the manner in which thinkers George Grant and Northrop Frye conceived of the idea of Canada through the conflicts between nature, technology and empire, or how political theorist C. B. Macpherson and sociologist Dorothy Smith thought about Toronto through the idea of a bourgeois Civic Culture, I have opted on these two aspects by way of an introduction to the difficulties of imagining Toronto. The first aspect I will explore is the theorization of technology, communication and performance in Toronto through the writings of , an Economic Geographer, noted Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, and writer, composer and musician Glenn Gould. My second focus will be on the ways that Toronto has been imagined by poet bp nichol and other writers writing from and about Toronto who view the city as it is lived in and lived through.

Space and Culture 6 36 Ioan Davies

4. The city within The Wired City: Technology, Communication and Performance which Innis wrote is now a monument to As someone who has subsequently spent much time trying to devise and shape commerce, banking programmes for TV I am grateful for the way in which McLuhan alerted me to the odd and the satellite of a properties of the medium itself. And yet I can rehabilitate no actual truth from what I much more compre- read. Perhaps McLuhan has accomplished the greatest paradox of all, creating the hensive empire than possibility of truth by shocking us all with a gigantic system of lies (Miller 1971: 132). he ever imagined. But 4 the business city Harold Innis taught Economic Geography at the (‘Bay Street’) is not from the 1930s to the 1950s with a conception of history and communica- geared to creating tion that included trade-routes, the alphabet, language, technology, space, jobs or creating a vibrant economy for time, oral traditions. In this exercise he was subsequently joined by the this city, or even this literary critic Marshall McLuhan, who produced a number of applications country, but to of Innis’ work from print to television. The impact of this thinking on running an interna- Cultural Studies has gone in two directions. The legacy of Innis (particu- tional lottery. As John Ralston Saul larly in two collections of essays, The Bias of Communication and Empire tries to demonstrate and Communication) has tended to stress the extent to which communi- in Voltaire’s Bastards: cation is part of Imperial expansion and the consequential technological ‘Finance ministers, ruptures, while the legacy of McLuhan (notably Understanding Media) who are meant to devote their time and tends to de-politicize the issues and emphasize the radical communicative energy to creating a effects of television (and subsequently, of computers). Both emphasize solid financial base communication as involving definitions of community. With Innis, for national adminis- technology (and hence communication) flows from a linear reading of a tration and growth, are instead forced to struggle to survive as well as imperial domination; with McLuhan it is spend a good part of part of a circular rotation of the audial, visual, tactile components of their lives culture. outthinking the currency speculators. Innis presents us with a marvelous sense of culture as grubbing It is difficult for them to keep a step ahead around for a living in the flow of an ongoing struggle between the search because the specula- for those natural commodities that would keep us going as every-day tors’ abstract sustenance, the ever-rolling commandments of empire that direct our approach has nothing movements, our language, our technologies and our sense of being part of to do with capitalism, growth or invest- a universal command of those discourses that matter for everyday ment. In fact it sensibility. It is a sense of culture which sees the layers of archaeological doesn’t have much to investigation as always being significant for the present. The tradition of do with any eco- the dead generations weighs like an incubus on the brains of the living. nomic factor. Currency speculation And just when they seemed engaged in revolutionizing themselves, Innis’ is the closest thing to history, in a staccato, retrieval sense, pleads for time, waiting for space, a child’s game that a hailing the new alphabet, waiting for the Pharaonic Egyptians and the grown man can do for new cuneiform script in the middle of the tundra. The frontier economy a living. The gold, black and blue towers which stimulated Innis was retro and verso, forward to the sequences of on Bay and the route to the present and back to the alternating otherness of now. Innis Wellington house are worried about the problems of Canadian society that ‘cannot be solved by the Casinos of Das discussion’ (1995: 458). Thus, although much of Innis’ work is predi-

Anti-Methods Theorizing Toronto 37

cated on communication it is not a communication which relates to com- 5. Of course, other munity. It is an approach to communication that relates to power: ‘It is religions define the city, apart from the Presbyte- perhaps a unique characteristic of civilization that each civilization be- rian, the Anglican and lieves in its uniqueness and its superiority to other civilizations. Indeed this the Catholic. In the may be the meaning of culture — i.e., something which we have that others second volume of his have not’ (Innis 1995: 316). autobiography Gunther Plaut (1997), formerly senior Rabbi of the Holy 5 Marshall McLuhan’s sense of communication is imperial in another Blossom Temple on way. This is Roman Catholic imperialism. What if during the Mass, the Bathurst Street, Wine and the Wafer really were transformed into the Blood and Body of discusses the problems of Jewish belief in Christ? How would we know? Would it matter to our sense of the every- Toronto, his own day? In what way is the virtual apprehension of the sensuous important to coming to terms with us in all our senses? McLuhan’s notion of communication is bloodless, a- aging, and the general contextual and putatively a-political. It is the communication of the sacred problem of talking with anyone. Plaut talks spectacle. There is no historical route to this space which has not been about communication trodden many times before: cool, hot, hotter, coolest. The whole of com- and technology in a municative experience is Aristotelian and ultimately Thomist. The inter- manner which, given his connections of the forms of the performances and their contents have been origins in Germany during the Holocaust, fore-ordained: the abstract future is asserted as already present. Politics, his migrations to the power, gender, race, class are inconsequential elements in analyzing the USA, Israel and Canada, world: alienation and fetishization are the normal conditions of human- projects a different kind. Technology, like the Hegelian Geist, moves independently of its urgency, which McLuhan’s romanticism military, political, economic dimensions, and incorporates all objects into conceals: ‘We shall its own totalizing scheme (as with any religion, facts are absorbed into the communicate with one ongoing mythology). Thus the virtual is the real and the real is based on the another more easily, authentic and the oral and the fundamentally organic. Here we have the note the danger we shall encounter arises from basis for the global village. But this village slides (elides) itself with the the very advance that society of the spectacle, the Panopticon, the cathedral, the virtual eye. the new sciences bring McLuhan, who had not a clear political vision in himself, may have been us. The medium will surprised at how political his message became. tend to come between us as a virtual persona and make us believe that In March 1977, the 553-metre tall CN Tower was completed on the face-to-face contacts are disused railway lands just south of Front Street. It snowed all day. ‘Pricked no longer necessary and, God’s ass,’ said the Montreal poet Irving Layton, ‘he’s been shitting on us in fact, impinge on our ever since.’ Ten years later the Sky-Dome was under construction (com- shrinking personal space. For privacy will pleted 1989). It was an architectural wonder, a giant igloo cathedral be tomorrow’s most devoted to the worship of Mammon. The retractable roof was based on the endangered species and principles of an armadillo’s back: three sections, moving together to open we shall look for and close. The internal structure was based on Jeremy Bentham’s methods of protecting ourselves in new ways, Panopticon: everyone could be viewed at any time from certain strategic for locks and bolts, guns locations as well as by the installation of video monitors. The stands and dogs cannot secure prevented any cross-overs. A giant television screen, the ‘Jumbotron,’ not it for us’ (Plaut 1997:

Space and Culture 6 38 Ioan Davies

228). There is memory only showed the game or event that was in process, but also — from time in Plaut -long, difficult to time — the activities of the spectators. The Sky Dome was not merely a memories - and a sense of urgency which performance space: it was also a television studio, providing simultaneous comes from those play-spaces for audience, players and the world. In 1993, for a performance memories and of Aida, real elephants were dragged in; in early September 1997, thou- experiences. It adds sands of mourners came to watch the funeral of Princess Diana on the quite a different dimension to the Jumbotron. After the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team won the World technological drive of Series for the first time in 1993, the Dome became the centre for an expres- Innis or the poeticism sion of the carnivalesque which quickly took over the major streets of the of McLuhan’s circular city. The erection of the Dome redefined the meaning of theatre and sport notion of communica- 6 tion. in Toronto.

6. For a longer The most telling development of the ‘wired city’ is the creation of version of this story see my, ‘A Stately Toronto as performance space, although the public itself is not involved Pleasure-Dome: the (except possibly as extras) in the performance. While in his early thirties, Entertainment Arena the pianist/composer Glenn Gould decided that he did not want to appear in as Panopticon,’ in public ever again. In several radio and television programmes, Gould Davies and Paul Anisef (eds) Con- provided arguments for the purity of performance through electronic media tested Boundaries/ and the significance of the private experience of perfected reception. Different Sociologies. Toronto: Institute for Stravinsky claimed that the business of art is technique; I do not agree. Nor do I believe Social Research, York that the business of technology is the rule of science - and, with all respect, I wish the University, 1996: good Professor McLuhan, who doesn’t believe it either, would say so more often. But I 315-335. do believe that once introduced into the circuitry of art, the technological presence must be encoded and decoded (no Dolby salesmen need apply) in such a way that its presence is, in every respect, at the service of the spiritual good that will ultimately serve to banish art itself (Gould as cited in Page 1984: 358).

Thus an art form which has its origins in the social becomes a vehicle for the non-social. Gould’s sense of the anti-social extended from music to the city itself.

In a TV documentary made in the late 1970s, Gould took us on a tour of Toronto.

The point is that, by design, I have very little contact with this city. In some respects, indeed, I think that the only Toronto I really know is the one I carry around with me in memory . . . . North York . . . is my favorite area of the city by far, and although I live downtown, I keep a studio in North York. I think that what attracts me to it is the fact that it offers a certain anonymity; it has a sort of improbable, Brasilia-like quality. In fact, it has much of the tensionless atmosphere of one of those capital cities where the only business is the business of government and which are deliberately located -- away from the geographical mainstream — Ottawa, say, or Canberra (Gould as cited in Page 1984: 410, 415).

Anti-Methods Theorizing Toronto 39

Apart from his own deep-rooted anti-social tendencies which have 7. See, in particular, been documented at length,7 Gould is the representative of one side of the Otto Friedrich’s Glenn Gould. A Life and tension between technology and the social which is a characteristic of Variations. New York: , and in many respects the life of any vibrant city. Gould’s Random House, 1989, personalization of technology is perhaps unique, but, whatever one thinks and Peter Oswald’s of his actual performances, Gould is surely the most significant musical Glenn Gould. Ecstacy and Tragedy of Genius. critic that Toronto (and Canada) has produced. Gould, unlike most other London and Toronto: critics, was conscious of the sweep of music as a genre which incorporated Penguin Books, 1997. ‘background music,’ Muzak, music as morality, performance, technology, the distancing factor between the actual encounter and the virtual one.

I believe in ‘the intrusion’ of technology because, essentially, that intrusion imposes upon art a notion of morality which transcends the idea of art itself . . . . If, for instance, one stumbled into an interview with a character who said, “Well, like, man, I sorta don’t want to go out on a limb to, like, answer da question, you know, because, like, well, it takes all kinds, you know, and, well, either you dig it or maybe not, am I right? But, like, man, if I were to give a real conclusive answer, I’d say that — well, could be, you know.” If he said that, it might be tempting not to cut it, to keep it intact as a portrait. If, however, one happened to deduce that what he was really saying was “To be or — like, uh — not to be,” and those words were bound up with that quote, then I really think that “like, uh” should go (Gould as cited in Page 1984: 355, 357).

Here Gould (who in this case was talking about editing radio programmes) is projecting the importance of the editorial technician not only as a moral agent but as also above the artist or the subject. It is an argument much older than Dolby and digital mixes.

Whereas John Berger argued in Ways of Seeing that technology altered our sense of the authentic work of art, Gould seems to be arguing that that which is truly authentic as art (whatever we might think is significant for newsworthiness) is that which has been cleaned up to technical perfection. And that authenticity extends to background music in shopping malls or on film:

In my opinion, the most important of the missing links in the evolution of the listener- consumer-participant, as well as the most persuasive argument for the stylistic mix, is to be found in the most abused of electronic manifestations — background sound. This much-criticized and often-misunderstood phenomenon is the most productive method through which contemporary music can confide its objectives to a listening, consuming, Muzak-absorbing society. Cunningly disguised within the bland formulae from which background sounds are seemingly concocted is an encyclopedia of experience, an exhaustive compilation of the cliches of post-Renaissance music. Moreover, this catalogue provides a cross-referenced index which permits connections between stylistic manifestations with fine disregard for chronological distinction (Gould as cited in Page 1984: 350).

Space and Culture 6 40 Ioan Davies

8. See also my own So, if Glenn Gould is the post-modern theorist par excellence, it is a post- article, ‘Theory and modernism where the body is absent, where music and theatre and film are Creativity in English Canada: Magazines, coded and decoded, and where sound — perfected — is cosmopolitan, trans- the state and Cultural historical and ‘pure.’ Why would anyone want to go through the tedium of Movement,’ Journal attending a ‘live’ concert, or attend a play, or even go to a night club? This of Canadian Studies, multicultural city of ours is surely available to those who might (virtually) Vol 30, No 1, 1995: 5-10. access it in the shopping malls, the drawing rooms, the sound-tracks of movies, the Dome. No need to experience life in a concert, or a pub, or to 9. Magazines such walk down the various streets of the city with their multicultural transmigra- as Now, Borderlines, tions. The purity of the performance is all that matters. ‘I confess that I have Shift, Fuse, and This Magazine are also always had grave misgivings about the motives of people who go to concerts, testaments to this live theatre, whatever’ (Gould as cited in Page 1984: 452). Nor, indeed, need (written) creative we go to libraries, universities, galleries, museums, restaurants, sports events energy, literary nor even jobs: everything might be perfected through simulation. Gould’s evidence of the kinetic and the issue, of course was that he was no mere couch potato (otherwise who would performative. listen to him?). He spoke out of the sense of a performer who knew his personal limits but also longed for posterity (unlike the football player or film 10. bp nichol, The star who lives for the moment). But Gould’s sense of self-preservation was to Martyrology. Pages say that, ultimately, all of us are unimportant. His posthumous reward is are un-numbered. assured. But what about ours?8

It is worth thinking that parallel to this, in the 1980s, Toronto (because of generous Federal and Provincial tax concessions and grants) became the site for films made for Hollywood companies where the city was used as the cloned location for American narratives. Toronto became the virtual city, existing elsewhere independent of the activities of its citizens. And yet, of course, the people who live in the city enjoy a large number of performance locales (probably more than any other North American city), where they make music, theatre, dance, sport and even film, and use the streets for their own political/cultural performances.9

Imaginary Cities how could you? saint reat’s been such a sad guy. maybe you’ll bring joy into his life. maybe the maybes can come to be! suddenly it makes sense. is it the poem makes us dense? or simply writing, the act of ordering the other mind blinding us to the greater vision what’s a poem like you doing in a poem like this?10

Anti-Methods Theorizing Toronto 41

This sad city (even the gays are sad) is a city of comedy, of art, of playfulness, the 11. Book II, near the ance of the other in a dance for the other. It needs its martyrs. It finds its martyrs, end.

but 12. With bp nichol we walk the St. Reets dedicate this poem to a whim looking for the gods and and saints who will as there are words i haven’t written save us from the things i haven’t seen world that is around us. Instead we find St. so this poem continues Erling, St. Ranger, St. a kind of despair takes over Ratified, flying the the poem is written in spite of flag of St. Ars and St. all the words i once believed were saints11 Ripes, comforted by St. Ripteaser and St. The poet bp nichol not only encourages the playfulness of language, Rumpet . We put on but surely also helps us to find a St. Ance, where the performance is both our St. Ereo and tragic and comedic.12 He might not go toYuk-Yuks nor the Berlin nor wonder whether we Second City (those Comedy-houses of the city) nor gawk non-stop at the can St. And it much longer. [Apologies to Comedy channel, but his laughter, like comedian John Candy’s, is David St. Alwart’s infectuous: ‘Afterword’ to The Martyrology]. i should drink less than i do eat less yes than i do i do do it 13. bp nichol, Book living that way & feelings rise II, in the middle. it is all so hard who takes me as i am not this self confronts me in the mirror saint rike he’s found you now tracked you down thru all the blue nothing we knew didn’t exist13 bp nichol introduces us to a Toronto which spins the theorists on their heads. For nichol this is a city where the words walk, and where the spaces resound with music. This is the jazzed-up city, which takes the metaphors of the global village, the trips to the cottages, the nutritionist and the psychiatrist, the vertiginous pressure of city life and puts them together into an ongoing myth of city life, the myth of living in death, the confron- tation of self, as work, as the making of a poem. nichol provides a sense of the (bitter-sweet) excitement of creation: simply writing, the act of ordering the other mind blinding us to the greater vision With nichol we stand back from McLuhan, Innis, Gould and the others because we have absorbed them as the ‘greater vision.’ We are confronted instead with the mundane reality of getting by with whatever equipment

Space and Culture 6 42 Ioan Davies we have. Behind the facade of the theorists we make poetry and music and art. Not because we despise them, but because, in their words and architectures and images, we have ingested them too powerfully. That is part of the space we inhabit.

Novelists, of course, no longer dominate the mind of a society. Some of these writers, in fact, are read only by a tiny minority. But when they make their home town a home for the imagination, their myth seeps through the city, flows into the stream of oral history, and shapes conversational pride. It has subtly transformed Toronto, giving it a precious, many-layered story. What animates the politics of recent months in Toronto is the perhaps overblown fear of losing this lovely thing, only lately won (Fulford 1997: 44).

The ultimate question, of course, is writing, and how that writing invents a city, but also how a city gives birth to writing. But, in the quote above, Robert Fulford, a regular columnist on cultural matters for The Globe and Mail (supposedly a ‘national’ newspaper, but decidedly Toronto-centric) adopts a somewhat elitist approach to writing in which the authors of books that compete for a Booker Prize or a Governor-General’s award are taken as the mark of the writerly city. That there is a connection between the writer (and the visual artist and the film-maker and the architect) and the imaginary city goes without saying. But Fulford suggests that these ‘imaginary cities are in part the creation of writers, who must invent the city before we can be satisfied to inhabit it’ (1997: 43). It is perhaps not surprising that his chosen cohort of writers set their novels in those parts of the city in which the wealthy and the cultural establishment live, and even though most of the authors are immigrants to the city, they are well-heeled immigrants: , Robertson Davies, Michael Ondaatje, Catherine Bush. Thus the imaginary city becomes the city of the bourgeoisie. Much more interesting would be the relation between these writers and the wider city of which they are a part. The imagined Toronto of the Booker school of writers (itself part of an international, self-referential literary elite) necessarily pro- vides an image of the city which is swathed with the accoutrements and artifacts of bourgeois living. There are other imaginary cities called Toronto, each of them infused with different anguishes and pleasures of living and dying.

In his studies of Paris, Walter Benjamin noted the connection between the new bourgeois living spaces in the late nineteenth century and the rise of the detective novel (even truer, perhaps, in London than Paris). In Toronto the city is written on and about in many different forms than the novel. The living spaces of this city now include high rise apartments, lofts, recycled industrial warehouses, condominiums, as well as the imagined living spaces of film, television, theatre, music, the internet (including chat rooms and electronic mail), magazines, journals, newspapers and radio. Much of this is ephemeral and publicaly unavailable material. And yet, as Peter Fritzsche (1996) notes in his marvelous study of literate Berlin, it is this sense of the writing of the city which is essential to understand the way in which the city is read, written, lived. Toronto is a city that is much written around, and yet the ontological vision of the city which we who live here write ourselves into is rarely encountered: it is invariably read against the epistemological, where the shifts in knowledge and the codes that frame reality become more real than reality itself. If we are to rethink writing as imagination, surely it is important to put the two together. This is perhaps why the novel is taken as the basis for coming to terms with the city as the intersection between the imaginary and the epistemological: it Anti-Methods Theorizing Toronto 43 allows us to conflate ourselves as sensitive beings and the great chain of 14. One of the knowledge as processes which we can imagine in the core of the flow of ongoing problems of thinking about cities experience. But it is, of course, a particular and privileged core. Everyone and any aspect of else lives in fragments. But do the fragments add up? post-enlightenment culture, is to take The theorists discussed above proposed a series of understandings of architecture as a metaphor for all that Canada, Toronto and ourselves as integral to the world’s vision of itself that we think creative not only spun around the notion of different realities, different cultures, but potential to be about. also about where those notions intersected. But, of course, these visions may Much of the rhetoric not intersect except in particular circumstances. There are imaginations of surrounding post- modernism has been places where we might be. Calvino, in his view of the same/alternative borrowed from spaces, tried to imagine the same place as having different realities. The architectural various theorists and creative writers who have engaged Toronto have accounts. In a likewise imagined different spaces: the space of perfect democracy, of a succinct, but dense little book, the ‘global village,’ of a feminist utopia, of a bourgeois urban paradise, of the Japanese critical city with perfect acoustics. Toronto is none of these, and yet their contrary philosopher Kojin images contend in the making of the city. Similarly, the structure of the Karatani has argued city’s many forms of architecture as well as the multiple forms of life that that the architectural metaphor has been inhabit these structures provide marks of the contestations, indications of developed since competing imaginaries. Descartes to over- rule the more In his collection of articles on Toronto’s places, the journalist John substantial socio- Bentley Mays (1994) provides an indication of the variety of building economic features which are at the core structures and the various ways that styles have emerged over the past of understanding the century. At one level this might be read as an account of the evolution of processes of capital architectural styles — and the organization of Mays’ sections partly encour- development. In ages us to look for those titles like ‘Modern,’ ‘Moderne Variations,’ relation to under- standing the growth and‘High Styles’ — but the book is rather a collection of pieces on places of the contemporary which are very conscious of the theoretical concerns indicated above. Mays city, Karitani’s is concerned with how nature is incorporated into the buildings (rivers, writing should surely ravines, gardens, cemeteries, the edges of the city, the waterfront), on where be conjoined with that of Benjamin, we shop, pray, read, live, work, play, and of the whole notion of the street- Foucault, Simmel and scape and the idea of cyber - and acoustic spaces. Throughout it all, the idea de Certeau in order to that architecture is somehow independent of what we do with it is avoided. relocate architecture Of course, there are some important indications of pieces of architecture as materiality, rather than a metaphorical which altered the shape of the city — the Canadian National Exhibition closure. See: Kojin grounds (opened in 1892), the Toronto-Dominion Bank (1967), the Karatani, Architec- SkyDome (1989) — but these are not given pride of place; rather we are ture as Metaphor. invited to explore their meaning along with the many other sites that the Language, Number, Money. Translated by population inhabits. Architecture is not put on any kind of pedestal, but is an Sabu Kohso and artifact like any other that is part of the process of civic and commercial edited by Michael decision-making.14 Mays invites us to explore both the drama of a well-

Space and Culture 6 44 Ioan Davies executed intervention into the cityscape, but also its use, abuse and disuse. And thus, because architecture is part of the process of being, he takes us to the expressways under whose ramps the destitute live, to the railway station which was built to take people out of the city — not into it, to Parkdale which was once the open gate to the city but now a cul-de-sac populated by the poor, and back to the Toronto-Dominion Centre whose original concept is now flawed by an ill- conceived architectural attachment. Thus, if many outsiders see Toronto as a ‘modern’ city, it is a flawed modernity, reorganized by the happenstance of living in it.

Another route to viewing cities as a collection of places with attendant spectacles is to think about what people actually do there. Of course, like a map-reader, Mays provides a guide to what spaces we might inhabit. But it is a reading which, in spite of himself, is predicated on place as itself. But spaces move into each other, because we move. bp nichol’s world is a world of moving words, Glenn Gould’s is a world of remaking old sounds, Marshall McLuhan’s is a world of moving kinetic sensibilities. What I’m suggesting is that in this city, Toronto, as we sit on the subway, or stand on the corner of Broadview and Danforth, or go to Toronto Island to celebrate Caribana (that superb mid-summer evocation of Trinidad and Jamaica), the different spaces suggested by these writers and artists shift into each other. The imagined cities that are named ‘Toronto’ are not one city but many cities. They meet in a fleeting moment, the glance of an eye, the brush of a skirt, the recognition of a piece of music.

In one way, there is no one Toronto, for those that live in it. Lynn Crosbie (1998) has tried to reclaim the moments of these intersections in a powerful series of prose-poems which use the letters of the alphabet (as good an excuse as any) to sing the modalities of the city: ‘I am a punk with two inches of spiked hair, a fish out of water. Trying to breathe. Sending long letters home and cultivating a depression that borders on nerve’ (Crosbie 1998: 53). Toronto is a city, like many more, to which people come because it encapsulates the version of a world beyond their own, but one which for most could not deliver everything it seemed to have promised. Looking at those intersections in the city reveals more than Mays’ spaces; it reveals the movements of real people as they slip between different places. Not that there are no flaneurs in Toronto, but it is a flaneurie that sometimes reveals itself as the desperate statement of the impoverished. Toronto, in spite of its reputation, is not a kind city. The current mayor is attempting to send the ‘squeegie kids’ (unemployed young people who clean car windscreens at major intersections) to ‘boot camps’ so that they can learn to do something productive. In contrast to John Bentley Mays’ aestheticization of the city, Lynn Crosbie tries to position it as a city with worry about life, jobs and identity at its core.

Imagining the city, Toronto, involves imagining its underbelly, its unwashed and unwanted, as much as it involves an imagining of its sediment, its layers, and the spectres of its history. It is a city in which being, moving and imagining is undertaken through remnants, is haunted by fragments of what has been forsaken, forgotten and abandoned, and that which has been em- braced, nurtured, and left behind. It is, as Anne Michaels wrote in her novel Fugitive Pieces, resolutely becoming on the ground of what is just as resolutely slipping away.

Anti-Methods Theorizing Toronto 45

Like Athens, Toronto is an active port. It is a city of derelict warehouses and docks, of waterfront silos and freight yards, coal yards and a sugar refinery; of distilleries, the cloying smell of malt rising from the lake on humid summer nights. It is a city where almost everyone has come from elsewhere — a market a caravansary — bringing with them their different ways of dying and marrying, their kitchens and songs. A city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of farewell. It is a city of ravines. Remnants of wilderness have been left behind. Through these great sunken gardens you can traverse the city beneath the streets, look up to floating neighbourhoods, houses built in the treetops. It is a city of valleys spanned by bridges . . . . Forgotten rivers, abandoned quarries,the remnants of an Iroquois fortress. Public parks hazy with subtropical memory, a city built in the bowl of a prehistoric lake (1996: 83).

Michaels provides a mapping of Toronto that is both diachronic and synchronic in that move- ments in the here and now of the novel’s time are superimposed on the many layers of the what was and back then. For Michaels memory, walking among the spectres of the past or uncovering remnants of what has been forgotten, is key to understanding the terrain of the city. And this terrain is mottled, provides not a smooth surface of perception, but is instead experienced through a kind of mental archaeology, a recovery of fragments of memory by burrowing deep into the ground on which they were first inscribed as memory.

Conclusion: Spectacles of the Spectre

In the beginning, I introduced Toronto through the pen of Dennis Lee, who was concerned that the city (a proud city with its own Presbyterian and Anglican heritage) was being dragged into the maelstrom of the ‘modern,’ with buildings and art that would change it beyond recognition. Lee’s spectres were those of the founders of the city. His spectacles were the buildings, art and sculptures, but also the founding fathers of the city. In thirty years the city has gone through a series of transformations: the population has increased to four million, the city has taken over a large portion of the hinterland, today there are more (Italian, Chinese, Korean, West Indian, African, French) Catholics than Presbyterians or Anglicans, the buildings have moved from Gothic to Panoptic. The government has changed to such an extent that the comforting inner- city sense of community has given way to the driving sense of the ‘global.’ If in the 1960s and 1970s Montreal was a real issue of civic competition, by 1998 it doesn’t matter except as a pimple on the body politic. Toronto is assured of its global space. It has overtaken Montreal in population: the banks have all relocated from there, as have many businesses.

There is, of course, a conflict between this sense of elan, represented by the current ultra- monetaristic Ontario provincial government and the new omnivorous administration of the City of Toronto, and the reality of a city. In a recent article on architecture, Fredric Jameson (1998) tried to show how the idea of architecture as a space for city growth is bound up with the notion of land speculation and that speculation is bound up with the idea that the space of the city is always up for land-grabs. This is not a new story, but the idea that the city’s public art is totally beholden to capitalism presumably puts it in the same league as feudal Catholicism or Ottoman

Space and Culture 6 46 Ioan Davies

Islam as occasions for censorship of what is, or what is not allowed to be built or seen or heard. But Jameson, in discussing the Rockefeller Centre in New York, invokes Hegel’s ‘ruse’ of history, where unintended consequences of a Capitalist project are realized as something else.

In Toronto the ruse works in several ways. For example, an old Victorian theatre, the Elgin, long abandoned to a bank as a storage space is reclaimed by the city, rebuilt at great cost, leased to an impressario (Garth Drabinsky) who makes it the site for operetta and musicals. But, of course, a shyster’s recreation. Drabinsky’s Livent company goes bankrupt, the show goes on. Or does it? Which show? This is the space and the notion of its presence being forever reclaimable. Another version, if Toronto is the ‘good’ Presbyterian, Protestant place of worship, is the rebuilding of the presbytery into the new electronic and multi-cultural world. The ‘People’s Church,’ formerly on Bloor Street, now on Sheppard, was once the headquarters of ‘missionizing’ the world. A TV show a week, networked around the world, rivals the other evangelical televisuals. It is one of the indications of the continuation of the ‘goodness’ of Toronto. Just off Highway 427, near the Pearson International Airport is a church called theVineyard Christian Fellowship. It has a congregation of thousands and an international influence exceeding any of the scholars and intellectuals discussed here. Physically it is a shopping-mall for God, like many others in North America; kinetically it has a sense of sponta- neity and joie-de-vivre, including its encouragement of dancing and singing and being inbred with the spirit of the Lord. If it has little to say about Canada, except the ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ bit, that is part of the universalism that accompanied the whole territory.

Just off Spadina, on Cecil Street, is a Chinese Community Centre, housed in an old Syna- gogue. It sits next to the former headquarters of the Canadian Communist Party and just across from Grossman’s Tavern. Round the corner is El Mocambo, where much of early Canadian and International Rock and Country music was first performed. This corner of Toronto space is alert to its own counter-significations, a play of the different ruses of history. It might also act as a metaphor, a symbol, a catalyst for the transformations of the city and its inhabitants.

As, in their different ways, Gore Vidal (1995), David Harvey (1996) and Derek Sayer (1998) have noted, one of the important metaphors in looking at our histories, spaces, experiences is through the notion of palimpsest. But it is how we pull the past back into our present that matters. The sense of how the spectres of the past are turned into the contemporary spectacles is surely one of the most important ways of reading any city. One of the riches of Toronto is that it allows us much scope for exploring how we write over the stencil, the slate, the carbon-copy, without wiping it completely clean. York University Toronto, Canada

References Anisef, Paul and Davies, Ioan eds. 1996. Contested Boundaries/Different Sociologies, Toronto: Institute for Social Research, York University Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing, London: British Broadcasting Corporation

Anti-Methods Theorizing Toronto 47

Calvino, Italo. 1974. Invisible Cities, New York: Harcourt and Brace Crosbie, Lynn. 1998. ‘Alphabet City,’ Alphabet City: 6. Open City, Concord, Ont: Anansi 44- 71 Davies, Ioan. 1996. ‘A Stately Pleasure-Dome: the Entertainment Arena as Panopticon,’ Davies and Paul Anisef eds. 1996: 315-335 Donegan, Rosemary and Salutin, Rick. 1985. Spadina, Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre Friedrich, Otto. 1989. Glenn Gould. A Life and Variations, New York: Random House Fritzsche, Peter. 1996. Reading Berlin: 1900, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP Fulford, Robert. 1997. ‘City of Imagination,’ Maclean’s March 17. 44 Gould, Glenn. 1984. ‘The Grass is always Greener,’ Page ed. 1984: 410-11 Harvery, David. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell Innis, Harold. 1951, 1964, 1991. The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press -- 1950. Empire and Communication, Oxford: Clarendon -- 1995. Staples, Markets and Cultural Change, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press Jameson, Fredric. 1998. ‘The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation,’ New Left Review 228. 25-46 Karatani, Kojin. 1995. Architecture as Metaphor. Language, Number, Money, trans. Sabu Kohso, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press Lee, Dennis. 1972. Civil Elegies, Toronto: Anansi McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media, New York: McGraw-Hill Mays, John Bentley. 1994. Emerald City. Toronto Revisited, Toronto: Penguin Books Michaels, Anne. 1996. Fugitive Pieces, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Miller, Jonathan. 1971. McLuhan, London: Fontana nichol, b. p. 1972-1987. The Martyrology, Toronto: Coach House Oswald, Peter. 1997. Glenn Gould. Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius, London and Toronto: Penguin Books Page, Tim. 1984. The Glenn Gould Reader, New York: Knopf Plaut, Gunther. 1997. More Unfinished Business, Toronto: University of Toronto Press Saul, John Ralston. 1992. Voltaire’s Bastards, Toronto: Vintage Sayer, Derek. 1998. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press Vidal, Gore. 1995. Palimpsest, New York: Random House

Space and Culture 6