Governmentality, the Grid, and the Beginnings of a Critical Spatial History of the Geo-Coded World”

The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Earth and Mineral Sciences GOVERNMENTALITY, THE GRID, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF A CRITICAL SPATIAL HISTORY OF THE GEO-CODED WORLD A Thesis in Geography by Reuben S. Rose-Redwood © 2006 Reuben S. Rose-Redwood Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2006 The thesis of Reuben S. Rose-Redwood was reviewed and approved* by the following: James P. McCarthy Assistant Professor of Geography Thesis Adviser Chair of Committee Melissa W. Wright Associate Professor of Geography Daniel L. Purdy Associate Professor of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures Jeremy S. Packer Assistant Professor of Film/Video and Media Studies Roger M. Downs Professor of Geography Head of the Department of Geography * Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ABSTRACT In many cities and towns throughout the world today, the numbering of houses has become such a commonplace practice of local government that its everydayness makes it hard for urban inhabitants to even imagine living without these inscriptions that make up the abstract spaces of everyday life. Yet, as a spatial practice, house numbering is a comparatively recent phenomenon, which did not become widespread until the second half of the eighteenth century. So taken-for-granted has the house number become that few geographers have examined the history of house numbering from a critical perspective. This is particularly surprising given the recent interest in understanding the intersecting “axes” of knowledge, power, and the production of space. Drawing upon extensive archival research, this study brings together the theoretical insights of governmentality studies and Marxian geography to explore the history of house numbering in U.S. cities and towns in general while also providing a case study of the spatial politics of street and house numbering in New York City. I argue that the ordering of space was a key strategy to contain the dialectical processes of capitalist urbanization within the fixed order of logic and number. The project of numbering houses was often first proposed not by municipal officials but by the publishers of city directories to facilitate conducting a privately-financed door- to-door “census.” I argue that the house number and city directory were two of the most important “technologies” of spatial individualization in nineteenth-century urban America, and that one of the principal goals of rationalizing space was, in fact, the economization of time. I further suggest that examining the construction of such a “spatial regime of inscriptions” should be central to a critical spatial history of the “geo-coded world.” The purpose of such an analysis is not to reduce politics to the technical. Just the opposite, it is to provide the analytical tools necessary for illustrating that the technical itself has a politics, which opens the possibility of viewing the realm of the technical as a potential site of democratic struggle and contestation instead of a restricted domain of depoliticization. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures ………………………………………………………………... vi Preface ………………………………………………………………………... ix Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………... xviii 1. INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………... 1 I. Preliminary Considerations on the Grid and the Taken-for-Granted World of the Numbered Landscape …………. 1 II. Geographical Imaginations of the Present and the Possibility of a Critical Spatial History ………………………….. 13 III. Itinerary …………………………………………………………… 18 2. GOVERNMENTALITY, GEOGRAPHY, AND THE GEO-CODED WORLD …………………………………………………………………… 31 I. Introduction ……………………………………………………….. 31 II. Biopolitics, Government, and the Technologies of Power ……….. 35 III. Governmentality Studies and the Analytics of Government ……… 41 IV. Geography, Governmentality, and the Question of Territory …….. 46 V. Geo-power as a Prerequisite of Biopower ………………………… 54 3. SPATIAL LEGIBILITY, POWER, AND THE FORMATION OF MATERIALIZED EPISTEMIC SPACES ………………………………… 59 I. Introduction ………………………………………………………... 59 II. Social Theory and the Politics of Spatial Legibility ………………. 63 III. “They Help You to Say Accurately Where Things Are”: A Critique of the Cartesian Pedagogy of Everyday Life ………….. 75 IV. Archaeological Excavations of Materialized Epistemic Space …… 84 V. The Inhabited Grid and the Spatial Ordering of Everyday Life ….. 91 4. INDEX TO THE CITY-TEXT: THE HOUSE NUMBER AND CITY DIRECTORY AS TECHNOLOGIES OF GOVERNMENT ……………… 95 I. Introduction ………………………………………………………... 95 II. “An Index to the Great Ledger of the Community” and “the Soul of Commercial Transactions” ……………………………………... 101 III. City Directories, Knowledge Production, and the Construction of the Public Sphere ……………………………………………….. 112 IV. Strategies of Urban Knowledge Production and the Tactics of Resistance ………………………………………………………. 119 V. Rationalizing Space, Economizing Time, and the Dialectics of Urban Governmentality ………………………………………... 124 iv 5. THE MAKING OF A GEO-CODED WORLD: STREET AND HOUSE NUMBERING IN TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA ………………… 127 I. Introduction …………………………………………………………. 127 II. The Concrete Production of Abstract Space and the Grid of “Municipal Orderliness” …………………………………………… 132 III. Resisting the Imposition of “Meaningless Symbols” by “Persons Without Brains” ……………………………………………………. 148 IV. Governmentality, Technoscience, and the Making of a Geo-coded World ………………………………………………….. 160 6. INSCRIPTION, CONTRADICTION, AND THE SPATIAL POLITICS OF NUMBERING THE NEW YORK CITY LANDSCAPE ……………… 167 I. Introduction …………………………………………………………. 167 II. The Making of a Spatial Regime of Inscriptions in the Empire City...172 III. The Contradictions of Urban Governmentality in Twentieth- Century New York …………………………………………………. 185 IV. The Place of Vanity in a Geo-coded World ………………………... 193 V. Contradictory Governmental Rationalities and the Production of Spaces of Concrete Abstraction ……………………………….... 201 7. FROM NUMBER TO NAME: REAL ESTATE DREAMS AND THE POLITICS OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN THE CARTESIAN CITY …. 204 I. Introduction …………………………………………………………. 204 II. “Sixth Avenue is Now a Memory”? ………………………………... 211 III. From Shantytown to Bourgeois Dreamworld: Remaking the Cultural Landscape on the Upper West Side ………………………. 218 IV. Taking History to the Streets: Harlem and the Spatial Politics of Collective Memory ………………………………………………… 232 V. The Politics of Re-appropriating the Symbolic Landscape ……….. 249 8. CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A CRITICAL SPATIAL HISTORY OF THE GEO-CODED WORLD ………………………………………………. 253 I. The Importance of a Critical Spatial History of the Geo-coded World ……………………………………….……………………….. 253 II. Limitations ……………..…………………………………………… 263 III. Horizons of Potential Inquiry in Critical Spatial History …………... 266 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………….. 271 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 0.1. The numbering of apartment balconies as an “anti-riot” measure in State College, PA xv Figure 0.2. The Cartesian classroom as disciplinary space, Penn State University xvi Figure 3.1. The classroom as Cartesian grid 76 Figure 3.2. The rural checkerboard landscape as pedagogical device 79 Figure 3.3. The cityscape as coordinate system 81 Figure 3.4. Adding a z-axis to the urban coordinate grid 81 Figure 3.5. The grid of discipline and the pedagogy of the external gaze 82 Figure 3.6. The archaeological excavation site as materialized Cartesian epistemic space, Mortimer Wheeler’s “area excavation” at Maiden Castle 85 Figure 3.7. The archaeologist’s regime of inscriptions as a “correspondence” theory of truth 87 Figure 3.8A and 3.8B. The archaeological grid, disciplinary power, and knowledge production 90 Figure 4.1. The number of U.S. cities publishing a city directory for the first time per year 103 Figure 4.2. The total number of U.S. cities publishing a city directory per year 103 Figure 4.3. The population size of cities publishing their first city directory 108 Figure 5.1. The primacy of sequential numbering over rectilinear geometric morphology in the geographical production of abstract space 134 Figure 5.2. The Philadelphia Block System and the emergence of “theoretical” house numbers 136 Figure 5.3. When space becomes time, the landscape as clock 140 vi Figure 5.4. Schwada’s “Universal Plan” of house numbering as a Philadelphia-New York-Washington hybrid 143 Figure 5.5. Lyman’s plan and the coordination of street and house numbering systems 146 Figure 5.6. Applying the Lyman plan to irregular cities 147 Figure 5.7. The “two cultures” reconciled? 152 Figure 5.8. Using the grid to number the curve—the production of abstract space in post-War suburban America 152 Figure 5.9. The production of spatial legibility and the “business-like arrangement” of house numbering 157 Figure 5.10. Urban governmentality and the “Visibility Test” 159 Figure 5.11. Spatial individualization and 3-D GIS visualization 162 Figure 6.1. An original mile stone first erected in 1769 on the Island of Manhattan 173 Figure 6.2. The “modern knight errant” in the Empire City 189 Figure 7.1. Celebrating “peace and solidarity” by renaming Sixth Avenue 212 Figure 7.2. After over half a century, it’s still 6th Avenue 217 Figure 7.3. The historical topography of Manhattan Island 219 Figure 7.4. “Shantytown” 220 Figure 7.5. Growing vegetables in “Shantytown” 221 Figure 7.6. “Freedom from Shanties” 230 Figure 7.7. Spatializing collective memory at the African Square, Harlem 235 Figure 7.8. Making a place for African American women in Harlem’s city-text 240 Figure 7.9. “Why isn’t

Load more