Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis: Aggregating Histories of Writing and Urbanization

Shannon Mattern

Cultural Politics, Volume 12, Issue 3, November 2016, pp. 310-331 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/643433

Access provided by New School University (23 Dec 2016 23:25 GMT) Special Section on Mediated Geologies

Of MUD, MEDIA, and the METROPOLIS Aggregating Histories of Writing and Urbanization

Shannon Mattern

Abstract For millennia, mud and its geologic analogues have bound together our media, urban, architectural, and environmental histories. Some of the first writing surfaces, clay and stone, were the same materials used to construct ancient city walls and buildings, whose facades also frequently served as substrates for written texts. The formal properties of those scripts — the shapes they took on their clay or, eventually, parchment and paper foundations — were also in some cases reflected in urban form: how the city molded itself from the materials of the landscape. And those written documents have always been central to our cities’ operation: their trade, accountancy, governance, and culture. In examining the place of mud in the Kulturetechniken of city-­making and record-­keeping, we see that urban and administrative culture are both utterly dependent on geological resources. Aggregating these often separate historical lineages has the potential to enrich the disparate disciplinary knowledges that are bound together here, but there’s more at stake than historiography. These public squares, city walls, building facades, urban archives, and sandy stores where earthen materials and writing intersect are the humble city sites where politics play out at myriad scales — where the entanglement of global and local political-­ economic forces enter people’s lives through the material, the geological, and the aesthetic. Keywords architecture, geology, materiality, urbanization, writing

ver sixty-­five hundred years ago, not far from where the Oradicals of Islamic State recently bulldozed ancient mud-­ brick temples and shrines, sledge-­hammering stone statues,

310 Cultural Politics, Volume 12, Issue 3, © 2016 Duke University Press DOI: 10.1215/17432197-3648870 AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

burning haram (un-­Islamic) manuscripts, writing, mathematics, the standardization and smuggling clay cuneiform tablets and of weights and measures, and adjustments mosaics for sale on the black market, a of the calendar were a part of an urban civilization was born — a civilization built revolution” (55) — a new way of living with upon many of those very same humble others, a new way of organizing and inhab- materials: mud, stone, and clay.1 Small iting space. farming villages in the fertile Mesopota- It so happened that Uruk’s urban mian region had made way for what are revolution was fortified by the most archaic widely regarded as the first cities, Eridu of natural resources: mud. The Tigris and and Uruk — settlements whose proximity Euphrates rivers not only created the to the Euphrates River made possible the opportunity for excess crops but also production of a reliable agricultural surplus. offered, due to their regular flooding, In Uruk, those bountiful grains fed a large plenty of alluvial clay — unconsolidated population — up to eighty thousand at the silt, sand, clay, and gravel, mixed in with city’s peak, around 2900 BCE — who had organic matter and deposited on the river- learned to build mud-­brick temples and banks. That fine-­grained clay was blended a mosaic-­adorned ziggurat, craft stone with chaff from the threshing floor, formed sculptures and clay pottery, pursue a wide into molds, and dried in the sun, yielding variety of professions, and design complex the mud-­bricks that constructed most of political and administrative structures to ancient Mesopotamia’s buildings and city manage their affairs. All of that administra- walls. Those bricks were typically “faced” tion required a system for keeping records. with a thick coating of mud and then Bureaucracy, many believe, begat sometimes gaudily painted (Oppenheim writing (Goody 1986; Houston 2004; 1977: 325); or the clay was fashioned Innis [1950] 2007, 1951; Mumford 1961; into multiform tokens that were used for Schmandt-­Besserat 1992; Woods 2010: accounting and into the clay envelopes 33 – 34). The origins of our written lan- that organized them (Schmandt-­Besserat guages, our chirographic cultures, are 1992); or it was strained and shaped rooted not in noble literary traditions but into tablets, on which a reed stylus then in accountancy (although it was the Epic impressed a wedge-­shaped cuneiform of Gilgamesh, which survived on a set of script — or a hard-­stone cylinder seal rolled clay tablets, that tells us much of what we out an impression, a script, or a figurative know about Uruk’s mythical history). “It scene, which served as a form of notari- has been suggested,” economist Harold zation for its “author” — after which the Innis ([1950] 2007: 46) writes, “that writing tablet was sun-­ or kiln-­baked, or recycled was invented in Sumer to keep tallies and (Collon 2005; Kilgour 1998: 16; Woods to make lists and hence was an outgrowth 2010). These alluvial documents consti- of mathematics. The earliest [records] tuted the new urban register, and they

include large numbers of legal contracts, serve us today as a valuable archaeological POLITICS deeds of sale, and land transfers, and archive (see Wengrow 1998). reflect a secular and utilitarian interest.” Many historians date the birth of Yet all this proto-­paperwork was part of a writing to the early fourth millennium larger constellation of developments that BCE. We have access to writing’s history CULTURAL extended beyond the merely managerial. largely because of the material properties

As Innis explains, “the development of of the historical record, of writing itself. 311 Shannon Mattern

Olof Pedersén and his colleagues (2010: wall), and fired-­brick structures span the 132) note that “it is a great advantage to globe and the ages (Staubach 2005: 114). archaeologists when texts are written on Those ancient architectures serve as clay tablets.” Clay, as Innis would say, is a more than archaeological remains; they’re time-­biased medium: it has permanence; often historical texts, too. As we will see it both cultivates lasting civilizations and later, civilizations the world over — in sticks around to make itself available for Mesopotamia, ancient Rome, Mesomer- historical study.2 Of course, early writing ica, Fatimid-­era Cairo, present-­day and proto-­writing appeared on a variety of Calcutta — have written on their material substrates: stone walls, shards of bone or environments, as well (through architec- wood, wax tablets, cloth, metal — some tural inscriptions or epigraphy, for exam- of which are similarly durable. Yet the ple), which provides another set of histor- materiality of the archaeological record has ical writings for future archaeologists to implications that extend beyond the mere consult. These various recorded formats — availability of artifacts; the forms of those tablets containing urban administrative artifacts inform their historical interpreta- records and the material city itself as a tion because they also shaped the civili- written text — are often entangled, which zations that used them.3 As Innis, Lewis complicates archaeologists’ attempts at Mumford, Denise Schmandt-­Besserat, and periodization and historical dating. Chris- a host of other historians, anthropologists, topher Woods (2010: 34), in his history and archaeologists argue, a civilization’s of writing in the ancient Middle East, prevailing media formats cultivate its habits acknowledges that most Mesopotamian of mind, its economy, its modes of gover- tablets were found in “rubbish heaps,” nance, its culture. in no clear historical strata: “The sun-­ Urban and architectural history are hardened clay tablets, having obviously likewise informed by the materiality of their outlived their usefulness, were used along historical records. Some early construc- with other waste, such as potsherds, clay tion used stone: consider the Megalithic sealings, and broken mud-­bricks, as fill in Temples of Malta and even Uruk’s own leveling the foundation of new construc- Stone Temple, built of limestone and bitu- tions.” Writing thus served as a literal men on a rammed-­earth podium. But as foundation for urban development. archaeologist Seton Lloyd acknowledges, For millennia, mud and its geologic “The raw material that epitomized Meso­ analogues have bound together our media, potamian civilization was clay” (quoted urban, architectural, and environmental his- 1

2:3 November 2016 in Kilgour 1998: 16). For millennia, clay tories. Some of the first writing surfaces, • and mud have together accounted for a clay and stone, were the same materials significant proportion of the earth’s built used to construct ancient city walls and environment: wattle-­and-­daub structures buildings, whose facades also frequently

POLITICS (woven sticks or reeds coated with mud), served as substrates for written texts. The

cob houses (chunks of clay tempered with formal properties of those scripts — the straw, manure, or sand and then stacked shapes they took on their clay or, eventu- and smoothed into walls), adobe bricks ally, parchment and paper foundations —

CULTURAL (tempered bricks, sun-­dried, stacked and were also in some cases reflected in urban mortared), rammed-­earth buildings (sand, form: how the city molded itself from the

312 gravel, and clay compressed into a molded materials of the landscape. And those AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

written documents have always been of mud in the Kulturetechniken of city-­ central to our cities’ operation: their trade, making and record-­keeping, we recognize accountancy, governance, and culture. that urban and administrative culture are The long history of mud’s applications utterly dependent on nature, on geological as both a writing substrate and an archi- resources. Writing and urbanization are tectural medium shows us how we can both muddy businesses, and they’re mess- integrate both the historical and contempo- ily entwined. rary meanings of the term Kulturetechnik, Aggregating these often separate or cultural technique, a framework very historical lineages has the potential to much en vogue in media theory. As Bern- enrich the disparate disciplinary knowl- hard Siegert (2015: 9) explains: “The very edges that are bound together here. Media word culture, derived from Latin colere scholars, for example, can learn to read and cultura, refers to the development and their histories in archaeological ruins, and practical usage of means of cultivating urban historians and archaeologists can and settling the soil with homesteads and better appreciate the centrality of com- cities.” Since the late nineteenth century, munication and media history to their own the term Kulturetechnik has been associ- fields. Thinking these histories in tandem ated with agricultural or rural engineering, also reveals the long history and expan- although there is, as we’ve seen and will sive geography of urban mediation (see see, a much deeper history to the prac- Mattern 2015b: 96). Particularly in light of tices that the term refers to. And rightly recent attempts to understand what kinds so: as Siegert states, “Cultural techniques of intelligence are embodied in our digital are conceived of as operative chains that “smart cities,” the comparatively “dumb” precede the media concepts they gener- histories of mud and mark-­making demon- ate” (11; my emphasis). “Starting in the strate that calculation, coding, and embed- 1970s,” he notes, “Kulturtechniken also ded technologies have long been integral came to refer to elementary Kulturtechni- to our cities’ infrastructures (see Mattern ken or basic skills such as reading, writing, 2015a). and arithmetic” (10). The blending of these But there’s more at stake than his- agrarian and literary etymologies, Siegert toriography. These public squares, city suggests, enables us to recognize the exis- walls, building facades, urban archives, tence of cultural techniques in realms that and sandy stores where earthen materials extend well beyond the book and culture-­ and writing intersect are the humble city with-­a-­capital-C­ . Culture, in our case, sites where politics play out at myriad even extends to techniques of settlement, scales — where the entanglement of global urban planning and administration, and the and local political-­economic forces enters practices of everyday urban life. Geof- people’s lives through the material, the frey Winthrop-­Young (2013: 5) proposes geological, and the aesthetic. Building

that Kulturetechnik’s genealogical ties to and writing materials extracted locally, or POLITICS husbandry permit us to recognize culture sourced and distributed from afar, con- as “that which is ameliorated, nurtured, verge in our settlements and cities, where rendered habitable and, as a conse- designers and laborers, often informed quence, structurally opposed to nature, by internationally codified and inscribed CULTURAL which is seen as actively resistant . . . or protocols and standards, give them urban indifferent.” Yet in examining the place and architectural form. These same 313 Shannon Mattern

construction materials then become public public-­works projects; civic announce- media. In their geologic composition — the ments; prayers, eulogies, and poetry — into distinctive hue or texture of the local mud, granite boulders and cliffs. Through these or the distinctive means by which local moya, or polished-­cliff carvings, art histo- laborers pack that mud into bricks — they rian Robert Harrist (2008: 15) proposes, can embody a characteristically local aes- “the Chinese have transformed geological thetic, an architectural or geologic parlante. formations into landscapes imbued with Those mud surfaces, then inscribed, carry literary, ideological, and religious signifi- messages to local residents and to visitors cance.” He argues that it is important both friendly and hostile — and their com- not only to study these texts in terms of peting, sometimes contested, messages their content and style but also to regard make them targets of destruction or attrac- them as “environmental case studies,” as tive spoils of war. Recent threats to our “integral parts of their landscape settings,” cultural heritage in the Middle East demon- as texts addressed to a public readership strate just how volatile inscribed bricks and engaged in “peripatetic reading” (23, 28, sculpted mud can be — and just how critical 32). The carving and the rock are, like it is that we comprehend, document, and, our cuneiform and clay, entangled materi- if possible, conserve these records before ally and historiographically: the carvings their historical voices are erased. themselves serve as historical records; they guide visitors’ exploration of the land- Writing on Stone Cliffs and Mud-­Bricks: scape, and as Harrist says, they “embed Landscape and Architectural Inscription historical memory in the topography of From 500 BCE to 500 CE, the people China” (23). Geoglyphs and moya thus also of the Nazca Desert in southern Peru exemplify the muddily mixed genealogies inscribed into the alluvial landscape of inscription, landscape, and what Henri massive fifteen-­ to twenty-­mile-­long Lefebvre (1992) calls “the production of line drawings — of flora, fauna, everyday space.” objects, and geometric forms — by brush- City walls and building facades, made ing away red pebbles and sand, exposing of clay bricks and sticks and stone, have the lighter-­colored ground underneath. long served as substrates for inscription, Once imagined as a gigantic astronomi- too.5 In the fifth or sixth century BCE (or cal calendar, these geoglyphs, the Nazca perhaps even centuries earlier, according Lines, are now believed to have been used to some scholars), the Olmecs, Zapo- as part of ritual procession routes or in tecs, and Mayans in Mesoamerica began 1

2:3 November 2016 religious rites (UNESCO 2015). Around the carving scripts into their monumental • same time that the Nazca began marking sculptures and buildings; these architec- the ground, Darius the Great, king of the tural inscriptions constitute some of the Persian Empire, oversaw the carving of earliest-­known examples of Mesoamerican

POLITICS an illustrated autobiography — inscribed in writing. Around the same time in Greece,

three cuneiform languages: Old Persian, Innis ([1950] 2007: 90) reports, “the laws Elamite, and Babylonian — high on the lime- of Draco and Solon were written on stelae stone face of Mount Behistun in Iran.4 of wood or stone and laws were regularly

CULTURAL Later, in the first century CE, the Chi- recorded on the walls of public buildings or nese began carving myriad texts — names on separate stelae in a public place.” Thus,

314 of places, people, and deities; records of “with the use of writing” — and the city’s AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

surfaces themselves as a medium — “the forbids the creation of images of sen- judicial order became a public document, tient beings — Yasser Tabbaa (2001: 54) definite and ascertainable.” explains, “public inscriptions were by The “epigraphic habit” captivated necessity one of the primary visual means ancient Greece and the Roman empire of political and religious expression and (MacMullen 1982).6 “The Romans seemed one of the few ways for a dynasty to dis- to inscribe onto and into everything,” tinguish its reign from that of its predeces- according to classicist Christopher Johan- sor.”9 In the tenth through the twelfth cen- son (pers. comm., February 26, 2013). turies CE, the Fatimids of Cairo, known for Around the forum, an ancient inhabitant or the splendor of their art and architecture, visitor could find “the written word cov- displayed official writing on the exteriors ering every surface of every major monu- of their minarets and other public struc- ment.” These building facades and walls, tures. As in Greece and Rome, architecture doorways and courtyards — of fired brick functioned here as an infrastructure for or terracotta, concrete (whose content of communicating territorial claims and volcanic sand, pozzolana, has accounted codifying beliefs. While places like the for its longevity), tufa (a volcanic stone), mosque of al-­Hakim also featured prom- limestone, or marble — were not designed inent Arabic writing inside — writing to be used as substrates for writing, but intended for the worshipping commu- through the Romans’ social practices, “the nity — art historian Irene Bierman (1998: fabric of the city” ultimately served to 4) contends that “the act of putting record major laws, achievements, and legal writing in Arabic, in several places at transactions, as well as jokes, jabs, and pedestrian level, and in large scale letters private confessions (Petrucci 1993: 1).7 on the minarets of the mosque . . . itself Through the work of its official and located outside the royal city of Cairo, amateur authors, who came from all parts made that writing viewable by all who of (literate) society, the city was “infor- passed that public space.” These exterior mally archiving itself on its skin,” Johanson scripts — sometimes in Greek, sometimes says.8 Archaeologist Louise Revell (2009: in Arabic — were occasionally placed on 3 – 4) suggests that the writings played gateways and city thresholds, too, and an integral part of political processes and were intended to publicly herald both ter- religious services and thus were bound ritorial claims and allegiance to a particular up in the social practice of “what it was to linguistic culture and ideology. be Roman.” Such processes and rituals The specific aesthetic properties of of course involved various forms of those “public texts” — their “color, materi- mediation — public address, sculpture, ality, and form,” their floriated Kufic script, and other modes of pageantry. Thus, and their occasional use of gold or glass the scripts were, like Harrist’s moya, mosaic — also played a key role in how

embedded in their environments, cross-­ and what they communicated: power, POLITICS referenced with other messages relayed opulence, and, as other scholars have by other media formats, and read by mov- argued, confused political goals (Bierman ing, sensing, often celebrating bodies. 1998: 20). Tabbaa (1999: 182) notes in his

The Arabic world has been similarly review of Bierman’s work that the ornate CULTURAL rich with epigraphy. “In a largely ani- Fatimid script was “deliberately ambigu- conic artist culture” — that is, one that ous. . . . This simultaneity of visibility and 315 Shannon Mattern

incomprehension, of inclusiveness and archived them, enabled the Spanish and exclusiveness” — of making proclamations Portuguese conquerors to impose an ambi- public, but incomprehensible — “underlies tious, rational, systematic plan on existing the intentions of a dynasty that always indigenous settlements and, more rarely, seemed divided between its messianic in brand new towns. While the conquerors purposes and its encrypted messages” and their subjects stripped the landscape (see also Blair 1992, 1998). of its gold and silver, they also (re)molded Writings on these landscapes and its mud into grids of adobe-­walled struc- landforms, and on the mud and stone tures set around central plazas dominated walls of these cities, all carry public mes- by a church. sages to their inhabitants and visitors. But Rama (1996: 19, 24) focuses on the in different contexts, they serve different letrados’ administrative authority — their purposes: directing ritual, marking terri- ability to “manipulate writing in largely tory, proclaiming power, echoing history, illiterate societies” in order to “evangeliz[e] evoking spiritual values, announcing laws, and oversee the transculturation of an accommodating dissent, perhaps even pro- indigenous population numbering in the voking disorientation and confusion — and millions.” And part of that evangelizing, in all cases negotiating, materially and Rama argues, involved conveying an urban textually, between local and global political imaginary, marshaling “diagrams that concerns. translated the [political] will into graphic terms” — typically, orderly checkerboard Writing Cities into Being: The Scripts of grids — that were intended, in turn, to Urban Planning and Administration inspire a translation into material terms.10 Written charters and drawn plans have Conqueror and conquered alike were to brought cities into being, and scrivened imagine transforming those paper-­based documents have kept them in order. Angel urban visions into stone and adobe Rama, in his posthumously published realities. Again, politics were to take The Lettered City, explains how Iberian material form in the architectural and colonialists employed a combined strategy aesthetic. involving both writing and urbanization to Yet the grid plan already was a impose a new order on the New World. In material reality in many indigenous his introduction to the book, John Charles Mesoamerican settlements. Not only Chasteen fleshes out the many ways in was plaza-­centered urban design present which inscription and city-­building con- in pre-­Columbian settlements, but the 1

2:3 November 2016 verged: “The Iberian monarchs created Spaniards, impressed by the grandeur • precocious urban networks, carefully and order of New World cities, may have planned with pen and paper, their geo- even imported their urban-­planning ideas metrical layout standardized by detailed back to the Old World and employed them

POLITICS written instructions. New cities housed in the redesign of Spanish cities under

both the institutions of state power and Philip II (Low 1995; Azevedo-­Salomao and the writers who dealt in edits, memoranda, Ettinger-McEnulty­ 2005).11 Anthropolo- reports, and all the official correspondence gists have also taken issue with Rama’s

CULTURAL that held the empire together” (Rama claim that the conquerors were entering 1996: vii). These written documents, and a New World devoid of its own literate

316 the educated letrados who created and culture. Anthropologist Frank Solomon and AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

sociolinguist Mercedes Niño-­Murcia argue more subtle: as anthropologist Setha Low that new colonial literacies, “sponsored by (1995) explains, colonial power made itself church and by state, were not expanding palpable in construction techniques and into a graphic void. For when Spaniards masonry. Ideology was made manifest in brought the alphabet, they brought it the way mud was shaped into bricks. And to a society which already had its own indigenous laborers molded those bricks advanced resources for recording infor- and forcibly remodeled their own homes, mation” (Solomon and Niño-Murcia 2011: through labor with profound symbolic 10). As discussed earlier, various ancient significance. Mesoamerican civilizations had developed Yet even if the New World was no scripts. Some indigenous populations, tabula rasa, and those colonial urban imag- like those that Solomon and Niño-­Murcia inaries couldn’t be translated “verbatim” studied in Peru, continued (and continue into brick, the written plan still served its to this day) to use the ancient medium of political function. The ideal-­city plan, Rama the khipu, or knot-­cord, to monitor taxes (1996: 9) says, has the “rhetorical capac- and military operations and to track census ity . . . to impose hierarchical order on records, genealogies, and agricultural spiraling empires.” On the city’s “physical calendars, and many villages developed plane,” we might be lost amid its muddy vibrant (and remarkably exhaustive) local “multiplicity and fragmentation” — the cultures of handwritten record-­keeping.12 juxtaposition of temples and cathedrals, While the colonialists’ grand urban the confusion of cosmic orientations and plans may have duplicated forms that rational grids. But we can rely on the already existed in indigenous settlements, letrados to provide signs — in handwritten they did promise to refashion those documents; or, more recently, in printed existing restructures, to reconstitute guidebooks or street signs; or, today, via them within a new ideological framework. Google maps — to “organize and interpret” Hernán Cortés, for example, remade the the mess, “rendering the city meaningful sacred central plaza of the Great Temple as an idealized order” (Rama 1996: 27). It of Tenochtitlán into a new Spanish Amer- is worth noting, though, that well into the ican plaza and cathedral. In many existing age of print, native writing — particularly settlements, an urban plan and orientation writing on the landscape — continued to that once reflected cosmological princi- play a key role in rural villagers’ territorial ples now symbolized rational order and markings: “Possession to territory was . . . the power of a new god. Cathedrals were inscribed on paper, on the land itself,” sited alongside, or atop, temples and through the digging of zanjas, or boundary other pre-­Columbian structures. Sites and ditches, or through census takers’ chalk streets took on new names: many that had marks on building facades (Solomon and reflected local geographic features, archi- Niño-­Murcia 2011: 10, 33).13

tectonic forms, or agricultural concerns Rama specifies that the written plans POLITICS were re-­Christened in Spanish, forcing for the ideal city “transposed” not into indigenous readers “to pay more heed to a concrete construction, not into “the the European-­framed models conveyed fabric of the living city,” but merely into a graphically in written documentation” compelling urban imaginary. Meanwhile, CULTURAL (Rappaport and Cummins 2012: 232). anthropologist Brinkley Messick (1993)

In some cases, colonial influence was argues that we can find concrete historical 317 Shannon Mattern

parallels between writing and urban form: charcoal or watercolor or on napkins; script made manifest in brick. He exam- the history and epistemology of various ines the history of Islamic architectural projections in architectural drawing; and inscriptions and their formal parallels in so forth (see, for instance, the work of the the very “articulation” of urban space.14 Instruments Project [Instruments Project Messick discusses so-­called Arabic spiral 2016]). Despite the prevalence of such texts, in which the writing rotates in a research, Bernhard Siegert calls for an end spiral shape, entwining form and content, to “expressions” about design “that do lit- and argues that “this poetics of written tle more than reinscribe the ideology of the space then can be extended to general artist’s [he uses “artist” and “architect” domains of spatial organization: towns, interchangeably] imaginary agency,” that architecture, and the space of the state” imagine architecture as “some ineffable (231). He contrasts the “curvilinear urban act of creation” (2015: 122, 123). Siegert script” of the Yemeni town of Ibb (“a exhorts design theorists and historians labyrinth of closely packed multistoried to recognize “design as a cultural tech- houses on narrow and winding alleys nique.” Yet they already do, whether they and culs-­de-­sac,” with plenty of “resid- use Siegert’s particular terminology or ual, irregular spaces”) with the zoned, not. They already attend to the “material planned-­out newer regions, characterized cultures, practices, and workshop condi- by “relatively straight-­line, wide thorough- tions” of design; they examine its historical fares with some space left between the “technologies, materialities, codes, and buildings” (246 – 47). This “new separation visualization strategies” — the means by and precedence of urban form over urban which they make the material aesthetic content” and the parallel evolution in and political. Drawing, in particular — in urban form, he argues, “is analogous to graphite or ink on parchment or paper or the changeover from spiral texts to their screen — is widely recognized as a histor- straightened successors.” Whether we ical and political practice that is central can claim a causal relationship is perhaps to the identity of the architect; as Reyner beside the point; what we see here is a Banham (1990) proclaimed: “Being unable morphological resonance between writing, to think without drawing became the mark an integral political-­economic and cultural of one truly socialized into the profession media in­ frastructure, and the shape of the of architecture.” city itself. “The architects of the ancient world,” Many design historians have made architectural historian Mario Carpo (2001: 1

2:3 November 2016 similar claims about the media of design 19) suggests, “would have drawn up their • (from verbal instructions to blueprints to actual project designs only at the build- parametric tools) and the character of the ing site and while the works were in full architectural drawing or drawn urban plan, swing. The drawings that they made were

POLITICS both of which are thought to shape the working plans, often done at full scale.”

designer’s proposed plans — and, eventu- In other words, they were written directly ally, the resulting concrete constructions. on the building site. Sometimes those Scholars have researched the impact of plans were inscribed at smaller scale onto

CULTURAL graph paper and photography and 3-­D the lower walls of the under-­construction modeling on design practice; particular buildings themselves or onto clay tablets

318 architects’ penchants for sketching in (Haselberger 1985; Millard 1987: 109 – 11). AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

Thus, in our ancient cities, the writing of recorded by Spanish notaries (Rappaport architectural and urban plans — if they were and Cummins 2012: 118). written out at all — and the realization of Solomon and Niño-­Murcia (2011) those plans most likely happened simul­ write that today, “modern campesinos taneously and in the same medium. Other bring to the bureaucratic-­legalistic style genres of architectural thought — rules, of writing a devotion and enthusiasm that theory, standards, and so on — likewise startle outsiders” (2), and that households took form on different media substrates: “cherish their goatskin-­wrapped packets of manuscripts, printed books, oral address. titles and lawsuits as vital endowments” These formats of communication (24). Information regarded as vital to the shaped the advice authors dispensed, community is typically preserved in man- which in turn shaped the built environment uscript form, not in print, and “letters that their readers created.15 Clay tablet or scroll matter often appear as art: as epigraphy, shaped architectural thought, which in as embroidery, and as carvings” (36). The turn informed the arrangement of bricks most critical texts thus materialize in stone, and stones. These texts thus mediated the mud, and thread. While record-­keeping translation of mud and stone into urban was intended to keep social order in the form, a form that both embodied an ideol- Iberian colonies, the villagers of Tupicocha ogy and created a platform for a society to see their own self-­directed record-­keeping perform its politics. “as the very linchpin of communal life,” the “very heart of the social contract,” as Urban Writing Cultures: Circulating Texts well as a means of ensuring “equitable In Rama’s lettered cities, colonial-­era treatment by outside authorities,” like state letrados generated and circulated texts organizations and NGOs (25). to broadcast and legitimate the colonial Manuscripts have proven similarly order. Meanwhile, in Peruvian villages, by central to the cultural identity of Timbuktu, the seventeenth century, “some kurakas in Mali (Gwin 2011, 2013; Hammer 2006, (Andean nobles) and Andean commoners 2014; Harding 2013). These vellum and close to the scribal establishment could parchment documents — primarily in Ara- emulate the [colonialists’] ponderous legal- bic, but also in a few African languages — istic prose that spoke to power” (Solomon were created between the thirteenth and and Niño-­Murcia 2011: 9). They generated seventeenth centuries, when Timbuktu a vibrant culture of literacy — both through was an intellectual, spiritual, and cultural programs sanctioned by the state and the center and a hub for the trade of salt, church and, informally, through their own gold, cattle, grain — and manuscripts. The kinship organizations and communities. several-hundred-­ thousand-­ item­ histori- Many of the Spanish-­language writings cal collection, containing both materials they produced were collaborative and imported from elsewhere in the Islamic

palimpsestic documents containing tran- world and those copied locally, included POLITICS scriptions of legal briefs interwoven from texts on a wide variety of topics: poetry, different periods of time, translating not music, African history, Islam, medicine, only one language into another but also science and mathematics, and so forth. As the spoken word into written form; native the city developed its library, its leaders CULTURAL dictation or testimony was sometimes also commissioned mosques, including filtered through a mestizo interpreter and the magnificent Djingareyber, Sankoré, 319 Shannon Mattern

and Sidi Yahia mosques, which served as for preservation of the material documents centers for Islamic scholarship, and which, and with equipment and funding for their like much of the city’s architecture, were digitization. Other private collections have constructed from banco, a mixture of mud used Western funding (from the Mellon and straw, on a timber frame. and Ford Foundations, for instance) to con- When the Moroccan army invaded struct their own private libraries — the Bib- in 1591, its soldiers looted the libraries liothèque Mamma Haidara, Bibliothèque and carried its preeminent scholars off to al-­Wangari, and the Bibliothèque Allimam Marrakesh. Yet many of Timbuktu’s manu- Ben Essayouti — and initiate their own dig- scripts survived — secreted away in private itization efforts. Here at these sites, again, homes (many families later established local and global politics converge. their own private libraries), hidden in trunks Yet digitization is no fail-­proof or caves, or buried in the sand (over the defense.16 Another attack, this time from years, some items have been carted or Islamist insurgents, occurred in 2012, and sold off to foreign museums or libraries, the Malians’ centuries-­old preservation too). This literate history has also remained strategy — burying their written heritage a popular secret: “Even most Malians in the earth — attracted global media have known nothing about the writings, attention. The Tuareg tribe allied with believing that the sole repositories of the Islamic militants and seized Timbuktu. The region’s history and culture were itiner- jihadists, Hammer (2014) reports, ulti- ant musician-­entertainers-­oral historians mately abandoned the Tuaregs, declared known as griots,” reported the Smithso- sharia law, and began attacking anything nian Magazine’s Joshua Hammer in 2006. haram: “Eventually the militants set their Musician Toumani Diabate, who claims a sights on the city’s ultimate symbols of fifty-­two-­generation-­long griot heritage, open-­mindedness and reasoned discourse: told Hammer: “We have no written his- its manuscripts.” The dormant network tory” (Hammer 2006). That written history of manuscript-­activists sprang to action, has been strategically concealed repeat- smuggling over 350,000 manuscripts — by edly throughout Mali’s history, each time donkey, by boat, by night, often through a city or village’s written culture has been jihadist checkpoints — to safety in Bamako. threatened by colonial invasion, flood, fire, “The people here have long memories,” or by tribal or radical Islamist insurgency. said reporter Sidi Ahmed. “They are used Yet over the past several decades, to hiding their manuscripts. They go into archaeologists and archivists have begun the desert and bury them until it is safe” 1

2:3 November 2016 to call attention to the documents and (quoted in Gwin 2013). • focus on their preservation. Much of this Early in 2013, French troops arrived work has been centered at the Ahmed in response to new threats from al-­Qaeda Baba Institute, which in 1964, with sup­ (much of what follows is informed by

POLITICS port from several other Islamic countries Hammer 2014 and Schultz 2013). Ham-

and from the United Nations Educational, mer reports that, at that time, the city Scientific, and Cultural Organization was preparing for its Maouloud festival, (UNESCO), sent its staff across the which involves a public reading of some

CULTURAL country in search of the diasporic manu- of their most revered manuscripts. The scripts. In 2009, the institute moved into jihadists, faced with both impending

320 a new home with proper climate control French resistance and an impending haram AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

ritual reading, threatened to destroy the Then, both children and adults “formed manuscripts as a show of force against a chain to pass the banco from hand to the French. On January 25, the jihadists hand to the sound of beating drums and entered the restoration and digitization flutes” (UNESCO 2007). And by consult- rooms at the Ahmed Baba Institute and ing ancient documents, the city’s written burned 4,202 manuscripts. Despite this heritage, they were able to refurbish great loss, most of Timbuktu’s written heri- the western facade of the Djingareyber tage was preserved — by digitization, yes, Mosque’s inner courtyard. Again, we see but also by mule and mud. The jihadists mud and text entwined in urban develop- never ventured into the basement storage, ment and restoration, in the creation and deep in the building’s foundation, where maintenance of urban communities, in the they would have found 10,603 restored cultivation of distinctive cultural identities, manuscripts. Thousands of other written and in international development. documents were shielded, too, behind mud walls or buried in sand, where they Standardization: Bricks and Concrete have hidden during so many times of trial. Before bricks were uniformly manufac- Before we leave Timbuktu, I should tured, they featured a great deal of local note that mud has even more long-­ variety, informed by local materials and standing and widespread applications in local masonry customs and the idiosyn- preserving the city’s cultural heritage. crasies of individual masons’ work. Some Not only have mud and sand helped to of the oldest dried bricks, made around obscure Timbuktu’s written artifacts and 7500 BCE from shaped mud, were found thereby prevent their destruction but mud in present-­day Turkey, and the earliest fired has also proven integral to the mainte- bricks, from around 3000 BCE, were found nance of its architecture, which embodies in Indus Valley, in present-­day Pakistan. the city’s spiritual and cultural heritage. Yet even in ancient Rome, the manufacture Residents have used banco to rebuild, of bricks was standardized — they came brick by brick, mausoleums destroyed in in bessales, or 1-­foot-long modules; recent years by al-­Qaeda. And since the sesquipedales, 1.5- foot-long; and biped- fourteenth century, Timbuktu’s residents ales, 2-­feet-long — and they featured have regarded it as their “religious and stamps identifying the name of the clay social obligation” to contribute to mainte- field or brickyard figlina( ) where they origi- nance of the city’s mud mosques, which nated, the name of its owner, the name of are constantly threatened by geological the brick-­maker (officinator), and the con- and climatic forces, particularly engulfment suls in office during its manufacture (Adam by sand (i.e., “desertification”) (UNESCO 1999: 293; Anderson 1997; Bodel 1983: 2007). In 2007, UNESCO reported that at 1). As Jean-­Pierre Adam explains, “These least prior to the mosque’s recent for- bricks and their subdivisions are found at

mal restoration (funded by the Aga Khan absolutely every level of the buildings as POLITICS

Trust), the community had contributed to a well as in walls, frames, arches and lintels, restoration “ritual” at least biennially. After vaults, floors or heating installations.” By the banco was delivered and kneaded, the the nineteenth century, the introduction master mason, “well armed with magic of wire cutters and dryers, brick-­pressing CULTURAL spells, applie[d] the first clods of banco machines and extruders, and other while the others chant[ed] incantations.” machinery dramatically routinized and 321 Shannon Mattern

standardized the production of bricks, reform the modern construction industry which are today composed of clay-­bearing (Vossoughian 2014: 46). The A0 sheet of soil, sand, and lime or concrete. paper, one square meter in area, could By the 1930s, a German architect be proportionally linked to a hypothetical named Ernst Neufert sought to further “standard-­format brick” via Neufert’s rationalize construction by publishing Octametric System, a set of norms based a set of architectural standards, the on an eight-­part subdivision of the meter. Bauentwurfslehre (published in English The regularity of the Octametric System as Architects’ Data), which remains today would purportedly increase the efficiency a valuable resource. He drew heavily on and cost-­effectiveness of the construction his teenage experience as a bricklayer. process and would allow builders to use Inspired by the work of Die Brücke ( Inter- the brick as a unit, an inscription, of mea- nationales Institut zur Organisierung der surement: one could count the number geistigen Arbeit), a Munich-­based group of standard-­sized bricks to determine a dedicated to the organization of intellectual room’s dimensions and then plan for its work and the development of standardized appointment with standard-­sized formats, he sought to build upon their furniture and appliances. The bricks, archi- efforts to normalize paper dimensions. tectural historian Nader Vossoughian He argued that “standard [paper] formats says, “are thus media — that is, tools of constitute the basis for the dimensions communication — as well as materials, of furniture used for writing and record instruments of construction. They are keeping. These are also constitutive of the intended as instruments for regulat- dimensions of spaces” (quoted in Vossou- ing — and not just building — buildings” (47). ghian 2014: 39). Standardizing these Paper, a substrate for writing, gives various infrastructures would facilitate the shape to bricks and the furnishings in circulation of ideas, promote easy transla- those brick-­built rooms. Those bricks, in tion between disparate industries, save on turn, could be read as measurements of storage space, and promote what he called a room’s dimension. And according to “rapid design.” Notably, Peruvian villagers Vossoughian, the standardization impulse came to a similar conclusion by the late that links those two forms together — nineteenth century: standardized uses of that makes the brick have to conform to paper — particularly, the way that it could the paper’s proportions — also manufac- allow them to record information in tabular tures the need for more writing. “Over formats and to maintain separate, consis- the course of the twentieth century,” 1

2:3 November 2016 tent books for different topics Vossoughian (2014: 49) writes, “it • (labor records, marriages, census, etc.) — increased the designer’s dependency on ultimately demonstrated that paper handbooks and manuals, which centralized matched, if not surpassed, the strengths and homogenized the production of archi-

POLITICS of their khipus, which had long served as a tectural knowledge.” Further, he notes: “It

tactile form of proto-­infographics (Solomon stimulated the spread of design systems, and Niño-­Murcia 2011: 83 – 97). which regulated architectural decision-­ Neufert saw parallels between making across multiple scales. . . . It

CULTURAL the proportions of standardized paper reimagined the ‘art of building’ (Vitruvius and Renaissance architecture, and he [the first-­century BCE Roman architect

322 proposed that similar principles could and engineer]) as a system for organizing AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

and arranging dimensional norms, which Adrian Forty (2012: 16) explains, chem- interpolated the architect as a kind of ists and engineers developed cements; ‘computer’ — that is, as someone who cal- industrialists sought to commercially culates, computes, and organizes. Finally, exploit cement production; and “ordinary it anticipated the phenomenon of digital builders,” originally aiming to improve on design, which replaces the drafting table traditional rammed-­earth construction, with the programmable ‘black box.’ ” developed, often by trial and error, “the Concrete has had a similarly radical practical application of the material and impact on architecture, allowing design- subsequently the technique of reinforcing ers to reimagine the “art of building.” It it with steel.” is liquid, poured rather than installed in Also like brick, concrete is both mod- units, and chemically active. That liquid ern and premodern, unnatural and natural, metamorphoses into solid form within in its mix of primordial materials and new mere hours of the pour. According to techniques and technologies. For millennia, architect Francesca Hughes (2014: 119), civilizations have been mixing burnt lime- concrete’s material properties transformed stone with sand, aggregates and water, construction and opened up new possi- and using it as a mortar — but cement, a bilities for conceivable designs. Yet this binding component of concrete, has also material untamedness also made it a prime occurred geologically for millennia. Natural target for standards and specifications, deposits, where limestone has reacted for “criteria for performance and written with oil shale, have been found in Israel. instruments of its own control” (126).17 As we discussed earlier, the Romans used “No other construction material’s handling pozzolana, volcanic sand, in their cement. had ever, nor has ever, been so keenly Yet this ancient material concrete is also determined,” Hughes argues. “The quan- an essential ingredient in Italian architect tification of every aspect of production, Antonio Sant-­Elia’s (1914) recipe for a futur- every small move of the laborer’s body ist architecture of calculation and “auda- prescribed, the degree of vigorousness cious temerity,” and it has “contributed to with which a tester might knead a sample, the formation of modern architectural the pressure with which a cement trowel identities in an age of unprecedented might be applied to smooth over the top urbanization” — with its ubiquitous office surface of a filled mold — all was set down, slabs and housing blocks — and monoto- dictated ad absurdam” (119). Traditionally, nous suburbanization (Cohen and Moeller the “embedded knowledge” of laborers 2006: 6). It found high-­profile, progressive and foremen, about both material science champions in the likes of Le Corbusier and and quality control, had proven sufficient Louis Kahn. Concrete has also allowed for on the construction job site. With the the creation of new, technically sophis- imposition of standards, however, Hughes ticated forms: shells, extended spans,

says, “such knowledge was effectively cantilevers. Still, its “crudeness” and POLITICS lent both form and formality (extracted the craft of its production, Forty (2012: and written)” (127). Laborers’ intuitive 32 – 33, 34) argues, have also “provided a understanding of the material was thus means of reconnecting with architecture’s externalized and formalized in writing. That supposedly primitive origins in mud.” CULTURAL externalization of knowledge paralleled a American architect Paul Rudolph, a noted division of labor: as architectural historian brutalist (from béton brut, meaning “raw 323 Shannon Mattern

concrete”), reportedly complained that overall quantity consumed, its use by American concrete contractors’ focus on self-­builders in poor countries probably precision gave their work a “thin metallic-­ exceeds all other applications. In the like quality.” “Concrete is mud,” he said. shanty towns of the world, its use is “I work with concrete not against it. I like characterized by ingenuity rather than mud” (quoted in Forty 2012: 23). innovation: new or even relatively old Concrete also embodies an ambigu- developments in concrete technology are ous politics. Cement production involves irrelevant, what matters is the way small mixing limestone with clay, along with amounts of reinforced concrete are made shells, chalk, shale, slate, sand, iron ore, to go a long way.” Outside the shanty and/or other materials, and baking at high towns, those new developments — temperatures to produce lumps of including the creation of thin, elastic high-­ “clinker,” which is then ground up and performance concrete or the integration mixed with gypsum and limestone. The of optical fibers to generate a translucent process — from burning the lime, to pow- material — have made possible new “forms ering the kilns, and ultimately transporting of expression”: decorative grainy surfaces the materials — is a source of significant or the use of photoengraving or digital carbon emissions (Forty 2012: 69 – 70; etching to inscribe imagery or pattern Portland Cement Association 2015). In into building skins, allowing, Cohen and comparison, older building materials and Moeller (2006: 6 – 7) suggest, “for a tech- techniques, like rammed earth and mud-­ nologically based architecture parlante,” brick, require significantly less energy. Yet an architecture that speaks its function or across a building’s life cycle, concrete, with identity through form.18 its high thermal mass, requires relatively little energy for heating and cooling and Writing on Walls: Industrial Materials thus proves quite efficient (Forty 2012: and Indigenous Inscriptions 70 – 71, 73). Still, as a global commodity like Concrete has also historically been used — steel or oil, concrete is traded worldwide, in unsanctioned practices, peripheral to the often via the thousand-­plus ships owned world of famous architects and interna- by the massive Germany company Heidel- tional construction companies — to provide bergCement (see HeidelbergCement 2014; a platform for voices speaking in marginal Forty 2012: 101). Despite the standardiza- languages. Concrete facades and walls, tion of this global product, however, there those ubiquitous urban partitions and is still room for local variation: when we barriers and screens, have given rise to 1

2:3 November 2016 mix uniformly produced cement with local their own epigraphic habit. Of course much • labor, steel, and aggregates, concrete has been written about the history of urban can exhibit local variations, inspiring dis- graffiti as a marker of territory or a means cussion of the material’s potential regional of reclamation, or of individual or collective

POLITICS characters — for example, a Japanese or a expression. Anthropologist Julie Peteet

Swiss concrete (Forty 2012: 103). (1996) has studied graffiti on the concrete, Perhaps place can thus be written in cinder-­block, brick, and stone walls of the concrete, too. It can speak to class politics, occupied West Bank at the height of the

CULTURAL as well: “In global terms,” Forty argues intifada, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (2012: 40), “reinforced concrete is one of For Palestinians, she argues, that writing

324 the new ‘technologies of poverty’ — in has served simultaneously to “affirm AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

community and resistance, debate tradi- painted semipermanent signboards on their tion, envision competing futures, index his- facades, and “the strip of wall underneath torical events and processes, . . . inscribe the row of upper-­floor windows provided a memory,” “provide political commentary,” continuous space for commercial billboards “record events and commemorate mar- that were mounted on fixed frames” tyrdom,” and “issue directives both for (Chattopadhyay 2012: 139, 141). Informal confronting occupation and transforming posters, which advertised films or intro- oneself in the process” (140 – 41).19 These duced political candidates, added a fleeting marks — typically created by Palestinians surface-­layer of applied text, “changing and erased by Israelis — undoubtedly the materiality of the wall and its claim to carried very different meanings for each. obdurate permanence by showing up its Yet both groups, as well as those foreign susceptibility to resinscription and transfor- to the region and the conflict, could read mation” (151). the walls “much the way an archaeologist At the very top of this palimpsest, reads stratigraphy — layer by layer,” with an additional layer of informal wall writ- superimposed texts reflecting the tempo- ing by subaltern and marginalized groups rality of an unfolding dialogue, or, as Peteet manages to overpower the official and puts it, “victory in an ongoing battle,” a commercial scripts. In the process, “barometer of discontent and resistance” Chattopadhyay says, it also challenges the (139, 145). The flat, banal, brutal face of a permanence of state and corporate infra- concrete wall, whose act of dividing and structures.20 Writers often first whitewash denying served as a profound symbol of the walls to create a fresh space for their deep conflict, seemed to invite agonistic inscriptions, many of which then employ inscription. “The riot of signs on stones, visual effects that mimic the shapes and and their erasure,” Peteet argues, “signaled materials of the facade; these writers and a contest over place and its definition. It their scripts “appropriat[e] the wall by made the stone walls into encoded tablets, following its geometry of surfaces, solids, public, didactic, archival, and interventionist and voids,” and “resonating” its “patch- spaces of riposte” (148). work plaster and . . . exposed brickwork” Meanwhile, Calcutta hosted a different (Chattopadhyay 2012: 152, 155, 158, battle of public lettering — between official 161). The wall is thus not simply a blank and commercial signage and informal wall substrate; its mud and concrete give form writing. According to architectural and to the writing it supports. At the same urban historian Swati Chattopadhyay, the time, in “talking over” the facade’s official early and mid-­twentieth-­century city was scripts — house numbers and commer- clad in layers of text. Building facades — in cial billboards — this political wall-­writing plaster and brick, and more often, by the “express[es] the wall’s impermanence early twentieth century, concrete — featured and malleability, . . . bring[ing] forth new

their owners’ names and building names, intentions and forg[ing] new readership and POLITICS dates of construction, street names, and political agency” (162). The banality and house numbers, all of which were embed- brutality of concrete thus offer opportu- ded in the buildings’ walls, “their perma- nities, again, for homegrown means of nency staking a claim in the city in the local inscription, for the subaltern to have CULTURAL longue durée” (Chattopadhyay 2012: 139; a voice. see also Tappin 2002). Businesses also 325 Shannon Mattern

The Mud and the Mark their walls and written symbols to negoti- Mud, that most humble of geological ate political forces at various scales. resources, and its material analogues — Writing and urbanization are entan- clay, stone, brick, concrete — have supplied gled materially, politically, economically, the foundations for our human settlements culturally, and historiographically. And as and forms of symbolic communication. In we’ve witnessed in the recent destruc- our mud-­brick walls and clay tablets and tion of many treasures of the world’s concrete buildings, we can observe the cultural heritage in the Middle East, those aggregated histories of communication most humble geologic resources — when and urbanization; we see the integration of molded into bricks and texts, into monu- Kulturetechniken’s dual lineages of culti- ments and manuals for living — are power­ vation — engineering the earth and training ful emblems of, and lightning rods for, the mind. Written decrees and urban plans cultural politics. Wind, rain, and sand will have proven instrumental in marshaling continue to take their toll on these geolog- the resources to bring our settlements and ical media — our ancient monuments and cities into existence, molding cities from cliff-­carvings — thus gradually diminishing clay and codes and cables, and in regu- the archive from which we can write lating and standardizing the use of those and experience our shared histories. But resources. The complexity of urban exis- an even more potent corrosive force, it tence then necessitates the production of seems, is the hubristic destruction inher- more and more written records. We some- ent in a radical form of Kulturetechniken. times observe formal parallels between The media of sledgehammers and bull- our written texts, our building materials, dozers and dynamite are equally powerful and our urban morphology, as in Ibb and “symbolic operators,” as Siegert might call the colonial New World — and we often them — not through their cultivation and find that our cities and our media reflect inscription of meaning but through their one another in their operative logics and erasure. politics. Our bricks and stones can even speak their own geologic parlante, reflect- Notes ing the distinctive character of a place. 1. Images illustrating the article, prepared for a And various cultures of writing — like those May 2016 talk at the University of Amsterdam, etching lines into the Peruvian landscape, are available in Mattern 2016. those carving on stones in China, those 2. The materiality of the historical record conditions the possibilities of historiography. As Innis collecting manuscripts in the mud-­and-­ ([1950] 2007: 29) noted: 1

2:3 November 2016 timber city of Timbuktu, those generating • household bureaucratic archives in post- The significance of a basic medium to its colonial South America, or those protest- civilization is difficult to appraise since the ing, in spray paint on concrete walls, in means of appraisal are influenced by the media, and indeed the fact of appraisal

POLITICS Calcutta and the West Bank — have used appears to be peculiar to certain types of those bricks and stones as a platform for media. A change in the type of medium expression. While their public inscriptions implies a change in the type of appraisal have held different meanings for different and hence makes it difficult for one CULTURAL populations, those public writers have civilization to understand another. The invariably, through their mark-­making, difficulty is enhanced by the character

326 reshaped the cities they lived in and used AGGREGATING HISTORIES of WRITING and URBANIZATION

of the material, particularly its relative the first communication medium” and that permanence. Pirenne has commented on “too few histories of information acknowledge the irony of history in which as a result this architectural power; too few histories of of the character of the material much is information are environmental.” preserved when little is written and little is 6. Much of this passage on epigraphy is drawn preserved when much is written. Papyrus from my “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure” has practically disappeared whereas clay (Mattern 2015). Malcolm McCullough (2013: and stone have remained largely intact, but 118 – 21) also acknowledges epigraphy as a form clay and stone as permanent material are of environmental communication in his Ambient used for limited purposes and studies of Commons. the periods in which they predominate will 7. For more on the material properties of public be influenced by that fact. lettering and their modes of address, see Drucker 1998, 2010. 3. In a 1975 report by the National Academy 8. Jane Webster (2008: 118) concurs that of Sciences, a group of materials scientists “individuals at all levels of Roman society” — and engineers wondered about the cultural including slaves — made literary and (non-­ and methodological implications of materials linguistic) figural inscriptions, bothdipinti development: How might the materials used (painted) and graffiti (carved). See also Keegan to produce historical records inform the nature 2014 and Mouritsen 2011: 127 – 35. of writing, and thereby shape a culture’s 9. As Laura U. Marks (2010) notes, however, language and their “mode of thought”? How some Islamic art traditions, particularly did the angular script necessitated by the reed Persian paintings and carpets, did allow for the stylus and clay tablet shape Sumerian thought? representation of animals or human figures. “The differences between the cuneiform and 10. See also Bernhard Siegert’s “(Not) in Place: The hieroglyphic culture,” which used a more flexible Grid, or, Cultural Techniques of Ruling Spaces,” medium, papyrus, “were made dependent on the in Siegert 2015 (97 – 120). differences in materials available, quite as much 11. Archaeologist Timothy Pugh has recently as were the mud-­brick and stone architecture of discovered that the Maya site of Nixtun-­Ch’ich’ their respective regions” (National Academy of in Petén, Guatemala, inhabited from 600 to 300 Sciences 1975: 1 – 14). BCE, was organized in accordance with a clear 4. Johanna Drucker (2010: 139) says that grid structure (Jarus 2015). inscriptions such as these, as well as 12. Rama (1996: 24) also acknowledges that similar inscriptions on the limestone palace during the nineteenth century, the graphic walls at Babylon and the tomb paintings of universe, the “universe of signs,” expanded ancient Egyptian monarchs, constitute spaces in dramatically beyond the “mute text”: “[Neo-­] which “authority is constituted through spatial Baroque discourse bloomed with a profusion of signs.” She explains: “These monuments are emblems, hieroglyphs, apologues, and ciphers, all frontal in their mode of address: flat surfaces commonly incorporated into theatrical displays large in scale and authoritative in intention and along with painting, sculpture, music, dance, and effect. They dwarf their viewers and often, as at decorative use of colors. . . . The best examples Behistun, are placed in a position so difficult to of this discourse are obviously not the mute texts access that they appear to have been produced that we have conserved but in these ephemeral POLITICS

by a superhuman force. . . . The speaking subject festivals of the arts, best represented by the of monumental spaces entertains no dialogue triumphal arches that commemorated great with the spoken subject.” events.” 5. Malcolm McCullough (2013: 140), in his 13. Rappaport and Cummins (2012: 121) note that study of “ambient,” or environmental, CULTURAL these territorial claims were also performed: communication, notes that “buildings were landholders “rolled on the ground, tearing up 327 Shannon Mattern

bits of turf to symbolize the act of claiming that identify the location of electric wiring, possession.” communications and gas lines, and sewers. That 14. Much of this passage on Islamic spiral texts and marking system emerged when, in June 1976, urban form is drawn from my “Deep Time of a Los Angeles construction crew working on a Media Infrastructure” (Mattern 2015b). road-­widening project cut through an oil pipeline 15. Vitruvius, the first-­century BCE architect and that was much nearer the surface than they engineer, wrote his De architectura, the only had anticipated. The resulting explosion caused surviving architectural treatise from antiquity, on a much destruction and resulted in nine deaths. In scroll. As Carpo (2001: 13) explains, the materiality response, California instituted its DigAlert spray-­ of his writing informed the advice he dispensed to paint utility marking system, with electric lines fellow architects: “Vitruvian architectural theory identified in red, sewers in green, communication did not escape either in its form or content from lines in orange, and gas lines in yellow (American the conditions of use inherent in the manuscript National Standard 1991; DigAlert 2015; Harrison medium.” He couldn’t rely on the accurate 2014; LAOneCall 2015; Stamp 2013; Twilley reproduction of any illustrations he might choose 2011). to include in his text, and furthermore, “there were in his day . . . so many ignorant architects References that Vitruvius preferred to be obscure rather than Adam, Jean-­Pierre. 1999. Roman Building: Materials teach ‘to the multitudes of those who do not and Techniques. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis. understand’ ” (17). American National Standard. 1991. Safety Color 16. Consider also various cultural organizations’ Code. Washington, DC: National Electronic use of 3-­D modeling and image databases to Manufacturers Association, www.scribd.com “preserve” those heritage sites destroyed or /doc/59771358/ANSI-­Z535-­1991-­Safety threatened by ISIS (Farrell 2015). -­Color-­Code. 17. “That an epistemological trend — such Anderson, James C., Jr. 1997. Roman Architecture and as increasing precision, quantification, or Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University standardization — might be directly accelerated Press. by the physical characteristic of certain materials Azevedo-­Salomao, Eugenia María, and Catherine R. is telling. It reveals the possibility that such a Ettinger-­McEnulty. 2005. “Indigenous trend might directly stem from a deep-­seated Contributions to City Planning in New Spain.” fear of instability of form and matter relations, Repenser les limites: L’architecture à travers an instability most embodied in a material that l’espace, le temps et les disciplines (Changing has both liquid and chemically active properties” Boundaries: Architectural History in Transition), (Hughes 2014: 126). inha.revues.org/289. 18. On architecture parlante, see Harries 1998 Banham, Reyner, 1990. “A Black Box: The Secret (70 – 72) and Forty 2000. For concrete Profession of Architecture.” New Statesman and inscriptions, see the work of Herzog & de Meuron Society, October 12, 22 – 25; reprinted in A Critic 1

2:3 November 2016 and Wiel Arets. • Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, edited by Mary

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Shannon Mattern is an associate professor of media studies at the New School. Her writing POLITICS

and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities (2007), Deep Mapping the Media City (2015), and the forthcoming Ether/Ore: Archaeologies of Cities and Media, and she writes a regular column about urban data and mediated infrastructures for Places Journal. You can find her at CULTURAL wordsinspace.net. 331