Benjamin Fraser

Madrid's Retiro Park as publicly-private space and the spatial problems of spatial theory

The scholarly focus on the production of space necessitates a thorough reassessment of the static categories employed in the analysis of spatial processes. Emphasizing space as a process, this essay calls attention to the recent implication of Madrids Retiro Park in larger processes of capital accumulation. At the same time, it highlights the insufficiency of the tempting yet problematic distinction between public and private space that obtains in easy solutions to the struggles over city-space. As many critics have pointed out, there is design flaw in the idea of public space—it can never explain how a given space, such as a park, comes to be free of the ‘private’ (personal and structural) interests operating throughout its societal context. The story of the Retiro ultimately foregrounds the pivotal role of city-space in the drive for capitalist intercity-competition and suggests that the latter process is insufficiently confronted by idealized notions of the role truly ‘public’ spaces might play in radical democracy and citizenship.

Toward an Urban Cultural Studies

relations which mask them. (Lefebvre 2008, 80) To properly understand the relationship between the cultural critic and the static cultural text, it is necessary to realize that the boundary of the text is only the conceptual limit for a reified—an alienated—view Urban Alienation and Cultural Studies 65 of culture. Properly understood, the relation in question is not one between the critic and the product to be analyzed, nor even between the critic and the artist as necessarily mediated through the work of art. Instead, it is a matter of seeing that the significance of criticism comes from a simultaneous interrogation of both the work of art and its social context. Cultural studies analysis, thus, seeks to resituate the cultural product within the context and terms of human relationships. This may seem a commonplace for many, but certainly not all, contemporary readers (note, of course, that this has not always been the case; cf. Williams 2007b, 165), but I wish to make another subsequent leap in articulating what I call an urban cultural studies framework inspired by Lefebvrian thought. My focus here, however, is on a very particular form of cultural critique, one that goes by the somewhat chimerical name of cultural studies. Whereas there appear to be many invocations of cultural studies—that is, arguments abound over whether the term evokes a political commitment, one specific intellectual inheritance or another, or merely a generally anesthetized appeal to “culture”—I find the definition offered by Raymond Williams to be the most convincing and the most succinct. In his view, cultural studies consists of “the refusal to give priority to either the project or the formation—or, in older terms, the art or the society” (Williams 2007a, 152). This is to say that you cannot understand an intellectual or artistic project without also understanding its formation; that the relation between a project and a formation is always decisive; and that the emphasis of Cultural studies is precisely that it engages with both, rather than specializing itself to one or the other . . . Project and formation in this sense are different ways of materializing—different ways, then, of describing, what is in fact a common disposition of energy and direction. (original emphasis; Williams 2007a, 151) The mention of “energy and direction” is quite important (and relevant also to Lefebvre’s own articulation of a rhythmanalytical method; see Lefebvre 2006a; also 2002, 2005). Facing a static cultural product, the critic’s task is thus to return from what is effectively an abstraction, an alienated extraction, to the shifting relations that at once underlie its production and reception in a given context. That context—as Lefebvre’s oeuvre makes clear—is an inherently urban context.49 What makes a Lefebvrian cultural studies different from, say, a cultural studies grounded in the work of Williams (see Gorak 1988; 66 Toward an Urban Cultural Studies Williams 2007a; Seidl, Horak, and Grossberg 2010a) is its explicit confrontation with the necessary primacy of the urban theme. Williams’ dual-reading/reconciliation of what he called “culture” and “society” (2007b: 163–165) effectively becomes a simultaneous reading of both “urban culture” and “urban society.”50 Seen from the vantage point of a (somewhat traditional but newly reconfigured) literary and cultural studies grounded in textual criticism, the task of the urban cultural studies critic is thus to venture across and outside of the boundary of the individual work of art to grapple at once with the realities of urbanization and its alienating effects. At their base, the methodological aims of a Lefebvrian urban cultural studies maintain a close relationship with those of Williams’s view of cultural studies (albeit inf lected more explicitly by questions pertaining to the urban problematic)—thus, in the dialectical process of uniting work and world that is synonymous with the praxis of scholarship, we disalienate ourselves from the dogmatically fictional approach to texts just as we also disalienate ourselves from the seemingly factual immutability or “givenness” of our collective extrafictional experience.51 Notwithstanding, we perhaps do well also in returning to Lefebvre’s critique of the fragmentary—“specialized/compartmentalized”—understanding of the role played by academic disciplines. To the degree that criticism is a part of an ongoing process of learning—and this is most definitely so, whether conceived as scholarly conversation, as an indirect catalyst, or a direct inf luence on students, or as a conversation taking place at the scale of community—it must eschew the progressive encroachments that capitalism has made into the realm of education (paradoxically—a realm whose autonomy from other aspects of life itself owes to the bourgeois fragmentation of knowledge discussed in Lefebvre 2003a, 1996). Effectively allying himself with critics such as Paolo Freire and bell hooks (a.k.a. Gloria Watkins) who have denounced a style of “banking education” inf lected by the capitalist reification of knowledge (see Freire 1970, 1998; hooks 1994; Rowland Dix 2010), Lefebvre similarly wrote that “An educator is not a mere conveyer, nor is the institution called ‘university’ a warehouse” (1969, 156) where learning can be reduced to a product in accordance with the capitalist logic of exchange (141). In this sense—and by way of conclusion—the essential relevance of “alienation” to the formulation of an urban cultural studies method can be approached in three overlapping disalienations. First, methodological disalienation: in the reconciliation effected between “urban culture” and “urban society” (a la Williams), there operates a potential disalienation of specialized disciplinary knowledge. Second, a disalienating Urban Alienation and Cultural Studies 67 view of cultural products: novels, films, music, comics, and so on, acquire new meaning to the extent that they are restored to the shifting urbanized and urbanizing environment in which they are necessarily produced and consumed—what is at first an alienated object (cultural product) becomes a part of urban cultural production. Third, a disalienation of the learning experience (Freire, hooks, Lefebvre): where knowledge itself becomes not a capitalist “deposit” but rather a process of folding the individual learner back into the movement of a necessarily complex urban society. Building on this discussion, the next chapter looks even more closely at the relationship between artistic discourse and the urban phenomenon in theoretical terms.

THE WORK OF (CREATING) ART

While engaging the process of artistic creation at the Creative Growth Art Center (CGAC) in San Francisco, California, Judith Scott produced numerous enigmatic three-dimensional fiber and mixed media sculpture pieces that subsequently received international attention. Approaching Scotts life and art from the perspective of Disability Studies – understood as an expressly political project – takes us beyond the limitations of the label of Art Brut/Outsider Art and of questions of artistic communication to properly situate her activities at the CGAC as work in both a social and economic sense. Judiths story – and her representation in a recent Spanish documentary film by directors Lola Barrera and Iñaki Peñafiel – suggests that in aspiring to achieve greater social and economic inclusion for such marginalized populations we must challenge the pervasive clinical paradigm that frames disability as lack and go further by cultivating sustainable, meaningful work experiences, such as that offered by the CGAC to people with developmental disabilities. Ultimately, creating art has the potential to be such a form of meaningful work.

The ‘kind of problem cities pose’: Jane Jacobs at the intersection of philosophy, pedagogy, and urban theory

The matter of cities is, as urban critic Jane Jacobs argued, a complex problem akin to the life sciences. As a rich tradition of philosophical and geographical thought has suggested (Bergson, Lefebvre, and Harvey), the city is not a thing but a process. In order to reconcile process methodology and pedagogy, this essay explores six key ideas distilled from Jacobs’ classic work The death and life of great American cities. These six pedagogical tenets suggest a radical departure from the framework of ‘banking education’, denounced by both Paolo Freire and bell hooks, and emphasize the need to engage students in an interdisciplinary and self-directed investigation of the city rooted in their own experiences. Incorporating the ideas of thinkers from many disciplinary traditions, this essay emphasizes that knowledge is a process involving the ongoing formulation of complex questions rather than the search for simple answers.

Ildefons Cerdà's Scalpel: A Lefebvrian Perspective on Nineteenth-Century Urban Planning

Employing his methodological scalpel, Ildefons Cerda cut into the urban fabric and created just as many problems as he solved. Today, the legacy of the piecemeal approach to urban life advocated by Cerda persists in its instrumentalist and inadequate focus on the built environments of cities without paying enough attention to the complex relationship between social, cultural, and political factors out of which the city is produced. A Lefebvrian reading of Cerdas urban theories (in his Teoria de la construccion de las ciudades, Teoria de la viabilidad urbana, and Teoria general de la urbanizacion) highlights the methodological and philosophical premises that may have prevented the Catalan planners socialist-utopian dreams from being realized.

THE BERGSONIAN LINK BETWEEN EMOTION, MUSIC AND PLACE: FROM THE “MOTION OF EMOTION” TO THE SONIC IMMEDIACY OF THE BASQUE BAND LISABÖ

One of the recent sea changes in geography has been the priority rightly given to emotion, as evidenced by the creation of the new journal Emotion, Space and Society, to give just one example. The context of this ‘‘emotional turn’’ is concisely and compellingly explored by Deborah Thien in her ‘‘Observation’’ titled ‘‘After or Beyond Feeling? A Consideration of Affect and Emotion in Geography’’, where she documents the importance of contributions to the critical conversation made by scholars grounded in feminism, geography, culture, philosophy, sociology and neuroscience. But it is perhaps Thien’s own formulation of affect that remains with the reader of her piece long after that act of reading has faded from the realm of immediate perception. Drawing on Nigel Thrift’s characterization of affect as the ‘‘how’’ of emotion (Thrift ‘‘Intensities of Feeling’’ 64), she puts it masterfully: ‘‘affect is used to describe (in both the communicative and literal sense) the motion of emotion’’ (Thien 451). The ‘‘motion of emotion’’*there may not be a more splendid way to capture the main push of the contemporary work being done by theorists across the board to revitalize simplistic models of experience previously dominated by overly rational approaches (understood in terms of both object and method) through a complex approach that reconciles quality with quantity. Encapsulating a tradition that can be understood to resonate with Bergson’s exploration of emotion and place (Bergson Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory), emotion does not merely mean something, it does something. In short, emotion moves. Recently, there has been quite an emphasis placed on emotion through the study of ‘‘emotional geographies’’ (Anderson; Anderson and Smith; Davidson and Milligan; Ettlinger; Tolia-Kelly; Wood and Smith) just as there has been a significant increased attention on the connection between music and geography (Anderson; Morton and Revill; Connell and Gibson; Smith ‘‘Beyond Geography’s Visible Worlds’’, ‘‘Performing the (Sound)World’’; Waterman; on music and sociology see DeNora). Benjamin Fraser

Baroja's Rejection of Traditional Medicine in El árbol de la ciencia

The traditional paradigm of medical practice is wholly spatial. It proceeds by division*spatially isolating and extracting affliction from its surroundings. In so doing it severs the physical body from the social body and methodologically cleaves the concept of disease from the concept of health which it takes as its necessary, if idealized, counterpart. Yet in opposition to this traditional medical paradigm of spatialized difference there is a growing body of nursing theory and practice which acknowledges the interdependent relationship between the affliction and its environment, the immanence of the physical in the social body, and the porous, if not friable, boundary between the concepts of health and disease themselves. This paradigm shift in healthcare and its accompanying distinct approach to disease permit a new reading of a now classic twentieth-century Spanish text*Pio Baroja’s El arbol de la ciencia (1911). In its depiction of the plight of the disillusioned medical student and protagonist of the novel, the ‘precursor’ Andres Hurtado, Baroja’s work prefigures nursing theorist Margaret Newman’s explicitly philosophical method of differentiation*one grounded implicitly in the works of Baroja’s

Disability Art, Visibility and the Right to the City: The Trazos Singulares (2011) Exhibit at Madrid's Nuevos Ministerios Metro Station

During May 2011 (ending May 15th) an intriguing exhibition titled Trazos Singulares was on display at Madrid’s north-central metro station of Nuevos Ministerios. The exhibition comprised some sixty works by thirty artists with developmental disabilities, and significantly, the work of artistic production was itself performed on site between the 5th and the 8th of April.1 This simple decision has an understated significance. Many times, of course, the public appearance of the artistic work is separated in space and time from the moment of its production such that the artistic product takes on an existence separated from the producer. Those who appreciate art tend to become accustomed to this sort of disembodiment. Nonetheless, if we are to take to heart the somewhat predictably rhetorical spirit of the speech with which José Ignacio Echeverría inaugurated the exhibition at the Nuevos Ministerios station—(“El arte no entiende diferencias ni conoce barreras sino que promueve la integración y la autonomía de las personas”)—the artistic producers of the Trazos Singulares exhibition are not merely being integrated symbolically through the integration of their artwork into Madrid’s transportation network, they are also Benjamin Fraser is Associate Professor at The College of Charleston, Managing Editor of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and Executive/Founding Editor of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies. Among his publications are Disability Studies and Spanish Culture: Films, Novels, the Comic and the Public Exhibition (Liverpool UP, 2013)—which emphasizes intellectual disabilities such as Down syndrome, autism, and alexia/agnosia—and Deaf History and Culture in Spain (Gallaudet UP, 2009).

THE ART OF ENGINEERING: THE BRIDGE AS OBJECT AND METHOD IN JUAN BENET'S FICTION

It is well known that prior to publishing what is arguably his novelistic masterpiece (Volverás a Región, 1967) Juan Benet Goitia (1927 1993) was already an established civil engineer dedicated to the construction of numerous public works throughout Spain. Notwithstanding, Benetian literary scholarship has relegated this fact to the status of a mere biographical anecdote such that it is difficult to find extended discussions of relevance to engineering work in studies of his literary production. As reflected in contributions by those who knew him to the ‘‘Acto de homenaje a Juan Benet’’ published in the Revista de Obras Públicas in 1994, a year after his death, Benet in fact straddled two worlds. José Antonio Torroja Cavanillas comments that ‘‘Juan Benet fue a la vez ingeniero y escritor, o si se prefiere, escritor e ingeniero. Serı́a difı́cil decir qué palabra deberı́a preceder la otra’’; ‘‘[Juan Benet] cultivó por igual y de forma permanente su actividad o ‘su profesión’*de escritor y de ingeniero, y no sólo las amó a ambas por igual, sino que jamás renegó de una de ellas para dedicarse en exclusiva a la otra’’ (Baeza 63, 63 4). Félix de Azúa and Vicente Molina Foix go further in this respect, suggesting that Benet identified himself first and foremost as an engineer, and only secondarily as an author (‘‘siempre dijo ser un ingeniero que escribı́a, y nunca le oı́ cambiar el orden de las palabras’’, Azúa, in Baeza 65; ‘‘Juan Benet era Ingeniero de Caminos antes y después escritor’’, Molina Foix, in Baeza 75). Although there can be no doubt that he excelled in both fields, lamentably literary critics have been slow in coming to assess how Benet the engineer necessarily influenced Benet the author. Apart from a brief but compelling section at the close of a recent essay by Tatjana Gajic (36 8), few critics have ever attempted a sincere reconciliation of Benet’s fiction with his profession as an engineer. A classic essay by Pere Gimferrer makes an earnest attempt to document Benet’s exploitation of his professional vocabulary as an engineer of roads, but then moves quickly from this topic to the mythical and allegorical dimensions of the author’s works (49). Generally speaking, the tendency of critics has been to see his professional experience as only tangentially relevant to his literary production, falling into a binary (engineering/ literature) of the sort that is routinely exploded through his sophisticated and complex fiction. Marı́a-Elena Bravo’s otherwise splendid essay (‘‘Juan Benet Before History’’), for example, is dangerously close to suggesting that engineering was, for Benet, Benjamin Fraser

The public animal in Barcelona: urban form, the natural world and socio-spatial transgression in the comic “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987) by Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the comic “Un cocodril a l’Eixample” (1987) by Pere Joan and Emilio Manzano within the urban context and modern history of Barcelona. Two specific sites are instrumental to this reading: Ildefons Cerdàs nineteenth-century design of the Eixample district and the development of the Parc de la Ciutadella. In its story, formal presentation and iconic signification, the comic draws upon and further contributes to the striking presence of animals within Barcelonas cityscape and its urban imaginary. As with the historical examples of a mammoth statue and a taxidermy whale, the movement of Pere Joan and Emilio Manzanos crocodile through the comics representation of Barcelona draws attention to persisting contradictions surrounding public space, knowledge of the natural world and Catalan urban identity. This study employs an urban cultural studies perspective rooted in the work of Lefebvrian theorist Manuel Delgado Ruiz. Its sections analyze the relation of form and content in the four-page comic, address the urban history of the Parc and the Eixample to underscore the geographical coordinates of the comic and investigate the legacy of exotic animal histories within the urban context of Barcelona.