PAVILION

Financial Imaginaries:
Toward a Philosophy of the City
[260]
by Reinhold Martin
For over a century, the social relations of
the metropolis have been linked analytically
to capitalist circulation, a link that is
still clearly audible in the term “global
city.” This applies in both the narrow,
deterministic sense that would privilege
the mechanisms of techno-economic
globalization, and in the broader, more
inclusive sense that would assign to
social and cultural processes a semistructural
role in shaping the pulsations
and interchanges of economic life. In
either sense, the city itself seems to
stand as a receptacle, a sort of archaeological
site for holding these dynamics in
place long enough and firmly enough to
study them in all their complexity.
This scenario was inherited in part from
the great thinkers of modern, metropolitan
experience, from Simmel to Weber to
Benjamin, with Marx and Engels just over
the horizon. Their cities, Berlin and Paris,
with London, Moscow, and New York just
outside the frame, gave the term
“metropolis” its phenomenological texture.
For his part Benjamin, reading
Baudelaire, was able to imagine the
Parisian arcades as paradigmatic of the
circulation of both commodities and
dream images through the interstices of
“modern life,” primarily through the literary
device of allegory. This insight would
eventually be inverted and transformed in
that same city into the Situationist dérive,
with the help of which a later cohort of
urban thinkers, from Lefebvre to De
Certeau, would draw their lines in the
sand: sous les pavés, la plage.
But this tradition, which extracted general
principles from what late twentieth century
urbanists would eventually call the
“historical center” of European cities (for
which the barricades of May 1968 are an
ironic emblem), has become a rather
quaint, if not entirely irrelevant, vantage
point from which to approach the “world
around” dynamics of today, to borrow a
term from the idiosyncratic lexicon of
Buckminster Fuller. We can let Fuller
stand here as a late representative of the
counterproposition, incipient in modern
architecture and urbanism and thoroughly
manifest in mid-century modernization
discourse and the policies and practices
that it generated, that the modern city
was a node in a much larger network that
could only be apprehended and managed
from above. Just as the inside-out,
bottom-up view of the city and of modernity
in general, from Benjamin to the
Situationists, was enabled by technologies
of perception that ranged from the
reading glasses of the dandified, pedestrian
flâneur, to the plate glass in which
the arcades were enclosed, to the vividly
painted panoramas that destroyed perspective
and enfolded distant horizons,
so too did the aerial, eventually planetary
view have its technical media. These also
had partial roots in the European nineteenth
century, in aerial photography (as
Benjamin intuited) and in imperial cartography,
but they would only be fully
expressed in the multi-screen, computerized
war rooms of the Cold War, mirrored
in the control rooms of NASA or the
Soyuz programs, and eventually miniaturized
in GIS and Google Earth.
The globe, as a dynamic object of perception
and manipulation quite distinct
from its antecedents in the history of cartography,
is a prerequisite for the concept
of globalization, and the design problems
that it generates, from the problem of
visualizing in real time the rapid pulsations
of “world around” financial markets
to the problem of predicting long term
weather patterns, are its materialization.
However, it is important to recognize that
historically, our two vantage points, from
the street and from the control room,
develop simultaneously rather than in
sequence. Though it may be tempting,
therefore, to assign to each a valence—
negative for the dominating, leveling perspective
from above, positive for the situated,
everyday perspective from below—
and hence to oppose them as two terms
in a dialectic of modernization, we would
do better to recognize the inherent limitations
of the analytical frame thereby
described.
This requires a theorization of media that
exchanges the eschatology of a
McLuhan or, for that matter, the millenarianism
of a Baudrillard or a Virilio, for the
rigorous materialism generally associated
with the term “archaeology” as elaborated
by Foucault and others. The
archaeological perspective, which
emphasizes the interaction between
ways of seeing and ways of knowing,
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