Urban Arabesques: Philosophy, Hong Kong, Transversality 1786614111, 9781786614117

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Urban Arabesques

New Critical Humanities Series Editors: Birgit Kaiser, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Utrecht University Timothy O’Leary, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong Kathrin Thiele, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory, Utrecht University This series has a twofold aim: to apply the best humanities methodologies in the study of a wide range of issues that are of global, transnational significance, and, at the same time, to develop a self-reflective critique and transformation of those methodologies themselves. The books in this series will contribute to a reimagination of critique itself: its powers, its strengths, and its possible effects. Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought Jacques Lezra Naturally Late: Synchronization in Socially Constructed Times Will Johncock Urban Arabesques: Philosophy, Hong Kong, Transversality Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

Urban Arabesques Philosophy, Hong Kong, Transversality

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. 6 Tinworth Street, London, SE11 5AL www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78661-411-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931534 ISBN: 978-1-78661-411-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78661-412-4 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

for Kanta, Duncan, Melissa, Subo, and for all who love, have loved, and will love Hau Wo Street

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix

Introduction: Threshold—Arabesques, Hong Kong, and the Material Poetics of Philosophy

1

 1 Cities within the City: Traversing the Streets

12

 2 The Arabesques of the Urban: Foliage, Frames, and Twists

33

 3 Thinking Streets: Transversal Empiricism

51

 4 The Lobster, Unleashed: The Peculiarity of Philosophy

74

 5 Ghost Money: TransRational Cash and the Non-Modern

89

 6 Kino-Surfaces: The Cinematic Streets

104

 7 Politics on the Streets: The Pink Panther, Yellow Umbrellas, and a Prolepsis

118

 8 Street Walking: The Peripatetics of Thinking

135

 9 Stepping Outside: Rhythms of the Streets

152

10 Everyday Life and the Urban Arabesque

170



179

Conclusion: Immensity

vii

viii

Contents

Notes181 References191 Index203 About the Author

205

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many friends and family, past and present, whose presences hum through this arabesque. The students participating in the Transdisciplinary Research Exchange between the University of Hong Kong and Utrecht University—along with co-conspirator Rick Dolphijn— have, in particular, all taught me to walk the streets of the more-than-humancity with a different eye, a different ear, and a different gait. I am grateful to the editors at Culture, Theory and Critique, who have allowed me to incorporate an earlier version of “TransRational Cash: Ghost-Money, Hong Kong, and Nonmodern Networks.” Finally, my deep appreciation goes to Frankie Mace, Rebecca Anastasi, and the rest of the team at Rowman & Littlefield International; Birgit M. Kaiser, Timothy O’Leary, and Kathrin Thiele, Terra Critica’s Editorial Board of the New Critical Humanities series; and to the initial reviewers of the manuscript, all of whose suggestions have made the book much more conceptually crisp and evocative. All the stupidities remain mine.

ix

Introduction: Threshold—Arabesques, Hong Kong, and the Material Poetics of Philosophy

Philosophy is not much. It is next to nothing, but it addresses and is addressed by everything. Philosophy is the risk of thought and thought entails incessant exposure, an exposure that cannot be absolute for that is tantamount to death, but that needs just a little bit of shelter to create a life on the streets of the world. An edge on which to balance. This is called living. ­Nonphilosophy— such as art, literature, a stanchion, viruses and galactic clusters, a stray dog, paleography, the entirety of the taken-for-granted everydayness—is a necessary accompanist of philosophy, establishing the historical conditions that sets philosophy into motion. This accompaniment takes, for us, the form of a speculative pragmatics of the urban. Experience, contingencies. Orange warning cones in the road. A blue magpie in the tree outside the window. There is, first, a snag, a stutter, a frisson of interest. Something that gets our attention. This sheerness of the city with its swarms of obscurities, eroticisms, and (im)possibilities instigates the attempt to write the philosophical poetics of the city, a poetics that is always material. This writing—there are many other names for it—is never an enclosed game within something called “language”; it is always an opening-out that occurs as the movement of an idiosyncratic style producing a material-conceptual breach of what-is. Double-pincers are always at work and the lobster awaits us. Philosophy is taking to the streets and the streets, from a certain angle of the ear, speak with philosophical accents. Cities within the city appear. This incision of scrawls—signatures preserved in the concrete of sidewalks— called a philosophical poetics passes through relays both human and nonhuman, expressing expositions as it moves diagonally, transversally, and in swerves that I will call an urban arabesque. The city keeps a beat. “Differentiation,” as Gilles Deleuze has succinctly defined it in the most condensed possible definition, “is the movement of a virtuality actualizing itself ” (2004, 40). 1

2

Introduction

That, actually, is all that needs to be said and after such a sentence philosophy cedes to poetry. Philosophy, nonetheless, likes to keep playing its own version of the game, keeping its own beat, and perhaps there is another thing or two to be said, after all, about thinking the city and the multiplicities in which the city thinks. Extension and thought are inseparable and they move in an unpredictable manner: “To think is always to follow the witch’s flight” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 41). This (dis)placing movement of the seam of differentiation breaches all urban surfaces of the what-is in a transversal empiricism that travels across the city in all of its dimensions, creating seeable and unforeseeable next steps as a yes-yes that, on occasion, asserts itself as a no. Affirmation carries the negative beyond itself. Such a transversality is material, differentiable across a number of scales, and expressive. It moves unpredictably in nonlinear loopings of an arabesque that is edged with a startlingly luminous green. This “image of thought is based not on the general idea and critique, but rather on singularity and affirmation. Its procedure is not syllogistic triage but mutual inclusion” (Massumi, 2015). Interfaces and interpenetrations. Transversality is a mutuality always in flux in which all things, in distinct and singular styles, interpenetrate all other things, sometimes close at hand and sometimes at infinite distances. The arabesque, moving simultaneously in all directions, is a figure for the ontology of the whole, an unknowable but necessary ideality—a kind of transcendental mirage—and also in its fractal formations a figure for the myriad ways in which cities city. Constellations of materialities, affect, image, concepts, and the event of sense accompany one another in a precisely determined and always opening structure of urban everyday life. Nothing special, quite miraculous. Hong Kong, where I happen to find myself living, is material thinking at work. We are in the midst of reinventing the language that expresses the enigma of materiality, and mattering is an “excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (Coole and Frost, 2010, 9). In this domain of “new ­materialism”—an insufficient but useful shorthand—bodies are “materialsemiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects” (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2010, 166). Philosophy, writing as an incision across styles, and the movement of the city are mutually migratory. They travel together, making new maps of appearing and counter-actualization and “we have to admit to the fact that Hong Kong was invented. It was one of the most marvelous inventions in human history. Hong Kong has been a work of fiction from its very beginning” (Dung, 2012, ix). The sea, sometimes quietly and sometimes with the turbulence of



Introduction 3

the sublime, washes through all of the urbanizations of thinking and the thinking that thinks the city. Hong Kong is replete with ants, branches broken by the winds of a typhoon, molecular interactions, utopian dreams, electronic cash, the distant boom of black holes, wild boars that roam the streets and the Kennedy Town MTR station, political jostling and protests, the immersion of the digital, a neon sign turned off forever, and a complex history of border crossings into and out of the city. We do not yet have an adequate language for this immense reimagining of the relations between materiality, the city, and philosophy, but it is slowly taking shape, in bits and pieces, as it approaches us through all the crises gathered together in our moment on the Earth. Since everything is in immeasurable motion, we will also have to attend to ways of provisionally stabilizing this motion, of capturing affect, of creating holds for concepts and perceptions, and articulating—in its structural sense—the “meta-stability of thresholds of sustainability” (Braidotti, 2014, 172). Movement and holds: this twisted lattice of experience is a necessary relation of the poetics of a philosophy of the urban. Everything flows, but Hong Kong and its inhabitants, its imaginaries, its architectures, its films, its tragedies, its aspirations all exist as islands of quasi-stability that intersect in a series of vortices that traverse each other. What habits and holds do the streets, the sea-strewn rocks along the harbor, the slick laser show, one glittering mall after another, the threats to the yellowcrested cockatoos and to the multiple languages of the city offer to us and to our nonhuman accompanists? Two concepts that articulate such a taking-hold and provisionally holding-fast are J. J. Gibson’s “affordances” and Arakawa and Gins’s “landing sites.” An affordance occurs at the symbiotic interface of an organism (a human being for instance) and an environment (a city). It is the accomplishment, or attempted accomplishment, of the provisional organization of perception, need, and a surface. As Gibson says, “Perhaps the composition and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis, for it implies that the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meanings are external to the perceiver” (1979, 119). We will have to ask about this “externality,” but value and meaning are in the world for thought to catch hold of and for the conscious subject of thinking to encounter and rearticulate. The worlding of Hong Kong is an event of sense, an aesthetics that hosts, supports, and exceeds the strictly cognitive modalities of the logos. Arakawa and Gins have remarked that “landing sites” are contact points at which “attention and conceptual activity come together in perceptual learning . . . they act on the sited-awareness hypothesis to explore the initial events

4

Introduction

of ‘pointing, selecting, determining’ and may be said to co-originate all sites’ ” (Arakawa and Gins 2002, cited in Keane 2005, 3). Pointing, selecting, determining: each of these, entwined, is an act of connecting, orienting, and moving ahead in time via a twist of spatialities that are taking shape. There are three fundamental ways in which to land on a site: Perceptual Landing Sites: “All designated areas of specified action (visual, aural, tactile, olfactory, proprioceptive, kinesthetic, somaesthetic (pain) . . . the initiating site of all sites.” Imaging Landing Sites: “Fill in areas not captured by [Perceptual Landing Sites] . . . extend and diffuse surfaces and volumes of less discrete patches of world.” Dimensionalizing Landing Sites: “Insert depth where needed” . . . “register and determine the bounds and shapes of the environment.” (Arakawa and Gins, 2002, 5–22; summarized in Solovy, 2013, 155) Everything cleaves, they say, a simultaneous holding-close and a leaving. Although rhythms and temporalities differ from site to site, moment to moment—and this differing is timing—this is a succinct description of the experience of everyday life as well. We come and go; things come and go; the city comes and goes. Like the concept of affordance, the landing site is an entangled constellation of complexity in which “world” and “self,” “subject” and “object,” “city,” and “thinking” are inseparable. “Like life, perception carries on: what it produces are not percepts but perceivers in person. It tunes their attention. Affordances are the ways in which things come into the immediate presence of perceivers, not as objects-in-themselves, closed in and contained, but in their potential for the continuation of a form of life . . . that occur on the wave-crest of its incipience” (Ingold, 2018, 39, 42). The and is the conjunction of an incipience that conjugates and multiplies. What type of affordance or landing site might the city itself serve as? This terminology gives us a precise function for surfaces, metaphysical or otherwise, and reminds us that the surfaces for sense, sensibility, and style are materialities. Landing sites form both an “epistemology, a theory of firstperson knowledge building, and to a consciousness practice, a discipline for firming and loosening our hold on landing, happening. The study of the body, the organism that persons, landing, is the study of how the body can land further, inner, wider, longer, also. To include the walls and floor, and to assume no ceiling” (Prohm, Funambulist Papers #53). Architecture is the first of the arts and we are walls, floors, windows, joints, and the turning of corners. We are buildings and dwellings and there is no ceiling. We live open to the weather.



Introduction 5

The bedeviled consciousness of the cogito is not first, for the body is first an architectural body, a cinematic body, a virtual body, and a body of the Earth. It is full of light, sound, and action, pixelated and torn by infinite holes, interstitialities, and passageways that leave an opening for the flights of the dragons. It is a socio-poetic body always seeking those affordances with the greatest leveragability for adaptative inventiveness. These socio-techno-poetics are also materially signifying as language practices and all such symbols “must stand in relation to a referential framework, because they gain their significance from a context that must be assumed in order to ascertain the way of dealing with them, of how to ‘apply’ them, as it were. Symbols represent bindingness, needed for orienting the expectation of future developments and for having reasons for counting on anticipating them” (Bühlmann, 2012, 139, my emphasis). What can we count on? How? Affordances; landing sites; practices of languaging as bindings and loosenings. Ana-lysis. These are all means of making-holds in the spatiotemporal flux of chaos that provisionally connect one thing to another. We need clip-ons and plug-ins, pieces of tape and glue sticks as ways of improvising the patchwork of the everyday. We will all be torn away from all surfaces, but, in the meantime, we grope our way along, like a snail in the dark, and try to find new footholds. One foot at a time. In addition to forms of making-fast, this philosophical poetics—a transversal and material critique that affirms footholds, handholds, and releases—also makes use of moving figures of ideas-affect-image that resonate with what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called conceptual personae, which are inseparable from that complex act of thinking called philosophy. “Simply put, if thinking is determined or often represented as and by an image that is distinctive from images of perception, memory, intuition or imagination, then the conceptual personage refers to a special faculty of thinking, which is not to be identified with the subject of the individual philosopher . . . [they are] the original social and collective dramaturgy of philosophy” (Lambert, 2015, 1, 5). The thinker is being projected onto multiple screens. Philosophy and the city—both of which are theatrical and theoretical dramaturgies—are full of masks, screenplays, rivals, actors, mimes, tragedies, histories, and comedies. By developing our own conceptual masks, our own affordances and landing sites, articulating the distances and intimacies within an urban speculative pragmatics, and by counter-actualizing the state of affairs in which we find ourselves enmeshed, we might be able to establish the possibility of a creative ethics of the city that attempts to live up to and live out what comes its way. It will always, however, remain an experiment. All of these operations are performances that depend on an originary and irreducible metaphoricity, not only as a figure of speech but also in the Greek sense of the metaphorai that are “vehicles of mass transportation” and “what

6

Introduction

happens inside and between these different transport systems” (Zournazi, 2005, 141). Metaphors are rumbling and screeching across the city of philosophy with the trans- of transversality, transport, translation, transmission, and transcendental empiricism keeping it all running. This trans- is the essential movement of the urban arabesque. As the city transits and transitions, figures emerge along seams of differentiation that expresses concepts, affect, images, and possibilities. The city shows itself as a “transtopia, a place with transit itself as its destination” (Dung, 2012, 33). In constant exchange. A transit through transitions toward a transit. No wonder we are dizzy. After establishing that “metaphor remains in all its essential features a classical element of philosophy, a metaphysical concept,” Jacques Derrida (1974, 18) concludes that if we “wanted to conceive and classify all the metaphorical possibilities of philosophy, there would always be at least one metaphor which would be excluded and remain outside the system: that one, at least, which was needed to construct the concept of metaphor, or, to cut the argument short, the metaphor of metaphor . . . The supplement is always unfolding, but it can never attain the status of a complement. The field is never saturated” (1974, 18). Metaphor does not come as a derivative of a proper and properly original truth of origin—the sun shining brightly in the azure sky— but it always copresences with the entire question of origin and the question of metaphysics.1 Philosophy as the logic of logos is contaminated from the get-go and metaphor—a passageway of a back-and-forth exchange—opens the field of thought and of the city. It is the condition for the production of figures of speech, figures of material critique, and the necessary poetics of philosophy. The field is never saturated; the virtuality of the event comes and is yet-to-come. This originary metaphoricity—there is always at least the doubling of a two—is the movement of transversal empiricism. Anywhere, anywhen, anything can become a figure or a conceptual persona that acts to illuminate thought and to intervene, usually in an extremely modest fashion, in the lived fabric of the city. We will, among other peculiarities, encounter a lobster on a blue leash that is also said to be God, paper goods and money burned for the ghosts, the Pink Panther ambling through a host of yellow umbrellas, women waiting desultorily at the windows in a sunstruck northern Italian town, a donkey going its own way, and swarms of ideas that bring other swarms along with them. A humming of an immense hive of bees fills the air with its anticipatory vibrations. Transversality—as empiricism, as critique, as thinking, as the mundane—crisscrosses the city as it crisscrosses itself. Blue washes across each page. All of this, which sounds so complicated, is just the simplicity of everyday ordinariness. We wake up, we use the toilet, we shower, we go to work, we eat, we write, we eat, we read, we use the toilet, we shower, we sleep. This is uncomplicated and the very essence of simplicity (for those with the money



Introduction 7

for toilets, food, showers, and books). This is the movement that effortlessly carries us along in our day-by-dayness and upon which everything depends. Perception is almost always a seamless familiarity without surprise, but, on occasion, something intensifies, pricks us, catches our attention. The screen glitches. This may well be an extremely quiet moment, but this small moment of perception—and, to reiterate, it can be anything at all—then takes the shape, slowly and over the times of our lives, of a naggingly ill-formed question that provokes us to look again, to think once more, to run our hand over a wall or a tree, to take out our notebooks, or to take to the streets. We look around for clues, for companions, for enemies. We sniff the air. One can never tell what will happen, but some sort of counter-actualization— a term lifted from Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense—however minor, and often barely noticeable, is called for. The critical figure speaks for itself as an expressive call, but we then work it over, out, and through along transversal axes of thought, which as a speculative pragmatics cannot be separated from action. There is no division between the active and the contemplative life. Extended, rearticulated, positioned elsewhere, reignited. The figure, as it were, presents an aspect of the city as a question, a problem-set, and as an array of possible responses. It poses questions for, and of, urban philosophy. The arabesque of the city happens within worlding as an arabesque and being is univocal in its infinitely differentiating expressivity. The arabesque is the becoming that is being and in a regional ontology of the urban the arabesque is a figure for the becoming of the city. There will be the force of movement, patterns, frames, swerves, and the always provisional boundaries of an infinite continuous variation at work. This continuous variation is, however, on occasion interrupted by a zigzag, an inflected and intensified aspect of the arabesque—akin to the lightning bolt that the Germans are so fond of—that is an immense electrical charge that flashes and is gone, leaving the scenario changed. Quantum nebulae. “How to understand contingency and order at same time, within the same continuum? . . . It’s our most important philosophical problem to solve, not just in architecture but everywhere” (Spuybroek and Mulder, 2006, 246). Our focus along this edge of the arabesque will be to try to understand contingency and order of the event of the city, and we—however we determine this human and more-thanhuman we—will, like the city itself, become figures crisscrossing the edge of an infinite arabesque. To whom and to what will the figures that we are becoming call toward? Hong Kong will, by an accident that has become a necessity, be our primary partner-in-thinking in this iteration of the arabesque, but Hong Kong is not thinkable without a complex history and network of other cities. It will serve as a metonymic opening for the question of the city in general, but all cities are singular, with their own personalities that have to be learned over

8

Introduction

time. Each city requires an attunement. Hong Kong serves as the pivot point because, by accident, I find myself living here, still surprised by that fact and taking note as best I can as a non-Cantonese speaker about what is happening below, above, and on the streets. There is the usual radical passivity of waking up with the day—here it is again as we both recoalesce—alongside the minute scribbles that I make, often illegible, in my passageway through the labyrinth that emerges on a metaphysical surface of a street. Just marks. Scrawls. Hong Kong also observes me thousands of times a day, positioning me on a multitude of scales and precise geolocations. Hong Kong thinks as I think—although we think differently—and thinking is both constrained and unleashed, distributed throughout the alleys, crevices, and eyries of the city. Thinking is an emerging-dissipating entanglement, a displaced and transfigured cogito that repositions both knowledge and the first-person pronoun, fracturing and redistributing it across a vast array of spaces and technologies. The city expresses itself, therefore we are determined beings who step-bystep move with an unpredictable rhythm of transversality. This is urban experience in any city, but Hong Kong, like all of those other cities where I do not now live, has its moods, its eyebrows, its rivalries, its accentuations, its frictions, its injustices, its style. This is the city where, for the moment, I now find myself and it contains multitudes. What-is, possibilities, virtualities, and (non)sense. A majestic row of Banyan trees in Kennedy Town simultaneously cascades down and rises above a massive old stone wall. Arboreality, I know, is frowned upon in some sectors, but treeing depends on how the tree is imagined in its fundamental orientations and upon whether we accept the hierarchy of an orientation of the up and down. Trees, after all, have multiple lateral movements and crowned anarchies, are resplendent as expressive complexities. Beginning their transformations in a small crevice or crack—always a product of the accident of grafting and finding the right affordance—their externalized roots crawl down the sides of massive wall along Forbes Street. Banyan trees speak of the absolute entanglement of “nature and culture,” a phrase in which the “and” should always be heard as a multiplier, a conjoiner, a form of differentiation in which the two are inseparable. “We have to understand that a philosophy of matter, one that explicitly upholds matter as movement, and that therefore doesn’t make a categorical distinction between animate and inanimate—where matter and life are on the same side, so to speak—inevitably leads to an aesthetics of matter, simply because there is not inbuilt distinction between natural and artificial” (Spuybroek and Mulder, 2006, 251). There is only the slightest of twists between these two: nature and culture. Banyan trees, I am told by my friends in the know, do not “stick” or “adhere” to the wall, but



Introduction 9

balance themselves on the wall based on their very sensitive perception of gravity and the inclination of the wall through shooting new aerial roots and shaping their branches. Their roots expand in a fan shape so that they increase contact with the surface of the wall (for structural purposes) but also so that they access as much water as possible. If trees don’t move (like animals) they have the amazing capacity to shape their bodies. Trees cannot run but constantly grow and adapt their bodies to their environment and other life events. The shape of roots on the walls of Forbes Street can be seen as individual expression of personal histories, a slow dance show, a 50 year-old environmental choreography. We move, they grow, we all dance. (Decaudin and Pryor, 2019)2

The Banyan tree is an extremely slow edge of the arabesque in motion: its dark whorls and cavities, its tentacular roots and branches, its choreographies of surfaces of exchange, the stone wall that supports a playground above, and a steady repetition of wedding photography that occurs on the street level. The theater is in motion. The trees await what is to come with absolute patience, watching the restaurants and real estate offices come and go, listening to the children shouting just behind them, or minutely reaching their tendrils outward toward the next typhoon. “If Hong Kong was abandoned,” one scholar has mused, “it would be taken over by banyans in a few hundred years” (De Wolf, 2016, 1). This is one of the infinite cities within the city that vibrates in Hong Kong, a yet-to-come that the we of this moment will never know but can nonetheless consider. In Lam Tsuen, in the New Territories, a Banyan had long been a wishing tree where people would write their hopes on yellow joss paper that would then be tossed as high as possible into the tree. The tiny notes filled with the immense wishes finally grew heavy enough to break a branch of the tree, so a plastic one was installed in a parking lot next to the organic one that could no longer bear the weight of hope, of grief. People do not seem to care what the tree is made of and the wishes keep accumulating. Tin Hau, the Goddess of the Sea, looks on as the Earth gods are honored. Branches have left their shadowed traces on walls from which they have been stripped—by a typhoon or by the decision of the land management ­officials—and in the “Tree House of Kam Tin” the enwrapping tree shows, in relief as it were, the shape of a house abandoned because of a Qing Dynasty edict in 1661. “The ghostly structure of a study hall’s windows and doors can still be seen in the trees roots” (De Wolf, 2016, 4) and the tree is now supported by a pile of bricks and a steel stanchion. The techno-city and the Banyan, bound by the structure of hauntology, have been grafted into one another and are now twisting around each other as they redistribute the elements of the city. Everything in Hong Kong is numbered and I am particularly fond of Banyan #ASD_11SW-AR838_TS012. The green minibuses line the road, parked under its shade in an act of gratitude, and the trees provide a nest for birds

10

Introduction

and insects, filter the air, and are useless for commodification. “Zhuangzi was walking on a mountain, when he saw a great tree with huge branches and luxuriant foliage. A wood-cutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it, and, when asked the reason, said, that it was of no use for anything, Zhuangzi then said to his disciples, ‘This tree, because its wood is good for nothing, will succeed in living out its natural term of years’ ” (Zhuangzhi, Chapter 33). Uselessness certainly has its advantages, but the trees nonetheless speak of this uselessness and the twelve-meter high wall—built in a traditional Hakka manner without using mortar between the stones—also stands as a witness, a partner in weaving the arabesque of the city. The Banyans have watched the history of the city, imaginary and otherwise, play out over time, including the history of the 1894 plague that brutally attacked the local Chinese community in Tai Ping Shan, “Peace Mountain,” a small enclave of winding streets and steep slopes that tumbles along between the Mid-Levels and Sheung Wan. “The sad history of Tai Ping Shan,” Dung Kai-cheung reminds us, “was then buried under the flowers and birdsong of Blake Garden. Giant banyan trees locked in the souls of the dead, their benign roots driving out putrid vapors so that everything implied by the name ‘Peace Mountain’ came true” (2012, 77). Tai Ping Shan is now a lovely area of chic cafés, coffee roasteries, playgrounds, and several remaining Temples where offerings to the gods and to the ancestors are still burned. Oranges are laid at the threshold and at the altars and the Banyan trees are transformation machines that cleanse the air and purify the souls of the dead. In Sheung Wan a battered and unused metal letter box is, in its turn, being transformed by a Banyan’s roots into something else, something rich and strange. (Ovid and Shakespeare are wandering the neighborhood.) Multiple histories meet here and Les murs ont des oreilles, maintentant ils ont la parole, as they said a very long time ago. The walls, like the trees, have ears and the walls, like the trees, speak. The entanglements of bark and tongue. We are, in this benighted age blinded by its own techno-glare, just beginning to learn these new practices of translations and transits of the crossing-over of urban differentiations, and this expressive assemblage elicits thought. We do not know if that will be enough. Philosophy creates concepts, but the concept, on its own, is insufficient, anaclitic: from the Greek anaklínō, “reclining,” and the German of Freud’s Anlehnungstypus, a libidinal type who leans, perhaps, too much upon another.3 Concepts, like the Banyans, need air and water to thrive, and for the city, too, all things lean together, are mixed, need propping up. S ­ urfaces— metaphysical and otherwise—are subjectiles that provide supports that are torn, folded, and provide landing sites. There is inclination, declination; the city is off-balance and therefore movement occurs. Concepts are part of a swirl of the nonsense of the contingencies of the transcendental and



Introduction 11

transversal empirical that produces the event of sense. Hong Kong is neither an allegory of a cave nor a cogito—an illusion to be escaped or a consciousness to act as a breakwater against doubt—but a determinable and interminable expanse. It is immense; it is the ordinariness of urbanicity. Outside the window—and the window, too, is a figure—the dusk comes on as the ridged silhouette of Lamma Island darkens, a smudge of charcoal on paper, darker than the wrinkled intervening sea that shines with a paler hue, as if emitting its own light. The soft lights of the small boats, still fishing or returning to the Central Pier from weekend junkets to the outer islands, are blinking slowly, backed by the sporadic strings of the vaguely shimmering glow from village houses nestled in the dark folds of the island. In the farther distance, the blood-red warning lights of the three smokestacks of the power station glow steadily. Pushed by an easterly wind streaming from Guangdong, the clouds are scudding across the sky, with the moon, I suppose, on its way. A donkey is asleep, standing up, beneath the intricate lacework of the Banyans at the base of the shadowed wall. The stars are out of sight, hidden by the haze of cloud and light. There is a lightning flash on the horizon and the city folds itself into the slow breathing of night. Thinking is a threshold. The streets, awaiting our appearance, welcome what will happen, the event that will come.

Chapter 1

Cities within the City: Traversing the Streets

Hong Kong is philosophy; philosophy is Hong Kong. Differentiable, inseparable. The city and philosophy are events of (non)sense, elements of an ecstatic arabesque that extends its luminous green edges in all directions through unforeseeable experimentations. How might a philosophy of the immanent event of the city—with its history of idealist thought entwined with an active trans- that opens passageways in, through, and across the given state of affairs—continue to make a distinctive contribution to a thinking of the city? How does the city inhabit philosophy and how does the philosophy dwell within the city? Even more strangely, if that is possible here where there can be no guarantee of a measure of counting or accountability, how might the life of the streets be illuminated by that next-to-nothing of that movement of “extra-being” of the event of sense that we call thought? What might the city become as it thinks? “We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. . . . I live in the interstice, yes, but I live in both the city and the city” (Miéville, 2009, 373). In-between: cities and cities: this is the movement of philosophy, which always traverses but is not contained by the ratio of rationality. There are nothing but interstices and relays, momentary transit stops and crossroads. We crisscross the city as the city crisscrosses us and at each instant, as we are swept along by the unbroken surging of the city, we stand at an intersection without the reassurance of the normative regulae of crosswalks, lights, signs, or guardrails. Hong Kong demonstrates the speed and complexity of the movement of contemporary urbanity with a particular clarity, including the hybridity of the “modern,” the confluence of histories of those immense simplifications called “East” and “West,” the proliferation of Kino surfaces across the boundaries of architecture, the vertical density that is dependent on a subterranean burrowing, and the staccato tempo of the 12



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urban jam session. The city—as name, concept, place, and experience—can never become a totalizing form, even with the exorbitant precision of visualdigital surveillance regimes of satellites, drones, and biometrics. All we can experience are fragments, partialities, and the infinitely precarious and precious surface of the event of sense. The city is an n-dimensional kaleidoscope always in motion and the weather is changing as we speak. Affects and effects multiply. Transversal critique, an affirmative movement that emerges from the streets of a city understood as “nonlinear dynamic systems that seem structured yet unpredictable . . . that emerge as a mercurial stabilization[s] of dynamic processes” (Coole and Frost, 2010, 13), creates possibilities and precipitates actualities from the virtuality that is the city. It stirs slowly into motion as the blades on the wind turbine on Lamma Island spin in the evening light or as the tacked together sampan—old tires lashed to its sides—pushes off from the Aberdeen promenade. Matter articulates meaning and meaning articulates matter as the event of sense appears, shimmers, and dissolves. Mercury, always translated, is at work, stabilizing and dispersing as the city, in constant interpretation, travels toward the heavens and toward the deep Earth’s core. It’s all humming along, accelerating, slowing, jolting to a stop. This urban metaphoricity is both on and off the tracks, predictable and unpredictable as to its timing and spacing. Our languages offer an immense treasure of possibilities and our language is poverty-stricken. Like the Ionians who laid the groundwork for the abstractions of Athenian metaphysics, we are now “trying to devise a vocabulary and syntax for a new future” (Bühlmann, Colman, and van der Tuin, 2017, 53) that is no longer oriented around a classical metaphysical organization of something like subject and object, substance and accident, human and nonhuman, but one that might begin to be adequate for the tasks ahead. As part of the Greater Bay Area of 60,000,000 people scattered throughout the Pearl River Delta through Shenzhen, Macau, Zhuhai, Guangdong, and Guangzhou, Hong Kong is both a tiny prick on a map and a place that generates an inordinate amount of services for the region. It is a blinking light, a node within a global network, a lacework of transportation-communicationwater-financial-and-sewage systems, a highly ambiguous legal jurisdiction, a port and a portal, enormously expensive with massive inequities, a hub for education, and a cinematic icon. It is intended, if all goes according to plan, to become a primary financial hub for the Belt and Road Project of the PRC. All of these aspects of the city have been thoroughly studied and are by now saturated with information. What more could the peculiarities of philosophy possibly bring to the discourse about Hong Kong, or by Hong Kong? How might we create a different map when “traditional cartography seemingly instructs us on how to

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recognize and search for places, but in fact its real lesson is that we can never arrive at our desire placed on the map, and, yet, at the same time, we inevitably arrive at its displace” (Dung, 2012, 10)? When we seek Hong Kong, we will miss Hong Kong: there is no stable referent that can be captured by concept, map, language, or image. Hong Kong is motion and as elusive as everyday life. Every place, like every word, is a displacement. This is the milieu in which philosophy operates. Hong Kong is, arguably, the anti-philosophical city par excellence, obsessed with getting and spending, usually driven by a pragmatism of necessity, and always trying to find just the right selfie spot. It is a strange mix of postcolonialism that exists in the ambiguous political space of one-countrytwo-systems governed by Beijing and it produces ongoing calls for democratic reforms and the maintenance of the rule of law. With an intense focus on education and a string of enclaves of artists strung across the city, who are recomposing the industrial buildings of the last generation’s manufacturing exodus or bringing the global elite into projects at M+, Symphony Hall, and Tai Kwun. There is an extraordinary sensorium at work on the streets and an (il)legibility—for a non-Cantonese speaker who will always be a visitor— that captivates the imagination of the feet. A series of hybridities shapes the city, including a mixture of populations, traditions, migrations, architectures, and politics, all of which engenders a means of urban expressivity that calls for thinking. Philosophy flickers, like heat lightning, across the cityscape. As Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid have argued, the normative “realistic” image of the city in the “urban age” is “still fundamentally empiricist. It presupposes that the city can be defined through (some combination of ) statistically measurable variables describing conditions (coded as either ‘urban’ or ‘non-urban’) within a bounded administrative zone” (2015, 5). Since the “urban itself ” is a theoretical figure, however, any attempt to understand the city requires a “new vocabulary of urbanization” and the “recursive [and historical] work of theory” (Brenner and Schmid, 2013, 751, 749) in order to breach the discourse of naïve empiricism, replete with its technical sophistication, that is incessantly working over the surfaces of a city. The city of measurement, planning, and data is an important form of local science, but it is only one of a multitude of the inexhaustible imaginaries of the city in which the dynamic hybridity of the urban arabesque is at work at every instant of every space, including those virtualities of the impossible, the unforeseen, and the infinite cities within the city. Sous les pavés, la plage. The positivism of “realistic” empiricism must be supplemented with a transversal empiricism that will encounter stranger things. Urban philosophy is a transversal empiricism that lives on the streets as a multidimensional field of speculative pragmatics, of materially poetic vectors that crisscross art, politics, history, language, and the techno-capitalist



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disciplines at work shaping the contemporary city. The city is thinking-inmotion and the motions-of-thinking evoke the city as a process of inventive naming that keeps things in circulation. Roundabouts, the underground trains, tourist itineraries, conceptual complexities, money. Immanently excessive along the double seam of a sensuously transcendental swerve, the city turns corners toward the incalculable. There is the event of what is happening, the event of what is happening as the city of Hong Kong, and the event of the event of sense. The event of sense is an immanent doubling of what is given as the everyday state of affairs and the event of sense is the expressivity of what happens as we take hold of possibilities of different meanings emerging from the cities within the city. The event within the event: this is thinking, this is art, this is the freedom of the city as it poses its own questions, including the question of itself. Hong Kong is an agora for the exchange of precious metals, ideas, equities, languages, currencies, histories, signs, images, and options; and, as an exchange, Hong Kong pluralizes. Hong Kong is not-London, not-New York, not- . . . and, yet: Hong Kong is London is New York is . . . There is no city; there is a city. The city has no identity since its identity is a multiplicity that breaks concepts of unified identity. Both of these series of the is and the is-not operate at once, simultaneously diverging and converging, the differentiation of difference constantly at work. It is not because every subject has a different perspective on a stabilized object we call “city” or that the city multiplies its own perspectival possibilities, but, rather, that these operate simultaneously with a provisional taking-hold of a landing site in an attentive manner. This attentiveness implies that the city is indeed readable as a quasi-textuality, but the city is also the unreadable since the excessive, the stain, the fragmentary, and the empty square of the paradox of sense are constitutive of the city, thinking, and experience. X marks the spot of the chiasmus of flyovers, the wakes of the outer-island ferries, and the irreducible spectrality of explicability (which we will explicate as we go). This is the (a)signifying transversality of the urban arabesque-in-motion. An understanding of the city enfolded with thinking and thinking unfolding in the city requires a theoretical schema that articulates how we provisionally take-hold of the localizing ontology of the urban through the expressive event of sense that touches upon the actual, the possible, and the impossible. Following the Stoics, Deleuze has in The Logic of Sense given us just this type of matrix that allows for that which-is and for that which might-become, without limiting the real to a positive—with a fully determinable content— empirical state of affairs. There are, for Deleuze, four intertwined threads of any proposition, the first three of which are: (1) denotation (a “state of affairs” with its correlative criterion of “true” and “false”); (2) manifestation (the expression of one who speaks); (3) signification (the word’s relation to

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general concepts of language that form the “condition of truth” and an “order of conceptual implication” (1990, 14). To these standard categories of a philosophy of language, Deleuze adds an enigmatic fourth: the “paradoxical” dimension of the proposition that is the event that is sense itself. The event of sense, of meaning, and of directionality—we might say an orientation of experience—is supplementary to the other three categories. Neither separable from nor equivalent to these categories, sense is incorporeal, skims along a metaphysical surface, and is evanescent but iterable. It takes two, the iterable oscillations of repetition and difference, for experience to occur, for the city to appear as city. It takes two to tango. The paradoxical, Deleuze explains, has the “function of articulating the two series to one another, of reflecting them in one another, of making them communicate, coexist, and be ramified . . . of assuring the passage from one distribution of singularities to the next. In short, it has the function of bringing about the distribution of singular points . . . and above all, of assuring the bestowal of sense in both signifying and signified series” (1990, 51). This bestowal occurs as the mutable urban spaces of Hong Kong: articulating, reflecting, communicating, ramifying, redistributing singularities into resonating series of meanings. Nonsense—which is not equivalent to the absurd—grants the event of sense as the world worlds in its determinative specifications: in its knowabilities, its possibilities, its impossibilities; in the flows of everyday experience; and in the formalizations that arise across every type of discourse. The city, a series of plans and accidents, is a singularity that gives rise to thought as thought—which is not a category of subjective individuality but a concatenation, a tonality, of interfaces of many assemblages—that articulates the city as a series of multiply dimensioned propositions. These propositions, which fluctuate, include the what-is of the state of affairs, the capacity of manifesting, the complexity of language as a system, and the phantasmatic, the imaginary, and the impossible, all of which traverse through all the other forms of propositionality. Sense is a doubling, with twoness being its fundamental condition of possibility, both individualized and collectivized, historical and futural, depending upon both signifying and asignifying elements, and as both common sense of a shared world and as that which fissures common sense. “Which private event,” Deleuze asks, “does not have all its coordinates, that is all its impersonal social singularities?” (1990, 152). This coordination is complex— involving all four dimensions of the proposition—but it is the paradoxical donation of sense that sparks the event of the city to resonate with the event of philosophy. Sense is bestowed not by God, as the Master of Meaning with a Plan for the Universe, but through nonsense, chaos, and contingencies, an a-signifying action of an impersonal transcendental field that provisionally coalesce into the experience of meaning. “Nonsense is that which has no



Cities within the City: Traversing the Streets 17

sense and that which as such and as it enacts the donation of sense, is opposed to the absence of sense. This is what we must understand by ‘nonsense’ ” (1990, 71). Donation, bestowal. The city happens constantly as the sensibility of sense—there is a working orientation—but the event itself, strictly speaking, must be produced, forged from the happening of sense. (Deleuze will speak of counter-actualization and amor fati.) The city asks each of us how we are going to respond to the questions that it poses of itself. The event of sense is not exhausted by denotation, manifestation, or the things, facts, or properties of states of affairs—the city as a descriptively plannable object that we blast open in order to build a high-rent skyscraper— but, instead, consists of “incorporeal effects,” “non-existing entities,” and “infinitives” (1990, 5). Sense is an “impassive extra-being which is sterile, inefficacious, and on the surface of things: the ideational or incorporeal can no longer be anything other than an ‘effect’” (1990, 7). This is all quite obscure and Deleuze will turn toward Alice in Wonderland, Artaud, Lowry, Fitzgerald, and Bosquet (among others) to support his examination of the enigma of sense, as both a lived and as a linguistic experience. We, in our turn, shall soon encounter a lobster scuttling one pincer clicking in front of the other in a maddeningly slow pace across Victoria Park, the Pink Panther ambling past the Bruce Lee statue on the Tsim Sha Tsui Promenade, and ghosts, waiting hungrily for a meal of scorched money, hovering about the Temple of Man Mo. We are awash. All four circuitries of the proposition interlace with one another. In the usual discussions of the city it is the first three planes that are evoked (and rightly so). Denotation, taken as a description of the empirically factual tells us about the measurements and descriptions of urban space including architecture, planning, infrastructure, and the politics of governance in a given jurisdiction. These are the intersections of a city from different domains of knowledge and they are invaluable. There is, second, always a “manifestation” for there is always “one who speaks.” This “one” might be an individual, a community, a government, a corporation, a biome, a building, or a series of algorhythms—and I will always misspell this word to indicate that we are being drawn into another rhythm—that are more and more pervasive and that run the “smart city” (even when stupidity ensues). The digital surround in which we are imprinted and by which we are habituated brings a new dimension to the contemporary city, since many semiotic motors have come into existence which bypass representation and consciousness but can be counted as real presence in the world with important and sometimes devastating effects . . . these machines do not act on consciousness as such but rather impact directly on the affective level as the “continuous variation and force of existing and potential action” (Guattari, 2014), made concrete by

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asignifying elements, pulsing directly through the body like rhythm, temporal cues, spatial formats, the variations and intensity of luminosity and colour, and sexuality. (Amin and Thrift, 2017, 55)1

These algorhythms that keep watch over us and drive us through the city will be increasing their power exponentially and the human subject is only one strand of a capacity to speak. We must keep a watch in our own turn. Everything speaks—albeit in different modalities, tones, and speeds—and this proliferation of the positions of expressivity is a fundamental change of the techno-imaginative pragmatics that cascades around, through, and inside us. The first two dimensions of the proposition depend, in turn, on the third element of “signification,” which allows us to order chance, contingency, nonsense, and chaos into conceptual networks that link up with one another within and across languages, cultures, and histories. One word leads to other words; one language to other languages. This ordering via language takes a number of different forms, but always depends on the force of a differentiating sieve—a term to which we shall return—to shape turbulence into a “chasmos, a composed chaos—neither foreseen nor preconceived” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 204). It is the fourth “paradoxical element,” however, that is the strangest of all these strange things. This shimmering is the “doubleseries” that subsists in every proposition as it resonates toward both words and objects, allowing us to experience the orientation of meaning: What are the characteristics of this paradoxical entity? It circulates without end in both series, and, for this reason, assures their communication. It is a two-sided entity, equally present in the signifying and the signified series. It is the mirror. Thus, it is at once word and thing, name and object, sense and denotatum, expression and designation, etc. It guarantees, therefore, the convergence of the two series which it traverses, but precisely on the condition that it makes them endlessly diverge . . . In fact, there is no stranger element than this doubleheaded thing with two unequal or uneven “halves.” (1990, 40–41, my emphasis)

Convergence through endless divergence. There is no stranger element than this double-headed monster: the uncanny, the irreducible, the impossible, the gift, the question. The paradox of sense, in which the city participates as one series and thinking as another, is a perpetual motion machine of reflections, sense and sensibility, refractions, distortions, screenings, and shadowings. Thinking, the city shimmers. The city, as an event of sense, enacts a transversal critique of the what-is of denotative language in a torqueing critical affirmation that never operates from an established foundation or points toward its “object” of critique in a unidimensional manner, but, instead, it cuts the city up in all directions as it shapes an exquisite corpse or a Matissean cut-out. It is as if city-thinking is



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akin to an atomic structure that “consists of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by a cloudlike, three-dimensional wave of spinning electrons . . . the atom is a smeared field of distributed charge whose subatomic particles are less like planets in solar orbit than they are like flashes of charge that emerge from and dissipate in the empty space form which they are composed” (Coole and Frost 2010, 11, my emphasis). Materiality consists of flashes in a blurred field of the urban, charged intensities appearing unexpectedly. There is no central core and Central, in Hong Kong, depends on the global network. These zigzags of the breachings of transversality—which exhibit radical variations in their speeds of manifestation—charge the city, creating the possibility for humor, acting, gaming, and inventiveness. Each step an experiment. The cutouts of critique enable us to cutup together, through which we take up the task of making the event. The human subject, a philosopher for example, can critique capitalism, inequality, the state, identity, and the city, but all of these will, as it were, create a matrix for countercurrents that flow backward toward and around the “individual.” The subject—whether human or nonhuman—is already immersed in the field and this is a critique that catalyzes crosscurrents that enable a different cartography to emerge. It is localized and situated, but with repercussions far afield, always provisional and in motion. It gives a temporary hold, a makeshift raft on the sea, and Ishmael is always floating on Queequeg’s inscribed coffin. There is, for example, no final idea of justice or of the “right to the city,” although there are successive enactments of the drive for justice. No solution will stay put because the city does not stay put. The urban arabesque proliferates where it will, an incessant work in progress. We have to work to keep up. A city is always a city within other cities and other cities of the Earth haunt any particular city. Images of Hong Kong—old black and whites of Fan Ho, the Kodachrome of Wan Chai during the Vietnam War, Michael Wolf’s high-rises and street altars, and the laser show that draws spectators from both sides of the Harbor—vibrate, intermix. There are strategies and stratigraphies, data-blizzards and histories, a poetry of the oppressed and the glitz of the glamorous. This is the event of sense and it is a complex infrastructure. Perspectives multiply. Leibniz had already taught us that “things, beings, are themselves points of view,” but for him these opened to each other “only insofar as they converged on one another: the ‘points of view on the same town’ ” (Deleuze, 1990, 174). There is one object, the city, and there are multiple points of view on this same object. This is most often what is claimed for any object of perception or for a concept such as God. The subject brings different angles of sight to the object that is objectified and put-into-place. The object is stable; the subject fluctuates. The object, however, also fluctuates—everything is in a blurred and dynamic field—and for Nietzsche, for example, “the point of view is opened

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onto a divergence which it affirms: another town corresponds to each point of view, each point of view is another town, the towns are linked only by their distance and resonate only through the divergence of their series, their houses and their streets. There is always another town within the town” (Deleuze, 1990, 174, my emphasis). Deleuze wants to insist on the difference between a Leibnizian “point of view” upon a stable object and a Nietzschean “perspectivism” that generates subjects-objects so that a “communication of events replaces the exclusion of predicates [because of the identity of its concept]” (1990, 174).2 The city as a unified concept would mean that different predicates would be excluded since the concept is defined by a principle of identity. Michel de Certeau is certainly correct, at least provisionally, when he claims that the “ ‘city,’ like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties” (1984, 94), but both the city and the proper name are fissured by, for instance, walking and an originary metaphoricity so that a different sense of sense might emerge. This “divergence which affirms”—choose any unanticipated predicate for the city that comes to mind—is one of the characteristics of a transversal critique that cuts across normative boundaries and resonates through all the series of conceptuality and materiality. Differentiable, but inseparable. Contaminated, irradiated. Deleuze names the manner in which we claim this affirmation counteractualization, an essential concept through which he names the difference between what-happens and the event that cuts-through what happens. “Counter-actualization is already infinitive distance instead of infinite identity. Everything happens through resonance of disparates, point of view on a point of view, displacement of perspective, differentiation of difference, and not through the identity of contraries” (1990, 175). The concept of identity, which unifies predicates, is replaced by the resonances of distances provided by infinitives—movement within movement—that vibrate. Dis-placements, differentiations, points of view within points of view. The vertiginous city slowed to a pace in which perception, art, politics, and a slow Sunday dérive can occur. The streets flower into forests of cacophonous blooms and yellow-crested cockatoos call from the murals painted along the alleys of Sheung Wan. There is no enclosure of the concept, of the name, of materiality, or of thought and there is no spatial or temporal enclosure of the city. There are, however, interfaces, membranes, relays, points of contact, and differentiations that are constantly morphing at different rates of acceleration. This is how we make our way through a city as it develops new eyes, ears, fingers, senses, rhythms of walking. Living the city as an assemblage or as an arabesque means “learning to be diplomatic—knowing how to compare and



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reconcile modes of machinic being and thinking that are taken to be equally valid—and developing situated forensic skills—the ‘step-by-step,’ thread-bythread tracing of the various networks and the ‘various trajectories of veridiction or malediction, each defined by a separate preposition’ ” (Latour, 2013, 66, cited in Amin and Thrift, 2017, 31). Prepositions, constantly reorienting us, move the city through its topographical axes.3 As we will see, this “step-by-step” will deflect toward sidestepping, for there is no direct line laid out ahead of time for the making sense of the city and relationalities reorient and redirect the meaning of experience as Hong Kong reverberates, resonates, vibrates, and oscillates. (We are now in a moment of great acceleration.) This diplomatic training, as Latour has taught us to name it, requires that we learn to think differently about Queen’s Road East, Harcourt Road, or Temple Street; about Kwun Tong, Yuen Long, Sheung Wan, or the New Territories, the histories of plagues, wars, migrations, and money. About the human and the other-than-human incessantly unfolding and infolding, opening out like a fan, like the opening notes of a song, like a street with its pedestrians, homeless, asphalt, grit, corners, alleys, and stairs. The city has forms and formats, but each form is flexious. Analyzing how we recognize structuralism, but already undoing any enclosure implied by the term, Deleuze argues that the “elements of a structure have neither extrinsic designation nor intrinsic signification. Then what is left? As Lévi-Strauss recalls rigorously, they have nothing other than a sense (sens = meaning + direction); a sense which is necessarily and uniquely ‘positional’ [that enables] a new distribution of the empirical and the transcendental” (2004, 174). There is, in addition, a pervasive “nonsense of sense . . . a new materialism, a new atheism, a new anti-humanism” (2004, 175). This interplay of new materialism, post-humanism, and nonsense all comes to bear on the transversal critique-in-motion enacted within—although this “within” does not “­contain”—the interstitial and fissured relationship of philosophy and the city, a critique that breaches the city as the creative force of thought and making that moves throughout the more-than-human-city toward a city-yet-to-come. This force of transversality, which always travels across all the subjectobjects of the urban assemblage, can emerge anywhere, at any time, through any figure. It can appear from any direction and it reorients the cities within the city at a variety of possible scales (perhaps that of individual perception, perhaps that of social revolution, or a perhaps that of a natural catastrophe such as a volcano raining ash down upon a city below, creating a city of charred and interred ghosts that will call to generations to come). Most often there is an almost invisible slowness at work, but this is often accompanied by the speed of thought, which travels exponentially faster than light. The multiplicity of the possible vectors of transversal critique is not driven by

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a totalizing vision of a social utopia—no one can predict the best form for the future—but it is, rather, determined as a specific this-or-that in a specific space and time. It works by working-over and working-through the contemporary terrain of the city as concept, affect, image, and machinery. Thinking is situational, but not enclosed, and this creates an opportunity for futurity. This transversality emerges as, or as an accompanist, of the “paradoxical element” or the “double-headed thing” that is pluralized as an endless motion of an arabesque with one filament of excess and another of lack whose disequilibriums produce the movement of sense. This irreality of nonsense and of sense as an incorporeal event is that by which “thought and art are real and disturb reality, morality and the economy of the world” (Deleuze, 1990, 6). The turbulence of transversality fissures the what-is of a common-sense understanding of a state of affairs, thereby creating affective effects in the everyday experience of all the other cities resonating within the city. Nothing can destroy the paradox of sense—whether those forces are naming as definition, technology as a fantasy of the perfect apparatus of the smart city, or what the Pink Panther will encounter as the “General”—for however tightly the linguistic, mathematical, or political net is drawn, the paradoxical eludes capture. It is repetition as elusiveness; it is a shimmering indifference. It allows itself to be neither captured nor held, but it does grant the possibilities of provisional captures and holds. Nets cast into the sea of the streets create new currents, new vortices, new assemblages. Each of the four planes of sensemaking is necessary for undertaking different tasks within across, and from the city. For the denotative to carry its force in areas such as urban planning, accounting, projective modeling, and environmental testing, there must be speakers—the human, the animal, the infrastructural, and the algorhythms of the digital—and a series of translatable and overlapping “natural” and “artificial” languages at work. The paradox of the event of sense is the condition for the emergence of the other three, but the denotative and the paradoxical are not “equal” levels, for they cannot be translated symmetrically into one another. Any scientific proposition, for example, can be poeticized, but no poem, paradox, or philosophy can become a determinable scientific proposition (although one can, following Alfred Jarry, invent pataphysics as a science of particulars). This will disappoint those who have long wished that philosophy were a verifiable science or a clear and distinct logic of propositions. All of these levels intertwine with one another in order to render the city as a quasi-readable text, a trope that emerges as “language” becomes the center of philosophical attention from the entanglement of what we might very loosely call a (post) phenomenological tradition of Heidegger-BarthesDerrida with philosophical naturalism of the Spinozistic-WhiteheadeanDeleuzean tradition that clarifies the immanence of experience. The event



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of sense, of a meaning and an existential dis-position, braids this “doublereading” or “double-expressiveness” into an active resonance of thought of the city and of the city in thought. All of these, except for Heidegger, are profoundly involved in the life of cities—Paris, Amsterdam, London—and this gives their thinking a certain cosmopolitan flex, a take on the technologies of philosophical and material infrastructure, and a streetwise sense of the movement of thought. Heidegger, for his part in the distribution of thought, attunes us to many dimensions but: At no time did he reach the dimension of the city, neither in his disposition nor in his discourse. His entire life he remained somewhere outside the gates, among the inconspicuous and uncanny things of ancient nature, among trees, grass, subterranean tubers, the belfries of small churches. His “clearing” is a forest metaphor, not a reference to the market, the bourgeois space for debate. And because he never made it to the city and the city center, to the agora, to the forum—because of this, that which stands beyond the city, that is to say state politics, contemporary cosmopolitanism, and intercontinental traffic remained even more foreign to him. What oceangoing ships, what capital and media are— means of extension, means of crossing over, means of relocating, onto-kinetic transporters, literally: that which cross on over and out into the horizontally open—he in no way understood or esteemed. (Sloterdijk, 2017, 27)

Heidegger, in other words, doesn’t open himself to, except in the modality of the negative, the horizontality of the “onto-kinetic transporters” of the urban metaphorai. I want to be very careful, though, about hardening these alignments, as thinkers are always talking alongside and at cross-purposes with one another, inhabiting one another even if only in the mode of the negative. Any of these thinkers can be rearranged into new filiations and genealogies; all of them are interested in what goes by the names of thought, nature, poetics, and experience; and, for all of them, “language” always means something other than a closed linguistic system of speaking, writing, and signification. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the “net is not linguistic in scope or origin (the same must be said of double articulation: if language has a specificity of its own, as it most certainly does, that specificity consists neither in double articulation nor in [the Danish Spinozist geologist] Hjelmslev’s net, which are general characteristics of strata)” (1987, 43). Language, of course, has its own specific determinations that are studied by a variety of sciences, but it is also a part of a larger set of stratifications, and their double pincers, at work on the Earth, in the cities. In whatever expressive gestures occur, there are always openings and points of contact: pin-pricks, tears, and folds that create oscillating rhythms of aesthetics as an ontology and the transitory concomitants of a transversal movement that affirms the possibility of inventing new

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ways of living. The street, bringing its past with it, renovates itself. Differing affirms differing. As the evanescence of the everyday life of the city, which coalesces and dissolves sense and the possibility of experience, the enigma is elusive. It steps back, steps to one side. It sometimes zigzags. It stays out of the way to make room for things, for thinking, for art, for building and for the swarming life of the streets. The window, the screen, the wall and the street are all topologically twisted surfaces, and, although there is a fantasy of transparency at work in the common-sense usage of these urban architectures of the insideoutside, there is always a reflection back at the viewer, a slight distortion—a kind of wavering—of what is, and can be, seen. This is the city as we live it moment-by-moment and step-by-step. Sense is sensibility—aesthesis in its classical Greek rather than its modern Kantian form—and it is inseparable from, but not equivalent to, the propositions of language. It is intimate, shared, and immeasurable. “Thought can now go in any direction, it can travel any dimension (for example through tessellation and ribboning), it can entangle in any type of surface (for instance through mosaic and fabric). And it will . . . . An aesthetics is thus ontology” (Dolphijn, 2012, 4). This is not the aesthetics as a category constructed by modernity. Aesthetics is ontology and ontology is aesthetics, but this “is” partakes of paradox. It is the “is” of identity incessantly un- and redone by the “is” of metaphor and the paradoxicality of any comparison. “A thing in para- is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between inside and outside. It is also the boundary itself, the screen which is at once a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside, confusing them with one another . . . dividing them but also forming an ambiguous transition between the one and the other” (Miller, 1977, 441). Aesthetics blurs into ontology that blurs into aesthetics, and these movements of boundaries, screens, light and shadow, affect and atmospheres, projectors, mirrors, and surfaces are the city, are thought. There are always distinctions and definitions at work in urban space—we want to pin things down—but these are all permeable, provisional, and shape-shifting. Each city traverses “historical epochs and maps and in an endless combinatory effort create a strange urban space that seems to shape, to construct an impossible architecture of desires, dreams, memories . . . there is not one ‘entrance’ into the city, but it can be anywhere, each street, each corner, house, each fabric or urban design” (Vrbančic, 2012, 3). The so-called tangible and material city is filigreed—a word that echoes with threads and seeds—with the urban imaginary as each singularity and collective of singularities is immersed in, and emerges from, a crisscrossing field of projective forces that extend themselves on surfaces such as skin, metal, glass, concrete, screens, and streets. An affirmative movement of thoughtful materiality



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opens up as a creative act at least a fragment of the uncountable cities within the city (which are not “there” before the work of transversality). The ergon is always supplemented by the parergon. Concepts fly effortlessly through the vertical humidity of Hong Kong’s financial district and through the wall paintings of Sham Shui Po and Sai Ying Pun. A beribboned lobster clicks its way through Kowloon Park and the Pink Panther strolls jauntily along Harcourt Road, empty except for a solitary walker. Ghosts are everywhere, just out of the line of sight. These are all transversal figures of critical activity—drawn from the built environment, the history of literature, the animations of television and film, and the custom of burning paper goods and money for the dead—which cut unpredictable seams in multiple dimensions of the urban texture. We do not yet know what a city is capable of and critique is generative not, finally, of the negative, but of the unforeseen. Cities are a-bloom with a philosophical efflorescence and philosophy patiently constructs architectures—foundations, tables of value, systems, and the bamboo scaffoldings of reason—within itself even as it laughs at its own deconstruction, its own poverty. The para- of the paradox marks the operation of the trans- as an opening from difference to difference, knots of inflection that enable the recognizability of resemblance, the presence of analogy, and the incessant mixing of the currents that move things along as if time were a river, a typhoon, the evaporation of the rain from the sweltering streets, an immense sea in motion. Sense, the possibility of meaning in which we find ourselves immersed and that we then twist into new configurations, is “an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition . . . It is exactly the boundary between propositions and things” (Deleuze, 1990, 19, 22). It cuts both ways: into the formal structures of language and into the objects that form a state of affairs, but it cannot, since it is incorporeal, itself be cut. It is indivisible, fleeting, indifferent, neutral. To cut and to be cut by; to city and to be citified: these are the expressivities of the propositions that may or may not be actualized in a predictable manner. The city is an evanescent surface, a built and imagined poetics of relations, but a surface is a complex infrastructure of material signification, sensuous signs. “A surface covers or hides what is underneath, even if here is really nothing underneath to hide . . . but the surface also refers to the plane where divergent realms meet and relate, as the surface of the ocean divides but also connects water and air. And no matter how thin it is, the surface remains different from these realms, even while these realms are nothing without the surface that delimits them. Surface sense is posed as an excess” (Widder, 2010, 36). The ocean spills out of itself, its waves hissing against the shore. We are on the shore, looking out at the unknown; we are in the very midst of

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the unknown headed toward the shore. We shade our eyes, but the water and the land become difficult to distinguish. The surface, a meeting-space that differentiates and a spacing of differentiations that conjoins, is a resonance between thinking and the city: The fundamental bond between philosophy and the city is a crucial co-creation, not just as an abstraction or as a history that is encased in a frozen past, but as the ongoing possibility of co-production of the event of sense that brings its memories and blind spots, deaf points, along with it. It is not just because philosophy was born and developed in the city (or quarter, if you prefer) in ancient Greece but because without the framework of the city, there would have been no philosophy. Thought, outside the city, did not have either the autonomy or plurality necessary for the constitution of philosophy. (Ramoneda, 2004)

Plurality, a radical empiricism of variabilities, constitutes both the city and philosophy; the city awaits thought, surpasses thought, accompanies thought, and ignites thought. “There is no philosophy outside the city . . . The identity of the city is a non-identity. This is because its only identity is diversity” (Ramoneda, 2004). Bonded, philosophy and the city differentiate, and bonds can attract, repel, share, and split. They hold energy and create form. The city is a chaosmos, a collective work of mobile art in which we are all collaborators, and, like all art, it passes through, but never completely beyond, the virtuality of a material phantasmicity. Although the city is reflected in the water pooled along the curbs, a philosophy of formal reflection—whether of linguistics, symbolic logic, or phenomenology—will not, finally, be sufficient to the task of thinking the city and the reflectivity of consciousness will not be able to be completed by a philosophy of speculative dialectics. Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel are twisted—but not destroyed—by Spinoza, Whitehead, Derrida, and Deleuze. City-thinking is critique in motion, zigzagging to its own rhythms, and the human is just one point on its arabesque (however important that point may be for all of us). The urban is a pragmatics of speculation, but it never gathers itself into a final moment of the recollection of the whole. Things come and go. They drift toward us, coalesce, dissipate, drift away. The city is empirically and speculatively saturated, but with a micrological edge of green excess—a virtuality, an irreality, an incorporeal effect along a metaphysical surface—that enables the emergence of the next event, and the reflection of a reflection within a reflection in the skyscrapers of Central that are always, as with the magic mirror of the paradox of sense, “perturbed reflections” (Derrida, 1994, 199). The financial institutions in Hong Kong—linked by light-packets to Singapore, London, Frankfurt, and New York—stabilize the flows of currency, the dips in value, and do their best to ensure that the movement creates a consistent rhythm of profit. And if the



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“mysterious mirror” Derrida mentions as he tracks Marx’s itinerary through Capital “does not return the right reflection, if, then, it phantomenalizes, this is first of all because it naturalizes” (1994, 195). The most apparently naturalized of objects across the most banal moments in the absolute banality of everyday life—a street, a bank—are spectral materialities. The city, the self, materiality, conceptuality, the event of the streets: Scheindasein. Dylan Thomas composed that tremendous poetic line that scans the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, and the flower, as we shall soon see, will become a column that will become a temple in a city with an agora and a stoa awaiting thought and then being carried along. The flower will bloom as the arabesque of thought and as the city, proliferating along a series of leading edges of a little something-extra, a little left-behind. It greens. Derrida thinks this “something-extra” in terms of différance, traces and remainders that are not contained or constrained by the concept of being. “The remainder is not, it is not a being, not a modification of that which is. Like the trace, the remainder offers itself for thought before or beyond being . . . without which there would neither be accounting nor calculation, nor a principle of reason able to give an account or a rationale (reddere rationem), not a being as such” (2005, 152). Deleuze, in his own inimitable style, thinks this excess as “extra-being (extra-être),” the minimal aspect of Being that allows the real, the possible and the impossible to inter-act, entre-acte on the edge of a stage of a surface. This little particulate beyond, or outside, that cannot be incorporated into being as a state of affairs “defines a minimum common to the real, the possible, and the impossible. For the principle of contradiction is applied to the possible and to the real, but not to the impossible: impossible entities are ‘extra-existents,’ reduced to this minimum and insisting as such in the proposition” (1990, 56). The bestowal of sense enables the real, the possible, and the impossible to circulate not in a modulated ring dance of a Heideggerean fourfold, but in an ecstatic swarming dance that is called matter, thinking, feeling, art, science, city, philosophy, life, death. This is the absolutely superficiality and the absolute superficiality and absolute profundity of the everyday arabesque that spurs thought as thought attempts to (re)think the city, with which it can never keep pace, and spurs the city to call forth thought, which it can never capture. Speeds are asymmetrical and the city is a clunker, a junkyard, a beam of light. The city is an irreducible riddle that drives us to make sense of the city. The event of philosophy encounters the city as an event and not as an established given of factuality, not as a technical problem to be solved, not as an ethical dilemma to be addressed, and not as a delimited object of consciousness for a subject who is one. The process of citying, to use an awkward neologism, is a first of all a manifestation of phenomenality: the appearance of the city as a particular city: Hong Kong, Utrecht, Kochi, Seattle. Phenomenality

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particularizes, singularizes, but the factuality of the state of affairs is exceeded on every side, which allows sense to occur and with the experience of sense comes a host of doublings. Phenomenality cannot be completely lit-up; it is invariably shadowed, withdrawn, hidden, in-potential. Earth, world, aletheia. There is the moment when day turns to night, but even at noon there is midnight, at midnight noon. This uncanny chiaroscuro is a passing-though of the paradox of sense. This irreality is neither conceptuality nor materiality, for the two are entangled, but that which provides an intersection for the passingthrough of the two.4 For there to be denotation, manifestation, or signification, there must be the passing-through of the paradoxical element, the empty square that enables differential series to resonate with one another. Sense is a coupling and decoupling of divergent series such as signifier-signified, subject-object, and materiality-ideality, and these movements resonate. We fall in love with cities; we hate cities; we dream cities as cities dream us into an unexpected unfolding. Roland Barthes, someone who knew about the punctum and the studium of urban experience, loved “both the city and signs. And this double love (which probably is only one)” led him to believe “in the possibility of a semiotics of the city” (1997, 166). Philosophy has always been a discourse on the erotic and since we are in love with the city, we will encounter many instances of the relationship of the two and the one in relation to the doublings of our beloved. The erotic weaves the urban fabric together provisionally, evanescently, and with the absolute power of an incessant re-turning opening. Détournement. Follow where I beckon. The doubling that is the city is a multiplicity with which “I” establish a distance and an intimacy, an intimate distance. This city in which I live is my city, but I also belong to the city, which shapes me as it pleases. “The body and its environment produce each other as forms of the hyperreal, as modes of simulation which have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each may have had into the image of the other: the city is made and mover into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, its turn, is transformed ‘citified,’ urbanized as a distinctly metropolitan body” (Grosz, 1992, 242). I am becoming-Hong Kong, but with all the historical particularities of both of our situations at play, simultaneously individual, collective, historical, and planetary. The cut-ups of critique express dying as well as vivifications; the fissures in the streets—and in language, concepts, and identities—are green wounds that can be fatal, even though we must risk the exposure. The city doubles itself as (re)presentations and (re)presentations—plans, sketches, novels, algorhythms, films, photographs, maps—have already doubled themselves as the city that we experience. Doubles double vertiginously, but even though we don’t have all the information and we aren’t sure what game we are playing, we all have to lay our cards on the table as we wager on the city: double



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or nothing. It’s all on the line. Let’s say that the “double” and the “nothing” are the conditions for an urban social poetics to occur and that cities are multipliers of meaning whether in architecture, transportation systems, electrical grids, formal and informal art, screens, advertisements, institutionalities of law or policy, or merely the ways in which we all mutter to ourselves as we walk the streets of a city. In the inflected accentuation of material energy that is the contemporary city, the crisscrossings of the digital are swarming through the urban body. All of the physical infrastructure that we take as the very definition of the “solid” or “real”—the Macau-Zhuhai Bridge, the highway tunnel from Central to North Point, the reclamation of land for housing or for an airport—is, in the context of the electrical actualization of the digital, a “space of potentiality that is transversal to the nature-culture dichotomy . . . Thinking in philosophical terms of capacities and capabilities in relation to infrastructures entails the secularization of certain noetic figures related to technics, motion, and power that had a strictly metaphysical connotation while they were connected to cosmological or natural frames of reference” (Bühlmann, 2012, 115, my emphasis). The quantum-materiality of the city, which is just barely beginning to think and be thought, will have certain capacities of binding, taking-hold, freeing, and framing that we have never before experienced and transversal critique, one that is replete with energetic charges and fluctuations, will follow a variety of noetic, and other, figures. Figures will figure, but in the same register as metaphors metaphorize. There is chiaroscuro and the idiomatic rhythms of the interweavings of the “rich indeterminations [that create a] poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical orders of movement” (Certeau, 1984, 162). There is always a stutter-step, a swerve, a shadow that enables the movement of understanding. “Sense always results from the combination of elements which are not themselves signifying . . . sense is always a result, an effect: not merely an effect like a product, but an optical effect, a language effect, a positional effect. There is, profoundly, a nonsense of sense, from which sense itself results” (Deleuze, 1990, 175). In even the dullest of our most boring everyday moments, there is a “strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of ‘meanings’ held in suspension” (Certeau, 1984, 162), a virtuality that awaits a host of possible determinations. The air is electric and we sing, are sung. This is the city and the sense of the city and the constructed order of the plans and the grids of the built environment—all of the conceptual infrastructure of possibility—is “everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order” (Certeau, 1984, 163). Alice goes into and out of the rabbit hole at the same time.

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The sieve is a figure of the city that sorts and reassembles the elements in a quasi-ordering of the urban chaosmosis. The sieve is a concept of a distribution of flows and holes and must be related to those handholds on a cliff, on a rock in a rushing stream, or as a lean-to in a snowstorm. Philosophy, like the city, is both a sieve and a handhold. “The plane of immanence is like a section of chaos and acts like a sieve . . . Chaos makes chaotic and undoes every consistency in the infinite. The problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 42). Affordances and landing-sites to shape consistency and letting-go into the infinite. This sieve-structure of the logos enabled the first philosophers—who emerged from a contingent milieu along the Adriatic Coast and then migrated to an Athens undergoing radical change—to take up philosophy and be taken up by the tasks of thought. “The philosophical sieve, as a plane of immanence that cuts through the chaos, selects infinite movements of thought and is filled with concepts formed like consistent particles going as fast as thought” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 118). The sieve, which will also become a slit umbrella, is a function that finitizes the whirlwind of chaos, slows down its forces so that we can exist, experience, think, and make. It delimits the comprehensible, the graspable, but it also invites us outside and lets us take hold, provisionally, of the passing moment. Each point and each instant of the street is a threshold on the edge of a sieve-slit, a passage and passing-through that is a “movement along movement, something equivalent to stepping out of a door and being carried away by a crowd irresistibly pulling in this and that direction. One finds oneself right in the middle of things, surrounded by a movement that cannot be controlled” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2016, 80). The city has always offered itself to thought and the thinking that we call philosophy has often associated with particular spaces in the city: the Academy and the Lyceum; the small shop of a lens-grinder in Amsterdam; the Albertina in Königsberg; the billiard rooms of Edinburgh; a Turin street where a horse was being flogged; the Café de Flores, the Cabaret Voltaire, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the British Museum. Philosophy now occurs in a coworker space in Sheung Wan, a studio in Ma Tau Kok, a tiny jewelry gallery in Wan Chai, in Kubrick’s in Yau Ma Tei and Nose-in-the-Books in Causeway Bay, in the artists’ library at Tai Kwun in Central, and the Empty Gallery in Aberdeen. And philosophy still, on occasion, occurs in the university. Place and thinking are cogenerative and the city places thinking into a provisional placement. Placing thinking is an actualization and actualization is the “cutting up of the continuous field by real relations and concrete settings such that the ideal differentiations are further determined. This coupure generates an actual being or given object. As Deleuze puts it, actualization is the ‘production of finite engendered affirmations which bear upon the actual terms which



Cities within the City: Traversing the Streets 31

occupy these places and positions, and upon the real relations which incarnate these relations and these functions’ (DR 297)” (Cheah, 2008, 152). The city takes hold of thought, captures our labor, our attention, our pain, our curiosity, and then releases it. The stoa was a shelter from the sun and rain without becoming an enclosed room. It was an in-between and transitional space, neither outside nor inside . . . We imagine the stoa as a spatial metaphor for the emergence of critical consciousness within the transnational public sphere. It is a space for criticality without the formal requirement of political deliberation, and sociality without the duty of domestication. The stoa is the pivot point at which the private and public sphere interact and from which the cosmopolitan vision unfolds. The mediated activities that unfold between large screens [of the city] and the public square are an articulation of the contemporary stoa. (Papastergiadis, 2016, 338, my emphasis)

How might architects, urban planners, poets, painters, and philosophers create new pivot points for thinking? How might the city, as it is being built, always take into account the generative porousness of its sieve, the play between sense and nonsense, the knots between ideality and the empirical? Why should it bother? How can it not? This constellation of questioning gives us the opportunity to move laterally through the alleyways and flyovers of philosophy and the city. It breaches the status quo, which positions itself as a fantasy that it is, and will remain, a stabilized equilibrium. It asserts itself as the real, but the real is spectralized in each of its manifestations. Transversal critique emerges, in fits and starts, as a troupe of figures, personae, concepts, and sites appear along cracks in the façade of the foundation of the status quo, fissures that it receives, creates, and accentuates as it goes. Transversal critique emerges anywhere at any time. Such a critique, because it is constantly being determined in different situations, and because these determinations are produced by the paradox of sense, becomes not only “facts,” “things,” “objects,” or “ideas” but also becomes embodied as imaginal “noetic figures” or “conceptual personae” such as lobsters, ghosts, odd birds, smiles without cats, streets, cartoon characters, zigzags, and arabesques. Anything at all can be put to work to generate pivot points and creative turbulence, and, as Bruno Latour reminds us, the “critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles” (Latour, 2004, 246). Both “we” and the “city” are compositionists. This critical motion does not add to the knowledge base of an empirical positivism and it is not a dialectical machine of a teleological movement, but, instead, shows itself as the fillip of a twist, a zigand-a-zag. “A combination of conceptual analysis with conventional empirical investigations is not enough. We need to look inside and around these

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concepts” (Catterall, 2007, 132); we need to create new figures of thought as part of a redistribution of the elements. Latour calls this a “second empiricism” and asks what “would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction . . . This would require that all entities, including computers, cease to be objects defined simply by their inputs and outputs and become again things, mediating, assembling, gathering many more folds than the ‘united four’ ” (Latour, 2004, 248). Mediations, milieus, and relays. An immanent empiricism is an activity of breaching and multiplying—of concepts, words, and urban infrastructures—that, swerving from a modality of the negative, becomes a productive activity that affirmatively, that is through resonating differentiations, paints the city pink. In order to respond to the questions of the (non)sense of the event of the city and to the distinctive, but not unique, contribution that the event of philosophy might make to this intersection, we need to step outside to see what is happening on the streets. To see what happens—to ask about the what, the is, and the happening—when ancient logics pass through the hubbub on the overpass of Wan Chai that leads to both the Inland Revenue and the Immigration Towers. This seeing what-is-happening is the very movement of the event of sense in the chaosmos of the city, but it must then be taken-hold-of, worked-over, counter-actualized. “It is the present of the pure operation, not of the incorporation. It is not the present of subversion or actualization, but that of the counter-actualization, which keeps the former from overturning the latter and the latter from being confused with the former, and which comes to duplicate the lining (redoubler la doublure)” (Deleuze, 1990, 168). The event of what happens becomes the event of meaning through the action of countering, doubling. Philosophy works over the city and is workedthrough by the city as a speculative pragmatics that multiplies itself within the routines of everyday life. The urban arabesque sweeps transversally along. Double or nothing: that is the wager of the event of the city. You can bet your life on that.

Chapter 2

The Arabesques of the Urban: Foliage, Frames, and Twists

The city is an arabesque-in-motion, an entwinement of propositions—material, significatory, and paradoxical—with dimensions of n+1. Always there is an excess, a remainder outside the frame of what establishes boundaries around and within the city: a mirage, a hallucination, a shimmering of histories. The city is a phantasmatic theater of and for thinking, critique-as-creation, and the living-out of possibilities. The city is a surface of a composition of forces— each its own singularity of becoming and each comparable to other cities—as it produces the game of meaning and (non)sense in which images, the built environment in all of its cultural and architectural senses, and the movement of thought are differentiable but inseparable. Thinking in, with, and through the city rides along the seams of an ecstatic torque of forces that binds and separates, that articulates: quoins, joints, corners, transversals. This torqued line is “topological, flexible; it’s made by bending, curving, like riding your bike or driving your car . . . it’s created by continuous variation, by what [Deleuze] always calls ‘matter-movement.’ This is a direct descendant of Diderot’s intertwining of matter and movement. It’s matter as active, as epigenetic, as self-organizational, as formative—all things we now classify under complexity theory. Now, the rigor lies in the fact that precisely this movement, this flexibility is productive” (Spuybroek, 2008, 249). The city, like philosophy, is a productive and speculatively pragmatic arabesque. This arabesque is not the city as a whole, for we can always experience only partialities, points of view, positionalities on the streets. But “escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible . . . a migrational or metaphorical city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” (Certeau, 1984, 93). 33

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A city in constant motion, scintillating and shadowed. Readable and opaque. Neither philosophy nor the city—as tendrils of the arabesque—create movements that representationally run through a pre-established “built environment” of a consistent temporalized spatiality. These arabesques are movement itself, braiding, undoing, entwining. Both breach the what-is in incisions of different lengths and speeds, sometimes in predictable lines and sometimes in formations of the unforeseen. In the city, we are never sure what is around the next corner, even if we have walked the “same” route a thousand times. One thousand and one is a magical number. The force of the arabesque of the urban, which generates actualized states of affairs such as the small restaurant called Home Dumplings on Queen’s Road West or the financial in- and outflows of billions of dollars, is constantly ex-pressing itself. We are actualized and counter-actualized. Many cities slip into the visibly planned city. What is thinking up to as it insists, yet again, on tracing its peripatetic itinerary across the uneven terrain of the city? Of a vertical-subterranean city like Hong Kong, with Victoria Harbour and the Lamma Channel opening to the South China Sea and being filled in with land reclaimed to create yet more speculative building-ground? What do the Banyan trees along Forbes Street whisper to one another late at night, after the last minibus has left the terminus, and how do the alleys off of Shanghai Street express their memories of love and bayonets? What operations might philosophy undertake to catalyze the material poetics of the streets beneath the streets, the unforeseen city as it appears on the edge of touch, at the far end of smell? The urban arabesque is this affirmatively transversal figuration that enacts a series of flourishes that sends its lines in all directions, dimensionalizing the city and the experience of the city as it extends itself, crosses back over itself, and undoes itself in an unexpected twist. These flourishes have no pre-established form, but they do exhibit histories, causalities, consequences, and the play of chance as they unfurl. The flourishes are doodles that the city produces of and as itself, but the city has no impermeable borders and city walls that protect against the marauders from the outside are anachronistic fantasies. Every wall is porous, a threshold for the unexpected to manifest. Concatenated singularities of all types create the arabesque—which is a single figure always proliferating—and it, in turn, bends back to create possibilities in and of the city, which are never a stabilized unity of either a putative object or a putative subject. Those terms emerge from the dynamic movement that works out and through the city as history, material production, and imagination. Cities within the city appear, hover at the edge of sight, become our lived reality. The arabesque of the urban weaves a speculative pragmatics, a matrix of multiplicity between virtuality, the phantasmatic, and the familiar banality of



The Arabesques of the Urban: Foliage, Frames, and Twists 35

the empirical as it shuttles back and forth across the everyday life in the city. The city appears as a city, but we need to understand the various figures of appearing—image, morphē, eidos, and especially phantasm . . . we take the word “phantasm” to mean that which weaves the universal and the individual together in the image . . . we are structured by the phantasmatic, and in particular we have a phantasmatic relation to the other, and that the phantasmaticity of this relation cannot be reduced, this pre-originary intervention of the other in me. (Derrida, 2001, 89)

Neither the “other” or the “me” are stabilized entities, but a kind of blurred field, and we must think this relation as a movement that takes the form beyond the category of the individual and includes what we call history, nature, and the assemblage of the city. Philosophy and the city are entwined with all of the mediations within and between the two; neither is self-­sufficient and both engage incessantly with the movement of the trans-. The phantasmatic is an appearing that never wholly appears and an understanding of appearing as apparition, a constitutive othering that circulates through each and every “I,” each and every city, and the Da-sein of the urban that is always thrown ahead of itself, always cast aside. Every Da-sein is a Scheindasein. The phantasm is an encounter, an address, and an expression of the (non)sense, art, materiality, and conceptuality of the event of the city, which occurs in the concreteness of urban surfaces such as streets; altars to the dead and to the gods of the Earth where ghost money is burned; on the screens of advertising, cinema, memory, and projections and in a theater of umbrellas that forms an historical, political, artistic, and philosophical knot. The dynamic transversality of this immanently beyond creates edges, seams, reflections, shimmerings, seemings, and the scintillations that form the dimensionalities of urban experience. These move at different speeds, scales, and directions. The city is thoroughly empirical, thoroughly phantasmatic, and thoroughly philosophical. There are never separable transcendental and empirical domains, but only the worlding of the world: “only two movements, or even just two directions of one and the same movement: the one is such that the movement tends to congeal in its product, in its result, that which interrupts it: and the other turns back and retraces its steps, rediscovers in the product the movement from which it resulted” (Deleuze, 2004, 24). The movement is not abstractly “general” but always comes with determinations, precise specifications, perceptions, and an aspect of virtual indiscernibility. The “street” is always Des Voeux, Sha Wan Drive, or Hau Wo. Hot, dusty, full of fumes, bleak, beautiful. Urbanicity is saturated with extension and thought, but both, which are always intertwined, exist with an edge of exfoliating

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excess. There it is, right in front of us as the most ordinary object of experience, a coalescence of histories, of measurement and big data, destruction and renewal, global flows and poverty, and a host of technical problems that are in urgent need of solutions. And, as an excessive reserve that might be quasi-­translatable along the vectors of the irreal, dream, imagination, and the unforeseen, it continuously resonates along different frequencies, trembles with possibility, and oscillates with the appearance of microkinetic fissures along all of the urban surfaces that provide options for turning the next corner. This is the movement of the urban arabesque. Although there is a rectilinear element to the arabesque as it becomes the column of artistic and architectural history, it always exceeds the programmatic framing of the technicity of the Ge-stell, the predictability of linear functions, and politics as an already determined field of endeavor. The tendrils of the arabesque breach the streets in all directions at the same time, creating cracks along all of the urban surfaces and projective screens that constitute a city. They create seams in which the seemings of sensibility, art, architecture, philosophy, and the purely mundane acts of everyday life appear. “Kant shows,” Timothy Morton has observed, “that this sinister dimension [the gap insured by the ‘aesthetic dimension’] is intrinsic to thinking as such. There are flowers in your head. Kant doesn’t make much of a distinction between an actual plant, an arabesque, and calligraphy. There’s no way to know in advance what they’re for” (2017, 104). The arabesque, which as we will see Hegel teaches us to see as foliage becoming architecture, also takes the form of the translatability of the built environment as it torques through the digital back upon itself into new foliage and fauna, creates a sense of sense as the event of urbanicity. Configuring the entwinement of “nature” and “culture” into a hybrid that has never truly been two—these “purifications” never hold—the arabesque is the built environment that is itself an inflection of nature by nature and the “natural” is a mode of representation that exceeds that representation. The arabesque as a movement is immanent transcendence, always going beyond what-is as a determinate entity, but never going beyond the worlding of the world in its infinite specificities. As an image and as a concept of the city, the arabesque has histories with its regions of clarity and obscurity; and, as it unfolds it creates visibilities, measures, unseeabilities, the immeasurable, crime, shadows, law, and glistening surfaces that draw us on into the ­stretching-out of our lives, toward the final snap. As with so many other philosophemes, the arabesque as a figure only begins to come into its most powerful expressive valences with Immanuel Kant and his immediate successors, the German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, recapped—as it were—by Hegel.1 After being rejected by earlier Enlightenment thinkers because of its apparently



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meaningless triviality, beginning with Kant the arabesque, explicated as ornamentality and frame, begins to gain force as a concept, reorganizing the relationship of the ergon, the main body of an art work, and the parergon, traditionally the accidental contingency of the act of framing of the work. The traditional frame, as a modest supporting device, simply holds and highlights the focus of the work itself. It is decorative and unobtrusive, its task to act as a background for the foregrounding of art, but the artistic experiments of modernism, the deconstruction of the logic of ontology, and the geosocial techno-poetic networks of assemblages are on the way. Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) is an immense effort to build a bridge between reflective aesthetic judgments—ones that do not come under a determinative concept and, therefore, cannot be adjudicated as knowledge—and questions concerning the purposiveness of a teleology of nature. In this context, our focus is how at the very edge of a borderline the ornamental (parergon) frivolity of the arabesque becomes a figure for the movement of the urban, of a thinking of the city. As Kant remarks in the “Analytic of the Beautiful,” In painting, sculpture, indeed in all the visual arts, in architecture and horticulture insofar as they are fine arts, design is what is essential; in design the basis for any involvement of taste is not what gratifies us in sensation but merely what we like because of its form . . . What we call ornaments (parerga), i.e. what does not belong to the complete representation of the object as an intrinsic constituent, but [is] only an extrinsic adjunct, does indeed increase our taste’s liking, and yet it does so only by its form, as in the case of picture-frames or the garments on statues or the colonnades around magnificent buildings. (Kant 1987, para 14)

Frames, the hem of a garment, colonnades around magnificent buildings. These are all quite charming, for Kant, but they are inconsequential for the understanding intentionality contained in the process of the design of more stable forms, whether in art, architecture, or philosophy. They are not “intrinsic constituents” but only “extrinsic adjuncts.” The logic of supplementarity, Derrida’s phrasing for this movement, is brushed up against, but cannot yet be critically articulated. The in- and the ex- remain firmly emplaced in their proper place and all of the implications of the inside and the outside, with their respective concomitant values, remain operative. The painting has its frame; the building has its colonnades; the dress has its hem; the city has its walls. These are nice but more or less frivolous afterthoughts. Objects are bounded. This is the stability of the setup through which Kant is working to construct an edifice of knowledge with a foundation that will be able to withstand the epistemological seismic tremblings instigated by Hume, the spontaneity of the freedom of practical philosophy—which is the foundation for pure reason—and the appearance of the extremely strange judgments of reflectivity.

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The arabesque—through Schlegel, Tieck, and then on to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics—“represents ‘no object under a specific concept’ . . . as a representation of nothing it is also a non-representation” (Menninghaus, 1999, 78). This is the very definition of the aesthetic in Kant, which can never count as knowledge because it cannot be determined by a concept that constrains it in its own proper articulation of truth across the play of faculties. The arabesque is neither a concept that gathers a determinate group of characteristics under itself nor is it a thing that is itself determined by a higher-level concept that would limit its proliferations. There is nothing “above” (or “below”) the arabesque to pin it into place: no transcendent height of sky that determines its flows, no definition that can contain its movement, no empirical example that enforces its emplacement. The sky, instead, reflects in a sheen along the hem of the arabesque, a figure of a free movement, a lemniscate of chance and necessity. It is ergon and parergon, surplus and lack. Ribbons twirl in the windy rhythms of turbulence. This is the movement of the thinking of the city. Schlegel becomes the most important theoretician of the romantic arabesque that weaves between philosophy and the arts and undertaking the task of “correcting” and reuniting the Kantian division of the faculties that had set science, ethics, and art off on divergent paths. The arabesque is, for him, the “oldest and original form of human fantasy” (cited in Menninghaus, 1999, 85) and in his thought the “Kantian parergonality breaks through from the margins of the work into its center; indeed it becomes the very essence of the work itself as an unending reflection . . . The ornamental addendum is transformed into an ironic-reflexive supplement” (Menninghaus, 1999, 86). Reflective consciousness, like the aesthetic, operates only as a twisting frame that splits asunder, as the back-and-forth of ergon and parergon. Ontology, as a transversal empiricism, is not self-standing, but anaclitic, always in need of support, canvas, paper, screens, a street, architectures of the dead and the living, a subjectile. This, in turn, relates to Kant’s concept in the Third Critique of the “aesthetic attributes” (Nebenvorstellung): If forms do not constitute the exhibition of a given concept itself, but are only supplementary (Neben-) representations of the imagination, expressing the concept’s implications and its kinship with other concepts, then they are called (aesthetic) attributes of an object. [. . . They present] something that prompts the imagination to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a specific concept determined by words. (Kant, 1987, 183)

The city and thinking entail these passages of ornamental exchanges that crisscross the frame and that which is framed, the parergon and the ergon. The first translation offered of Nebenvorstellung is “sideshow,” a show that



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occurs off to the side of the main-stage or the main-attraction, that nonetheless draws our attention. Snake-dancer! Magician! Step right up! “Although itself a part of the aesthetic work, the para-representation produces a similar side-step, a spreading and straying along the border similar to what the parergon of beautiful frame does. Both evade the center because both evade the concept for the sake of the aesthetic” (Menninghaus, 2000, 37). Like Schlegel, Hegel labors to modify and extend the Kantian corpus with his elaboration of a speculative dialectics, not a pragmatics as we are using it in this context, that carries within its spiraling teleology a certain form of historicizing. In “The System of the Individual Arts” in his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel discusses the emergence of particular arts including architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. He begins his introduction to architecture by thinking about particulars, realizations, and beginnings: By making its content emerge into a determinate existence in the real world, art becomes a particular art and therefore we can now speak for the first time of art realized and so of the actual beginning of art. But since particularization is to bring about the objectification of the Idea of beauty and art, there is at once present along with it, as the Concept requires, a totality of particulars. If therefore in the series of particular arts, architecture is treated first, this must not merely mean that it is presented as the art offering itself for treatment first on the strength of its being so determined by the nature of art; on the contrary, it must equally clearly be seen to be the art coming first in the existence of art in the world. (Hegel, 1975, 630)

This is confusing. On the one hand, the first art comes along with a “totality of particulars” and cannot therefore be considered “first,” but simply simultaneous. On the other hand, Hegel clearly places architecture as the first art along a sequential chronology. Architecture is the first art treated, Hegel argues, because it is the first to historically particularize itself, to become a real object in the real world of external matter, but this “realization” is a conjunction of “concept and reality” and, as a concept, it brings along with it a “totality of particulars.” This totality of particulars indicates that there is no concept that appears without the entirety of a concomitant signifying network always already at work. (This is Deleuze’s register of “signification.”) No idea comes or stands alone and there is no Ur-Wort. In the Aesthetics, this always-already is not a grammar, syntax, and semantics that are already established, but, instead, Hegel claims, it comes into being with the first artistic realization of spirit in the world: architecture. Architecture, like the other arts, creates its own spaces of meaning, its own senses of sense. After distinguishing the way in which common sense tends to think about origins as a linear tale of gradual development—a kind of chronological fallacy—along the line of time from

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the philosophical mode of “making an origin intelligible by deriving it from the concept of the thing” (1975, 631), Hegel explicates the relations at work in the earliest moments of architecture. He is already correcting himself or, rather, more clearly articulating the meaning of “firstness.” Nothing is given in its immediacy, for immediacy cannot account for its own consciousness of itself or its object until the dialectical twist occurs with its looking backward and forward. The spirit of a thing unfolds itself as a particular thing into experience, negates itself, and turns back to a recuperated understanding as a history of the spirit’s own twistings-and-turnings. Thought weaves world. Meaning explodes into consciousness as a whole. We are in an extremely close proximity here to the action of the urban arabesque, but in Hegel the movement unfurls as a moment of the speculative dialectic and not as the unfolding of the speculative pragmatics of the city, and, more generally, of what Deleuze has called “superior or transcendental empiricism,” the dialectics of which are of shape-shiftings that are closer to the stutter-step, the sidestep, and zigzag than to the formalities of the Hegelian schema of the logic of the rational movement of history. “Zigzag” first appears in French in the 1670s, which perhaps emerged from the German  Zickzack, though this is attested only from 1703, which is possibly a reduplication of Zacke “tooth, prong,” which was used in reference to military siege approaches. Originally in English, it was used to describe the layout of certain garden paths (Online etymology). Teeth, armies, fortifications, gardens. Pleasure and death. We are here in the midst of the city, sidestepping all the time. As Samuel Weber notes, “The step beyond the pleasure principle does not involve [a ‘moving forward’]. By a linguistic chance, the word for step in French, pas, is also an adverb of negation, so that a pas au-delà becomes not merely as ‘step beyond’ but also and perhaps above all—for Derrida at least—a non-step, or a step that is revoked, negated, perhaps even a side-step” (2011, 5). The sidestep is not a Hegelian negation that regathers what it has surpassed, but, rather, a step out to one side—a positioning along different angles of experience—that enables a different movement to occur. One drags one’s foot in the sand; one limps. Critique occurs by changing, however slightly, the vectors and inclinations of perception, and the city, too, moves with its own rhythms: stepping out, stepping ahead, stepping to one side. Zackzack, Zickzack. Side- or stutter-step. Zigzag. We will cross this way again with the peripatetics of the lobster and of thinking, the rhythms of the outside, and the humming of the Pink Panther, but let us for the moment turn back toward Hegel and see what happens with his description of the architectural arabesque. “What we have to do is to establish the beginning of art by so deriving it from the Concept or essential nature of art itself that we can see that the first task of art consists in giving shape to what is objective in itself, i.e. the



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physical world of nature, the external environment of the spirit, and so to build into what has no inner life of its own a meaning and form which remain external to it because this meaning and form are not immanent in the objective world itself. The art on which this task is imposed is, as we have seen, architecture” (Hegel, 1975, 631, my emphasis). Spirit takes its sensuous shape as architecture, as the column, as the arabesque that brings meaning to nature, fills in its blank emptiness with the work of the spirit. External nature is becoming a house for the dwelling of the spirit, which carves out the event of sense, meaning. (Lascaux, Chauvet, and the other caves—and the much earlier examples of cross-hatched designs in ochre— where what might be called painting burst into being to illuminate the long darkness—would require that we rethink this entire division of distinctive types of architectures and types of arts, but for the moment we will remain within the nineteenth-century Hegelian ambit.) It is quite peculiar that although the appearance of architecture brings along with it a totality, this totality does not for Hegel include all the other arts as a kind of simultaneity of appearances. They must wait, apparently, even though the Muses,2 even if one of them is foregrounded in each art, always arrive as a troupe. Art, for Hegel, had already fallen back into the crypt of the tomb and the time of art has for him already past, even as he reconstructs its history. As art moves in the Hegelian taxonomy from the symbolic through the classical to the romantic stage in a philosophical Bildungsroman, it becomes more spiritual, more inward, and more independent of a first-order instrumentality. It is no longer used solely for the sake of something external, for the utilitarian value of the in order to such as to build a shelter from the rain and cold or even as a house for the god. Art adds a new twist that is aligned not only with use but even more acutely with meaning. The “classical” moment in Greece is marked by the appearance of a different form of “humanly shaped figures of the gods are derived from a sphere other than that of nature in its immediacy; they belong to the realm of imagery and are called into being by human artistic activity . . . [O]nly in surroundings produced by art do the gods find their appropriate element” (Hegel, 1975, 655). These classical forms are still useful, still participate in the category of the in the order to—they house the gods and provide a space for human interaction with the gods—but now “beauty” and “holiness” have been added to “usefulness.” The gods take up their dwelling only in the contexts of art. There is a modification of natural forms toward a greater mathematical “regularity” and this entire effort of the spirit encountering marble must go “beyond symmetry and eurythmy to the organic, the concrete, the varied, and the self-complete. But in that event there enters as it were a reflection on differences and characteristics, as well as an express emphasis on and formation of aspects which for pure purposiveness is wholly superfluous”

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(Hegel, 1975, 656). The natural flowering of nature is becoming spiritshaped, a meandering twining of decoration around the erection of a column on its way to becoming art: plant, obelisk, column: Doric, Ionian, Corinthian, Giacomettian, Brancusian. The in order to of purposiveness continues to be supplemented by the “wholly superfluous.” Hegel is now speaking of the transition—and, as Earth’s transformation into a built environment, this is an endless transition—between plants, with their stems and flowers, and the emergence of columns, which marks the transition from the symbolic architecture of Egypt to the classical architecture of Greece: We see columns originating in the greatest variety from plant-formations . . . [T]he whole column is not mathematically regular in form, because the pedestal is onion-shaped, the leaf rises from the bulb like a reed, or in other cases there is a cluster of radical leaves . . . Then out of this pedestal the slender stem rises up or mounts up, intricately interwoven, as a column. The capital again is a flowerlike separation of leaves and branches. Yet the imitation is not true to nature; on the contrary; the plant-forms are distorted architecturally, brought nearer to the circle, the straight line, and what is mathematically regular. The result is that these columns in their entirety are like what are generally called arabesques. (Hegel, 1975, 658, my emphasis)

The arabesque has now formally appeared, and Hegel situates it along the lining up of lines, a geometry of regularity. (We will return to this concept with Descartes and Le Corbusier.) This is the superfluity of beauty, the spirit’s contribution to the functionality of the load-bearing column and this work of the art of the spirit is achieved contra natura through the distortion of the irregularities of nature toward the mathematical regularity of classical architecture proper. This distortion normalizes toward the regularity of geometry, but the distortion, as a force, will then come to distort the geometric regularities themselves toward other unexpected forms of architecture, art, and urbanity. The way of the donkey cannot be erased. The arabesque has now formally appeared—Hegel is rewriting Kant’s ornamentalism of the (par)ergon into an historical phenomenology of art— and as architecture frees itself the subject also begins to free itself from the coils of the externality of nature, its stoned rigidity: the four “slaves” of Michelangelo emerging through a tremendously arduous labor of the chisel driven into the stone. The arabesque, whether of a column or a city, is a transition-form between the natural flowering of plants and the “more severe regularity of architecture proper.” The ergon and parergon are already very much at work and the “proper” soon gives way to its own impropriety through a distortion, a swerve and a sidestep, that creates new vortices. An immense torsion is occurring at this crossing and the progressive freeing of



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architecture into its own proper form is constantly threatened with its debasement “back” into ornament. The emerging form of classicism is vulnerable to the whimsicality of ornament, which retains its odd power through Adolf Loos and beyond, although the criminality of the ornament is always contested. By the time we get to Lars Spuybroek, the ornament “is not ‘added to’ a structure, but rather creates the transversal movements that make structure in the first place” (Dolphijn, 2012, 2). This movement is a fundamental, useful, and finally logically irresolvable tension in the building of thinking and the building of cities. For Hegel—in another deeply embedded tension—the soberness of understanding is threatened by the frivolity of the play of the imagination: In that case they are principally distorted plant-forms and animal and human forms growing out of plants and intermingled with them, or animal shapes passing over into plants. If they are to shelter a symbolic meaning, then the transition from one natural kingdom to another may pass for it; without such a significance they are only plays of imagination in its assembly, connection and ramification of different natural formations. In the invention of such architectural decoration imagination may indulge in the most varied friezes of every kind, in wood, stone, etc., and in borders even on furniture and clothing, and the chief characteristic and basic form of this decoration is that plants, leaves, flowers, and animals are brought nearer to the inorganic and geometrical. (Hegel, 1975, 658)

Plants, animals, flowers, leaves, and the zoology of the phantasmagoric can all be blended into the stone in “only the plays of the imagination,” in ornamentation without the significance of meaning. This is why it is frivolous in its only. As meaning emerges into architectural forms, the external becomes interiorized, rigidity becomes supple, the line becomes a curve, and substance becomes subject through the movement of a turn, a slight twist. The movement of the whole, though, is toward the regularities of geometry that contains these curves and aberrations. The ornament structuralizes because it moves in a certain manner, but the swaying of this style is held in check by lines and angles that keep the imagination in its place. Metaphor and metonymy, however, are “not in any way figures of the imagination, but are, above all, structural factors . . . Far from being imaginary, they prevent the series that they animate from confusing or duplicating their terms in imaginary fashion” (Deleuze, 2004, 184, my emphasis). The animal is not the same as the human and the human is not the same as the animal—the “as” is the structural pivot—nor does this blending actualize in the real, but they cross one another and thereby create the incorporeal event of meaning. The animal and the human do become blended in, let’s say, the arabesque of the contemporary with its genetic crossings, synthetic and digitized biologics, and in the flashes and fluctuations of the smeared field

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of the atomic movement of matter. This arabesque, like all of the others, is a differentiating structural force that separates-and-conjoins as it is actualized as works of urban thought and works of the arts of urbanicity. Its braiding is empirical, conceptual, figural, and virtual. The organic immediacy of nature, Hegel remarks, had first been translated into symbolic architecture of the Egyptians, which must then be architecturally transformed into the “organic” form that moves toward classicism through the Aufhebung of the immediacy of nature and the symbolic forms of pre-Greek art. The “organic” now carries an entirely different meaning within itself than it had in symbolic art as the threshold of the appearance of the arabesque is crossed. The city and philosophy are put into motion by the speculative dialectics of the translation by nature via the Geist, all of which are de, re-, and in-flected: twisted around. The living plant is becoming the rigidity of an architectural form. The arabesque, then, appears explicitly as a “distortion” of nature—it is nature as distortion and there is no other activity of nature but this swerving—that becomes a more complex form of nature as represented as architecture and art, as touched up along the edges. Geometry, without which one cannot enter the Schools of Plato, Descartes, Husserl, or Le Corbusier, is already beginning to be entwined into something that although it bears traditional geometries along in its currents nonetheless supersedes it toward something different through a long and arduous historical process of torqueing. As the arabesque emerges as an empirical form productive of sense, so, too, do philosophy and the city. There is a proliferation of arabesques swirling deliriously through every city and every form of thought, each with an absolute specificity of each site, rhythm, tone, and language. Each city feels different; each form of thought has its own style. And, yet, there is also only one arabesque, that of the chaosmosis at work in the worlding of the world. Each arabesque of the city has a proper name and each proper name undoes itself as it arabesques. There is also the movement of history, which as a “perspective vision and prospective vision constitute the twofold projection of an opaque past and an uncertain future onto a surface that can be dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city. Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particular figure of history, it assumes that this fact can be dealt with as a unity determined by an urbanistic ratio” (Certeau, 1984, 94). The concept of the city is projected, into the past and into the future, as a ratio, a relation between elements that are arranged in a particular perspective as a certain prospect, a lay of the land. This ratio is of course still with us—we will encounter it again—but its unity and identity are transfiguring. Hegel is not, however, yet finished with his own history of a figure. “No doubt arabesques, whether in relation to organic forms or the laws of mechanics, run counter to nature, but this sort of contrariety is not only a right of art



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as such but is even a duty in architecture, since only by this means are the organic forms, otherwise unfit for architecture, adapted to and made harmonious with the truly architectural style. Nearest at hand for this adaptation is especially the plant kingdom which is used profusely for arabesques in the East too” (1975, 659). The dialectic is already globalized as East and West twine about and through one another. And why does Hegel assume that organic forms are not fit for architecture when counterexamples are easily found? The arabesque is a counter-form created by a certain concept of duty, a counter-thrust to the natural, but as it enters through the activity of the Geist it becomes a “right” and a “duty” as it is torqued into the proprieties of the proportions of classical Greek architecture. The telos is embedded as a structuration in the act of narrating this history. Art and philosophy are both movements of this contrariety, this counter-actualization, but they do not leave nature behind. The arabesque is an entwined movement that undoes all the oppositions between nature and culture, spirit and materiality. Existence is a transversal empiricism. As Spirit begins its long return to itself from its wayward expulsion from itself, rights, duties, and self-consciousness appear on the scene of the staging of history. Classical architecture cannot be separated from these acts of spirit, which occur as philosophy, art, and politics in the classical Greek politea (and not, this time, in the “East”). Athens is the locus of the constellated appearance of rights and duties, the obligations of art and architecture, and the invention of democracy and philosophy, but it is the apparent simplicity of the column that illuminates this transition. “Architecture proper,” Hegel remarks—and we of course instantly wonder about “improper architecture” which will continue to appear alongside the proper throughout a very long history—leaves the purely organic to enter the sphere of geometrically ordered purposiveness and then out of this into an approach to the organic again. It has been necessary here to mention this double starting-point of architecture from (a) real needs and (b) purposeless independence, because the truth is the unity of these two principles. The beautiful column arises from a form borrowed from nature which then is reshaped into a stanchion, into a regular and geometrical form. (1975, 659)

The concept of truth emerges as the “unity” of the double-origin of need and freedom, very roughly of the material and the spiritual. The column of classical architecture may be understood, then, as a threshold event, as the sign of a momentous crossing. The staging of the urban and its philosophical dramaturgies are being set up in Asia Minor and Attica—with comedy, tragedy, and the satyr plays in the near vicinity—as Hegel triggers ascending and

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descending networks of a dynamic relationality in his own period, just as Berlin is slowly wending its way toward its position as a Weltstadt. It will take a little longer for Hong Kong to become “Asia’s World City,” but by 1841 the British will have already seized the “barren island” for the sake of opium, trade, and empire as global capital takes on a virulent new form of desire. The column awaits, but the arabesque always loops back on itself and we are not yet done with Kant’s parergon, ergon, ornamentality, a very peculiar universality, and a critique of judgment that cannot do without a conceptual architecture of foundations, edifices, and columns, even as it articulates a reflectivity and will never be able to be founded upon a stable ground of truth. Truth requires movements of supplementarity. Examples, metaphors, metonymies, argumentative sequences. And, above all, it requires the movement of the framing of the frame as the frame is twisted into motion as an arabesque that unfolds as the history of the city—which moves forward, backward, and sideways—and which cannot occur without the seam along the edge of a border. This seam shines, although it requires the backing of that which can never come to light. In The Truth of Painting, Derrida has hammered together a four-sided frame of a book that frames Kant’s Critique of Judgment showing that it, in its turn and in its turnings, sets into motion an act of framing of the so-called aesthetic. Quoins and joints are essential to this reworking of the ergon and its parergon, its putatively unnecessary and add-on frame. I will focus only on one side of the fourfold, section II of the “Parergon.” En abyme, as Derrida is so fond of demonstrating. This philosophical frame that insists on the centrality of the work and a secondary status for the parergon of the ­ornament— what Kant has exemplified as “hem, column and the frame of painting”—not only frames, according to Derrida, the entirety of the discourse on art from Plato through Heidegger, but also the entirety of the discourse on all the attempts to define and precisely determine of the meaning of the city as name, definition, techno-field, and event. How to frame the city? How to know what’s inside and outside the city, what belongs inside its visible or invisible walls, and what roams outside its boundaries? How can we know how to assign meanings to migration, the nomadic, and the settlement of the citizen and how do we experience the transposition and translation of originary metaphoricity, which includes these movements within its autoconstitution and not as outsides that arrive belatedly? The frame of [Kant’s] analytic of the beautiful, with its four moments, is thus furnished by the transcendental analytic, for the sole and bad reason that the imagination, the essential resource of the relation to beauty, is perhaps linked to the understanding, that there is perhaps and still (vielleicht, noch) some understanding in there. This relation to the understanding, which is neither certain



The Arabesques of the Urban: Foliage, Frames, and Twists 47

nor essential, thus furnishes the frame of this whole discourse; and, within it, the discourse on the frame. Without forcing things, but in any case in order to describe a certain forcing on Kant’s part, we shall say that the whole frame of the analytic of the beautiful functions, with respect to the fact that the content or internal structure of which is to be determined, like a parergon. (Derrida, 1987a, 71)

Derrida is speaking, here, of the book, but this framed-open structure—which carries the traditional name of “form”—is also at work across the board with cities and architecture; bodies of any sort; religious, cultural, political, or economic systems. And philosophy. Of anything, in short, that comes to appearance as an experience. This inventive intervention is what Derrida calls, in the context of autoimmunity, an “illogical logic” (2005, 123), which is the very movement of deconstruction. As we perhaps still on occasion need to be reminded, this logic of the a-logical is not the irrational as an opposition to the rational. The event of opening is prior to that distinction that occurs within the domain of the logic determined by the syllogism and the ratio of rationality. But back to the hems, columns, and frames through which the city incessantly runs. “Parerga have a thickness, a surface which separates it not only (as Kant would have it) from the integral inside, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall in which the paintings hang, from the space in which statue or column is erected, then, step by step, form the whole field of historical, economic, political inscription in which the drive to signature is produced” (Derrida, 1987a, 61). A protective, absorptive, and projective surface facing both ways, then, toward the inside and the outside, much like Deleuze’s “paradoxical element” or like the multidimensionality of a screen, an urban Kino-surface. The edge of the urban arabesque moves both ways, toward an “exteriority as a surplus” and as an “internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon” (1987a, 59). Surplus, excess. Nature, let’s say, and the technologics of planning. Rivets that are tacked around a rip, a tear in the sieve-city. There will be an “inside” and an “outside,” but these are always provisional and in-movement. “The frame fits badly,” Derrida notes. “[And there is a] gesture of framing which, by introducing the bord, does violence to the inside of the system and twists its proper articulations out of shape” (1987, 69). This twisting—the Destruktion of the multiple framings of philosophy and the city that enables the next event of meaning to arrive—engages with a “certain repeated dislocation, a regulated, irrepressible dislocation, which makes the frame in general crack, undoes it at the corners of its quoins and joints” (1987, 75). As it frames itself and is framed, the city breaks apart as an aspect of the process of the “revelatory force of the arabesque, which lies not in giving a schema of visual revelation, but in touching upon a force

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that transforms and changes, the very ‘plasticity’ inherent in every being and image . . . The idea of the arabesque is in and for itself a ‘motor of thought’ (C. Malabou)” (Cojanu, 2013, 3). The arabesque as a “motor of thought,” which is a motor of the materiality of the city as well, runs at different vibrations in different sites and in a number of different transversal figures of critique from the classical Greek world to the “absolute superficiality” of Andy Warhol as traced by Michael Angelo Tata. “Schlegel invokes this concept of the arabesque, a variant of the grotesque, to propose an aesthetic that is inherently sportive and embodies a principle of play . . . this Romantic fascination with the arabesque cuts through modernism and postmodernism, reaching an apex in Warhol, for whom the diurnal flux, the twists and turns of his social world’s inhabitants, constitutes a supreme artistic content in his films and writings” (Gilbertson, 2010, 91).3 The arabesque re-joins the arts, sciences, and philosophy after they had been split asunder by the Kantian purification. They can be sportive, playful, and produce the whirl of the superficiality of the social or they can appear as the correlative entanglement of subatomic particles, which (Einstein, 1971, 158) famously described as spukhafte Fernwirkung, spooky actualizations at a distance. In every situation, however, the arabesque opens new configurations of experience (even if that configuration comes to look exactly like a habit for habits, too, bind together differences). The urban arabesque is a dynamic force; an assemblage that conjoins and catalyzes; a mutability with its (dis)continuities; a movement of thought that sweeps through the streets and hovers above the city. “A complex system is one that lives an intense life since it contracts an expanding number of external moments in its present duration. It thus becomes capable of creating free acts—acts of inner determination—which are spread out over a multiplicity of moments of matter and that pass through the meshes of necessity” (AnsellPearson, 2005, 1113). The arabesque is just this sort of “complex system” that generates (non)concepts, a transfluctuation between multiplying internal and external relations, and all sorts of materialities flowing through necessity’s mesh. This is urban experience, freedom, and the peripatetic of thinking that crisscrosses the city in every direction, across every dimension. At any given point the arabesque determines an event, a metonymic exemplar of the opening of the framing of the movement of the (par)ergon: hem~column~frame. Becoming-Hong Kong. The arabesque coalesces into singularities across the trajectories of temporalities and spacings, but, as we know, we are not inside the usual logical space of the grid or ladder of deduction-induction, particular-general, or a region dominated by the so-called law of noncontradiction. Not exactly, not quite. We are in a transversal orientation of thought where all moves laterally, diagonally, off-kilter. “Common scientific or logical discourse proceeds by



The Arabesques of the Urban: Foliage, Frames, and Twists 49

determinant judgment and the example follows in order to determine or, with a pedagogical intention, to illustrate. In art and in life, wherever one must, according to Kant, proceed to reflective judgments and assume (by analogy with art: we shall come to this rule further on) a finality the concept of which we do not have, the example precedes” (Derrida, 1987a, 51). Art escapes the finality of the concept and there will only be examples, one after the other, that will pique commentators into asking about the finality of the concept—what idea binds all of these examples together into something called “art”?—but all of those examples of art will also actively work to undo that wish for finality. That’s just enough, then, a bit more than enough. A minimum and an excess that keeps it all in motion, that ensures that the questions of the city and of philosophy, as they coappear, cannot be exhausted. “It is the analytic which determines the frame as parergon, which both constitutes it and ruins it, makes it both hold (as that which causes to hold together, that which constitutes, mounts, inlays, sets, borders, gathers, trims—so many operations gathered together by the Einfassung) and collapse. A frame is essentially constructed and therefore fragile: such would be the essence or truth of the frame. If it had any” (Derrida, 1987a, 73). This fragility, as Deleuze reminds us, is also the essence of all surfaces upon which we enact affordances, landingsites, and encounter the event of sense. On which we live. This is the movement of cities, of the everyday framing of experience that is simultaneously infinitely fragile—exposed as it is to fissures, cracks, and to the cutting-up of the negative—and yet also unsurpassable in its power. One day follows the next and we are always asking about this temporal and spatial movement that is, simultaneously, a following and a preceding. Deleuze and Guattari contend that “art begins not with flesh, but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts . . . the most scientific architecture endlessly produces and joins up planes and sections. That is why it can be defined by the ‘frame,’ by an interlocking of differently oriented frames, which be imposed on the other arts, from painting to the cinema” (1994, 186). There is always, at the minimal threshold, a membrane, skin, and a lean-to: a house of art. Frames frame framings and this is not only all of the arts—the screens of cinema are just around the corner—but also the banal everydayness of the city that is made through an obscure “interlocking” forcefulness. “Interlocking these frames or joining up all of these planes— wall section, window section, floor section, slope section—is a composite system rich in points and counterpoints. The frames and their joins hold the compounds of sensation, hold up figures, and intermingle with their upholding, with their own appearance. These are the faces of the dice of sensation” (1994, 187). The dice throw is a framing and unframing of provisionally upheld appearances that have found a temporary foothold. The figures are

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an “upholding” contaminated—so to speak—by always being imbricated in the appearance of their own appearance. “Subject and object”—as a standing over-against one another—miss the mark altogether. This is the compound complexity of the event of sense. The arabesque is a complexity of frames in motion. The frame, twisted into a warp, cracks, splinters, and comes alive. The stones flower toward speech; the sun glistens on the hem of the dress; and the colonnades have been taken inside as a commemoration that projects toward the future. “And what about the window of a building in a painting?” (Derrida, 1987a, 59). Doors that open onto other doors? Mirrors in mirrors? Apparent transparency, partial reflections, architecture, and art. All in a frame, enframing, but twisting to its own rhythms as it once again cracks open the frame. The arabesque of the wild foliage of nature transmutates into the geometries of the architecture of the house and the column of the temple as it gains self-consciousness and becomes a determined history of there-and-thens, here-and-nows. The arabesque, however, is infinitely wild, breaking apart all architectures, temples, thinking, and determined histories into ruin, rubble, and new possibilities for the city as we frame it at the moment and for the cities within the city that will appear. Twisting in its own style, the green at the edge of the urban arabesque glistens toward the next arrival of the unforeseeability of philosophy’s and the city’s restrictions, its expansiveness.

Chapter 3

Thinking Streets: Transversal Empiricism

Streets think and we think the streets in a transversal empiricism that repositions subjects, objects, and relationalities. Earth, territories. Cities on the move. The streets haunt us as we haunt the streets. Each expresses itself in its own idiosyncratic style, using human and nonhuman mediations, sometimes giving us directions, sometimes sharing information about Sammy’s Kitchen or the Rooftop Institute in the Foo Tak Building, sometimes speaking of plants and minerals as they become architectures, and sometimes pricking us to ask questions about an urban poetics and how it is that streets speak. They speak in the languages that include, but are far from exhausted by, that of infrastructure, interactions, data-streams, weather, and images. They speak of sense and nonsense. They speak as the textures of surfaces, of the invisible and the visible. And as we have already heard from the Banyan trees along Forbes Street, les murs ont des oreilles, maintentant ils ont la parole. (These are well-educated and multilingual trees.) The Wall of 1000 Thoughts, composed by artist Jasmine Mansbridge as part of the Hong Kong Walls 2019 Project, is painted on the steep retaining wall at 8 Queen’s Road. “It references the physical act of painting the work, and the meditative aspect of that, as well as the engagement with the thoughts of all those who come by. The use of the recessive boxes (or Thought Catchers) are a visual representation of this process . . . and [it] also considers the architectural surrounds” (Mansbridge, 2019). The physical act of painting, thinking as painting and painting as thinking, the random thoughts of random passers-by, the built environment, and a system of “thought catchers”—as landing sites and affordances—that combine with one another in an eloquent streetscape of expressivity. The Wall of 1000 Thoughts, as it breaks the normalizing routine of the street scene, speaks of the entanglement of thinking, paint, hard labor, inspiration, globalization, and the architectural surrounds of 51

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highways and high-rises. And, like all landing-sites, it has a specific address, this one even numbered with the lucky eight. The wall is thinking; it speaks. Deleuze is emphatic that the “logic of sense is inspired in its entirety by empiricism. Only empiricism knows how to transcend the experiential dimensions of the visible without falling into Ideas, and how to track down, invoke, and perhaps produce a phantom at the limit of a lengthened or unfolded experience” (1990, 20). This “superior empiricism,” which he also attributes to Nietzsche and Spinoza, is an empiricism along the contours of a speculative pragmatics. Keeping thought active and eschewing the fantasy of a pure positivity of knowledge, this genre of empiricism invites experimentation: tweaking the thing into expressing its potential further. Paradoxically, metaphysical understanding that aspires to be flexibly abstract enough to grasp a thing in its singularity necessarily proceeds pragmatically . . . The thinking of the thing must be open to the unplayed-out in advance: it must be speculative. The image of thought at issue here is an odd bird: a speculative pragmatism. Speculative pragmatism must actively affirm—accompany—the potential of what it thinks. The philosopher cannot take a seat of judgment outside or above. She must take the plunge. (Massumi, 2015, my emphasis)

Odd bird, indeed. The menagerie is proliferating. This paradoxical empiricism is pragmatic as a way of making our way through a city and it is speculative in its liaisons with speculation as a name for metaphysics, as a mirroring that keeps the unreflective tain in mind, as a thought of the what-if, and as a wager on an increase in value. We constantly speculate for pragmatic reasons, an affirmative act that accompanies all the dimensions of the city. The complex relation between classical idealism and empiricism has generated a host of vexed questions that have coursed across millennia. We will not solve these vexations here and now; indeed, these interweavings do not have a “solution”—they do not present that kind of “problem”—but only rivalries, inflections, emphases, movements, punctuations, and further experimentations. As a moment of orientation accompanied by an attention to the ease with which we fall into worn-out habits of thought, Derrida reminds us, The signifier “matter” appears problematical only at the moment when its reinscription cannot avoid making of it a new fundamental principle which, by means of a theoretical regression, would be reconstituted into a “transcendental signified.” . . . It can always come to reassure a metaphysical materialism. It then becomes an ultimate reference, according to the classical logic implied by the value of a referent, or it becomes an “objective reality” absolutely “anterior” to any work of the mark, the semantic content of a form of presence which guarantees the movement of the text in general from the outside. (1981, 650)



Thinking Streets: Transversal Empiricism 53

Derrida is suspicious of an empirical metaphysics—“finally, everything is mere matter”—but insists on the materiality of the textured weaves of the arabesque that loops from inside to outside and back again. A mark on a surface that appear simultaneously. The cut creates the surface and the surface creates the cut. A first cut that creates the transcendental illusion of firstness. At first: complexity, polemos. It takes, to begin, two, but the two are twined together in their movement. This is inscrutable. If the stratum of the logos were simply founded, one could extract it and bring to light its underlying stratum of nonexpressive acts and contents. But since this superstructure acts back upon the Unterschicht in an essential and decisive manner, one is indeed obliged, from the very outset of the description, to associate a properly textual metaphor with the geological metaphor: for cloth means text. Verweben here means texere. The discursive is related to the nondiscursive, the linguistic “stratum” is intermixed with the prelinguistic “stratum” according to the regulated system of a kind of text. (Derrida, 1982, 160)

Everything is a kind of text—and everything hinges upon how we understand “kind of ”—that engages the materiality of the nondiscursive. All is mixed, shaken, and stirred. Folded, sedimented. A text is a rocky surface of geological strata; a fabric is a woven street. And an Unterschicht is not just a lower strata of materiality, but it is also a below-ground story of a building and the riff-raff of an underclass. All of those movie car chases and gunfights that happen in echoing, desolate, and gloomy parking lots below the ground, that subterranean concrete displacement of Hades. The metaphorai flit around the city, displacing and replacing as a means of positioning that requires the empty space of the paradox of sense. With Deleuze, we move to the double-pincered action of lobsters and fields of movement across a variety of planes: Deleuze characterizes the movement of originary difference as a transcendental field, or, which is the same thing, a plane of immanence that generates actuality . . . actualization is the cutting up of this continuous field by real relations and concrete settings such that the ideal differentiations are further determined. This coupure generates an actual being or given object. As Deleuze puts it, actualization is the “production of finite engendered affirmations which bear upon the actual terms which occupy these places and position, and upon the real relations which incarnate these relations and these functions” (DR 297). (Cheah, 2008, 152)

There are, for both Derrida and Deleuze, “originary differences” that then give rise to the astounding details and specificities of the world. There are, in fact, parking lots, weather patterns in the South China Sea, operations occurring in Queen Mary Hospital, research in the labs at the Science Park,

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children racing through the rides at Ocean Park, and hackathons at Cyberport. There are, in fact, facts and a state of affairs. These are all expressions of, but not equivalent to, the event of sense, which “remains immanent to our world, though it resides within it as something different from the world’s immediate appearance. And for this reason, sense must show itself in the internal passage from one side of the divide to the other, in the movement from the empirical to the conceptual and back” (Widder, 2003, 4). This movement is transversality at work: looping conceptuality and materiality in its many aspects. There are distinctions between conceptuality and the empirical, but they are inseparable from one another, just as sense is inseparable from, but not identical to, propositions in language. What is most essential, however, is the movement to-and-fro, the movement between what we are figuring as the arabesque, the zigzag, a filigree, or a fillip. One of the fundamental shifts that Deleuze makes in his revisioning of classical empiricism is the development of the concept of virtuality, which “precisely designates the mode of the structure of the object of theory, on the condition that we eliminate any vagueness about the word. For the virtual has a reality which is proper to it, but which does not merge with any actual reality, any present or past actuality. The virtual here has an ideality that is proper to it, but which does not merge with any possible image, any abstract idea. We will say of structure: real without being actual, ideal without being abstract” (2004, 179). This sentence of Proust’s, which Deleuze loves, is precise if enigmatic: Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract. Ideality is immanent. Empiricism is transcendental. The city is a sedimentation, a fold, a virtuality, and a language, keeping in mind that neither a language, the text, nor the city are closed-in and self-­ sufficient signifying systems. All are open, material, and nomadic structures that are not, not quite, structures. In a well-known passage from the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein has written that “our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses” (§18). Descartes, Haussmann, and Le Corbusier—the constructivists of a certain vision of rationalism and all of whom are extraordinarily important to the development of modernity—will all labor strenuously to straighten out the old crooked streets into the grand boulevards of thought and urban space. And this will-to-straighten is accompanied by a will-to-the-grid seen from above. Le Corbusier “made an extreme use of perspective in order to render the towers; the perspective on the project is drawn from someone descending in an airplane to the ground, about 1000 metres up. While the architectural convention of looking down on a big built object to see it whole is commonplace,



Thinking Streets: Transversal Empiricism 55

Le Corbusier overstretched this convention, by positioning the view so high in the sky that is impossible to see much detail in the buildings; one notices more the mechanical repetition of the Xs, composing a forest of towers. The Plan Voisin illuminates, oddly, one aspect of ‘liquid modernity’: its erasing of past time” (Sennett, 2019, 72). This kind of vision of the city, this kind of design of repetitive structures, this fetishism of concrete tends to obscure the cities within the city, makes it more difficult to crack open the interstitial spaces in order to slip in to try something new. But there is always a twist. A donkey, standing in the shade, waits by the side of the road. Accidents are waiting to happen and Dionysos bides his time. A proposition is not a linear one-dimensional linguistic form exhausted by denotation, syllogistic logic, or conceptuality: it is one of the manners in which the world does its work, carrying with it mood and meaning. The city is a name and every name is itself a city of restless inhabitants, concepts, histories, howls, whispers, yearnings. The city, as thought, moves as an empiricism of the event of sense, but this empiricism is uncanny, emitting incorporealities, quasi-causes, and tiny currents of something that moves us to think. We cannot keep up with, much less become masters of, either thought or of the city. The city is a name and all names are transport hubs through which we move and which move through us, an ordering of our lives that is both sustained and disturbed by the representations of what Lefebvre calls the “semantic field that organizes feelings and emotions as well as objects, because it contains an order and imposes it upon the chaos of fleeting moments; it is enjoining because it joins and disjoins” (2008b, 282). Frames unframe and unframing reframes. This semantic field, also shaped by the outside of nonsense, now includes the digital atmosphere that enmeshes us and configures the flux of the city as it shapes the sensorium of our experience. In addition to its operations of clarity, transparent readability, and the reflectivity of rational processes there is also “an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” (Certeau, 1984, 93). There is never only light, only transparency, only clarity. There are shadows, stains, dreams, dark spots on the polished facades of the banks and insurance companies. And there is always space for slipping-into, slipping-between. There is a crossingpoint between the city and the city. Metaphor is movement and movement is metaphorized, but there is no literal site from which metaphor brings the city into movement. The trucks and trams are nodes in a network of circulation. Everything is transversality in motion. This is not “simply” the movement of empirical objects through space, for originary metaphoricity—which is equivalent to metaphysics—is “constitutive of the very unity of being. The as-structure of understanding

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unearthed by Heidegger characterizes understanding and the saying of Being as hinging on a movement of transfer” (Gasché, 1986, 302, my emphasis). Without the hinged structure of being there could be no transfer of goods, language, or understanding for there would be no experience of the ­borders— screens, interfaces, membranes, and paradoxes—that crisscross the urban surface. There could be no joints and quoins, no topologies, no thinking without this movement. All the milieus of the urban proposition are in motion, and, except in provisional and contingent ways, there is no point of an initial origin or a teleological end point, although there are watering-holes, trysts, affordances, rest areas, and landing-sites. The city is, by disruptions and turning corners, incessantly becoming-city. This city and the un-city entangled with philosophy and un-philosophy are all brought into relation by the transversality of the trans-. The trans- is the mark of an operator for crossings of every sort. In the midst of a dense analysis of the “by” of the “passing by” of an event, which is connected to the entirety of the history of “practice,” Derrida observes that the “whole spectrum is deployed by by, through the seme of crossing or passage through and beyond. If I say it is deployed by by or through through, through traversing [à travers la traversée] it is not to make a game of it, but because the sense is in fact transformed by passing through the schema of transformation and trans, as one would say in Latin, at once passage through and overflow, transgression, the step that surpasses” (2019, 30). The passage through the trans- changes things. A rabbit hole, a force field, a time warp, a whorl of a Banyan tree. It is, of course, a game, but a game with the highest stakes possible and therefore a game of chance that exposes one to absolute loss. It is what Deleuze calls an “ideal game” that only thought and art can play. This is philosophy. The trans- enables the transits of transversal empiricism. A force of passing through, passing by, and passing around drives the city and philosophy toward one another while also sheltering differentiation, a force that carries the human city along with its turbulence toward an unforeseen to-come. “Strictly speaking, this force or dynamism, if we can use these words, is inhuman. It is prior to any figure of human consciousness such as the subject, reason, or spirit, and even practical action. This relation to alterity is more material than matter as substance or presence because it is more fundamental or ‘infrastructural,’ so to speak, since it constitutes matter as such” (Cheah, 2008, 146, my emphasis). So to speak. This infrastructural dynamism that is neither matter nor spirit or both matter and spirit—Gasché calls all of Derrida’s essential nonconcepts such as différance and its many substitutes “infrastructures”—constitutes matter, consciousness, and presence by a timing and spacing that differentiates. This is the paradox of sense, the impossible at work. It’s that not-a-thing that brings that swing to the rhythms of the streets.



Thinking Streets: Transversal Empiricism 57

This inhuman force cuts into the unifying forces of the urban, language, perception, the line of time, and the vast complexity of nature. Philosophy is the thinking that accompanies—and this is a sign of speculative pragmatics at work—a being-caught-up in this force in an attempt to recognize and articulate it while acknowledging that impossibility. The zigzag of the coupure on occasion shatters the unfolding of the arabesque. It is the necessity of the originary two and of iterability, which disrupts every unity and identity, whether expressed in the event of the city or in the event of thinking. And while utopian projections of the urban can be extremely interesting as well as useful—we are all in one way or another always utopianizing the next step—the impossible is a “force of precipitation that is experienced as an eruption within the order of presence and that in turn forces the experiencing subject to act. The impossible ‘gives their very movement to desire, action, and decision: it is the very figure of the real. It has its hardness, closeness, and urgency’ (Derrida, 2005b, 131)” (Cheah, 2008, 147). This is the jolt of thought that Deleuze reminds us of, the jolt that makes us think, makes us wander the labyrinth of the city, our hands out ahead of us as if we were groping our way through the dark. Movement, the impossible, the paradox. The very figure of the real, so to speak. Hard, close, urgent. As it were. The streets of Hong Kong are shimmering after the thunderous blast of a typhoon has polished the city, leaving traces of itself in the water gathered along the curbs and the trees ripped from the Earth that are cast about like twigs. The metal carts piled with used cardboard pushed by the bent women, the street altars outside all the shops, and the Tin Hau Temples with their incense and blackened goddesses. There is the anonymity of the massive high-rise flats in Wah Fu and the glittering Mid-Levels, the leather handbags of the wealthy and the sandals of the poor. Everything, including the immeasurable immensity of the sky, is reflected in the miniature seas of the scattered surfaces of gathered water. The city pools and reflectivity gathers the city. Legein, logos. But the desultory chop of the harbor, ruffled by the last of the winds, refracts the lights from the ferries and the skyline; crimson and purple clouds are scudding away over the New Territories. Reflection is not a one-to-one doubling, but always a swerve, a diffraction. Light bends, curves. Thinking the city thinking entails a polylectics with nothing but improvisational tactics and partial resolutions, one that continues to breach the urban with its fissures visible and invisible and which therefore can never have a conclusion unless it is the conclusion of the absolute disappearance of the event of meaning. Extinction is possible. Since each of us, however, is for the time being one of the determined beings in a city each of us are also operative as this kind of mirroring and call toward inventiveness. Transindividual force-fields draw others into our sphere of influence and sends our images— our eidolons—into the force-field of others. “Each individual would be like a

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mirror for the condensation of singularities and each world a distance in the mirror. This is the ultimate sense of counter-actualization” (Deleuze, 1994, 178). Countering the actualized state of affairs, we are incising new lines by skating on the surface of a mirror, on a surface of thin ice. We cast worlds onto the screens of the streets, against the walls of M+ in West Kowloon, while other worlds cast us in other directions. Philosophy is speculatively pragmatic, but we will have to take care not to close down thinking by thinking that we know what the “application” of such a “pragmatics” means, as if there were a prefabricated thing called “philosophy” which can then be placed over, applied to, a prefabricated thing called the “city” with its many dilemmas. It is true that there is an appliqué at work—as in sewing and ceramics—but this is always a graft of differences, an assemblage cobbled together through a movement of forces that are not applied on an “inside” from an “outside” that possesses critical distance. “With quantum literacy,” for example, we can think of applications as an opening up of models, as plugging in new concepts, attaching new points, diffracting points, and hence triggering bifurcations in the continuity of lines and lineages. Applications, then, are parasitic upon a system; they are what prevent a system from every truly settling within a form of organization. As in biology, where parasites and symbionts have long been acknowledged to play a major role in evolution, applications as parasitic “mobile units” that hook up with the dynamic functioning of a system at points (literally: discretely) are a major factor in the evolution of technical systems. (Bühlmann, Colman, and van der Tuin, 2017, 53)

Apps, and not only electronic or quantum applications, are not impositions but “mobile units” of interpenetrations that generate options. They are plugins that enhance external relations across the city. They slip across and into. Applications, too, engage the movement of the trans-. The “city” is a name for a name such as “Hong Kong” and indicates a coalescence of contingencies that create dense sedimentations of historical orders both visible and invisible. Sedimentations are always expressivities, waiting to be pried open by double-pincers. Every name is a miraculous appearance of Wittgenstein’s image of language as a bricolaged city (which follows his question about “how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?”). Socrates’ real dwelling was in the hustle and bustle of the agora and the Stoics, changing places as they moved into the shade of the Attic heat but still remained outside to see what would come, claimed the “arcades that surrounded the agora of classical Athens . . . envisaging that cosmopolitanism was not only a moral duty toward stranger and a political system for universal governance, but also an aesthetic engagement with cultural difference . . . The stoa was a shelter from the sun and rain



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without becoming an enclosed room. It was an in-between and transitional space, neither outside nor inside” (Papastergiadis et al., 2013, 338). Philosophy is always such an in-between and transitional space—that, as we have seen, is not equivalent to extension but to a different topology—that is neither inside nor outside and both inside and outside. Philosophy thinks along the borderlines, is exposed, and must constantly become reoriented as it creates new maps of experience. Threatened by the rigidity of the formulaic, by capitulation to the technological, and by the absurdity of the absolutely opaque, it must learn to move nimbly, beyond the speed of light and slower than the slowest of lobsters parading in the streets. It must zigzag and do a two-step. Sense and its others. The being of meaning in the fluid contours of the urban occurs one stutter-step at a time, as a looking around with one’s view always partially blocked, and with an acknowledgment that there is an incessant swarm of what cannot be consolidated in any single language. The city babbles; philosophy listens, responds, creates, redistributes, and, traditionally, labors to constrain the epidemic of meanings. “A name is a proper name when it has only one sense. Or rather, it is only in this case that it is properly a name. To be univocal is the essence, or rather the telos, of language. This Aristotelian idea has never been rejected by any philosophy as such. It is philosophy . . . Language is what it is—language is language, only to the extent that it can control and analyze plurality of meaning. And without remainder. A spread which cannot be controlled is not even a plurality of meaning: it belongs outside language” (Derrida, 1981, 48). The times are changing. The containment zone called “Aristotle”—to which we will always owe an infinite debt—is being reshaped and opened to other currents. Quantum literacies of polyglot cities of assemblages. There are two additional visionary containment engineers—one called “Descartes” and one “Le Corbusier”—in whose well-worn tracks I want to follow very briefly once again, for they stand as founders and guardians of a tradition of thought and construction in modernity that hopes to be impervious to uncontainable contingencies, evil demons, and to those lazy meanderings of the path of the donkey. They want to trust their own empiricisms that grow from their own rationality. Their form of modernity is coming to a close, but with powerful continuations at work in both the city and philosophy. Descartes and his descendants believe in purifications, which have been extraordinarily successful and extraordinarily destructive, and want to raze to the ground these places of the ancient crookedness of the in-between and begin again to put things right by laying down a new rational foundation of a grid of certainty. If God can be proven to exist then science is safe. In his fantasy of the “Radiant City” (1924/1933), Le Corbusier in his turn longed for not just science, but a shining city, to “emerge from a tabula rasa: it was to

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be built on nothing less than the grounds of demolished vernacular European cities. The new city would contain prefabricated and identical high-density skyscrapers, spread across a vast green area and arranged in a Cartesian grid, allowing the city to function as a ‘living machine’ ” (Merin, 2013). Each of these thinkers emerged from specific historical circumstances, which must be taken into account, and then significantly reshaped those circumstances, but what did the two think of the violence that they invoked in the name of planning, about how that violence would be displaced, redistributed? This “living machine” is the result of a wish for a perfect repetition of forms, a delusional dream tantamount to death and in a direct line from the geometric imagination of Descartes who thought of automata and the soulpilots of the body. Derrida thinks the “living machine” in a much more supple manner, along the trajectories of the “living,” “machine,” and the two superimposed upon one another: An event does not come about unless its irruption interrupts the course of the possible, and, as the impossible itself, surprises any foreseeability. But such a super monster of inventiveness would be, this time, for the first time, also produced by the machine . . . The thinking of this new concept will have changed the very essence and the very name of what we today call “thought” the “concept,” and what we would like to mean by “thinking thought,” “thinking the thinkable,” or “thinking the concept.” Perhaps another thinking is heralded here. (2002, 73)

That’s a start. Technē is a modality of manifesting being that a god will certainly not save us from, but that we can rethink, reimagine, reaffectualize, and, perhaps, even reengineer? New concepts must be articulated that touch upon the “living,” the “machine,” and the conjointure that brings them together in ever more intimate and uncanny ways in the neighborhood, for instance, of the monstrousness of the multitentacled Cthulhu and the infinitely descending abyss of the Exham Priory. Magna Mater! Magna Mater! . . . Atys . . . Dia ad aghaidh ‘s ad aodann . . . agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas ‘s dholas ort, agus leat-sa! . . . Ungl . . . ungl . . . rrrlh . . . chchch (“Lovecraft,” 1924). Artaud could not have said it better and the typewriter is banging out its own languages, going its own way. This is another thinking with names such as new materialism, post-humanism, cyberpunk, or transcendental materialism. Descartes, that sophisticated urbanite—he knows all about the trade routes to China and elsewhere—separated the thing from the mind, considered the soul the captain of the body, and loved the life of the streets. About Amsterdam, for example, he wrote to his friend Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac on May 5, 1631: I could live here all my life without ever being noticed by a soul. I take a walk each day amid the bustle of the crowd with as much freedom and repose as you obtain in your leafy groves, and I pay no more attention to the people I meet



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than I would to the trees in your woods or the animals that browse there. The bustle of the city no more disturbs my daydreams than would the rippling of a stream . . . Whenever you have the pleasure of seeing the fruit growing in your orchards and of feasting your eyes on its abundance, bear in mind that it gives me just as much pleasure to watch the ships arriving, laden with all the produce of the Indies and all the rarities of Europe. Where else on Earth could you find, as easily as you do here, all the conveniences of life and all the curiosities you could hope to see? In what other country could find such complete freedom, or sleep with less anxiety, or find armies at the ready to protect you, or find fewer poisonings, or acts of treason or slander? (Glasfurd, 2014)

Descartes loves Amsterdam in the same way we all love Amsterdam. It’s a good place to avoid poison and treason, to see all the rarities of the world arriving in one’s neighborhood, and to know the pleasures of the anonymity of the bustle of the crowd. We all enjoy being lost, being not known as a determinable identity. His residence at 6 Westermarkt, which he rented from an English bookseller, is still lovely with its black and white marble-polished floor and the back room where he ate, slept, had an affair with his Dutch maid, and did a bit of writing.1 Six years after this vignette on Amsterdam, however, the thrust-and-parry of his thought moves in other directions with a composition of a text with the prodigiously reverberating title of the Discourse on Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637/2017). In this foundational text for what is to come, Descartes uses the tropology of architecture to lay out the rational demonstration of the necessity of his project to build new foundations for thought as the thought of the sciences, if only for himself and his confidence in his own understanding and its necessary alignment with the what-is of the world. “Thus we see that a building started and completed by a single architect will usually be finer and better organized than one that several people have tried to patch up by adapting old walls that had been built for other purposes” (2017, 5). The single individual will always have a more coherent vision—it is, after all, unified by the unity of the subject doing the seeing of a unified image—than a group that “patches up” by “adapting” that which has been built for something else. The concept of identity should be completely dominant over the concept of difference. There will be no bricolage or dressing in motley for Descartes and his followers, no theater or cutting up for this crowd. As if ventriloquizing his own future voice that will have been called Le Corbusier—which, it is worth recalling, is a grafted pseudonym for CharlesÉdouard Jeanneret that he adopted in 1920 and is drawn from his grandfather’s name—Descartes continues, “Again, these old cities of Europe that have gradually grown from mere villages into large towns are usually less well laid out than the orderly towns that planners lay out as they wish on level

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ground; so much less that from the way the buildings are arranged in the old cities—a tall one here, a small one there—and the way they make the streets crooked and irregular, you would think they had been placed where they are by chance rather than by the will of thinking men” (2017, 5). The oppositions are already profoundly embedded in the entire structure of inquiry: the old cities of Europe with their “crooked and irregular” streets versus the more consistent efforts of town planners of the new who prefer “level ground.” And, perhaps most deeply of all, at the level of the foundations of the subterranean where the foundation meets its other—the unfounded, the given, the abyss, God—is the opposition between “chance” and “the will of thinking men.” I will not rehearse the history of the concept of the “will” but only note that the voluntaristic individuality of this usage and the incessant construction of a barrier between “chance” and “thinking,” as if the two could live apart from one another, as if thinking and the city were not both profound games of chance. Descartes also excises the actuality of the urban, of childhood, the political, the religious, and the educational—all the fundamental forms of institutional sociality—from his meditations, which are solely for his own “personal intellectual hygiene” (2017, 6). He is trying to clean up his act—and one wonders about this desire to become hygienic—and the purifications of modernity are gaining a nuclear velocity. Descartes constructs boundaries in order to cleanse the procedures of the thing thinking itself thinking for the sake of greater certitude in the sciences and for greater personal health, while the public, the social, the past, and the accidental are all cast outside the magic circle of the rational lumen naturale since they are all, apparently, bad for one’s philosophical health. Nonphilosophy, at least for the moment before God reenters the scene in his ontologically perfect costume, contaminates philosophy and this has consequences. Descartes employs the self-reflective plumb-line of reason to set things straight, clear the debris of the past—and there is plenty of that—and of the provinciality of the books, all of which are old and outdated, for the sake of the emergence of the clarity of science and its very powerful tools of mathematics. It works quite amazingly well. While Descartes is writing a preliminary treatise on a method for the generalization of the sciences, Le Corbusier makes the geometry of planning a means into a very tangible end, a radiant city for living a better and healthier life through the wonders of repetition. Health, for him as well as for Descartes, is a good thing, for which it helps to be regular. The tabula rasa—a Roman school image of an erased slate—as a type of repetition (there are others), the link to a standard re-production, and the hubris of a “perfect form” are all phantasmagoria of the urban that come in the disguise of the purely rational geometry of planning as the necessary precondition of the construction of the urban good. Unité d’Habitation, Pruitt—Igoe, Cabrini-Green,



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Grenfell Tower. This vision of the rectilinear as habitation is built on a fantasy that excludes fantasy—the phantasmicity of the potentials of the virtual—other than the fantasy of the “purely rational,” including chance, the contingencies of historical accretion, and nonsense as ineluctable aspects of the urban imaginary. Neither Descartes nor Le Corbusier was finally content with the richness of the sensorium of the life on the crooked streets of Amsterdam, Paris, or Chandigarh, for their goals required that they raze these streets for the sake of other, more abstract goals: certitude in the sciences and the functionality of the modern megacity. “The street wears us out,” Le Corbusier muttered. “And when all is said and done we have to admit that it disgusts us” (cited in Sennett, 2019, 73).2 Contingencies, crookedness, donkeys, demons, and the messiness of the sensorium are all threatening to these projects, and so, with a flash of their magisterial hands, the two friends wiped the slate clean so that they could start over and do things right. Then they could wash their hands to get the chalk off. “The streets are at right angles to one another and the mind is liberated” (cited in Sennett, 2019, 73). This angularity and its passion for purification is as far as possible from the Great Health of Nietzsche, Artaud, or Deleuze.3 The city is never a blank slate for it has always, as a slate, already been voluminously scribbled upon and traces, however faint, always remain to prick curiosity, the conscience and the will-to-invent. The city is a resonance of spatialized temporalities, a historical experience of a patchwork of meanings but never an object of knowledge that is bound into a complete determination of facticity or designation by the power of rationality. Its materiality of thought is always in motion, ex- and im-ploding. Time convenes the spacings of the urban, with its uncountable specificities and slivers of sensibility, as well as the chaotic cosmos of the planetary. There is, of course, massive and intricate planning at work across the infrastructure of the city as architectural structures, transportation, energy, sewage, commerce, the lawscape, communications, and the surveillance systems already put into place, with more to come as the digital enters ever more intimately into the body. The ghosts of Descartes and of Le Corbusier continue to haunt the city and we must always pay heed to the play of this phantomenology.4 Before, alongside, and beyond the planning and the programming of the normatively empirical with its planning, there is always the throw of Geworfenheit, games of chance being played in the alleyways of Sham Shui Po as well as across the water—now connected by a bridge—in the glittering pastiche of the monumental casinos of Macau: the Parisian, the Venetian, the Grand Lisboa, the City of Dreams. Double or nothing. What stakes are we willing to place? The same throw always gives uncountable results. Your money or your life. This kind of game as art or philosophy, however,

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for which one must invent the rules anew with each throw, is always a counter-actualization of the what-is of the empirical as the denoted. The city profoundly needs philosophy—as a metamorphic movement across multiple folds of translation, prepositional positions, and mediations—and all the platforms of expressiveness that are concatenated around the generosity of the event of making sense called “thinking.” The city yearns, almost always without recognizing it, for the irreality of the virtual, for this is the condition for the event of meaning to arrive, transpire, and pass by. In fact, though, isn’t all of this prattle about the city’s need for philosophy irrelevant at best and nonsensical at worst? The city after all is real and the real after all is the empirical. Here it is; here we are. If the city of the empirical is the real—that which we experience from waking until the time for dreams and even that which enter into our dreams while we are ­sleeping—then why bother with peculiarities such as the event of sense, idealities, purifications and hybridities, concepts, quasi-subjects and objects, ideas and phantasmatic transcendentalities that philosophy presents in its own strange and almost unreadable lexicon of scrawls, graffiti? The in order to represents all of the forms of instrumentality that we all apply to the many tangible problems of the city, to trying to make the city better, more just, more beautiful. It is a translational operator, a network that understands pragmatics as utility as profit as the good. The in order to represents the order of representation in which signification, the good and common sense of the usefulness of referentiality, correlation, correspondence, symmetry, self-reflection meet and align with all the orders of the exertion of power such as capital, politics, patriarchy, or the machinic. All of these have their structures of existence, which exert enormous effects on everyone all the time and in every place of urban life. These aspects of the urban all require the most rigorous and sustained attention, but the in order to does not contain, constrain, or exhaust the event of philosophy or the event of the city with its inventive critiques, analyses, logics, emendations, questions, dilemmas, and blind spots. Philosophy and the other platforms for urban expressivity are excessive in that they elude the determinative constraints of the in order to and intersect with a series of possibilities, impossibilities, and the virtual. Philosophy intervenes as a speculative pragmatics, sometimes with an in order to in mind and sometimes to see what happens, to experiment with the urban scene. These possibilities play across all of the streets of the event of the city as a shuttle weaving the arabesque. The city to be a city does not need to explicitly think in this sense of making-relations—it does quite well without the questions, formalisms, and histories of philosophy—but philosophy must think, write, invent concepts, and offer them to the play of the city.



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Philosophy coinhabits the production of the field of the city; the city produces the relations of thinking we call “philosophy,” but we must continue to ask what philosophy makes when it takes to the streets as a thing that thinks, an assemblage-in-motion. What is a thing? What is an assembly? What is a city? Heidegger has argued that a “thing,” rather than being an object standing over-against a perceiving subject, is rather an assembling of an assembly, a cause and concern for humans, a mirroring that binds-into-freedom the fourfold of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. An assembly is a thing—it serves as a coherent concept, an object of thought—and a thing is an assembly, a collocation of differences that speak with more than one voice. A thing is an assemblage, a gathering of a parliament of things for moving forward, an individual that is a series of individuals expanding toward a recursive infinity. Both philosophy and the city are things in this sense, assemblies of assemblages, infinite un- and refolding loops. A building, for example, the very model of a stabilization with its foundation driven deeply into the Earth, is a thing: a concept, an assemblage, and an instantiation of a poetics of the social. Composed across all of these transversal dimensions, it is to be evocative for an experience of the urban. Transversality resonates. Philosophy is freedom on-the-go that is a manifesting, constraining, opening at work in the world and not the abstract voluntarism of the “will” of the individual. The philosophy that plays across the event of city has no special skill set or expertise that will help the city work more efficiently in transport and sewage than it can already do in its usual ways. Transport and sewage know how to think as well. Plato could not save Syracuse, but perhaps philosophy taken up as an inventive thinking that opens toward the trans- might be able to modestly contribute to assembling the cities within the city, the persons within the person, the experiences within experience. The people of the city, as well as the city’s technical experts, can handle the tasks of the in order to quite well, making use of without the need to thematize reason, imagination, the divinities, ethics, causality, and mirroring in their many forms. (It is true that the experts will not understand the twinship of nonsense and signification, but this will not, I am quite confident, keep them awake at night.) Instead of a technocracy’s representational and gridded mirrors of predictability in the many radiant cities of modernity with their clear and distinct foundations, philosophy creates a provisional setup in the middle of the streets, a lean-to in the milieu of mundane events that can only be partially tracked, partially understood. The conceptuality of bric-a-brac piled in the alleys with the stench of garbage wafting by. The opening to the unexpected with each step, each instance, each space of the urban. The unexpected will not occur with each step, but we must remain attentive. And, as we have seen, the mirror is never a simple act of linear light and straightforward

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duplication. These mirrors create affects and percepts, “oceanic percepts of Melville, urban percepts, or those of the mirror, in Virginia Woolf ” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 169). The city is awash with slow waves of azures, violets. Both Deleuze and Derrida, differentiators moving beyond the speed of light, “reinscribe, in the strict meaning of this word, reflection and speculation into what exceeds it: the play of the infrastructures. Instead of disposing of reflexivity in an empiricist or positivist manner (the surest way for it to reenter through the backdoor), the philosophy we have been considering takes reflection’s exigencies seriously” (Gasché, 1986, 239). Concepts are productive, not mimetically reflective. The city is a skein of real relations, including those of the paradox of impossibility, but not, finally, a space of mimetic representation that mirrors the real. “Nonlinear dynamic systems that seem structured yet unpredictable . . . the physical world is a mercurial stabilization of dynamic processes” (Coole and Frost, 2010, 13). The mecuriality of the city, though, also provides affordances for dwelling, building, and thought. Hermes moves between the living and the dead. Flux, tains, quoins, landing-sites: this is the city. Philosophy occurs as a profound sense of disorientation accompanied by a slightly more profound sense of puzzled wonder that invites, or forces, one to write. It is an experience of being lost, uneasy, or excited for not quite explicable reasons that triggers a desire for orientation, an experience of the obscure that triggers a desire for clarity. This is not a simple disorientation that can be solved or set right by looking at a map or asking an expert, a turn toward a preestablished background of facts, equipment, habitual procedures, and the good common sense of thinking that is familiar to everyone. Most of the time this is precisely what is to be done, but the status of the essence of a question and means of responding, of finding one’s way about, are quite different when a disorientation becomes “philosophical.” Thinking creates a step, and then a next step. Each step one must step out and step up in order to think. Step back, then, step inside and outside, step to one side: the urban happening is happening. The height of the sky soars above us; the foundations settle into the Earth. The city befalls us as we fall for its moods, its dreams, its wounds, its invisibilities that await around the corners. What is happening with the city? The contingencies of the throw, the happening of the happening of everyday life in the city. “Happening” emerges from Middle English hap, happe (“chance, hap, luck, fortune”), from Old Norse happ (“hap, chance, good luck”), from Proto-Germanic *hampą (“convenience, happiness”), from Proto-Indo-European *kob- (“good fortune, prophecy; to bend, bow, fit in, work, succeed”) . . . The verb is from Middle English happen, from Old Norse *happa, *heppa, from Proto-Germanic *hampijaną (“to fit in, be fitting”). (Etymology Online)



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The city is a happening of transversalities of sense that donates the occurrence of the event. For a very long time philosophy has dreamed of, the metaphysics of auto-affection and of thought thinking itself in the synchrony of an absolute foundational knowledge, but it has now—and there are many ancestors to this particular now—become street-wise, hybrid, promiscuous. There is a chance for good fortune. The purifications of modernity are coming untangled and getting reentangled in a different distribution of the elements, and modernity should be defined, Deleuze has argued, not by the Cartesian fantasies of the modern— which has its own place but must not be amplified into the whole—but by the power of the untimely. “It behooves philosophy not to be modern at any cost, no more than to be nontemporal, but to extract from modernity something that Nietzsche designated as the untimely, which pertains to modernity, but which must also be turned against it—‘in favor, I hope, of a time to come.’ It is not in the great forests and woodpaths that philosophy is elaborated but rather in the town and in the streets—even in the most artificial (factice) in them” (1994, 265, my emphasis). The untimely, which skews the traditional matrix of Platonism, means that the simulacrum is no longer the “false model” of the true idea, for “modernity” is the time when there is no final distinction between real and the copy, the woodpath and the street, but, rather, it is when the two, though differentiated, lean toward becoming the other through a series of very complex mediations active in the world: pollutants, weeds, cloning, geocaching, concrete, satellite signals, and way-faring. The same is the case with the “natural” and the “artificial”—the Derridean “living machine” of the city—which depends on an oppositional and simplistic language that is no longer adequate. The purification called for in the Modern Constitution is a fantasy-structure that is now coming undone as we compose a new Constitution a “natural contract” as Serres names it. One hopes it will be a better fantasy, a more vital contract. The arabesque is a vast machine; it is the slender vein of a leaf and the shimmer of the forest in sunlight. Descartes must give up on his hygienic project and get his hands dirty, for the arabesque urbanizes and hybridizes. It does not purify. This urbanization involves a superior empiricism of impossibilities, virtualities, and a two-headed paradox of an empty square that redistributes actualizations and a joker that cuts-into any hand that has been dealt. Deleuze, as we have seen, employs the term “extra-being” (extra-être) to indicate the power that enables us to think the impossible: “square circles, matter without extension, perpetuum mobile, mountain without valley.” These impossibilities are objects “without a home,” outside of being, but they have a precise and distinct position within this outside: they are “extra being”—pure, ideational events, unable to be realized in a state of affairs . . . If we distinguish two sorts of beings,

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the being of the real as the matter of denotations and the being of the possible as the form of significations, we must yet add this extra-being which defines a minimum common to the real, the possible, and the impossible. For the principle of contradiction is applied to the possible and to the real, but not to the impossible: impossible entities are “extra-existents,” reduced to this minimum and insisting as such in the proposition. (Deleuze, 1994, 35, 56)

This minimality of extra-being is absolutely enigmatic and both philosophy and the city as devotees of a metaphysical tradition of logical good sense, of an all-compassing rationality of a ratio that can be planned, and of an empiricism that cannot think originary metaphoricity will always recoil against such an absurdity. When we are illuminated by the event of the city as a zigzagging flash, philosophy will trace itself around the edges of that little something extra, of the sieve-being of the city that Certeau speaks of as he surveys Manhattan from the textual mirage of the now-vanished World Trade Center via a lexicon that passes along the tendrils of the irreal, the noema of expressivity, the phantasmatic, of cartoons and crustaceans, the subjectile burned by the red tips of cigarettes, micro-cracks fissuring all the surfaces, and, guided by one who knew how to leap, of the simplest experience of the event which is sense itself, that “thin film at the limit of things and words” (1990, 31). This “thin film” is a porous membrane on all the surfaces of the city upon which image and desire are projected (which is every surface). It is a slipping-away that enables a slipping-in and a slipping-out. This empiricism is complex, common to us all, and transversal. It is not the “good sense” that Descartes claims is the most regularly distributed of all things. Thinking asymmetrically crisscrosses the city and it’s all about the world in which we find ourselves living our mundane lives, getting and spending, waking and sleeping. Wanting the day and frightened of the night and the end of the night. There is no separation, although there are distinctions, between the empirical and incorporeal event of sense, the experienceable, possibility, and the virtual. Philosophy, when it activates its own General, necessarily forms its own borders as an act of self-constitution and kicks poets, nonmathematicians, rhetors, the illogical and the mad, and drunken revelers outside of its magic circle of the logos. Except for the very rare exception of stepping outside the walls to sit next to a cool stream in the midday heat and talk of writing and love, philosophy sets up shop among the men at the heart of the city or in the gymnasium. Money, it says, is the paltry exchange rate not for the ideality of knowledge but only for the simple teachable skills of the rhetoric of winning arguments. Transversal empiricism shifts this terrain. Things happen; cities occur; time passes and does not pass. The ideality of a transcendental immanence,



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which is empirical through and through, shapes an unfurling arabesque and only an originary metaphoricity, for which there is no single word that stops the incessant exchange of substitutions and displacements, can begin the task of barely beginning to do justice to the event of the event. This is why both philosophies of difference and modern art can take up the task of inventing a superior empiricism. “Difference must be shown differing,” Deleuze insists, “[and] modern art tends to realize these conditions . . . [T]he work of art leaves the domain of representation in order to become ‘experience,’ transcendental empiricism or science of the sensible” (1995, 56). Experience emerges from the differing of differences and the “transcendental” is not a schema of categories for all possible experience but the very intimacy of immanence itself. Singularities that elaborate their own idealities. Ontology is aesthetics, the infinitely dynamic sensorium from which philosophy and the city emerge and the “fissures within the concept of life yield not just a critique but the seeds for new forms and tempos of living itself, and perhaps also a fourth category of the thing other than life through which life is thought: matter” (Wark, 2015, 97). Matter entangles. This aesthetics of transversal empiricism is no longer aligned with a particular faculty of the mind or a particular region of being called “art,” much less the “beautiful,” but is aesthetics as the possibility and actuality of experience. The sensorium reverberates, precipitating thought. Experience differs, producing the incorporeal effects of meaning as a movement of at least two series that, through the paradox of the empty square, crisscross one another. “It is in difference that movement is produced as an ‘effect,’ that phenomena flash their meaning like signs. The intense world of differences, in which we find the reasons behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism. This empiricism teaches us a strange ‘reason,’ that of the multiple, chaos and difference (nomadic distributions, crowned anarchies)” (Deleuze, 1995, 56). A strange reason, indeed, one that is not that of the system of the plumb-line, the T-square, or the algorhythm as a set of preset instructions, but one that rides turbulences and comes to know how to adapt to, and create, new situations. This is superior empiricism at work, superior because it is more encompassing, more precise, and more expansive than the empiricism of the positivists. Streets within streets. The mode of being for such a philosophy is a selfabandonment of assurance and the aspiration for absolute clarity for the sake of the differing of sensibilities, a material activity of a pragmatics that as a disposition always invites experimentation. “To think is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 111). Try out something new. Give it a go. This is the greatest demand that the city puts upon

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us. The speculative as an aesthetics is not an abstract general idea, much less a transcendental a priori, but a force that courses through the specificity of the normality of the normal; the givenness of the given; the everydayness of the everyday. Nothing special. The speculatively pragmatic is the movement—the snags, flows, stops, and starts—of everyday urban life. These recur as a constant differing that informs the city a series of through-lines at work, through a series of infinitely particularized singularities that coalesce as a continuity of the sense of an event and of events. “What is an ideal event?” Deleuze asks. “It is a singularity—or rather a set of singularities of singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical state of affairs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are turning points and points of inflection” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 52). Inflect, pivot. Singularities are provisionally conjoined and brought into series of conjunctions, always finally disjunctive, which are arranged by the resonate magnetism of the paradoxical instance. Sets of singularities are idealities; they are comprehensible and repeatable, but not in a Cartesian-Corbusian sense of the regularity of form. Singularities, points of determination that are landing-sites and affordances, are inflections and pivot points at which “we”—the blurred field of the individual, the collective, the assemblage, the city, and the weather—can do the work of counter-­ actualization that we take upon ourselves. This is the arabesque-in-motion and Bühlmann has given the evocative name of choreostemics to the urban movements that occur as an infrastructure whose power sources are the fluctuations of an electrical field. Choreostemics refers to the very real action in a city, to an unfixed point loosely moving within an occurring choreography, but without being orchestrated prior to and independently of such occurrence . . . philosophical thought has freed itself from the primary assumption of to-be-referred-to identities, having started to view these identities as difference. Choreostemics lets these differences be treated as operative differentials. It stands for knowledge about the motive dynamics within thinking . . . Choreostemics is about training a capability of differentiated behavior within produced and accumulated knowledge. (2012, 125)

This is also an astute description of the fluctuating action of the urban fields as a whole (and not just the electrical field that supports the digital). The construction of new mobile cartography of urban experience, however, is quite different than the quest to more firmly establish a new foundation for knowledge that has been the dream of every idealism. New differentiations always occur within an already existing choreography of materialisms and the intensities of experience, including that of thought.



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Map-making for the contemporary moment of urban choreostemics requires the articulation of new figures of a transversally empirical critique. A “figuration is a living map, a transformative account of the self: it’s not metaphor. Figurations are not figurative ways of thinking, but rather materialistic mappings of situated, i.e. embedded and embodied, social positions . . . Figurations attempt to draw a cartography of the power-relations that define these respective and diverging positions. They don’t aim to embellish or metaphorize: they just express different socio-economic and symbolic locations” (Braidotti, 2014, 179–80, my emphasis). Ex-pression is an ecstatic outreach by the Banyan trees along Forbes Road, the stratified rock in the geopark, the polluted waters of Deep Water Bay, in street art in Sai Ying Pun, or in the paintings, films, and performances of the Frog King. All of this can be mapped in multiple formats, but what cannot be mapped is the virtuality of each of these coordinates, that which each coordinate—each pivot point—holds in reserve not as a potential energy that can be calculated but as an unforeseeable virtuality to-be-released. There is no causal necessity in or for this release, but things happen when we form different relationships, different networks. We do not know what will arrive, what we will create, what will allure us or crash down upon us. We have only to take the next step. Philosophical maps of urbanicity do not delineate a given territory with clear borders, but, instead, articulate possibilities in a milieu of relationality. The ethos of philosophy, its precision and its placement, creates windows inside windows, doors on the other side of doors, and streets beneath the streets through an ever more dense layering of a variety of figurations of concept, image, affect, and a looping line. The city intersects incessantly with philosophy, but without a symmetrical correspondence; referentiality and representation, which remain active, are not the primary gestures and neither “explains” the other. “As a beauty free in the Kantian sense, that is without concept, purpose or interest, the arabesque has its field beyond the difference between sense and nonsense. It is without sense, without, however, being nonsensical. Yet the arabesque can become the producer of nonsense-effects, where its indifference toward sense is itself placed and exploited within the field of sense” (Menninghaus, 2000, 44). The arabesque is the field for creative expression, consisting of chance and regularity, as the city makes itself over. Placing places on a map coalesces the world, but only in a swerving manner, for “every place on a map is a displace. A place is never itself but is forever displaced by another. This is also to say that the map itself is a displacement, and cartography is such a process of displacement . . . Traditional cartography seemingly instructs us on how to recognize and search for places, but in fact its real lesson is that we can never arrive at our desire placed on the

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map, and, yet, at the same time, we inevitably arrive at its displace” (Dung, 2012, 10). The maps of the city and philosophy are all being refashioned. The agora has been digitized; the polis has been globalized. Glitches in the screens and glitches in the concepts. A vertiginous network of mediations demands that we patiently conjoin a daunting set of translational relations between the so-called empirical and the so-called transcendental, the visible and invisible, between the living and the dead, the dust and the crystalline scintillation of words hovering in the air. We are in the early stages of untangling modernity, reweaving the elements in the most modest of preparatory acts possible as we await that which is to arrive. We need to hurry slowly. Descartes and Le Corbusier haunt every street, every Wi-Fi device, every GPS coordinate, every smart house, and the spectral logic of their return remains powerful. We must address this power with an ethos that heeds the ghosts, that takes account of both dwelling and the nomadic, and that is attentive to both matters-of-fact and matters-ofconcern. That knows how to listen with the third ear and envision the world with the third eye. All of the returnings of modernity, which perhaps are interminable, are now caught up in a more expansive re-turning toward a series of differentiations. We give this transition different names—the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plasticine, the Chthulucene, the end of history, and the end of philosophy—but none of these are sufficient. We are seeking a new complex of names and a new redistribution of the elements as we attempt to make a counter-actualization of the event that is happening to those of us who now walk the faciality of the Earth and its cities of Babel. There is, in this redistribution of the elements, a distinct turn from any binary dichotomization, at any scale of description, toward a differentiated monism that “refers to Spinoza’s central concept that matter, the world and humans are not dualistic entities structured according to the principles of internal or external opposition . . . matter is one, driven by the desire for self-expression and ontologically free. It aims at enacting its desire (conatus) which is the expression of the subject’s essential freedom of becoming” (Braidotti, 2014, 170). The “subject” may be anything-at-all. The scenarios of the world, including Homo sapiens sapiens, create innumerable moments of “solidification” and “division”—unifying and differentiation—which coalesce into a “fulcrum” in order to “fix starting-points.” The real requires a hand-hold, a lean-to, a diagram, a minimal interruption, but these are always from “within” the real, from within a transversal empiricism. There is no outside in this sense, for to be “inside a place means at the same time that you’re outside other places, and vice versa . . . all outsides are a form of being inside and all insides are a form of being outside . . . From this perspective, the fixing of boundaries is a way of making a place a place” (Dung, 2012, 20). All in one single act we



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place, displace, replace. We work with and from the landing-site that gives an affordance on the face of the Lion Rock and riding the waves of Cheung Chau, actualizing the operations of culture, including art, philosophy, and politics. Staying alive. “Everything is alive, in the sense that it continues to move through the world in a way that continually generates new variations on itself, ever reincluding itself in the world anew” (Massumi, 2015). This is the very movement of the chaosmosis of the financial databases as they circulate through the temples of Tin Hau. Variations of variations in a green twisting of a line. Transversal empiricism, with its idealities of the real, catalyzes a philosophy of the streets that suffuses the routines of daily life. It generates cracks in the city, new pathways, new landing-sites as the network of metaphorai creates points of contact, sparks of possibility. The city drifts, itself a dérive, a “filigree of vectors intersecting and running askance, forking and converging again in the neighborhood of singular points that coagulate” (Flaxman, 2011, 10). It traces lines and the “trace,” or any of its synonyms, is never something that only exists in the form of our normalized concept of “language.” Derrida insists upon this: I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of “mark” rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is everywhere there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language. (Derrida and Ferraris, 2001, 76)

The mark is inhuman and names, always marks and scrawled signatures, curl languorously like fog drifting through the city, keeping it bound provisionally into place, keeping each thing on a looped blue ribbon that will always be unleashed. Things slip into and out of one another. The sun, that great metaphor of the illumination of metaphysics, turns and turns on its tropological axis. Reason is distributed in a play of light and dark. The sun is a heliotropic flower, but “the heliotrope is a stone too: a precious stone, greenish and veined with red, a kind of Eastern jasper” (Derrida, 1974, 74). The sunstone is also a bloodstone, green flecked with red, and said to be useful for invisibility, healing, and divination. A star, a word, an image, a history of thought, and a stone. Materiality on the move throughout the long night and the sweltering days of the city. Hong Kong, with its own inimitable idioms, sweeps in an offbeat rhythm through the donation of sense called the urban arabesque.

Chapter 4

The Lobster, Unleashed: The Peculiarity of Philosophy

The lobster knows the secret of the sea and comes to find out the secret of the city. When the lobster is unleashed in the streets, and the lobster is always being-unleashed, philosophy courses through the city at the speed of thought. The click-clack of the lobster’s movements is the zickzack of the zigzag, a critique-in-motion that is unbearably slow. Gerard de Nerval, a nineteenthcentury “eccentric” and midnight rambler who was a precursor to the Surrealists and the Situationists, is said to have taken Thibault, his pet lobster, for a walk in the grounds of the Palais-Royal in Paris. Thibault was tied to a blue silk ribbon, presumably so that he would not make a mad dash for the gates and disappear into the growing bustle of the Hausmannian metropolis that was quickly taking on the title of the “Capital of the 19th Century.” Thinking of other ribbons—Rousseau’s and Marion’s, as well as that of a typewriter—Derrida muses that a “ribbon perhaps figures therefore the double bind en soie, in itself, its own silky self. The silk ribbon, the double silk ribbon [ruban a soie] that will never have been the self’s own ribbon [ruban a soi]” (2002, 121). The ribbon supports and grants expressivity; the ribbon is tied on both ends, but it is unclear who is leading whom or what is leading whom. “The ribbon will have been a subject, to be sure, but also more or less than a subject. It was originally a material support, both as subjectile in which one writes and the piece of a machine thanks to which one will never have done with inscribing” (2002, 122). What is the ribbon that binds Thibault to Nerval, both of them to us, and all of us to the city? What is the ribbon of time that spaces itself?1 How will the double-pincers of the lobster come to be named as “God”? While on holiday in La Rochelle, Nerval had apparently stolen the creature from the lobster nets when “it” was an “it” and not a “he”: a simple nonpoetic but sand-loving lobster before being graced with such a sonorous title 74



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as Thibault. Nature becomes culture by acts of naming and an amphibious animality enters the boulevards on a silken blue thread through an act of art. A generation of Nerval scholars attempted to debunk it, but then a letter to his childhood friend Laura LeBeau was discovered. Nerval had just returned from some days at the seaside at the Atlantic coastal town of La Rochelle: “and so, dear Laura, upon my regaining the town square I was accosted by the mayor who demanded that I should make a full and frank apology for stealing from the lobster nets. I will not bore you with the rest of the story, but suffice to say that reparations were made, and little Thibault is now here with me in the city . . .” Nerval, it seems, had liberated Thibault the lobster from certain death in a pot of boiling water and brought him home to Paris. Thus we know that it was Thibault, and not just “some lobster,” who went for that celebrated promenade in the gardens of the Palais-Royal. (Horton, 2008)

In some manner or another—how does one best transport a lobster?—the poet had brought the lobster back with him, or, perhaps, the lobster had beseeched the poet in a vision to give him a new life, a second chance that would take him out of the dangers of the turbulent sea and into the glamorous streets of Paris? This was something that, as far as we know, no lobster had ever dreamed of before, so we may safely conclude that Thibault was a romantic genius, a harbinger to all of the avant-gardes yet to come, and the most fortunate of all lobsters, assuming, of course, that one prefers life in Paris to scuttling along the sandy bottom of the sea with predators above and below waiting for one’s slow and awkward passing. Théophile Gautier, a friend, quoted Nerval’s entirely reasonable proposition about the lobster: “I have a liking for lobsters. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw at one’s monadic privacy like dogs do.” (None of us like having our monadic privacy gnawed at, do we?) Thibault the Lobster is, then, the very icon of the one who wanders the city streets at its own pace, the crustacean as a dandified flâneur who, always accompanied by a swarm of curious onlookers—a few who might even be piqued toward thought—pays close attention to rhythms, scenographies, economies, and image-regimes while making his—and we presume a “he”— way through the speculative experience of urbanicity. What, though, is a lobster doing in a city, completely out of its natural element, as if a bizarre version of the Husserlian epoché was being performed, enacted as a sociopoetic zigzag? What are the incorporeal and transmissible effects of a lobster, at the end of a blue silk ribbon, walking through a park with a poet who is a crustacean thief and a giver of names? By its strange presence, the lobster helps us to see the city differently, the very task of philosophy as it comes to see itself differently. The salty waves have rolled ashore and are washing across the boulevards, disturbing the ancient binary

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of Earth and Sea, ground and water. Everything is becoming amphibious and amphibologous; modernity is liquid and cities are awash with money, suffering, depression, buildings, and alleyways. Blue and green canals are everywhere. With an intensifying prevalence, the cities are being inundated by actual seawater as the ice caps melt and the atmosphere slowly burns away in our slow and arduous suicide. One form of liquidity is digitality, as the quaint notion of the “physicality” of the city begins to hover between the visible and the invisible as it is enveloped in a becoming digital, or, more precisely, what we call the “physical” stands as a kind of short-term interregnum between moments of the technocapitalized network that pocks and furrows the lines of the city. The lobster is a sign of liquidity’s oceanic seepage into the scene in the parks, in the offices tightly cubicled and facing blank brick walls, the light falling narrowly from high above, alone and without preference. The lobster is in the close vicinity of a cockroach hiding beneath a couch, Sancho Panza’s donkey called “the gray” (el rucio), the parrot and the cat in The Third Man, Zarathustra’s animals, and the silence and short sentences intoned by that copyist of the accounts and the accountability of Wall Street. “ ‘I would prefer not to,’ he said, and gently disappeared behind the screen” (Melville, 1853, 8). (Screens await us in the near future.) A figuring of fissures and pivots. The lobster does not simply come before, or relatively alongside, the emergence of the injustice of the industrial and financial city. By its very presence where others would prefer it not to be—it is, after all, out of its element and its origin is the accident of naming as an amphibian gains the land and language of the human—the lobster, more importantly, interrupts the putative technicities of the efficiencies of the city, all the logic of all the measurable ratios operating in the city, enabling us to experience the multitudinous noises and variegated rhythms of the urban score in a different manner. The lobster slows down our perception; it teaches us to begin to feel our way with our claws and our antennae into the atmospheric confluences of the arabesque of the urban. “A lobster [or a city or a philosopher] is not simply within a larger system, but folds from that very same system, functioning and operating consistently upon it, with it and through it, immanently mapping its environment, discovering its own dynamic powers and kinetic relations, as well as the relative limits of those powers and relations” (Wikipedia, “Plane of Immanence”). The lobster lobsterizes the city and it is clear what will create the greatest possibilities: to unleash the lobster and then to follow its lightning-swift rhythms, its scratching out of incandescent zigzags. “There are double pincers everywhere on a stratum; everywhere and in all directions are double binds and lobsters, a multiplicity of double articulations affecting both expression and content” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 45).2 The Banyans, the white dolphin, and the kite wheeling high above High West seeking



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its prey, all speak and are spoken, are doubly articulated in their intersections with thought and the body. The city brings to the common sense of philosophy what everything brings to philosophy: a drifting constellation of questions to which we must invent a myriad of responses. Most of these questions can be sufficiently addressed by the usual range of normal empiricisms and normal speculations—­denotation, manifestation, and signification at work—and yet the city, as a singular object of and for thinking, also presents its own distinctive peculiarities. The lobster, having become-amphibian, appears in the City Centre—which is now distributed along nodes of global networks—and incites a different type of question, a different type of thought. Appearing where it doesn’t properly belong, embodying the intertidal zones where land and water intermingle, and incising a series of hieroglyphic figures on the streets, Thibault ensures that we not only pose questions to the city that have a determinable set of solutions, but that we also ask the question of the event of the sense of the city. The city is the compression and inflection of such provocations and the lobster is the paradox of sense. When lobsters are trapped, from the ocean or from the aquatic farms, they are situated along the powerlines of the Ge-stell that lead to a boiling pot and a plate, all mediated by money. When Thibault appears in the city, however, something else happens. A threshold is constructed and the cities within the city begin to shimmer. The entwinement of the city and philosophy carries with it determinations that evoke the history of philosophy as it frames and hovers above the questions of the globalizing digital city of telemodernity, the contemporary successor of the multiplicity of forms of cities that have come before it. This shifts the significance of place, communication, identity, and street. The city has always been a multiplier of force that gathers and disperses differences and a site for the exertions of asymmetrical power: political, economic, religious, artistic, architectural, or the power of thought. For much of human history these have not been separable from one another, but one of the characteristics of modernity is just this attempt, reflecting Kant’s division of the faculties, at the purifying differentiation of cultural forms: science, ethics, art. We are now, though, at the pivot point of transitioning beyond this division as the metaphorai carry us through the city, not into a unified form of a concept of identity but into new networks of becoming-something-else. Philosophy, like the oscillating city, commutes between all the framings of nature-culture,3 but it is not exhausted by any of them. Philosophy— a hole-puncher that makes networks of alleys, byways, and boulevards— necessarily requires the accompaniment of nonphilosophy to get its work done. The blue-leashed lobster is an artifice that, nonsensical, cannot be absorbed into economics, politics, or art; it cannot be subsumed by the

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religious or the architectural; it cannot be quantified into statistics, algorhythms, or set theory; it cannot be dissolved into logic. The lobster, however, requires the road between La Rochelle and Paris, the horse and carriage, the Palais-Royal and its political intrigues, and the history of poetry. Among other things. Thibault instigates the thinking of philosophy and this reflexive projection—this thoughtful casting—of the of is essential. This of is the sign of the opening of philosophy that includes all topics in its purview but is not thereby equated with any of those topics. Thinking, in its essence, exceeds itself and thereby stretches itself along. It is an activity that scrawls along via the dissolving stepping-stones of contents. The of is not simply phenomenology’s object of thought, but rather the step to the side, the step back, a thinking-about that never becomes a regional science of determinable expertise. This of, which outruns determination, is related to the Socratic not-knowing that marks the limits of philosophy as well as to Deleuze’s declaration that obscurity, and not just clarity, is an inevitable quality of Ideas. Philosophy does not know: it thinks. And although it presses strenuously, especially in its idealist formations, to overcome this fundamental limit and claim knowledge for itself, it cannot cross this boundary without ceasing to be philosophy. The in-motion of the creative critique that philosophy performs is not that of skepticism—at least not necessarily—but of a walking, burrowing, flying, digging, and clacking that breaches the dead letter of the status quo and opens a virtuality of the who-knows-what in all directions. Philosophy invents concepts in their materiality. Hong Kong knows how to think. This “not-knowing” is neither the doxa of opinion nor an epistemological skepticism, both of which necessarily occur on the plane of knowledge, but a distinction between that plane and the plane that recognizes the “paradoxical element” of sensemaking, the phantasmatic irreality of the apparition of the city-within-the-city, and the fact that the lobster is always unleashed, free, pulling the blue ribbon behind it on the streets. Planes of immanence always intersect—this is how sense is generated—and philosophy is neither the rational nor the empirical; it is the site where the two are entwined with or slide across one another. Cocking an ear with a receptivity required by an encounter with the demands posed by questions, philosophy incessantly listens with all its ears, uncountable. It possesses an ear for the echoes and resonances of the other, not as some kind of “absolute other” that is somehow already constituted, but as a partner in becoming something else. Expanding external relations and plug-ins as interior articulations of memory, anticipation, capacity, and distinctiveness also expand. It is a space for a questioning that responds in the form of writing that clarifies, provokes, unbalances, and invents. It makes things up and tears them down. Philosophy is the most precise and intensely rigorous attempt at the resolution of certain types of questions while recognizing that this resolution



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will not stop the movement of questioning. This is one of the reasons why philosophy must always continuously reread its own history while that more “progressive” form of determination that we call “science” tends to cast its history off, as if it has been cleared away for the accumulative truth of the future. Freud is a quaint left-over of an historical moment, Darwin merely a point of reference for that which biology has long ago surpassed, and how many physicists have read Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica? The “clear and distinct” that marks the wish that philosophy be knowledge— and there have been many versions of this dream—wishes to be ahistorical and can, finally, be neither clear nor distinct. The clarification, the bringing to explicatory light, that thinking entails also creates obscurity around it, a penumbra of shadows. Mixing occurs; hybridity contaminates the possible clarity of truth since before the beginning. Philosophical propositions are not the same as those in physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, or logic. They are not the same as the quantitative social sciences, of urban planning, or of architecture as a techno-rational project of planning and building. To act philosophically is to keep questioning, to keep the of active, to be able to create a provisional handhold in an affirmative not-knowing, and to create the necessary tools of thought to make something of one’s meanderings through the streets of infinity. Scuttling along the seafloor of the stock exchange. The writing that is philosophy is not, at the end of the day, a legislatively justificatory genre of rationally justified opinion—since there is no ground that can, finally, justify justification—though it will proceed by a material poetics of argument more or less aligned with a variety of logics of sense. It will proceed as a techno-poēsis of rationality as the formation of an opening of attended-to relationalities out of which one might learn, in a painfully slow manner, to live differently. Philosophy enacts a transversal critiquein-motion. The cities—Athens, Jerusalem, Lugano, Rio, Amsterdam, Paris, Buenos Aires, Havana, Berlin, Rome, Seattle, Hong Kong, Moscow, New York, Shanghai, Delhi—have intimately shaped the writing of philosophy and philosophy, in turn, has shaped the experience of the urban. The city does not automatically produce philosophy but must be twisted in a particular manner if the lobster is to appear in the streets. Cities, after all, often try to control their inhabitants and thereby to suppress thinking. But all cities have cities within cities and there philosophy might emerge, however furtively. There is the event of what-happens and the event of the “pure expression of sense,” which occurs as a transversal counterforce to the usual operations of the city. Writing is graffiti scrawled on the walls or painted in logographs on the streets, l’écriture as a chiastic activity that weaves unexpected entanglements crosswise along the torqued surface of a twisted plane. “Writing,”

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Deleuze reminded us, “is inseparable from becoming” (1997, 1). Writing is becoming and the lobster knows how to write. Inhabited and haunted by its others—history, literature, art, architecture— philosophy operates on the streets and in the high-rises, in the subway and on the bus, in the scuzzy bar and the chandeliered hotel lobby gleaming with polished marble. It stands on top of the billboards and in front of the screens in the windows. It mutters next to the traffic lights and inside the black-andwhites, in the blind gaze of the networked surveillance cameras and in the chatter of the mobile phones. It operates behind the bars of the prison in Stanley—whether holding criminals or owners of yellow umbrellas—and on the way to the airport, in the boardroom, and on the grates that vent, in great gusts, the warm air from the underworld below. It knows that the only two attributes that we know are extension and thought, so that materiality and ideality always appear together, a skein of experience. Philosophy moves with the infinite acceleration of thought and the infinite hesitation of Thibault. More formally, philosophy vibrates in that space that Foucault, in the analytic of finitude, named as a “strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since [Man] is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him [sic] of what renders all knowledge possible” (2004, 347).4 The doublet is constitutively “strange”—just as Deleuze’s “paradox of sense”—and the hyphen marks that irreducible oddity of the diagonal motion by which we scuttle simultaneously along the streets of the empirical and the transcendental, which are neither separable from one another nor collapsible into one another. Quoins, jointures, bindings. The “empirical and the transcendental will never converge, the unthought will never fully appear to the cogito, and the origins of meaning will always retreat from conceptualization” (Embree, 1997, 245). Philosophy is fractured by the drive for a definitive logic of meaning as truth that is constantly working its way through a labyrinthine anxiety about its uselessness, its incapacity, its poverty. Thought as thinking cannot have a fulfilled content since thinking breaks the vessels of its own thought, exceeds itself as its own movement. There are true ideas, but there is always a remainder to any content that enables the next swarm of thought to emerge. There is clarity, but this clarity is itself obscure, paradoxical, peculiar. The infinite space of the hyphen, whether called “philosophy” or the “city,” shape-shifts into an arabesque and peers over the balcony and out of the windows that reflect its own looking. High white clouds and glistening rainwater gather as a shimmering image in the reflective panels of the skyscrapers. There are metaphorai of distribution systems and warehouses of image, affect, and idea. The atmosphere is getting hotter, the immense sea crosses the typhoon shelters with ever greater ferocity, and we know that each word and phrase, in whatever its “original” context, takes on new inflections as it moves. The empirico-transcendental double of city-philosophy is



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shaping a new quantum-social entanglement that projects itself in all directions, creating a light humming in the night sky. Thibault’s antennae are slowly swiveling. Hong Kong is built on land speculation and the speculation of the stock market, and, in order to understand the city we must understand the specular, the spectacle, and the speculative, the latter of which Deleuze names “transcendental empiricism [that is] an idealism of the event [that] may be the most radical materialism there is” (Swarbrick, 2017, 3). The transcendental is the empirical and the empirical is the transcendental, but each of these terms must be practiced differently, pried away from the spirit-matter dichotomy and the formalized Kantian conditions of every possible experience, in which the “transcendental determination of being, cognition, or rule-following guarantees a priori the rational order of that which is so determined—establishes beyond the empirical possibility of accidents, deviations, and unknowabilities a necessary order of the eidos and the logos” (Staten, 1984, 14). Here we are. (What a triplet!) Hong Kong is sweltering. Thinking crisscrosses the city and the city crisscrosses thinking. Philosophy speaks with its companions in the libraries, the theaters, the labs, the studios, and in the circuitry of the laptops, solar panels, censors, and satellites. The ecosystem of the city has expanded—it is engaged intensively with the near-Earth orbit and has long ago, since its moment of origin (which does not exist), traveled to the edge of the known cosmos and beyond—but, as always, the ordinariness of the everyday suffuses philosophy just as philosophy suffuses the everyday. The everyday may be a “level” of experience and analysis, but it is also that which levels all levels, providing new platforms for the organization of the levels. The absolutely common saturates everything, precipitating, on occasion, thought. Nameless buildings loom above us, strangers walk by us and disappear into a café or onto a bus. The domestic helpers from the Philippines and Indonesia gather on Sundays across all the public spaces of the city, dividing their own spaces with cardboard so that they can be together separately, playing cards, fixing their hair or nails, eating, sleeping, talking with home. Work occurs all around us and within us all. The streets fill with the daylight of commerce and then empty out into the desolation of rain. They are replete and vacuous; they are fluxious. Philosophy is so slow that it is almost invisible, a ghost at the edge of vision. The city is pixelated. The streets, shadowed, are chiaroscuro in movement. This play of light is what enables us to see, to think, to wonder, to understand, to want. The shadow of the streets, like philosophy, is erotic. A wisp of a silhouette of a girl, casting a shadow behind her, races along corridor of an illuminated street, rolls her hoop along between a white colonnade and a cart with its back door ajar. A sense of melancholy suffuses the street that opens into a plaza, as she runs, lost in her play, as if up a hill toward the shadow

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of a statue of an unknowable figure with, perhaps, a slanted spear. The lines are divergent. A flag is statically blowing against a bruised sky. This is what Giorgio de Chirico has shown us about the city within the city, and it, like others that flicker along the curbs of consciousness, is an image that carries us alongside itself as we walk up the steep concrete stair of Ladder Street or take the escalators down below the Earth or back up again. “It is hard to imagine what it would like to draw a map of the living from below, from the perspective of the underworld. The posture that maps adopt is always one of looking down from on high” (Dung, 2012, 28). We have to learn to move both ways at once. The way up may be the way down, but there are also differentials at work, orientations of the image of thought that must always be in transition. Mechanics in motion. The city is dynamic and it is still. There is electricity in the air, signals resounding from every direction. The Banyans and the cockatoos speak in their own tongues. Winding our way through the labyrinth of any city, we can hear the keening lamentations of the urban spirits as they emerge from a long history of the transitions between animality, culture, religion, magic, dwelling, markets, roads, and philosophy. They speak of the torqued spaces of metro-anxiety, of the vortices of money, history, dwelling, and identity. The expansion of urbanization that began to pick up speed with industrialization and the force of the Baron’s Parisian renovations vaulted forward with the development of higher-speed transportation and communication networks, global finance capitalism, and, more recently, the embedding of the digital into the most minute of the interstices of common experience. China intends to move 250,000,000 citizens from the countryside into rapidly constructed cities by 2025. As this new spatial organization of urbanization became historically configured, it was accompanied by the emergence of an explicit critique of everyday urban life and the city is the site of everyday life, not simply as a general ontology of experience but as what Lefebvre, echoing Foucault’s doublet, has called a “double determination,” in which the generalities of any experience are intertwined with the empirical social forces at work that produce the complexities, boundaries, and stratifications of urban space. Edmund Husserl, diagnosing the crisis of European science in 1936, had already offered a succinct definition of the everyday: The life-world for us who wakingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the “ground” of all praxis . . . The world is pre-given to us, the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live is always to live-in-certainty of the world, being constantly and directly “conscious” of the world and of oneself as living in the world. (1936, 142–143)



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The everyday is the “always already there” that we do not have to think about to produce; the world is freely given to us—and we to the world—as we live out our life-projects, our dreams, our failures, and our successes, toward the dead end of our own death. As the “universal field of all actual and possible praxis,” the passive synthesis of the everydayness of the world for us mortals as historical beings also becomes a platform for construction. We make the day; our labor creates history; and we are overcome by the night. This intertwining must be constantly re-reticulated in the milieu of the city. This going-beyond, as abstract as it sounds, is precisely the experience that we live moment-by-moment of the everyday and it is essential to insist upon this in an age that tends to contain the real within the confines of the denotative states of affairs of number, definition, and—in the most violent case—of the meaningless unit of abject objectness that is the other to be eliminated. Philosophy is the trans- that steps beyond. It never steps outside of the transand the trans- is always an exploratory movement that loops backward, forward, up, down, and to the side. The trans-, the hyphen that twists, is the condition of existence for the orientations—the meanings and values that are there to greet us and then to be remade—to the dimensionality of the city. It is what enables counter-actualizations. We must think this link not only as the agora below the Temple of Athena on the Acropolis or of the Porch of the Stoa, but, as inheritors of that site, along the edges of the globalized tele- of technopower, along Harcourt Street and Nathan Road. The city is the example par excellence of the everyday and its paradoxical rhythms: a fleeting object of perception, desire, and imagination; a relatively stabilized set of efficiencies; reticulated forces that crush us and give us options; a space where the mass is inflected by the individual and the individual absorbed into the statistics of a population or of the crowd; and a virtual object yet to be created. It is a space in which categories such as the “social” and the “individual,” the “subject” and the “object,” the “human” and the “thing” become blurred and reconfigured, especially in the digital age where our sensorium is so often tele-mediated. It is haunted by an electric lobster on the loose. Philosophy makes strange the familiarity of the city as we become the familiars of the uncanny. As physis becomes more resolutely a determined interpretation of technē through the multiple operators of culture, there must be an undeterminable excess available into which the determinations of the new can come into being. The city is always exceeding the city; the there exceeds a localizable site; localization displaces place; historicity breaks the bounds of the factuality of history. The polis, the site of the emergence of the political, the historical, and as an activity of thinking that is always kept under the gaze of the political power of the norms of the General, is figured by the street. In a “quick word about the street, that phenomenon which epitomizes

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the modern city,” Lefebvre argues that it is in its “streets that the life of the large industrial city is at its most original and authentic. It is the street which offers those possibilities and choices which are incomparably more numerous in the city than in the village or small town . . . As soon as the street loses this attraction, because it is empty or because the weight of traffic makes it unbearable, the city becomes transformed into a lunar landscape” (2008, 309). The Earth becomes the moon (which is, perhaps, unfair to the latter). Without streets brimming with quasi-chaotic differences, there cannot be a flourishing city, for the street is both the metonymic image of and literal platform for the generation of possibilities. Neighborhoods must be busy crisscrossings. (Jane Jacobs was right.) The street, especially as a zone for driving, shopping, encountering, and walking is the manifestation of the encounter between the rationally planned and the contingency of chance. The street is where we put ourselves into motion to learn how to pay closer attention to our environs, to recall the sedimentations of history, to educate our senses, and to practice the tricks of turning corners into the unexpected. To mimic the actions of the lobster. Philosophy and the city draw figures and filigrees across the surfaces of the other. Edouard Glissant has suggested that this turning driven by the force of the dé- might make more livable the politics of the city and of imperialism, asserting a kind of political strength but emphasizing a “rhizomaticity with the Other and basing every community’s reasons for existence on a modern form of the sacred, which would be, all in all, a Poetics of Relation” (1997, 16). Whether in philosophy, our daily rounds, or in the office of the mayor’s architects, planning must leave room for chance, which, regardless of the thoroughness of the plan, will always intervene to disrupt the mechanism. And everything must have a voice, a place at the table of possibilities that await at the edge of the horizon of the streets. Latour’s Parliament-ofThings is emerging, creating its own rules for a diplomacy of differences in a common but not uniform world, signing unexpected contracts with a host of alien contacts. These formations occur within a confluence of forces as an estuary, as names, affect, concepts, and as densely populated and expanding built environs. What is the task of thought as it encounters the globalizing city—the city of the Earth—with its streets, windows, virtualities, wealth and poverty, abjections and sublimations, its swarms of signs, and its torqued architectures? What is manifesting and how is this manifesting occurring within urban form that inscribes itself in, or on, the khȏra? How does the relational matrix of the streets become traversed by prepositional and adverbial crosstown traffic? How does the city think us as we think the twenty-first century as it gains momentum, as it unleashes possibility, one of which is devastation?



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The philosophy of the city is a double-genitive in which each term claims a kind of possession of the other. “Through” indicates a passage-beyond—that in this case can never be completed—as well as an aperture of vision: to see philosophy through the means and methods of the city and the city through the lens of philosophy. (There are, of course, innumerable additional methods of vision that we could employ to better see each of these phenomena.) The and is philosophy’s n+1 and the city’s unexpected curvature of surprise; its abysmal reflections that simultaneously refract and reflect one’s blurred image along with the other objects, visible and invisible, of the urban world. Thinking, in this slightly skewed space, is not the thinking of formal philosophical logic or of the rationality required of urban planning, but something flowing in the staccato or adagio rhythms of the everyday, an errant wandering of Thibault who leads Nerval far from the Palais-Royal, sensing the sea in the banlieues and along the waterfront of reclaimed land. Life on the streets figures this thinking and this thinking—always dissipating, failing, falling away, re-stitching—follows the liquid currents of the movements of the streets. The streets configure the unexpected, the encounter from around the next corner, the way the light and shadows of thought reflect across the windows at dusk, the questions that form and dissipate as we walk in the winter or ride the metro in the summer. The streets embody a spatialized temporality and a temporal spatiality that are not the givens of a Kantian a priori transcendental aesthetic, but, instead, create eddies as we go, slipstreams of time in which ghosts and the future are inseparable, spaces where the impossible outside almost appears, almost makes itself known. The manifest, however, inevitably remains the appearance of an apparition; the everyday, which Blanchot has named the “most difficult”—to which we shall return and which returns us time after time to the streets—comes and goes. In The Madness of the Day, Blanchot’s narrator tells us self-reflectively that “I walked through the streets like a crab, holding tightly onto the walls, and whenever I let go of them dizziness surrounded my steps. I often saw the same poster on these walls; it was a simple poster with rather large letters: You want this too. Of course I wanted it, and every time I came upon these prominent words, I wanted it. Yet something in me quickly stopped wanting” (1995, 195–96). Philosophy is a street is a painting is a page is a screen is a theater: but the thinking that is philosophy is not primarily a theater of representation, an enclosure where preestablished scripted roles—and their concomitant masks and meanings—are acted out. This slow-motion critiquein-motion moves across the faces of twilight and the reflections on the highest skyscrapers, the shadows that move between cars, between buildings, between a sleeve of a shirt and a jacket. Philosophy that, unleashed, cannot be contained even by (especially by) that which is called “philosophy.”

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A transcendental empiricism, not a transcendental idealism. A step, another with a slight curvature of direction. Where there is philosophy, there is noble Thibault roaming the streets at his own pace, once bound by a blue leash as it stuttered on its claws making its slow way through the Palais-Royal, but now free, roaming the world’s cities with the click-click of a zickzack, its antennae poised in exploratory anticipation as it searches the sea of signals. In a different way “shells” or “crustaceans of the sea” [Schalthiere des Meeres] (Kritik, 1987, 76, para 16; para 58), which Kant evokes several times throughout the third Critique, are also marginal to the human realm of dominion. Kant thinks of these creatures not in terms of fishing and eating, but, instead, he imagines them as free creatures that occasionally lend themselves to aesthetic contemplation at the liminal margin between land and sea. This twoness of doubling goes from the bottom to the top, from the sea to the city, even though there is no longer a “bottom” or “top,” a substantial “sea,” or a solidified “city.” And the Lobster is Divine: God, too, is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each strata is double (it itself has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of double articulation. Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not at all to say that the strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units (substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 40–41)

Structures are always singular and non-generalizable—although the “always” refutes this claim and is captured by the pincers of the double bind—and are always multiple, organized by the throw of the dice. One must cast about for understanding of the strata here in Hong Kong, without assurance of a correct answer or a complete empirical determination. Genuinely philosophical problems, after all, “emerge wherever human beings have begun to question the place assigned to them by nature, society, and history, and searching for firmer ground, demand that this place be more securely established. The fundamental question of philosophy is: where is humanity’s place, its ethos? In this broad sense all philosophy is at bottom ethical reflection” (Harries, 1987, 29). This ethos is not predetermined and reflection does not reflect simply what-is but moves into the virtuality of what emerges. Cities within cities. Ethics, as a practical and free act of the creation of place and relationships, is the center of gravity for philosophy. Kant said all of this long ago. And ethos, as place and people, is always itself in motion, re- and dis-placing. Think and think again; find your footing.



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All strata speak in their own way, for they bring themselves to a listener’s attention, not in the formalized language of the other as linguist patterns but as a call for attention that speaks in the expressiveness of sedimentary rocks, ants, galactic clusters, and the rustle of a lobster in the corner of the night. Cities speak as cities; streets speak as streets. Imagine all the strata, slowly—or explosively—shifting places. B-A, BA: repetition and difference, the nonsensical a-signifying produces the effect of sense. Each of the four strands of the urban arabesque produces sites for experience, analysis, experimentation, furthering, or regression. The Lobster-God is complex: The abstract machine of stratification has four processes in two articulations. The first process is sedimentation, which determines: (a) substance of content, that is, the selection of homogenous materials from a subordinate flow; and (b) a form of content, that is, the deposition of these materials into layers. The second process is “folding,” in which there is: (c) a form of expression, that is, the creation of new linkages; and (d) a substance of expression, the creation of new entities with emergent properties (ATP, 43). Sediment and fold. (Protevi, 2001, 36)

Sediment, fold. Fold the sedimentations. Things speak. Thinking is movement in all the senses of sense and the senses: energy, action, affect, masking, critiquing, displacing, accelerations, playing. It is a manifestation-eclipsing that, simultaneously, shows itself on the streets and hides around the corner. Thinking is (in)visible; thinking is a trained improvisation and an improvisational training. “It is a question of producing within the work [of theatre] a movement capable of affecting the mind outside of all representation; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate presentation; of invention, vibrations, rotation, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind” (Deleuze, 1995, 8). The lobster clicks its way along through the city and along the sandy bottom of the sea with its philosopher in tow—a migrant, a metaphor, a geography, a poem—leading him, her, or it by a loosely connected blue ribbon. This is a whirling critique, a vibrating invention. Thibault, unleashed, scratches slow arabesques throughout the streets of the Hong Kong as a city of speed, of the high-rise, of the utilitarian, of the protest, and of the dollar. The thinking of the lobster incises narratives of surprise, the unpredictable, and the unexpected along the surfaces of the city. The sea-creature who has come ashore is always ahead of us as it looks forward, backward, up, down, and sideways. It scuttles up the sides of the ICC, amused at its own reflection, and then makes its way into a jazz club in Lan Kwai Fong that pulses with rhythmic improvisations. With one stalked eye open and one eye closed, Thibault—learning to vocalize in a strange hum

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never before heard—dances akimbo through the streets, seeking alignments, swerves, openings, connections, plug-ins, new bodies, and new thoughts. Both pincers are working, blurred, seeming to multiply. The early morning light opens itself to the lobster of thought, art, science, and the unforeseen as they appear in the event of the city. There is a rumor that the “legendary city of Victoria was, like Venus, born from the waves of the sea. It is not known how it disappeared in the end. The legend thus brings us face-to-face with an archaeological question: by what means can we verify a city’s existence?” (Dung, 2012, 45). All cities, erotic, are born of Venus and blue waves, tipped by white, wash through the city. Philosophy is a strange thing, an amphibious creature who lives in the ambiguity of scuttling and swimming between the sea and the city. This strangeness is tantamount to a condition for, and definition of, thinking. It is not heroic; it is not cataclysmic; it moves painfully slowly and with the speed of infinity. It has swiveling and extraordinarily fine-tuned antennae and it has the movement of the doublepincers whose click-clack worlds the world, cities the cities. Sedimentation. Folding. Expressivity.

Chapter 5

Ghost Money: TransRational Cash and the Non-Modern1

Hong Kong is a non-modern city par excellence. Ancestors, hungry ghosts, and dragons move about the city alongside the precise calculations of an exchange rate pegged to the U.S. dollar, a real estate and land reclamation business that runs incessantly, and a transport and trade hub that brings the world by air to Chek Lap Kok—which was first inhabited in the Middle Neolithic—by sea to the enormous port, and by electric signals in more ways than one can count. And all of this depends on money. Money, philosophy, and cities are inseparable and it has often been observed that the city cannot exist unless a surplus of some sort—of grain, of water, of animals, of jewelry, of priestly or imperial power—has been accumulated that can provide for its upkeep, protection, expansion, and exchange. Tariffs and tributary—a finally unpayable system of indebtedness that must keep debt in circulation—are inseparably bound up with the existence of the city from at least the period of Çatal Hüyük (c. 7000 BCE), which has given us a deeply scratched obsidian mirror—and what types of mirrors are there other than those that are scratched?—and their dead, companions of the living, who are buried under the Earth and under the bed. On occasion, they are headless. The streets, the archaeologists tell us, were simply the surfaces of the rooftops of the dwellings. And there was trade. The circulation of “money”—a history of value based on a large variety of materialities—is the lifeblood of the cultural pathways of the city and it has always been “associated in varying degrees of closeness with religion . . . Thus the taboos which circumscribe spending in primitive societies are basically not unlike the stock market bears . . . so that the true interpretation of what money means to people requires a sympathetic understanding of the less obvious motivations as much if not more than, the narrow abstract calculations of the computer” (Davies, 2002, 2). Money is not merely, as the recent 89

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history of modernity will claim, a universal and abstracted means of exchange and a store of value, but it is also linked to the gods, to justice, to affect, to magic, and to the mediated exchanges between the living and the dead. This is not an abstract concept of justice but the give-and-take of tangible and elemental exchanges. Ethics, obligation, and money are inseparable from life in the city, and money is a “kind of magic talisman through which transformations of the city take place” (Sardello and Severson, 1983, 22). “In God We Trust.” We are all in circulation even, for a brief moment, after we cash in our chips and step out of the bright lights of the casino into absolute darkness. Take, for example, the Temple of Man Mo on Hollywood Road. After carefully folding a bundle of $100,000 bills of ghost money—embossed on one side with the image of the Emperor of the Underworld and on the other with the façade of the Bank of the Underworld—I place it carefully into the furnace outside of the Temple and watch my offering catch fire, curl to black ash, and ascend toward the sky in smoke as it makes its way to my ancestors on the other side of experience. Coils of incense hanging from the ceiling burn with infinite patience along their spiral pathways toward extinction filling the inside of the temple with a pungent aroma and marking a different time than the one of the hypermodern streets just outside. The Series 2006 note, backed by the Hellbank Corporation and assuring us that “this note is currency in the ghostdom,” is authorized by the signatures of Mary Ellen Withrow and Robert E. Rubin, president and fit-president, respectively, of the Banking House of the Underworld (and who also happened to serve as the treasurer and secretary of the treasury under President Bill Clinton). There is no money, after all, without writing, art, and some form of institutional legitimation, and, with a slight twist of signification, the money is valuable not on this side of experience but on the other. A boundary has been crossed. As a nomadic gweilo passing through Hong Kong—but who is not a foreigner in some sense in these regions of incense and high finance?—I am not sure if my offering will be accepted by those on the far side of visibility, but the performance of the ritual itself is what is important. I bow toward my father, my in-laws, my grandparents, my uncles, cousins, the never known siblings who passed away before they were born, and all the others who walk with me as the narrative of modernity—with the trans-, hyper-, post-, and non- always at work—folds upon itself like the creased joss paper. The empirical and the transcendent brush transversally across one another as the living turn toward the dead, who, expecting us, are still in need of cash. “The dead, like the living, have wants and needs in the netherworld, including material goods such as a spirit/soul house (lingwu), which are necessary to keep the ancestors from becoming ‘hungry ghosts’ and to help them live through the required period in the netherworld” (Kuah-Pearce, 2011, 142). The ritual of burning honors the dead and the gods; protects me from the



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ghosts that hunger for a home; and restores the balance to the whole that is the world by covering at least a fraction of the debt incurred by the fact that I am alive. Existence demands a balancing of the account books. Ashes to ashes. In its most general sense, the traditional understanding of the world is the “system of cosmic phases known to all Chinese as yīnyángwŭxíng . . . the process of continuous cosmic renewal. It is an ultimate sacred postulate insofar as it is a fiat of discursive reasoning behind which there is no higher logical category . . . the assumption that all things are constituted in their mutual relationship rather than in their individual substances” (Blake, 2011, 82). And, even now, the language of money reflects and refracts the archaic language of the elements: “Earth appears in the filthy rich and dirty deal; air courts recognition as inflations, depressions, soaring interest rates; fire roars up in hot deals, hot checks, money to burn, a life’s savings going up in smoke; water surfaces in staying afloat, floating a loan or a deal, going to the well one more time” (Sardello and Severson, 1983, 61). On the other hand, with its progressive sense of time, its orientation toward the virulent growth of capitalism and the correlative depletion of the Earth, and with its rejection of ancestral relationality in favor of the measurable, the utilitarian, and the narrowly scientific, modernity as a whole wants nothing to do with such rituals of fire, Earth, water, and air except to label them “superstitious,” “antiquated,” and then to create an eco-tourist industry around these elements by projecting them backward or forward along the line of history. “Money,” Simmel showed, “is similar to the forms of logic, which lend themselves equally to any particular content, regardless of that content’s development or combination” (2004, 441). The empty forms of logic, the neutered objectivity of positivistic science, the deracination of the Earth, the universal solvent of money, and the dead ancestors all form a complex of relations, most of which is forgotten most of the time. Communist modernity, which operates (quasi)visibly in Hong Kong—the “freest economy” on the planet—would prefer to do without such traditional practices altogether, but it now puts up with them since they provide social and cultural cohesion, the “harmony” of the family and the state. Ghost money is a ritual assemblage connecting the present across a multitude of differences, and, for this situation, we need a more comprehensive language than “tradition” and “modernity,” since these simultaneously coexist. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour analyzes the organization of forces at work in the “Modern Constitution”—beginning with the scientific and political revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—as he shows how it has operated and how we might reimagine other means of participating in the world through what he calls “nonmodern networks,” which are emphatically not anti- or un-modern. This thread of Ariadne, “which can only be encountered in a labyrinth, allows us to pass with continuity from the local

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to the global, from the human to the nonhuman. It is the thread of networks of practices and instruments, of documents and translations” (Latour, 1993, 121). The nonmodern—which Latour locates in the “Middle Kingdom”2— rearranges the relationships between categories, objects, and behaviors: ghost money, from this perspective, indicates a form of life that takes into account identity, metaphysics, transformation, social bonds, and economics. Different types of paper goods are delivered to gods, ghosts, or ancestors, but they are all transmitted across the relay-system of a burnt offering when flames transfigure paper into smoke and ash. Situated at the lower end of Hollywood Road where the skyscrapers of the financial powerhouse of Central disappear into the older twisting streets of Sheung Wan—though this area, too, is in rapid transition—the Temple serves as a dwelling for Man, the god of literature, and Mo, the god of War, who are worshipped here together as part of the long Chinese tradition of scholars seeking social advancement through the War of Letters. One must only touch the pen of the god to bring one good fortune. Exam-takers and parents come here often. Further down on Queen’s Road West, I purchased a stack of GM100,000 for HK20 (about USD2.60). The exchange rate is very favorable to those of us on this side of the divide, though we must be beware of inflation both here and in the realm of the spirits. This shop, like others, sells not only ghost money but also all the other forms of paper-offerings for the dead such as the gold and silver papers for particular gods, as well as paper houses, cars, mistresses, umbrellas, clothes, iPhones, Viagra, and credit cards. The dead, like the living, want to live comfortably and distinguish themselves from their neighbors by what and how much they own. Like other shops across the city, it is being squeezed out of its location by the movement of international capital and soaring property prices in the economy of the daylight world. “The intersection of this world and another is marked by the transfer of funds, linking the heavenly and Earthly economies into a single system. What homologies exist between these economies that allow us to discern the structure of each? How does this financial ritual reveal the nature of the capitalist hegemony in its practitioners’ lives?” (Gates, 1987, 259). There is certainly a “capitalist hegemony” at work in Hong Kong—the speculative property exchange and the trading floors of the global major banks demonstrate this— but this hegemony cannot be seen as the cause of the rituals of ghost money or, at best, only one of many overdetermined causes. These rituals go back thousands of years in Chinese practice3 and we know that fire is one of the fundamental transformers of substance as the human emerges as the human. Capitalism is very much a latecomer, emerging through the history of commerce, from the ancient world of Promethean fire4 that claims technology for its own, and then through the fires of the industrial transfiguration of the Earth. Money is an accelerant: it burns.



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Latour argues that the Modern Constitution sought the “purification” of categories such as politics, religion, subjectivity, and knowledge and “renders the work of mediation that assembles hybrids invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable . . . [in it] the obscurity of the olden days, which illegitimately blended together social needs and natural reality, meanings and mechanism, signs and things, gave way to a luminous dawn that clearly separated material causality from human fantasy” (Latour, 1993, 34–35). The world, desiccated, became disenchanted. But although the hybrids have always existed—for without them nothing moves—the attempted purifications have now become visibly riddled by habits, actions, and assumptions that modernity thought it had excluded forever in its steady march of enlightened progress. The hybridity of ghost money gives us an entry into rethinking the (non)modern as history restitches itself into something not predictable by linear models of development, of progress, or of the more-and-more. In Cantonese the word for “ghost-money” is zi-zaat (paper goods), which includes a range of paper objects beyond money itself. Ghost money preceded the more recent monotheistic theologies; it points toward traces of visibility, power, need, departure, and return; and it resonates in a relay system of the spectral from digital technologies to deconstruction. Everybody needs cash, for there are always exchanges to be made and debts to be paid, but how is it that ghost money can cross that most impassable of divides, that it can serve as a network of exchange in the land of the dead and of the divine? Money, ghostly or not, has always been transrational, straddling the limits of the rational and the liminalities that crisscross it, operating along the sinuosity of interfaces between the rational and its multiple others such as the imagination. “All imaginaries belong to the realm of social practice . . . [and] financial capital is much more, but also (by virtue of its abstraction) much less, than the sum total of the material goods and services in which it ostensibly trades; it is, strictly speaking, imaginary, though in a very real, material, and practical sense rather than in the sense of an ideological illusion” (Martin, 2016, 50). Money moves along both calculated and phantasmatic itineraries; money is the magic of asynchronous and asymmetrical exchange. It is the universal equivalent, the power of alienating homogeneity that makes different things translatable into other things via the transfiguration of cash or credit. “The flow of money transcends questions of what is real and what is unreal” (Blake, 2011, 60), at least in the familiar positivistic senses in which these terms normatively operate. Money cannot operate—and has never been able to—apart from the excremental, the imaginal, the affective, the technological, the material, and the numeric, for as “the value conferred on the useless object, and the prestige conferred on the owner, is magical, mystical, religious, and comes from the domain of the sacred” (Brown, 1959, 245)

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where all of these attributes are bundled together and ritualized. In a contemporary example, Reinhold Martin points to the fact that the rise of the developer and the rise of the signature architect go hand in glove, but not only in the sense of each securing access to capital or prestige for the other. Much more significant, the rise of these two icons has to do with a religiosity that architecture and money still share. This affinity is based on a common language of “faith,” which, as distinct from any historical religion, is addressed directly to economic abstractions and hence is as universal as the money form. To the extent that financial relations are ultimately relations of faith, in the sense of “faith” in higher forces such as the self-regulating, autopoietic financial markets that seem to lie outside of human control but are nevertheless constructed as benevolent, this language acquires the force of law. (2016, 52)

The market, surely, will take care of things. The hand of God, invisible, will bring order into chaos. Faith becomes law; finance becomes judicial; and the sacred becomes the profane. The rational, in this sense, is a particularly structured distillation of chaos that, like God, should bring order into the world. In the West, the formal system of the logical emerges from Aristotle’s basic law of noncontradiction: A = A. A never equals B. A proposition can be true or false, but not both, and the state of affairs is the state of affairs and not otherwise. Thinking is divided and systematized; cutup and transvalued; and the metaphorai are, apparently, contained. They must, apparently, stay on the right track. The formal logic of syllogisms is eventually bound up with the logic of verification through scientific experiment and mathematical coherency and thus, through a much denser itinerary that this encapsulation can follow, we enter an age in which technology and its quantifiabilities become the carrier of the true (as well as the good). The logical in this form is a purification of truth, exorcising the swarms of hybrids that gather around ambiguity and metaphoricity. There are many versions of this history, but John Berger summarizes a particular interpretation when he notes that the rationalist dream of the nineteenth century was that precision would replace metaphysics, planning would resolve social conflicts, truths would replace subjectivity, and all that was dark and hidden in the soul would be illuminated by empirical knowledge . . . [T]he unachieved positivist utopia became, instead, the global system of late capitalism wherein all that exists becomes quantifiable—not simply because it can be reduced to a statistical fact, but also because it has been reduced to a commodity. (2013, 72)

Commodification + Quantification = the visible truth of fact. This is the age of econometrics, another moment in a long history of such moments that



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takes as its task the exclusion of the nonrational as a means of constructing a socialized narrative of modernity that is a rationalized sphere of utilitarian predictability. The nomos of the oikos in its guise as econometrics and rational-agent theory fantasizes that it can disregard the nonrational in the incandescent light of the power of the predictability of equations and the governance of algorhythms. With ghost money, however, the law of contradiction does not hold; the rational is traversed by the trans-. The trans- serves, on the one hand, as a connector of similitudes, for the inhabitants of the other world also need “items of personal finance—the checkbooks savings account books with withdrawal and deposit slips, ATM cards, and credit cards—all made to scale and drawn on the Bank of Hell . . . The credit cards, it should be noted, bear the image of the King of Hell, and colors (greenish blue, white, and black) and design elements that are suspiciously similar to the American Express card, providing an otherworldly twist (‘Don’t leave this world without it’) to their advertising slogan” (Scott, 2007, 126). On the other hand, however, the trans- also serves as a differentiator between domains of difference, in this case the living and the dead, as well as between the rational and its others among the living. The trans-, partitioned within itself, is the sign of what Latour calls “translations,” “mediations,” and “networks,” all of which keep everything trafficking with everything else, incessantly changing tempos, spaces, and codes across a fluidity of interfaces. Such concepts indicate how mythos continues to copresence with the rationalities of the digitized hypermodern of the overand underworld financial system of Hong Kong. Neither dichotomies nor chronological sequences, these are connected trajectories of networks of nonmodern hybridity, which “adds instead of subtracting, fraternizes instead of denouncing, sorts out instead of debunking . . . A nonmodern is anyone who takes simultaneously into account the moderns’ Constitution [the presumed clean separation between Nature and Society since the 17th century] and the populations of hybrids that that Constitution rejects and allows to proliferate” (Latour, 1993, 47). In the emerging nonmodern Constitution—this redistribution of the elements— mythos and logos, the primitive and the progressive, are sorted differently than in the modernist version in which one version of rationality seeks to vanquish its others. Nonmodernity helps us with this task of “thinking otherwise,” a now clichéd phrase that must nonetheless continue to spur a vigilant reexamination of what we take to be the “real.” The paradox of sense circulates through all the other dimensions of the proposition and each object, each assemblages, carries its own virtuality about it like a penumbra, or a halo, of possibilities. It is not as if these debates have only now, at the pinnacle of the present, appeared. They have been occurring for as long as the Modern

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Constitution has been taking shape (if, in fact, not since number and the gods parted company). Commenting on Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms that describes the mythical “stage” of cultural development—to take but one example—Heidegger observes, What is later conceptually distinguished as body and soul, or life and death, is indeed also always already actual for mythical Dasein, but in the mode of magical power, according to which what is dead also is, and a force of the soul makes itself known even when the human met with is not encountered bodily . . . Only first at higher levels does the magical daemon become daimonion and genius, in such a way that Dasein in the end comes to determine itself not as an alien power but rather from out of that for which it is freely capable, from itself and for itself as an ethical subject (Heidegger, 1997, 185)

A diachronic network of exchange draws the alien and the itself of the ethical subject out of one another and casts them ahead into the future. The “higher level” is identified with the Socratic inception of philosophy, who, as one who still listens to the genius of his daimonion—which only knows the “not” of “I do not know” as well as the belated initiations of the secrets of music— serves as a boundary figure that straddles the mythical and the emergence of the rational as the “proper logic” of philosophy. But if Platonic philosophy participates—against its will, as it were, since it strives for the clarity of the eidos—in both the mythic and the rational, it nonetheless labors to establish the rational as the ideal, as both method and goal, as it sets the stage for putting mathematics and philosophical abstraction into high gear. Socrates is a man. All men. A white horse and a black horse are still horses, substances attached to the accidents of the secondary. This enormously powerful shift in human history is one moment of enlightenment. Another is that of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, for which Kant can stand as a kind of culminating representative. Both the ritual practices of Christianity as well as the “superstitions” of non-European, non-Enlightened cultures come under the attack of critical rationality. These series of enlightenments, however, do not show us how the world organizes itself at the Temple of Man Mo on Hollywood Road. Enlightenments proliferate and “when the nineteenth century invented the social sciences, precise knowledge of society and its laws made it possible to criticize not only the biases of ordinary obscurantism but also the new biases created by the natural sciences . . . it became possible to distinguish the truly scientific component of the other sciences from the component attributable to ideology” (Latour, 1993, 35). Ideological critique is born alongside the social sciences and ghost money— superseded by the science of economics and safely locked away in the underworld of the primitive stage of the development of technocapitalism— should therefore vanish like smoke. Rational and scientific critique, from the



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standpoint of the modern, dissolves the mirage of illusion. Ideology and superstition, be gone! But as the woven fabric of modernity begins to fray along all of its ­boundaries— and as the textuality of the fabric becomes a matrix of code—translations, networks, and hybridities continue, as they always have, to rapidly multiply. The trans- sorts, redistributes, and expands. As we have seen, on the one hand the trans- serves as a differentiator, for the ancestors are clearly dead. They are no longer present to us as partners in the daily round. Even this deadness of the dead, however, is traversed by the trans-, for our ancestors must, like us, also be living or we would not be making them offerings of burned paper, ghost money, and all the accoutrements of success to be found in the Mid-Levels or on the Peak. We would not, if they were not living, both fear their presence—perhaps they will pull us into the realm of the dead before our allotted time—and, at the same time, we ache for their presence. The ancestors, like each of us, are in the inescapable bind of being the living-dead. We often wish that the trans- could be singularized into a unity without any of the crisscrossings of ficticity. We wish that all of us could simply be alive together once and for all (though this might create economic quandaries of supply and demand since the desire of both the living and the dead is apparently infinite). If we could just print more cash or multiply digital wealth without limit, however, we would create absolute inflation and everything, consequently, would be without value, whether in this world or the next. There is a clear indication that such inflation has occurred, but there is no Central Bank to curtail its impact. Earlier examples of these notes were issued in denominations of $5 and $10 yuan and upwards, with such amounts being considered adequate until inflation took hold within China from 1944. The soaring denominations of authentic currency was soon reflected in that issued for the afterlife, and after 1945 the majority of Hell banknotes were issued in denominations of $10,000 or higher. (Wikipedia)

When paper money and what stands behind it in the daylight world revert to worthless paper alone, the currency of the dead is threatened as well, but it can afford—since it draws on an infinite reserve—to simply add zeroes and print larger bills. Inflation of ghost money will not cause either the living or the dead to starve. Without limits—say those given by the state around legal tender or of the laws of supply and demand—economic value cannot be set into motion. In the case of ghost money, though, what are the boundaries, limits, and translations at work that create the value of the expenditures by fire? Is there a universal equivalent between the living and the dead or does this

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equation always already throw things asymmetrically off-balance, thus giving rise to the possibility of meaning, which depends on the disjunctions and imbalances of the relations between (non)sense? Sense requires the imbalanced swerve of the petrifying and terrifying absent presence of death. How do these two currencies float against one another or is there perhaps a hidden gold standard—another name for the heliotropic norm of a clear, distinct, and lasting epistemology inherent in various forms of idealism—against which each dimension of these currencies are measured? This question of value and measurability emerges as an integral part of the very inauguration of the Greek philosophical tradition in, for instance, Plato’s Euthyphro or the Republic. Currencies flow, but they flow only in a deliberative scale of numbers and it is precisely this capacity to flow in measured ways that creates the possibility for value, whether economic or ethical. (What, then, of the immeasurable, and, in particular, of the immeasurability of both life and of death? This disrupts all scales and throws time out of joint. Spectrality accompanies all facticity.) There are, in any polity, always social distinctions at work and in the underworld, as in our own, some of the ghosts are privileged and some go begging. “Some died without children; others were unlucky enough to have all their descendants die out; still others have been unable to reach the world of the dead because they had no proper funeral. All these are the underprivileged dead. They get none of the food, paper clothing, and spirit money that are showed upon ancestors, and none of their great respect. And they resent it. That is why they are dangerous” (Scott, 2007, 92). They are dangerous because their spirits are in need of the goods of the living, but they have no one living to care for them, to burn offerings and thereby satiate their hunger. The dead, like the living, have needs and desire. Seeking blood or money, the homeless in the under- and afterworld are hauntological wanderers who can cross, sometimes at will and sometimes only at certain ritualized times and spaces, the supposedly firm boundary between the living and the dead. Neither a proper funeral nor ongoing ritual offerings have been made, so these unpropitiated spirits cannot be contained, kept fixed into the proper house of the dead. They linger inside the banks—reflecting off of the teller’s windows and the polished marble floors—or they linger on the late-night streets, all the while waiting for the gullible or the careless to wander by. The dead must be paid off with protection money by the living, but there are neither monthly payment plans that can erase an interest rate nor an end to the debt, at least not until the living pays her debt for the gift of existence with her life and becomes a ghost herself. The living and the dead are conjoined in a state of need, but no form of payment—however exorbitant, as with the recently minted trillion dollar notes of ghost money—can ever put a final stop



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to the circulation of money, paper goods, longing, fire, and smoke that mingle in the act of a communicative transfiguration accomplished by the burning of paper into the more subtle forms of ash. Need circulates. “One suspects that moral assessments of certain adjectivally marked moneys—dirty money, hot money, bitter money, money that burns like oil, ‘liquid’ money . . . derive from those moneys’ positions as hinges between short-term and long-term transactional orders” (Mauer, 2006, 35, italics mine). These hinges are pivot points, signs of the trans- of hybridity that runs a transportation racket across ontological borders. Money provides an abode for wishes, blood, and histories. There are, to be sure, moments of satiation, but the rule is not “your money or your life” but “your money and your life.” What is the price of a life? Society constantly makes this judgment and time puts a price on all of our heads in a bounty that will be paid, but at least until the death of the dead, can never be paid off. All of the burned paper goods must travel to the dead as the represented but destroyed image of the memory of the form of the objects, since the paper object is now ash in the embers of a temple, a home, or in one of the small streetside altars found all over Hong Kong. The goods and the money all travel via fire, accompanied by the wind and by words whispered to the fire, to the wind. These offerings through the act of burning imply that “incineration is an act whose effects are contradictory: in this world, the object is destroyed, while in the invisible one this act has a positive result” (Hou, 1975, 92, my translation). The object, dis-placed along a relay of the infinite, is teleported from one world to the other. It vanishes on Hollywood Road only to reappear once again, scarred and reconstituted by flame, in the land of the ancestors. One assumes a trustworthy delivery system even though the letter to the dead cannot be tracked. Large quantities of money are required in order for those who precede us to become happily dead, especially since the dead, like the living, apparently want to live the good life of high-end cars, high-rise apartments, and high-tech gadgets. As early as the twelfth century in China, paper money had already become a standard item in funeral rituals to meet this demand for release of the living from the hands of the dead. “Each person was born into this world by borrowing money from the bank of the underworld. Each person stayed alive only so long as the term for payment had not ended. At death each person was required to pay in full the loan contracted at birth” (Scott, 2007, citing Teiser, 26). Forgive us our debts as we forgive each other. The gift of reason cannot finally be a gift for it finally expects a return on the investment and a return to itself. It gambles on a sacrifice in the hopes of a higher return. We live on borrowed time until one fine day the note, absolutely predictable and absolutely unexpected, comes due and we vanish like smoke. The throw of the dice does not lead to profit, but only to play.

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Discussing the “voodoo” and “mirror” economics of the Reagan-Thatcher years—and very much continuing into the present—David Harvey notes that “the emergence of the casino economy, with all of its financial speculation and fictitious capital production (much of it unbacked by any growth in real production) provided abundant opportunity for personal aggrandizement . . . [T]he obverse side of the affluence was the plague of homelessness, disempowerment, and impoverishment that engulfed many of the central cities” (Harvey, 1990, 356). This speculative mode of finance capitalism led to the crash of Black Monday on October 19, 1987, when more than a third of the world’s paper assets were wiped out, as if by fire or magic, and to the global debacle of the 2008 subprime disaster “triggered” by the fall of Lehmann Brothers, which, in fact, was only a symptom of the economic greed of a deliriously unregulated casino capitalism burning down the house. Money in whatever form it takes depends on more encompassing symbolic networks of exchange, but money as depositable and transactionable for goods and services in the present—Anwesenheit, Heidegger’s preferred term for “presence” in his later work, is connected to the naming of Being as ousia or parousia “in a sense which basically means the ‘estate,’ the immediate and always present possession, the ‘property’ ” (Heidegger, 1997, 168)—would be linked with, but distinguishable from, the money for the ghosts, the gods, and the ancestors. As an intermediate form of this continuum of exchanges, all of which are operated on by different series of translations, we could examine instances when worthless money, say from a fallen regime, becomes a collector’s item to be purchased or when money becomes art, as in the case of J. S. G. Boggs, whose art acts like money by generating goods and services on the spot, in the present.5 Money under capitalism, which is inseparable from the development of Hong Kong, is a kind of “uniscalar valuation and universal commodification were seen as the hallmarks of modern, capitalist money, and as eroding other societies’ systems of value, flattening the dense and complex networks of value formation that had previously been built on distinctions of gender, rank, age, and status. Money makes inanimate things reproduce and confounds categories among human, spirit, and natural worlds” (Mauer, 2006, 21). This confounding of categories is perfectly expressed by the performative action of ghost money. We pay with “real” money for “fake” money in a paper goods shop in Sheung Wan; but this “fake” money then buys “real” value in the spirit-world that we have access to only by sending the burned fake money ahead via the postal system of flame into a transfigured and smoky body of respect tinged with anxiety. As Brown reminds us, at a philosophical level, “sociology (on this point most elaborately articulated by Simmel) correctly says that money reflects



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and promotes a style of thinking which is abstract, impersonal, objective, and quantitative, that is to say, the style of thinking of modern science—and what can be more rational than that?” (1959, 234). The concept and function of rationality depends precisely on the fantasy that categories—a term that follows philosophy from close to its inception—can be separated one from the other and kept bounded by impermeable membranes. In fact, to accomplish the work of the rational—whether in language or in number—one must depend upon the order of a preestablished logic that excises the others of the rational for the putative sake of rationality. But categories as boundarymarkers are all finally permeable: smoke, ash, ghosts. The rational is always twinned by its others and the essence of the rational, to slightly displace Heidegger’s thought on technology, is not itself rational. Money is magic as a modality of being. This is not to deny the value and usefulness of the rational as a domain of action—who would want to do that?—but it is to recognize its essential limits and to refuse to valorize it as the highest good that obscures ficticity, the wondrous, the moods, the contingent, and the paradox of sense. The fact that there is something like the rational is itself wondrous, but if the rational usurps all the other categories of experience it becomes, like all idolatries, destructive. “Between the electrum of ancient Lydia coins to the electronic currencies of the present day,” Mauer reminds us, “money has been a metaphor for and exemplar of the problem of the relationship between sign and substance, thought and matter, abstract value and its instantiation in physical and mental labors and products” (Mauer, 2006, 27). Ghost money, confounding categories, operates as a trans- across all of the distinctions between transfer, translation, transaction, and transubstantiation. Both philosophy and the city must operationalize the rational order of thought, but both must also recognize the empty square or the joker at the displaced and displacing “center” of all urban and philosophical endeavors. If empiricism is transversal, so, too is the element of the ideal in that transversality. Ghost money occurs as one of the nodes of a nonmodern network that crisscrosses Hong Kong’s hypermodernity that paves the streets and lays down the sewers, digitizes the stock exchange as it connects to Shanghai for its through-trades, zips signals through the fiber optic cables and into near-Earth orbit, creates feng shui in the architecture of the global banks as they face off against one another, and burns patiently, with an immemorial memory, in the temples, throughout the city, redolent with the fragrance of incense. Ghost money both extends current forms of capitalist consumption to which Hong Kong is habituated, and, with the dead waiting expectantly just around the corner of experience, simultaneously critiques this consumption that will not, whatever type of car we drive either here or there, protect

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us from exposure to the debt of finitude. Still commenting on Cassirer’s presentation of mythic symbolic consciousness, Heidegger notes, A basic feature of mythical consciousness of objects is the fact that a demarcated boundary is lacking between what is dreamt of and what is experienced while awake, between what is merely imagined and what is perceived, between image and the object that is formed in the image, between word (meaning) and thing, between what is merely wished for and what is actually possessed, and between what is living and what is dead. Everything remains in one uniform level of Being that is immediately present, by which mythical Dasein is dazed. (1997, 181)

We are all, then, still dazed, but not quite, perhaps, in the same way that we were dazed “before” modernity. Although it is the case that we have never, as Latour reminds us, been modern, it is also true that we have lived within, though not yet by any means to the other side of, the multidimensional matrices of the Constitution of Modernity with its relationships to nature, society, the dead, and those fables of objectivity and subjectivity. This makes an important difference of inflection and enables us to understand ghost money through a score of the critical grids of modernity: anthropology, sociology, political economy, semiotics, the history of money, art, philosophy, and psychoanalysis (among others). But this understanding does not erase the physical and symbolic movement of ghost money. Critique does not ultimately dissolve the object of critique—whether of ideology, false consciousness, the dogmatics of metaphysics, or suppressed memories—but it does re-position the object away from the literalisms of ideology and more toward the function of the play of symbols. As Blake observes, with the “mutation of state-based capitalisms [in China] into international corporatebased global capital, reification is simulated through semiosis. To the extent we want to view this in the totality of historical dialectics, we would have to say that thus far capitalist civilization has moved the human spirit toward an alienation of historic profundity” (2011, 14). The global financialization of capitalist practice and the critical analysis of the neoliberal paradigm are both ongoing endeavors, but neither “explains away” the ritual practice of burning money toward the other side. Money of any sort is an assemblage that conjoins the rational and its others, a transrational wildcard that brings chance, hope, calculation, story, history, and desire along with its every transaction. We burn through money as if there were no tomorrow. There is and there is not a tomorrow and this conjunctively disjunctive is-not—the structure of temporality, appearances, and being—is essential for understanding what we can about ghost money and its vicissitudes, for these are our vicissitudes as well. Just as we burn money, money also burns through us, coursing like a fiery currency through our fingers, our veins, and out onto the streets. It is killing us as



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we spend down our time and prepare for that which cannot be prepared for: our own becoming-ghosts, spirits in need of cash and other paper goods forwarded to us posthumously from those we have left behind. We, too, will be hungry ghosts looking to live as well as we can while we spend our money dying the next death so that we can dissolve the last curled ash of that life-in-death and that death-in-life. As if, having finally paid all of our debts—or getting a final gift of a loan from those left behind at Man Mo—we will at last be able to separate the one from the other and then vanish. Like Hong Kong and like all the names of cities and of philosophy, smoke in the wind.

Chapter 6

Kino-Surfaces: The Cinematic Streets

A screen is (not) a screen; a surface is (not) a surface; a city is (not) a city. Always more than, less than, different than, the screen, surfaces, and the city twist and turn around and through one another. The city is a labyrinth of surfaces: projections, phantasms, screens, interfaces, philosophies. A sinuous membrane between the skin of the human, the technology of the digital and of urban infrastructure that carries along with itself, as itself, image, affect, and thought. It is naming, drifting, infrastructure, and virtualities becoming, and having always been, perceptions, fables, hallucinations, dreams, films. “Nothing,” Deleuze reminds us, “is as fragile as a surface” (1990, 82). Dappled, in movement: clouds over water. Noting the recent upsurge in the fascination with the question of surfaces, Timothy Ingold observes that this has its “roots in broader intellectual currents across the arts and humanities, which many have identified . . . with an inversion of the relation between ontology and epistemology, or more prosaically, between the conditions of being in the world and of having some knowledge of it” (2017, 99). We move along the surfaces of the world, seeking affordances as we make our itineraries, and one of these surfaces is the Kino-surface. The cinema is no longer locatable at a specific intersection of the streets, but, instead, it is “all around you outside, all over the city, that marvelous, continuous performance of films and scenarios” (Baudrillard, 1986, 56). In addition, we can no longer think about the cinema being an experience in a darkened room as the light of the projector illuminates a screen in front of us. Instead, “smart metabolic biomaterials and optogenetics will make all surfaces into screens that can be interrogated . . . the result is that the human membrane has been technologized” (Amin and Thrift, 2017, 79). The human membrane is technologized as a cinematic surface and this shift radically 104



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displaces the analogical relationship of surface = falsity // depth = truth that has been in place since, let’s say, Romanticism, and also away from the much older relation in which height = truth, which is nevertheless still very culturally active as well. The new interrogation of the surface also has to do with the emergence of digital networks as a primary means of production; work on the processes of folding from protein synthesis to philosophies of language with their recursive loops and architecture with its curves and blobs; and a more acute sense of the fragile surface of the Earth with its atmosphere. Topologies: deformable and reconfigurable, but not cuttable. All is surface: the plane of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari, sidekicks, have opened up the surface of surfaces. The city itself is a Kino-surface and all surfaces project. They project images, a texture for the event of experience, and affordances for landingsites. Surfaces support, open, offer themselves to cameras (that glassy technoeye), and bend, flex, break. They are fragile, exposed, and expressive: Cinema thinks for itself—and thinks by itself. It does not need anyone to think for it, and it certainly does not aspire to mimic (or indeed surpass) human thought. Cinema is an artificial intelligence that possesses its own powers, logics and styles. To which we would add: cinema is first and foremost a thinker of the city . . . The city, itself a cinéaste, would doubtless concur, having gestated cinema in response to certain profound transformations in the fabric of space and time wrought by urban industrialization: speed and acceleration; dynamism and agitation; proliferation and fragmentation. (Clarke and Doel, 2016, 4)

The city gestates cinema as the cinema is gestating the city. Cinema thinks the city and both are dimensions of artificial intelligence at work. They speak; they listen; they translate. Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (Himmel über Berlin), for example, begins with the voiced thoughts of Berliners with their personal worries, traumas, hopes, and plans audible but invisible. The characters are not speaking— their mouths are not moving—but nonetheless we are hearing their thoughts. The screen is emitting a steady stream of language that, through our familiarity with various fits between image and sound, we assign to one figure after another in the opening minutes of the film. The illusion of presence: the voice listening to itself speak. Eventually, we discover that we are in the position of angels who listening in to the long tragicomic tale of the human—centered in the Berlin of 1987—but extending as far back as the earliest rhapsodes and into at least the future of our present listening. The tale murmurs on as we continue to be inside the ears of the angels until one of them steps outside of the angelic order and into human history in order to give love yet one more shot. At that moment, the voices stop and a different kind of silence appears as a phenomenon, since at that moment of crossing into time the angel can no

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longer hear anything except that which is spoken with a moving mouth: the songs and lamentations of human language. As Wenders remarks, “I always had a close relationship to the city of Berlin. And I always felt throughout the making of Wings of Desire, that the city was carrying the film, the city had sort of co-invented the story—the whole idea of the angels was something that I always felt that the city itself had suggested . . . Wings of Desire, more than any of my films, was a sheer gift. I was given this film as a gift from this city” (2018, my emphasis). The city—Berlin, Hong Kong, wherever—­ powerfully molds us into what we are and what we might become; the city gives us suggestions, co-inventions, suffering, passions, and gifts. These are the chance-encounters and the gifts of history that the urban arabesque grants as the city inhabits our thought, our sensibilities, all of which is in movement. “We engage with spaces and places in our daily life in ways that are essentially cinematic  .  .  . The Greek term ƙɩʋɛȉʋ or kinema, meaning ‘to move’ or ‘movement’, also appears in the word stem of kinematic, kinetic and kinesthetic” (Koeck, 2013, 5). The city as cinematic, in constant movement, is neither an anthropomorphic metaphor projected on the dead concrete surfaces of the streets nor an urban surface upon which “things” are projected from some “outside.” The screen and the projector form two sides of an assemblage of sense, always copresencing with one another as they retain their differences. “Ontology! I’m just/Telling you a story/About this projector, that’s all,” writes (Edward Dorn, 1989, 78) in Gunslinger. The city and philosophy are projected projections, thrown ahead, behind, and besides themselves in a wild Dionysian movement that moves like a panther, a lobster, a ghost. The city is a kinematic-scope (1989, 78). “What if surfaces are,” Ingold asks, “the real sites for the generation of meaning?” (2017, 100). They are: but they are complex, textured, torn, and burned. “A theory of surfaces . . . must not only raise being ‘up’ form the depths, but also take knowing ‘down’ from the heights. It must join with the texture of the world, with its materials and processes, answering to them as the to it. The practice of theory, in short, must be a modality of habitation—a way of thinking and working with stuff—on a level with the materials of its trade” (2017, 100). We are all moving in the midst of a speckled assemblage in-motion, a cinematic apparatus that includes what we call “consciousness,” but recognizing that this experience, so dear to us, is inseparable from the nonsense and the nonphilosophy of the materiality of surfaces and the paradoxical elements of the incorporeal event of sense. The angels in Berlin bend in our direction; the angels become us; we turn our heads, as if, for a moment, we heard a whisper from on-high, from the library, from the movie-house. The city is an immense compression and expansion of images and every surface of the city, as well as the idea of the city itself, becomes a screen for projection, sometimes in the instant of perception and sometimes as



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the futurity of virtual potentially. We exist in and on this urban process of screening; we project and are projected upon; we screen and are screened. Biometrics, entertainment, and politics. As the twentieth century surged into its currents, cinema and the city were becoming tightly entwined in the expanding movements of their historical unfolding. “Of the celebrated ‘coincidences’ that the birth of cinema shared with other emerging modernist projects, such as psychoanalysis, nationalism, consumerism, and imperialism (Shohat and Stam, 1994, 100), cinema’s emergence as a quintessential urban set of practices has ensured that the city and the moving image have, from the very outset, remained inseparable constituents of the modern urban imaginary” (Koeck and Roberts, 2010, 1). The city is a moving image—flickering, physical, phantasmatic, and virtual—that refracts topologies of desire and dreams onto the cantilevered surfaces of the city, which reflect them back into imagination and forms of thought. Hong Kong is projected around the world as millions come to know Chungking Mansions, the dilapidated theater in North Point, the streets with their neon signs, the disruptions at the airport, or the glittering majesty of the IFC Tower. Philosophy and the Kino-City crisscross.1 There has been, as we all know, a massive proliferation of literal screens in the city—embedded on the facades of buildings, behind the glass windows of luxury shops, on double-decker busses, in the front seats of taxis, in security and utility offices, and on mobile phones and watches—but there is also a densification of the city as a concept of screenwork. The old networks of broadcasting have become the new networks of broadband, all of which comes along with the intensification of capital in global cities and the discourse of the “smart” city in which “smart” basically indicates an increasing automaticity of technological responses, cutouts of the human agent by algorhythms and sensors. Screens screening screens; machine learning, big data, and feedback loops. Every screen is, however, like every street, a multidimensional phantasmatic surface, an arabesque of flickering projections that signify and that are a-signifying. Nonsense; differentials of light and numbers that produce meaning. An opening, a pivot point, a staging-ground. This opening, which takes effort as an act of art or thought is perhaps best introduced through the technopoetics of the Surrealists. For example, Louis Aragon developed “synthetic criticism, [which] came to signify the tangential reading of film, the bringing to the surface of film’s second, secret life, its latent content. Instead of criticizing a film from a soi-disant objective position, the Surrealist viewer deconstructed it according to his or her lights . . . A way to do this was to purloin images of sequences whose poetic charge, when liberated from the narrative that held them prisoner, was intensified” (Hammond, 2000, 8). Cut-and-paste, decontextualize, re-situate as a means of illuminating the scene and freeing the subject from the stultifying habits of

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perception. Or, in another example, in a “madly loving meditation on Leonardo’s famous wall at which you gaze until you see a battle scene delineated in the cracks, Breton conjured up the image of the écran (screen or grid) that functions as a brittle palimpsest for hallucinated yearning: ‘Everything man wants to know is written on this screen in phosphorescent letters, in letters of desire’ ” (Hammond, 2000, 12). Even the grid of urban planning, with all its digital datapoints, is a screen through which the cracks of desire proliferate across data-sets and all the letters of the city, whether the tallest or the most miniature, are letters of desire. The city crackles. The screens that are now scattered throughout Hong Kong, large or small, are framed in different ways, some by the monolithic digitized exteriors of a skyscraper, some by the headrest of a taxi, and some by the palm of a hand. It is now the holiness of Mammon that centers the screen, which still opens to other worlds, but is now beginning, with its sensors, to respond differently to our “presence.” We are beginning to be automatically read by and incorporated into the database called a “city.” With the pervasiveness of digital screens—sometimes right in front of us and sometimes elsewhere, at sites of surveillance and control—a different set of circuits is being created and all of the different aspects of the screen-experience are now in motion: screen, infrastructure, projections, image, viewer, site, desire. We are framing and being-framed by the screenings of the city. As Rudolf Arnheim observed, the frame “as we know it today developed from the Renaissance from the façade-like construction of lintels and pilasters that surrounded the altarpieces. As pictorial space emancipated itself from the wall and created deep vistas, a clear visual distinction became necessary between the physical space of the room and the world of the picture . . . The frame was thought of as a window, through which the observer peeped into an outer world, confined by the opening of the peephole but unbounded in itself ” (Arnheim, 1954, 239, cited in Koeck 2010). The frame emerged into a separate object—the parergon of which Kant and Derrida speak—from the architectural structures surrounding the aura of the centered altar-piece from which holiness emanated and into which the believer was invited to enter. The altar became a frame of the painting on the museum wall that has now opened up to the screen within the cinema, a white pearlescent rectangle waiting for the magic to appear in the darkness, which then, digitized, opened back into the architectural niches of the mega-stores in Times Square (whether the one in New York or in Hong Kong), and into the mobile spaces of smart watches, airplanes, and taxi cabs. Architecture becomes frame becomes window becomes screen becomes frame: always a series of substitutions that acts to focus the field of urban experience, which is simultaneously dislocated from the traditional notion of space by digital networks and their orbiting satellites.2



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The screen is also a mechanism of blocking, hiding, and obfuscation that necessitates detours, hijackings, and ritornellos of resistance, invention, and the emergence of unexpected configurations of experience. Screened memories that screen out: sometimes physical veils and sometimes reroutings of intensities. Desire, frustrations, and trauma swirl around and through screens that are scattered through cities and that are the city itself. Screens are fragile surfaces and this fragility is essential, for the screen often tends to create a paranoid fantasy that Big Brother, the NSA, the CCP, or the Tyrell Corporation are everywhere, monolithically and omnisciently ocular. We cannot dismiss the dangers of this rapidly growing power, of course, within whose domain our bodies become surfaces for biometric surveillance and control, but, nonetheless, all surfaces—including the surfaces of networks—are fissured topologies of wounds, cracks, incorporeal effects, and events. The screen projects itself as unified, but is inevitably pixelated, always a sieve for the mixture of light and darkness to flow into and out of the tiny holes. The city is a screen and is its own projector, a field-event that generates, and is generated by, the (in)corporeal effects of (non)sense. In this milieu in which factory workers and arriving trains, moonshots and kisses shimmer as if they are trying to leap from the silver screen, the event of the city occurs, as it were, not an any “anatomical location,” but at the virtual focal point of a collective “psychic apparatus” that has as its analogue an “urban apparatus.” Freud notes in The Interpretation of Dreams that consciousness emerges when the idea which is placed at our disposal is one of psychic locality . . . We shall remain on psychological ground, and we shall think ourselves called upon only to conceive the instrument which serves the psychic activities somewhat after the manner of a compound microscope, a photographic or other similar apparatus. The psychic locality, then, corresponds to a place within such an apparatus in which one of the primary elements of the picture comes into existence. As is well known, there are in the microscope and telescope partly fanciful locations or regions in which no tangible portion of the apparatus is located. We therefore conceive the psychic apparatus as a compound instrument, the component parts of which let us call instances, or, for the sake of clearness, systems. (2008, 425)

A compound and complex apparatus from the beginning. Multiple. Locality— whether psychic, cosmological, or urban—is not an anatomical or physical attribute pinned to a spatial site that is locatable with the stable mathematical precision of a GPS system—which itself depends on multiple coordinates— for locality is not locality except where there is a virtual and fictive sense already at work to focus the optics of a system that brings such locality to visibility at a particular point of attention. We are learning—from governments

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and from our friends on Facebook—what it might be like to live an entire life, day by day, as a digital image. The orientation of the social and individual psyche, of optics and of the orientations of places and placings are all virtual constructions. The stability of spatial organization, the very foundation of experiential orientation in the world, is trembling before our eyes as a sense of vertigo sets in and a man with a Kino-camera—is it inside or outside the psychic apparatus or of the city?—stands in the wings waiting for screen time. And, as Jean Nouvel has remarked, “Architecture exists, like cinema, in the dimension of time and movement. One conceives and erects a building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage through which one passes . . . In the continuous shot/sequence that a building is, the architect works with cuts and edits, framings and openings” (cited in Koeck, 1998, 93). The city is architecture is cinema is thinking. Framed sequences, jump-cuts. These are not “metaphors” in which one term serves as a “basis” for all the other analogies. Each displacement, each translation, simply instantiates the manifestation of the operation of the materiality of the urban, of the cinema, and of thinking as a movement that looks seamless or as-if it is standing still, but that is, actually, always sliding along, passing time. This, of course, includes the place of the subject as well, for we are not sitting still in a theater watching the film go by in the dark. “We,” too, are cinematizing screens and projections. The abyss, the nonsense “out-of-which” sense emerges, “has always already infiltrated presence,” Derrida reminds us, “always inscribed there the space of repetition and the splitting of the self. Representation in the abyss of presence is not an accident of presence; the desire of presence is, on the contrary, born from the abyss (the indefinite multiplication) of representation, from the representation of representation” (1998, 163). The image stutters; the moving frames of architecture quiver in the heat. Urban space is not a space of a positivist empiricism—though all empiricism is part of the apparatus that creates urban space—but, rather, the conjunction of differentiated systems that are a virtual assemblage of infinite participants swirling along. The locality of the filmic urban—let’s say, for short, Metropolis (1927), The Third Man (1949), Breathless (1960), Manhattan (1979), Blade Runner (1982), Wings of Desire (1987), The Matrix (1999), In the Mood for Love (2000), and Ghost in the Shell (1995/2017)—is vibratory. This phantasmicity is not a movement of generalized abstraction, but of the utmost specificity, of the most precise of determinations of the images of urban experience. A city becomes a city within and as a projective apparatus that includes every form of screening surface from the architectural projections of a plan to the building that sequences itself, as it sequences us, in the heat of Hong Kong in the summer. Suzie Wong, Chow Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen, and Doctor



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Strange—for whom “Hong Kong” was an elaborate soundstage constructed in London—are apparitions who come and go through the city: a shimmer of light, a flicker in the night. Provisional stability is the result of a concatenation of forces, a transitional pause on the metaphysical surface that is always torqued into new topographies. The screen is a landing-site.3 The valences of the simulacrum, accelerated but not founded by digitization, are beginning to pried loose from the Platonic taxonomy of the simulacrum as an error of the false copy of the true idea—which forms the ground, as it were, of the operations of representation that lead to the world as a picture and the worldview about which Heidegger speaks—but, instead, in a different distribution of all of these elements of intensity, have “become” part of the real itself. Film, video games, biometric scans, data streams that count our steps, Pokemon Go, sexbots, and dating apps. We are in the midst of the real of the simulacrum. Infinite screenings of screens. This is a continuation of a very old twist that turned as philosophy was first developing its momentum. Deleuze shows that Plato not only divides the real Idea from the correct copy of itself but also, and more significantly, the copy from the phantasmatic simulacra. “This Platonic wish to exorcize simulacra is what entails the subjection of difference. For the model can be defined only by a positing of identity as the essence of the Same [auto kath’ hauto] and the copy by an affection of internal resemblance, the quality of the Similar . . . What is condemned in the figure of simulacra is the state of free, oceanic differences, of nomadic distributions and crowned anarchy” (1994, 265). Deleuze describes this internal fissure of thought—Idea, copy, simulacrum—that was constructed by Platonic philosophy and its successors and that attempted to contain differences through a system of border-checks, night patrols, and special administrative zones that we have come to call “idealism,” but he is after not merely an historicizing description—that is not yet the thinking of philosophy—but, rather, a redistribution of the elements that can reconstitute the “image of thought” and set the nomadic impulses free to roam. “Crowned anarchies are substituted for the hierarchies of representation; nomadic distributions for the sedentary distributions of representations” (1994, 278). The ocean swirls through the history of thought and through the streets of the city. For Deleuze, Ideas possess no actuality, but are instead “pure virtuality,” series of differential relations and reciprocal determinations. Imagine an urban intersection, a roundabout in frantic motion. “The possible and the real resemble one another, but not the virtual and the actual. The incarnation and the actualization of Ideas no more rely upon similarity to proceed to resemblance than Ideas themselves possess a given identity or may be assimilated to the Identical . . . whereas the possible is the mode of identity of concepts within representation, the virtual is the modality of the differential at the heart of Ideas” (1994, 279, my emphasis). This “modality of the differential”

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is what powers the unfoldings and entwinings of the arabesque. Ideas are Dionysian, “distinct-obscure” rather than the “clear and distinct” ideas of Apollinian Cartesianism, and the “distinct-obscure is the double colour with which philosophy paints the world” (1994, 280). The Pink Panther paints in pink, but other beings paint in the entire spectrum, visible and invisible, of light. This shifts all the axes, redistributes all the elements, and reconfigures the plans and planes of the projects called the “city.” Dionysos is an auteur, a camera, a key grip, an audience, a theater in the dark. For Deleuze cinema is philosophy and philosophy is cinema as a thinking of images and signs—the movement of cinematic history is also the movementof-thought in one of its newest materialities. Which, in this instance, is instantiated in urbanicity. The contemporary city with its prosthetic bodies, hybridities, phantasms of projective surfaces, unpredictabilities of every sort does not exist as a measurable, determinable, and constrainable thing in its traditional sense—although all sorts of entities within the city are measurable—but it is, instead, a provisional name, a figure of thought, a proposition with dimensions of n+1 raised to the power of the virtual, a cinematic time-image. All of this seems extraordinarily remote from our ordinary experience of the city, but it is the nearness of the nearest neighborhood, right in front of our very nose: the smell of locality, proximity, and relationality and the vibrations of sound and sight without which there could be no quasi-locatable “city.” Hong Kong, like any city, is a Kino-City, and each step, each place, each smell releases its own cinema of virtualities. Threading a history that leads from the Lumière Brothers and Edison through the Situationists and our own technomedial capitalism, Paul Virilio reminds us that the “screen abruptly became the city square, the crossroads of all mass media” (1991, 25). Screenings now organize the space of the city as the spheres of entertainment, surveillance and law enforcement, the economics of banking and shopping, the politics of social movements and elections, and the multiple modes of transportation that are folded together into overlapping digital networks. And although the virtual is a more encompassing event-potential than the actuality of the digital, the digital nevertheless gives a plethora of different determinations of the virtual. The city is a signal and the city is noise, always (un)readable. Always (in)determinable. One form of this is what Mike Davis has described as “ ‘imagineered urbanisms’ in which all the arduous intermediate stages of commercial evolution have been telescoped or short-circuited to embrace the ‘perfected’ synthesis of shopping, entertainment, and architectural spectacle” (cited in Papastergiadis et al., 2013, 330). With its “Symphony of Lights” on full display every evening, Hong Kong offers an extraordinary exemplar of just this phenomenon that is transnational, cosmopolitan, local, capitalist, and spectacular. The algorythmically choreographed laser, LED, and light show



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illuminates more than forty buildings on both the Kowloon and Hong Kong Island sides of Victoria Harbor, and this spectacle, in combination with the fact that Hong Kong has served as a location for scores of films, marks a principle at work in all contemporary cities as they weave together histories of cinema, technologies of light and surveillance, transnational flows of cash and crowds, and the spectacle of capital at work. These are a contemporary modality of the life of a city, the archi-technical experience of everyday urban life, a Ge-stell at work, working us over. Massumi speaks of the ordinary “genres” of the city that we experience in ways such as the stability of architecture, a regular commute, ATM machines, walking the dog, and the commonality of the familiar streets. This is a kind of simple normality of experience. In the everyday course of things, the sites of the city can be trusted to keep their appointments . . . For each generic, there are regulated rhythms of passage into and out, more or less predictable patterns of circulation around, and strict zoning and ownership limitations on what can affix to the external envelop that stabilizes its public mode of appearing. The regularity of a building’s regime of transition creates a backdrop against which any unexpected arrival will stand out. (2003, 4)

When the city serves as a projector and as a screen for projections, which it always does, the “accustomed persists in the background conditions contributing to the special effect which is not reducible to a logical operation on the generic types, a message about it, or even a visual recontextualization of it. This is because the sensori-motor specifications of the human body are built into the city on several registers at every site” (Massumi, 2003, 5). The levels of human kinetics and the sensorium are interwoven in a complex series of interfaces with the city surfaces, at each site, in uncountable ways. We are absorbed into the rhythmic projects of the city and the urban bioscope—as a camera, a theater, a politics, and as the scopic drive of bios itself—is constantly adjusting its focus and its power of the zoom. We become a landingsite for the different vectors of citification that are scanning all the time. The human is “built into the city” in multiple registers at every step. The everyday at its most banal remains the everyday at its most banal, but it offers something a little extra for those who smell, look, touch, practice, project: holes, sieves, affordances, artworks, screenings on stairways, and torqued pockets of urbanicity. Each is a threshold for the unforeseen to begin to appear and it then becomes the work of art and of the nonsense of philosophy to further illuminate its surrounds, to make tangible alternative spaces that are more spacious for living. The city is an evanescent surface, a shimmering screen, a built (but often fortuitous) poetics of relations. Hong Kong is lit up by the shadow and lights of moving images. Money purrs through its streets

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and the entire skyline becomes interconnected digital screens as the crowds line up along the promontory to offer the nightly offering of their quasi-awe. It is something that is expected and the selfies confirm status and existence. The electronic gods are pleased. But before, and alongside, the technology of light in the age of global capital, there is the enigma of the opening, the clearing, the lighting up of worlding. The illumination that concerns us at this juncture is neither the fiat lux of monotheistic theology, the lumen naturale as “that which makes the self-transparent to itself ” (Wyschogrod, 1990, 161) for the centralizing subjectivity of the cogito and its many heirs, or the empirical history of urban lighting. The city is a play of light, volumes, shapes, and experience, but all of this depends on another sense of “light.” Da-sein, an ecstatic projection in all directions—and not “human reality” or the “individual”—is a simultaneity of clearing, lighting-up, manifestation, a giving, propagation, disclosedness, and keeping hidden, remaining in reserve. Thus, there can be history, language, reflections, inflections, films, and cities. Worlding. In the “Essence of Truth” (1942) Heidegger continues this line of thought begun in Being and Time, but now after a turn away from the language of fundamental ontology. After establishing that freedom is the essence of truth as a mysterious binding of relations that enables statements to be true or false as well as statements to correspond—as an attunement (Stimmung)—to things in the world as accurate representations, he moves through the necessity of “errancy” as a to-and-froing of Da-sein that keeps us in motion and keeps possibilities arriving, and then analyzes alētheia, unconcealment, as a movement of truth that simultaneously casts forth and withdraws: Truth signifies sheltering that lightens [lichtendes Bergen] as the basic characteristic of Being . . . Sheltering that lightens is—i.e. lets essentially unfold— accordance between knowledge and beings. The proposition is not dialectical. It is no proposition at all in the sense of a statement. The answer to the question of the essence of truth is the saying of a turning [die Sage einer Kehre] within the history of Being. Because sheltering that lightens belongs to it, Being appears primordially in the light of concealing withdrawal. The name of this light [Lichtung] is alētheia. (2012, 140)

Showing-forth and concealing in withdrawing. Earth/world. The folding that is not “within” Being, but that is the movement of the arabesque of being itself. This folding, along with the black sun of metaphysics, also fascinates Derrida. In Speech and Phenomenon, a laser-focused critique of Husserl’s theory of signification, Derrida argues that “in the final instance, signs (Zeichen) always refer to Zeigen [indication, demonstration], to the space, visibility, field, and compass of what is ob-jected and pro-jected; they refer to phenomenality as a state of encounter and surface, as evidence or intuition, and first of



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all as light” (1973, 72, my emphasis). Sense and sensibility; signs and expressivity; ob-jects that are pro-jected; and the entire manifestation of the appearance of appearance, of phenomenality as evidence, intuition, an encounter with surfaces, and, first of all, light. Light, they have said, is the first—fiat lux—but we know how Derrida and Deleuze have both disturbed the putative sequence of the firstness of origins and its derivatives, including light. The images are cast ahead of themselves, forming great shadows on the walls, on the streets. Only mixtures, hybridities, chiaroscuro. The looming shadows of German Expressionism and then American film noir. This is the city as it lights-up in both its physical and its virtual sense: an encounter along a surface of multiplicity; a co-dwelling of subjects, objects, projects, and rejects; and with the light of evidence, intuition, and the invisible narratives of Da-sein as signs of our sojourn through the streets. Metaphysics and its deconstruction— which is not a simple duality but an always multiplex of concepts—are waiting alongside and across from each other at each intersection, at each traffic light, on each screen that emits and absorbs light. The city has always been an arabesque of surfaces, but these surfaces are now taking on different valences and hues in the time of the newly technologized Kino-City and of the digitization of experience. This lighting-up, the setup of the Ge-stell of modernity, is a politics in development from the bad repetition of propaganda—believe what you see, unthinkingly and as if you were a talking machine—toward more nuanced politics of differential relationalities that allow for different plug-ins. Each surface is an interface between two environments that is ruled by a constant activity in the form of an exchange between the two substances placed in contact with one another. This new scientific definition of surface demonstrates the contamination at work: the “boundary or limiting surface” has turned into an osmotic membrane, like a blotting pad. Even if this last definition is more rigorous than earlier ones, it still signals a change in the notion of limitation. The limitation of space has become commutation: the radical separation, the necessary crossing, the transit of a constant activity, the activity of incessant exchanges, the transfer between two environments and two substances. What used to be the boundary of a material, its “terminus,” has become an entryway hidden in the most imperceptible entity. (Virilio, 2002, 443)

The terminus—each moment in a specific place—has become an entryway, a portal for the emergence of the virtual. The city is an osmotic membrane, a meme-brain, a thin film that allows goods and services to come and go. The city is a marketplace. But these membranes—all the arteries that allow all the circulations to occur—are all always surfaces. Things slip in and out; there are slips of the tongue and slips of the pen. Slippage in accountings. A blotting pad shaped by the arts of origami of the arabesque.

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Film, screen, canvas: the city has long been represented in the history of the visual and architectural arts, but what if we take the city not as a represented image but as a presentation of itself as a screen, canvas, projector? As a surface to be written upon, painted and filmed, a dirt path to be walked upon, a stone for inscription? Disputing the usual narrative that the emergence of abstract painting is “simply” a discovery of the canvas as a two-dimensional surface, Jacques Rancière has argued that in “actual fact, however, this surface does not have any distinctive feature. A ‘surface’ is not simply a geometric composition of lines. It is a certain distribution of the sensible. For Plato, writing and painting were equivalent surfaces of mute signs, deprived of the breath that animates and transports living speech” (2014, 11). This is a condensed version of the entire Platonic tradition and its epigones but instantly moves in a small side step beyond this tradition when it begins to “redistribute the sensible” in a different manner. The mute—in this instance writing and painting rather than the “living” voice—will regain its place in the series of signs. Rancière continues, arguing, Flat surfaces, in this logic, are not opposed to depth in the sense of threedimensional surfaces. They are opposed to the “living” . . . In the Renaissance, the reproduction of three-dimensional space was involved in the valorization of painting and the assertion of its ability to capture an act of living speech, the decisive moment of action and meaning. In opposition to the Platonic degradation of mimesis, the classical poetics of representation wanted to endow the flat surface with speech or with a ‘scene’ of life with a specific depth such as the manifestation of an action, the expression of an interiority, or the transmission of meaning. (2014, 11)

A flat surface is never merely a flat surface; a city is never a city; a screen is never just a screen. Each, rather, is an always co-implicated folding topology of possibilities and the entirety of the sensible relations between that which lives and that which is either dead or nonliving begin to shift. The depths appear on the surfaces of surfaces and in the electronic and rare-metal infrastructures of the codes of choreostemics. The city is alive, but not only in the traditional sense of organisms, for now the machines, too, are coming toward life. A post-human, inhuman, new materialism is emerging. The sensible becomes differently distributed as politics, technologies, subjectifications, architectures, and works of art. “If the cinema thus redoubles the course of modern philosophy and its discovery of time [Kant], in so doing it also lends itself to the practice of philosophy: the cinema creates images and signs, the conceptualization of which revitalizes thought” (Flaxman, 2011, 7). The historical emergence of cinema is rolled back into the operations of thought, both of which traverse the bio-scopic assemblage of daily life. The projectors have now become digitized and the city is a screen of



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exchanges, interchanges in motion, images of thought, and a perplexity of affects. Surfaces that project and are projected upon, a virtuality of telescopes, microscopes, and cinescopes: light, shadows, action, and a virtuality of the unexpected. Although the city is certainly experienced differently after the Lumière Brothers and the mobile phone with a camera, the city has always been a techno-arabesque, always been a Kino-surface: affective images moving through time that spur, and require, the movement of thinking. And the Kino-surface that we are now living in Hong Kong, and that Hong Kong radiates through all of us, must be thought and rethought. Nothing stands still and the frames of the film are burning along the edges.

Chapter 7

Politics on the Streets: The Pink Panther, Yellow Umbrellas, and a Prolepsis

Hong Kong knows how to take to the streets, how to think with the streets, how to listen to the streets. What potentialities of everyday life might emerge if the Pink Panther painted all the streets of a city pink and if pink is a mixture of infinite hues? If the General stayed up all night inside his club, drowsily drinking, fantasizing about glittery parades, and playing solitaire in a stupor while his befuddled troops kept an anxious guard outside the gated walls of the citadel? What might it indicate for the critique of a politics of control that this clichéd cartoon figure of the Panther, who initially emerges as the image of a flaw, a discoloration at the center of a diamond, ambles obliquely through the streets celebrating the wild loves of the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon? What does the Panther, a figure of media frivolity, have to do with the seriousness of urban philosophy, politics, and art, in particular as they emerged during the unexpected appearance of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in the autumn of 2014 and as new social conditions have, in 2019, given rise to another type of social movement? How is the Panther activated as a transversal critique? In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari and Deleuze make a well-known, if rather odd, appeal: “Don’t bring out the General in you! Don’t have just ideas, just have an idea (Godard). Have short-term ideas. Make maps, not photos or drawings. Be the Pink Panther and your loves will be like the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 25). This “having of an idea” creates provisional alliances with, for example, cinema, cartography, ethology, botany, a cartoon, and the amorous, all of which becomes articulated as an intermezzo of momentums. This alliance is opposed to something called the “General,” but it applauds wild loves between differences: wasp, orchid, cat, baboon. Why, though, do the nomadic philosophers of the rhizome pick up a mediatized Panther from 118



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the popular culture of American film and television and add him (or it?) to this list of loves? And what could this possibly have to do with the Umbrella Movement and its reverberations into the future? This passage is already an echo of one that appeared earlier in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: “Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature. . . . The Pink Panther imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its color, pink on pink; this is its becoming-world, carried out in such a way that it becomes imperceptible itself, asignifying, makes its rupture, its own line of flight, follows its ‘aparallel evolution’ through to the end” (1987, 12). The Panther does not mimic, copy, or re-present a real: the Panther moves, sometimes as signifying and sometimes as a-signifying, and worlds—new assemblages of possibility—become organized around that movement. The Panther animates an assemblage—which sidesteps the “nature” and “culture” split—that, in the twist inaugurated by Deleuze and Guattari, traverses the cat, the baboon, the flower, and the wasp. The Panther and its multiple plug-ins, its external relations, serve as a counter-movement to the General’s violent binaries and this contest of movements between the two assemblages, this polemos, has consequences. Even when it was just beginning to take shape, the Umbrella Movement immediately became an object of inquiry related to the political and legal status between Hong Kong and Beijing, the explosion of the arts in what many consider a “cultural desert,” the broad range of the participants, the architectural bricolage that sprang up almost overnight, the role of social media, and the connections of this moment to prior social movements such as the “colour revolutions,” the Arab Spring, and the Occupy events from Zuccotti Park to the tents pitched beneath the HSBC Headquarters in the financial district of Hong Kong. The Panther’s irreality that sets it apart from the simplicity of the question of the (not)real, its insouciant playfulness that always crosses the boundaries of the law of the expected, and its animation across a saturated capitalist media-scene are all analytic scenarios that create an opening onto the street theater of Hong Kong in 2014 and beyond. Why, in the midst of such very tangibly difficult circumstances, is the Pink Panther still whistling? After the 1997 handover from Great Britain to China, Hong Kong has since been governed as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) under the Basic Law as part of the “one country, two systems” policy. In June of 2014, Beijing reaffirmed its sovereignty over Hong Kong in a white paper that asserted that the nominating procedure for the chief executive of Hong Kong would remain in the hands of select committees, all of which would be approvable by Beijing. This rationale for governing the local electoral process, which avoided the affirmation of universal suffrage, triggered the September 22, 2014, action of Occupy Central with Peace and Love as well as the student demonstrations

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led by Scholarism (the secondary school students who first protested against the introduction of national education into Hong Kong schools in 2011) and the Hong Kong Federation of Students (which represented the Student Unions of the eight publicly funded universities in the city).1 The peacefulness of the demonstration was destroyed on the night of September 28 when the police used pepper spray and tear gas against the protestors to try to disperse them from in front of the government offices on Tamar Square in Admiralty. Some of those students protected themselves by blocking the spray and gas with opened umbrellas and in that moment of conflict, public visibility, and asymmetrical power—and with a spontaneity that could not have been planned for or predicted—the yellow umbrella immediately became a political symbol. As the size of the demonstrations increased, the streets of Admiralty, Causeway Bay, and Mong Kok—all usually packed with traffic—became spacious pedestrian zones, campsites full of tents, art studios, study halls, first-aid stations, supply depots, waste-removal centers: an event of street theater, of staging the streets as the construction of a different life and a gesture toward the future. Spontaneous social combustion had occurred and the Umbrella Movement had found its name and its icon. Umbrellas, however, have been connected to art and politics long before this moment. In 1929, D. H. Lawrence, in “Chaos in Poetry”—an introduction to Harry Cosby’s Chariots of the Sun—claimed, “Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos. Then he paints the underside of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives, and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong” (1998, 234). We all have a wish for an order of dwelling and a dwelling within an order that will establish a protective lining between our lives and the chaos of the wild, a sheath that Lawrence depicts as an umbrella on the underside of which we paint our world to keep out the hard rains of life and death. Eventually, however, we begin to feel constrained by that painted vault of representation—it’s always the same—and begin to seek another more exposed and vital form of existence, another way of thinking. Exposure, shelter, exposure. Citing Lawrence, the two writers who love baboons, ticks, and cartoons pick up the call about the question of the task of art: “poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent—Wordsworth’s spring, or Cezanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 204). It is the object of art, not the subjectivity of the artist, to which the two gesture: spring, apple, Macbeth, Ahab, Alice. In Hong Kong in 2014, the umbrella of the habitual perception



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of the city was torn and what came into sight was another umbrella, a yellow umbrella that, as a provisional shield, itself became a form of exposure not only to the wildness of chaos but to the tear gas of the General and the power of the law. The art, politics, and philosophy of the city were all put into play at that moment and the streets became, quite unexpectedly, a theatrical stage, a space for acting and its ethics. There are many routes to be taken into the critical terrain of the Umbrella Movement,2 but I would simply like to follow the trail of the Pink Panther as he ambles through the city with that inimitable gait accompanied by the unforgettable theme song by Henry Mancini. The Panther, a mime in time with music, concatenates crime, the law, the cartoon, and an irrepressibility of movement and color. Created as an image-in-motion by Friz Freleng and Hawley Pratt, the Panther is then taken up by those comedians and cinematographers of thought called Deleuze and Guattari, where as an emblem of a transmedial artwork that can circumvent the forces of the General and hook up with the sting and scent of the fur of amorous partners it could form an unexpected heterogenetic assemblage to create a strange map of a new urban commonality. In the original 1963 Blake Edwards’s film, the Pink Panther is first the name of a large pink diamond with a discolored flaw that looks like a panther, but from the depths of the diamond the Panther emerges an elegant, ironic, and comic character. Diamonds are formed at “high temperature and pressure at depths of 140 to 190 kilometers in the Earth’s mantle. Carboncontaining minerals provide the carbon source, and the growth occurs over periods from 1 billion to 3.3 billion years (25% to 75% of the age of the Earth) [and] are then brought close to the Earth’s surface through deep volcanic eruptions by magma, which cools into igneous rocks” (Wikipedia). The Panther, then, is an ancient telluric figure emerging from the depths of the Earth through a series of unimaginably violent movements through the Earth’s strata, its flows, and its temperature variations. Surely, though, this is just a bit melodramatic? The Panther is a simple cartoon produced for profit as a capitalist vector through a technopoēsis that works through the materials of signification in the age of cinematic, tele-visual, and digital reproduction. In the trailer to the original film, the Pink Panther is introduced like a spokesman for the film. Zooming inside the pink diamond, a dream sequence featuring the panther begins, and the panther dances through the opening credits, playing with the typeface and jumping over obstacles. In the theatrical trailer, the panther has a reel of the film’s negatives, pouring over them with an eyeglass and laughing hysterically. A narrator asks him questions—what he thinks about the actors, what’s he’s doing with those negatives, what he thinks about the music—and he mimes his answers. (http://www.parkwest-animation. com/depatie-freleng-enterprise/)

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The Panther introduces the “real” film; he is actor, director, and critic, and from inside the diamond, inside the dream, inside the film he always breaks out of enclosed interiority to cross boundaries and take on a transversal form. The laughter of the mime is the response to a series of quite predictable questions. It is also true that the Panther is self-serving and wants the limelight, which he delightfully manages to obtain. Over time the cartoon—the art object of color, line, and technology—has taken over the carrying power of the image away from the human actors playing in the films. In a succinct summary of the Panther’s global nomadism, Georg Stanitzek, speaking of the “title sequence” of films, notes that the most astonishing case, however, is the Pink Panther, who arose from the title sequence created by Friz Freleng and David. H. de Patie for The Pink Panther (Blake Edwards, 1964) to gain a life of his own: in subsequent movies, in a serial comic and later television series, and in Germany, among other things, as a logo for branches of a chain of dry cleaners. In France, he has been used as a theoretical model and ethical imperative, from there imported as a mascot into the anarchist and punk scene, cast by Jeff Koons with his arms around the neck of a scantily clad blonde, then—Warner Brothers owned his rights—acquired in 2000 by the German Telekom Group and, simultaneously, summoned as a witness for German “media philosophy.” (Stanitzek, 2009, 52)

Any concept-figure can be captured by radically different perspectives, including the appropriation by Beate Zschäpe and the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in Germany of the Pink Panther, a group that had been “living under false identities and sent out gory videos they had made, in the style of a Pink Panther cartoon, of their dead murder victims” (Economist 2012, 1). Peter Klose, “who served as a member of the Saxony state parliament with the party from 2006–2009 and also as the NPD head in Zwickau . . . went by the name ‘Paul Panther’ on Facebook, which is the German name for the ‘Pink Panther,’ and he used an image of the cartoon character for his profile photo” (Jüttner, 2011). There is only ever a polemos, a continuous work of making, unmaking, and remaking in which all of us have a stake.3 The Pink Panther—a common name that has become a proper name—is both the subject and the object of investigation, a counterpoint alter-ego to Inspector Jacques Clouseau, the bumbling vaudeville detective who, if only apparently, is the lead of the film. The Panther crisscrosses the frame of the urban as a work of art linked with the politics of jazz and can therefore serve as a guide through the ins-andouts, the comings-and-goings, of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. He is one for whom the frame is always porous and whose borders can never be fixed into any type of stabilized inside-outside form of organization, which is the interminable wish of the General, who thinks only in the simplistic terms



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of “us” and “them.” The Panther, however, cannot be controlled for it, or he, is simply on a stroll, looking around, interrupting the action. The rhizomatic city—like philosophy, art, and politics—never quite knows where it begins or ends, but that is as it must be, as it should be. When we enter the Umbrella Movement through an animated figure, a singular and iterable work of art, we encounter the relations between the surprise of the appearance of the unexpected, urban philosophy as a speculative pragmatics, and the movement of the trans- of the assemblage that links philosophy, in both internal and external relations, with its others. As David Cunningham has reminded us, “Philosophy’s own relation to a specifically modern urban space must evidently be conceived in a quite different form from its classical relation to the ancient polis, which presumed a fundamental theoretical unity of knowledge(s) that would organize the city” (2009, 524). The city is, rather, an “immanently fragmented whole” (2009, 526), a fissured surface that allows change to occur, which means that the General will inevitably fail to live out his fantasy of totality even though immense brutality can occur as the fantasy disintegrates. Figures will always migrate throughout the city. “Fragments” are, perhaps, always too close to the broken but re-joinable symbolon of the vase, amphora, coin, or column. Metaphorai, in this restricted sense, are still within a Platonic Ge-stell and a commerce of exchange of differences that fit together in a rejoining contract. “Partialities,” never having formed a whole, is perhaps the more accurate term. Hong Kong as the terrain of the Pink Panther is a radically different image of the city than as the beautifully cinematizable skyline, the efficiency of the MTR, or the “freest economy” in the world. There is something more at work than the planned city of the political and built environment. Why not include a cartoon character as an operative of such theory of the “morethan” of the transversality of a superior empiricism? Plug-ins are literally everywhere, the flotsam and jetsam of culture, fragments, and debris that is just waiting, available to all, to be placed into a new critical-creative operation of a transcendental empiricism that breaches the status quo with an event, a counter-actualization. The Umbrella Movement opened up a new expressive space of social, political, and philosophical aesthetics in the streets in Central, Mong Kok, and Causeway Bay. The Pink Panther is not a causal force, but an affective idea, a critical image, and a conceptual persona that allows us to re-think philosophy, politics, and the arts in Hong Kong as a recombination of the materiality of a pragmatic poetics. “Knowledge in act expresses itself in images, those of a metamorphosed life,” Lefebvre demonstrated. “At the same time, this knowledge has to pass by way of a praxis of transformation. The act that inaugurates knowledge and praxis is poietic, simultaneously a creator of concepts and images, knowledge and dream” (2016, 110). Concept-image-knowledge-dream: urban praxis, with

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all of its necessary but not sufficient empiricisms, is always already a material poetics. Streets as events are shape-shifting assemblages, theatrical demonstrations that unfold into a host of unprogrammed cityscapes of experience. Occasionally, when events are (dis)aligned, the yellow-lined surfaces of asphalt built for the combustion engine become theaters, screens, media platforms, schools, rallies, jam sessions, art studios, museums, dance-spaces, medical clinics, and camping sites. The Umbrella Movement was not a unified set of actions organized around the voice of a single leader, but occurred as p­ ositionalities— currents, waves, affects, voices, rhythms—proliferated across a built terrain of frustrations, hopes, memories, and dreams for an alternative future. The streets of every city speak in an eloquently heteroglossic lexicon, which is always partially legible and partially illegible, but never exhaustively readable. The Pink Panther sidles along with a raised eyebrow and a grin, whistling his signature ditty. The Panther disrupts the seriousness of the city’s normative self-­projections and the sober critiques of the city with its frivolousness, but this frivolity might more accurately be called “joyous impertinence and ludic impropriety” (Sauvagnargues, 2016, 15). This joyousness circulates through figures such as Krapp with his tape recorder, the Little Tramp with his cane, a Mechanical Turk, Ubu and Dr. Faustroll, and Kant with his clock. It wends its way through the history of carnivals, festivals, and the masks of Commedia dell’Arte, Pantagruel and Gargantua, Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Socrates and Socrates-in-Cloud-Cuckooland as all of this flotsam and jetsam of history are cast ashore in the erratic waves surging out from the telluric intoxication of Dionysos. All of these figures take the work-of-the-work with absolute seriousness, but all of them also enact the paradoxical work of play. They all know how to laugh at the tragedy of themselves, turning that tragedy into a kind of comedy, to which philosophy is intimately related. The Panther moves in the direction of what Deleuze and Guattari thought of as conceptual personae: “not the philosopher’s representative, but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and all the other personae who are the intercessors, the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual persona are the philosopher’s ‘heteronyms’ ” (1994, 64, my emphasis). All philosophers have multiple heteronyms, names within names, and Fernando Pessoa is only one name among a series of names. The Panther exhibits the rhythms and masks of philosophy as a technopoetic cartoon emerging from a complex media assemblage rather than from a “single” thinker. (But isn’t this, finally, always the case?) The Panther traverses like an ironic zigzag through the law, crime, wealth, and the history of cinema. This is the scene of the political and in an emergent moment such



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as the Umbrella Movement the political always takes us by surprise. It is not that historical antecedents are not at work—they always are and everything coalesces from a milieu—but that an unexpected spontaneity occurs emerging as-if from nowhere, an as-if that is constitutive of art, philosophy, and politics in both their formal structures as well as in the tacit movements of everyday life. “History is perhaps not so much that which unwinds itself and links itself, like the time of causality,” Jean-Luc Nancy has remarked, “as that which surprises itself. ‘Surprising itself,’ we will see, is a mark proper to freedom. History in this sense is the freedom of being—or being in its freedom” (1993, 15). This is the neighborhood of Deleuze’s concept of counter-actualization, which occurs “at the point where the actualization cannot accomplish or the cause produce that the entire event resides, it is at the same point also that it offers itself to counter-actualization; it is here that our greatest freedom lies—the freedom by which we develop and lead the event to its completion and transmutation, and finally become masters of actualizations and causes” (1990, 212). We discover the pivot point at which the actualization is not quite finished and carry what happens to us forward through making, symbolizing, and affirming. Yes-yes. This freedom of coming-to-be that Nancy describes as a “burst”—like the zigzag of lightning, machine-gun fire, or satellite signals—is not simply an origin, an initial stage followed by the determinations of a more traditionally ordered politics. It concurs—runs with—everything, but only by refusing to concur absolutely or symmetrically with the state of affairs of what-is, by always being off-balance in a creative dis-equilibrium that undoes stasis. In a social movement, instead of a free origin followed by a sequence of causal consequences, “spontaneity is pervasive and consequential throughout collective action. This refutes the conventional thought that spontaneity is more important at the early stage of social movements. Given the inextricable connection between structure and contingency, spontaneity should be treated as a ‘dynamic element within the collective action process’ rather than a stage” (Cheng and Chan, 2017, 223). A social movement, enhanced by digital communications, is a flash mob in action, contingency that coalesces. Manuel Castells has offered a comparative analysis of the numerous social movements for greater autonomy that have sprung up around the world since the financial debacle of 2008 (although such a singular dating of time is never quite adequate). In summarizing these differential movements, he points to a series of common characteristics: (1) they are networked in multiple forms, (2) they occupy urban space, (3) they are simultaneously local and global, (4) they generate their own form of time (and space), (4) they are viral, (5) the transition from outrage to hope is accomplished by deliberation in the space of autonomy (and they are usually leaderless movements), (6) they create

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newly established communities that are both virtual and physical, (7) they are highly self-reflective, (8) they are nonviolent in spirit, (9) they are rarely programmatic, and (10) they are aimed at changing the values of society (thus they are political in a fundamental sense) (Castells, 2012, 221–28). In terms of the Hong Kong experience, each of these would need additional elaboration and clarification, but there are clearly a great many similarities with a social, technical, and generational shift of how social movements operate. Castells also emphasizes that “social movements are most often triggered by emotions derived from some meaningful event that help the protesters to overcome fear and challenge the powers that be in spite of the danger inherent to their action” (2012, 219). In Hong Kong, this intensity of the instant in 2014 when the police used tear gas and pepper spray on the demonstrators and the umbrellas opened onto a new form of life. Affect exploded, then took multiple forms as image, discourse, and a continuing propagation of affect, although this is quite differently inflected depending on where people are positioned on the global-local matrix called “Hong Kong.” Urban philosophy, always an affective thinking-in-motion, cannot do its work without such a theater, without a staging of its stage on the streets of a city and a street is never only a street; streets always enact the force of metaphor, of (im)possibility, and of transversal irreality—both empirically “real” and “not-real”— as art, thinking, and politics. That the city be understood as a theater is far from a new observation and the crossover between the two—which is and is not a metaphor—was already an active network at the historical unfolding of Western philosophy in the transits between the agora, the emergence of the philosophical schools, and the plays held in the amphitheaters. Lewis Mumford has famously defined the city as a “geographic plexus, an economic organization, an institutional process, a theater of social action, and an aesthetic symbol of social unity. The city fosters art and is art the city creates the theater and is the theatre. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s [sic] more purposive activities are focused, and worked out, through conflicting and cooperating personalities, events, groups, into more significant culminations” (1937, 92). Moving from the city as a site for the performance of art and theater to the city as art and theater—as if it were itself a conceptual persona—Mumford links the urban to social action, aesthetics, and a classical notion of the theater as an agonistic space in which conflicts are symbolically addressed and provisionally resolved. Politics is a theater of the streets and Jacques Rancière has been explicating the possibility of a politics that through a dissensus brings to sensibility what has previously been occluded. “In order to enter into political exchange, it becomes necessary to invent the scene upon which spoken words may be audible, in which objects may be visible, and individuals themselves be



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recognized. It is in this respect that we may speak of a poetics of politics” (Panagia, 2006, 116). The emergence of a street theater—in which the streets themselves are active and necessary players—is a manifestation that reconfigures the perceptions, pathways, and habits of daily life, as well as sets a stage for the development of a more formal political response. Deleuze reminds us that already in the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had “put metaphysics in motion, in action . . . They invent an incredible equivalent of theatre within philosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theatre of the future and a new philosophy” (1994, 8) and Rancière continues this work via what Peter Hallward has termed a “theatrocracy,” in which “[Thinking] is more a matter of improvisation than of deduction, decision or direction. Every thinking has its stage, every thinker ‘plays’ or acts in the theatrical sense. In particular, every political subject is first and foremost a ‘sort of local and provisional theatrical configuration’ ” (2006, 111). This theater within philosophy creates unforeseen futures on the streets and the streets further immerse the theatricality of philosophical thought into the articulations of the polis, for it is always in motion: humming, vibrating, whistling. This “governing by the theatre” is an extremely strange form of sovereignty in which the rule of the theater on the traditional (“classical”) stage of representation is undone in the name of the demos inventing a street scene. “Theatre is connected to democracy,” Rancière insists, “because if actors can be themselves and someone else at the same time then perhaps citizens can have a political existence in addition to their craft [their occupation] . . . In other words, perhaps one does not need to be an expert in politics, or in philosophy, in order legitimately to exercise power” (cited in Davis, 2010, 86). Philosophers should never be kings or generals. One’s occupation and expertise does not determine one’s identity, one’s voice, one’s visibility, or one’s ethics. Counter-actualization is to become an actor. We are always in the theater of the streets and before “it is a matter of representative institutions, legal procedures or militant organizations, politics is a matter of building a stage and sustaining a spectacle or a ‘show’ ” (Hallward, 2006, 111). The Umbrella Movement was precisely this complex act of staging a transformational theater in the streets. The Theatre of Umbrellas rearranged the assemblage of the political and kinetic sensorium in Hong Kong both for its own moment and for an unpredictable future and even though the explicit manifestation of the event has now dissipated and the traffic long ago returned to its usual density along Harcourt Road. “Where political actors turn streets into stages, the police re-establish the smooth circulation of traffic” (Hallward, 2006, 117). The smooth flow of the literal traffic, but not the smooth flow of the traffic of ideas and affects. Hong Kong, “after” the Umbrella Movement, has been projectively haunted by a variety of futures formatted by the virtuality of that extended instant of

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collectively creative rearticulation. Thought surprised itself in 2014 and the Pink Panther, improvising, did a soft-shoe across the stage. Way back in 1964, when Hong Kong was very much under British colonial rule and the riots of 1967 had not yet taken place, the first season of the Pink Panther cartoon series begins with an episode called the Pink Phink that is, literally, a contest between a the “Little Man,” a painter of blue—one who lays traps, becomes enraged, and picks up a gun—and the Panther, a painter of pink. A “phink” is an invented term as the “f ” of “fink” becomes a “ph” and asignifying letters take on significance as they change their positionality on a surface of writing. The etymology of “fink” is of “uncertain origin, possibly from German Fink, ‘a frivolous or dissolute person,’ originally ‘a finch’; the German word also had a sense of ‘informer’ (compare stool pigeon). The other theory traces it to Pinks, short for Pinkerton agents, the private police force hired to break up the 1892 Homestead strike. As a verb, 1925 in American English slang” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/fink). The fink, that dirty rat-fink, has become pink through painting. The fink of the painter of blue belongs to the General, but, undergoing a dialectical reversal, fires a shot that makes the world pink. The phink is closer to the conceptual and material shifters of philosophy and the Panther. In the last scene of the episode, after the Panther has momentarily disappeared into his painting, the world is pink, the Panther is moving into his new house—a world is a way of dwelling—and a series has been established. A new type of occupation is occurring. During the Umbrella Movement the capacity to act was remapped and the city came alive with a palette of different colors. Deleuze and Guattari, those outlaws of affirmative transgression, have taught us how better to in paint in pink in the singular process of living affectively and the “most beautiful thing is to live on the edges, at the limit of her/his own power of being affected, on the condition that this be the joyful limit since there is the limit of joy and the limit of sadness” (Deleuze, 1978, Spinoza Seminar). Living along the edges, the city and all of those who dream the city, creates a matrix of affect that opens different possibilities of everyday life in the city, two of which are the styles of the General and the Panther. Like the city, we, too, are always both the General and the Pink Panther, but the relations created between these two forces is essential. “Fascism seems to come from the outside,” Guattari remarks, “but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone’s desire . . . Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force. It can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak” (Guattari, 2009, 97, 98). The workingthrough to be done is to crystallize the Panther more often and the General as little as possible. (How might Dionysos make use of Apollo? How does the



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Panther make use of the Little Man, of Da Vinci, of Inspector Clouseau, of the force captured by the General?) Such an affective field creates alternative possibilities of relationships— the apparently “all powerful” and the “ridiculously weak”—across the spaces of the city that offers an actual (if always provisional) life that vibrates with color, line, and thickness. This shared affect puts the Umbrella Movement to work in registers that combine its spontaneity, its intentional symbol-­ formation, its reorganization of public and private space, and its unpredictable after-lives. A concatenation of umbrellas popped open in front of a tear-gas attack by the police and the image circulates, and is transmitted to the future, as a recognizable icon. Graffiti, photographs, and sculptures appeared on the streets, on temporary concrete barriers, on stanchions that support the MTR lines and the overhead roads, on faces, and on walls as many discovered that they had always been artists. What was the Occupation of Central with Peace and Love and what is it now that continues to occupy us about the movement that continues to occur in Hong Kong in the form of party politics, trials and sentences, memorials, exhibitions, seminars, poetry, film, elections, nostalgia, hope, hopelessness, critique as composition, and, as of 2019, of more widespread protests? Very recently, millions have once again taken to the streets against a proposed Extradition Law and the failure of the Hong Kong government to listen adequately to its residents’ needs. What will become of all of this? What is this strange act of occupation? The most familiar meaning of to “occupy” is the inhabitation of a space that signifies power. We occupy such a space in the absolutely simple act of existing. I exist; I am; I occupy space. “I am here and I am now” is an existential act that establishes a boundary, an ontological assertion. There are then the economic, political, military, or media meanings of the phrase in which “to occupy” is to increase one’s territory, one’s visibility, and one’s control over others who enter that space. Occupying space by those not “authorized” to inhabit that space demonstrates a desire for a new set of relationships. Michel Serres has articulated a “particular view of wisdom as that which is garnered by occupying the middle position, right in the midst of the confluences and mediations . . . Serres gives the name ‘third-instructed’ to him or her who is able to give up the comforts of disciplinary specialism [or absolute identification with a role of any sort since that is not the function of a ‘role’ in the theatre] and risk putting themselves into perpetual translation” (Brown, 2002, 12, my emphasis). What might occupying and being occupied with “perpetual translation” look like? One has to stay on one’s toes and constantly be not only navigating the crosscurrents of language, but also inventing new terms, new concepts, new tools, new pathways across the city.

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Occupation is transport and translation, always accompanied by a beingoccupied-by-an-other, by something just off-track or around the next corner, a translational event to come. This milieu in which all acts of occupation happen is not a determinate midpoint between two domains able to be properly measured by any form of calculation, but, instead, a resonant milieu essential to all experience, concepts, and interventions. As Rick Dolphijn has suggested, “Instead of occupying ‘something’ (an outside object) we are now asked ‘to be occupied with something’ (the revelation of a world). It turns a passive, subjecting force into an active and creative one . . . [It]comes with an intense love, with an unbound desire to explore a new landscape” (2014, 191). To occupy and to be occupied come into a relationship in which the socalled active and the so-called passive incessantly crisscross one another in order to create, from the virtuality of the not-yet, a space for transformation. One does not occupy, or become occupied with, an already stabilized space, but, instead, the occupare of the occupation—the work of the work— entails a differential making of the modalities of urban political, artistic, and philosophical experience. Being-occupied creates unexpected futures across the terrain of the city. The Pink Panther occupies the city and the global imagination through the serious playfulness of his antics with his adversaries, by popping up unexpectedly and rearranging the sensorium, by creating a provisional technopolitical assemblage, and by posing questions about the event of sense. Cutting a slit in an umbrella or drawing an umbrella on a pink post-it note opens a tiny vortex in the so-called empiricism of the real. The Panther, emerging as an image of a flaw from the heart of a diamond, then laughs at the sobriety of cinematic production, demands (although, again, playfully) attention, and then sets off—in an example of dissemination that keeps on traveling—into a series that circumnavigates the world, settles nomadically within philosophy, and changes the color of a city. This is street smarts at its best. The Umbrella Movement was, and continues to be, an indicator of a phase-shift for the politics of Hong Kong, which is very much unfinished and unpredictable. It cannot be used as a model for a prediction since predictions require an assumption of a linear sequence of causes and effects rather than the swarms of entangled causalities at work in a dynamic matrix of vectors. This uncontained field of possibilities highlights a new imaginary requiring new skills of trans-territorialization that marks a reorientation of the streets that entails a having-been-breached by an irritation, a prick, a tingling, an image, and a call. The Pink Panther, and its multiplicities of plug-in analogues, reproduces nothing: it sets into motion. This process of thinking, feeling, walking, and whistling in the city is open to all and the goal of structural politics is to make ontological freedom congruent with the freedom of the social as an empirically immanent ideal



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that keeps us moving. There is always a cartoon within the cartoon, a city within the city, a street within the street. How are we to live this out in the contemporary moment? Before us and inside us, urbanism today is a truly cosmopolitan world culture, our very own world literature, our Here Comes Everybody. Here Comes Everybody is what global citizenship ought to be about—hence the “normative letters,” HCE—a citizenship conceived of as something urban, as something territorial, yet one in which urban territoriality is narrower and broader than both “city” and “nationality”; a citizen of the block, of the neighborhood, becomes a citizen of the world, a universal citizen rooted in place, encountering fellow citizens across the corridor and at the other end of the planet, sharing world music together, reading books in every language, watching world cinema, entering Twitter streams and communing on Facebook. (Merrifield, 2011)

Block parties, neighborhood associations, global climate movements, and watching reloops of the Pink Panther? Democracy, this “here comes everybody,” is “the paradoxical power of those who do not count: the count of the ‘unaccounted for’ ” (Panagia, 2000, 124). The Umbrella Movement made countable, if only temporarily, what, and whom, had not been sufficiently accounted for. Its successors will do the same. The dissensus creates an interval in the controlled and surveilled space of the street-scene, a caesura in the technics of the political, but it does not create a structural political configuration that sustains the possibility of the greater equality that shows itself within the milieu of the interval. That is a task for others on the day after the opening show. That is a different show. To paint the streets pink and to enact the demotic theatricality of the streets—both of which can occur at any point in time and in any moment of space—is not to homogenize the world into one dominant color, but, rather, to contribute in a very modest manner to the surprise of differentiation that adds a slight tint of a mixed color running through the entire assemblage of philosophy, art, politics, and the city. Pink jazzes up the urban scene, splashes a thin thread of color that weaves through tapestries of localities, relationships, and the surprise of possibilities. Involving but exceeding memory, repetition, and the understanding aligned with the determinations of knowledge, this sensibility is a strange practice of learning how to see around corners and see what happens, to live on the edges of turbulences. This is art; this is perception; this is thinking, all of which was activated during the Autumn of the Umbrellas with the thousands of post-it notes that covered the Lennon Wall, the posters stenciled across the city, the “Umbrella Man” sculpture of wood constructed by a local artist, Milk, the millions of photographs now abiding in the cloud, and its films that are still making the rounds, still yet to be made.4

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The Umbrella Movement was marked with a temporal boundary—­ September 22 to December 15, 2014—but although it did not achieve its hopes of universal suffrage in Hong Kong elections, the movement has reached its end neither in the temporal sense nor in its political ramifications. In recent Legco elections, for example, there were a number of democratically leaning candidates elected, including several candidates who support a Hong Kong independent of Beijing. They have now been barred from serving and vacated their seats. The student leaders have been arrested and released on appeal; the leaders of Occupy with Peace and Love have by now been put on trial and sentenced to prison. But now, in 2019, the proposed extradition law, frustration with the Hong Kong government, and a continuing desire for universal suffrage are bringing people from every sector of work back into the streets. Philosophy, politics, and the city are theatrical demonstrations, creating reverberations, resonances, and afterlives. Let me gather together the tears, the slits, the arts and the politics of the umbrella that we have been following and return to the spring, the apple, the witch, and the whale, which tear an originary slit in the umbrella of normativity and the repetitions of perception: Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the “clichés” of opinion. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, 203–4)

This is an entire history of the arts and their relations to social milieu, but it is also a description of how the streets come to life. A small tear here, a scratch there, a post-it note, an assemblage of people on a street, generating, however provisionally, a new vision of individual and collective life. PROLEPSIS: AUGUST 2019 Futurity and flashbacks, flashforwards and duration. History moves far faster than the speed of writing. An event such as the Umbrella Movement has occurred that leaves a virtual penumbra in place of the actualities of the street and if the only ethical question is whether we might live up to the event that addresses us, then it is a question that must be answered time and time again. The Pink Panther, glancing over his shoulder, seems to wink at us as a new event appears as a changed re-appearing. The visible stage of Hong Kong’s



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Umbrella Theatre has long ago been packed up and put away; the post-it notes and sculptures are gone, some archived, most lost forever; the graffiti has been painted over and Admiralty, Causeway Bay, and Mong Kok have gotten back to the business of business. The trials and their consequences continue and since becoming is untimely and nonlinear, we do not know what to expect, not past a certain point. Quite unpredictably, however, the Panther has recently once again been seen ambling down Hennessy Road, into the Western District, out to the airport, to the New Territories and in a host of other locations. The Panther must multiply itself to keep up with the rapidly changing scenarios. Bright umbrellas have once again been bobbing slightly up and down as over a million Hong Kongers have taken to the streets to protest the government’s attempt to pass an Extradition Law that could send local citizens to other countries for trial. Most of the protests have been peaceful and calm, but a new strain of violence is also now appearing. The Legislative Council was broken into; the national symbol of China at the Liaison Building was defaced; and many people were badly beaten by a group of men in white T-shirts in the MTR station in Yuen Long in the New Territories. The Hong Kong airport has been shut down on numerous occasions and the MTR lines disrupted. The police have shot tear gas and pepper spray at close quarters, inside the MTR stations, and in residential neighborhoods; and the protesters have started throwing small petrol bombs. These protests have taken on a different form and a different tenor than the sprawling 2014 Occupation of Camp Umbrella that was built around Admiralty, Causeway Bay, and in Kowloon, where families came together and students set up libraries and homework sites. This post-2008 logic of occupation has now shifted to a “highly mobile, agile style of protest. A rally may turn into a march; a march may begin in one direction and abruptly change to another direction; the focus of a particular protest action may only emerge in the course of the march itself ” (Dapiran, 2019, 3). Be like water. Be networked; be mobile; do not follow a leader; change shape quickly. This cohort of advocates for change are making new demands for universal suffrage, the clear removal of consideration for the extradition law, the formation of an independent council to examine the violence, the release of those arrested, and the removal of the term “riot” as a description of the protests. There have been protests by students, from within the Civil Service, by the medical community, by artists and cultural workers, by bankers and accountants, and by lawyers in the city, all of which are unprecedented signs of an expressivity at work that is illuminating the fracturing of the social order. The Hong Kong government, at least at this particular moment, seems incapable of moving the dialogue for solutions ahead and the People’s

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Liberation Army, which has barracks in Hong Kong, has circulated a promo video about its loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its pledge to keep Hong Kong in line. There is talk from Beijing about the “terrorists” in Hong Kong. The Hard Hat has come to supplement the Umbrella, which is still very visible, and the citizenry on the streets is learning how to “be like water” in its many forms. Lennon Walls—with their inscribed post-it notes of neon yellow, pink, red, and green—are springing up once again everywhere. The walls are speaking, eloquently, and the future, emerging as a zigzag and an arabesque, is unknown. * But what about the Pink Panther? Isn’t he, after all is said and done, simply an entertaining distraction for children? A tool of media capitalism? How can the Panther, immersed in a comedy of plots, act as an abstract map in a mode of jauntiness that sets multiple fissures into motion cross an urban landscape? “The social machine captures forces—in a ‘transversal’ relation of forces—that constitute a symbiosis, an alliance between two heterogeneous forms” (Sauvagnargues, 2016, 203). The Panther—a transversal gathering, focusing, and dispersal of social forces—performs as the precise swirl of a cigarette-holder, a posture, a gait, a tune, and a socio-poetic construction that is constantly being reframed in different locales around the world. Deleuze and Guattari chose well: the wasp and the orchid, the cat and the baboon are all smiling while the General, who has played his last trump, is lost in the back-room smoke of his hotel at his seaside resort. An empty and welcoming expanse hovers above the scene early in the morning, in the stunning humidity of noon, as dusk falls over the skyline, and as night settles in like a permanent visitor. This is the space of virtuality, of possibilities that are being determined. The city hums, but no one knows what will happen.5 What’s up, now, with the city? The music lingers, preceding us and awaiting our arrival. It’s as if a strange but familiar tune is floating from somewhere around the next corner and drifting in our direction. The Pink Panther is becoming the green edge of an arabesque; the arabesque, along one of its edges, is glowing a bright pink.

Chapter 8

Street Walking: The Peripatetics of Thinking

Philosophy, like the city, is essentially peripatetic and walking is a movement of thought. In the urbanized space of thought-in-motion philosophy is always at work, but its work is never a preestablished body of knowledge that “applies” itself or as a genre of writing that transparently reflects itself or its object-of-thought in a self-supporting clarity of conceptuality. Philosophy constitutes itself by continually breaking itself apart as calling-forth, analysis, reflection, and expression. It is always questioning itself, revising its drafts, recasting its arguments, retracing its tracks, and trying to see ahead of time what it might see next. Philosophy cannot cohere with itself and it thinks, always, through differentiation. Thinking breaches, cracks, rambles. “Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals” (Solnit, 2001, 5). One of the modalities of the donation of sense is walking. Walking and thinking depend on a movement that Peter Sloterdijk, speaking about Heidegger’s early philosophy, calls onto-kinetics. “Heidegger is the thinker in motion. His original thought or virtual action [Tathandlung], as it were, is the leap or letting-himself-go into a disposedness [Befindlichkeit] in which he finds nothing more in himself and ‘under his feet’ than movement. In this case, kinetics precedes logics . . . motion is his foundation” (Sloterdijk, 2017, 13).1 As we shall see, Heidegger cannot help us out much with finding our bearings in the city, but he is highly attuned to the movement of movement, the ecstasies of Dasein’s temporalities. We cannot, not quite, comprehend the arrival of the apparition of the city and the everyday life of the city, which is a form of nonsense that gives rise to the incorporeal surface event of 135

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sense. It is chaos become chaosmos. Walking is an affordance that slows the movement into a scale of apprehension. This arrival of the city through walking comes as ghosts appear at midday on Hollywood Road, as lobsters clack through Kowloon Park, as animated cartoon characters whistle along Harcourt Road, and as the early morning mists swirl slowly about the Peak. We encounter this arriving as familiar defamiliarizing movements that are not calculable, although we have to attempt to give an account of this incalculable arriving. It cannot be fastened into place or held down in the essential evanescence of the everyday and yet we can, provisionally, take-hold of it, if only as a gesture in a certain direction. Like the city, philosophy is a mélange of a material poetics in which the supports of thought anaclitically lean upon further supports—streets buildings, billboards, screens, histories, alleys, hillsides, cultural codes, trails, ideas, ravines, algorhythms, sounds, escalators, cement, glass, and the Earth and its satellitic surrounds, and even the quaint old technologies of paper—in ways that remix the readable and unreadable inscriptions of the assemblage of the city. The motion of urban philosophy opens itself through the reciprocal permeability of the trans-, which both necessitates the attempt at making the city legible and simultaneously ensures that, as with all concepts and with everyday life, the city can only ever be read as a series of partialities, of a montage of fragments moving like dust, plastic, or cardboard in different rhythms through the streets. (Il)legibility: (non)sense. The great modern stylists of the city all write as if walking a bit offkilter, sometimes jolting from side to side as on a tram headed for from Central to Shau Kei Wan and at other times composing as smoothly as the Airport Express leaving Hong Kong Station. The metaphorai rumble along the streets as we hitch a ride. Each of us writes the city as the city writes us in the “long poem of walking” (Certeau, 1984, 101), but neither neither is fulfilled as transparency, symmetry, a fulfilled proposition, or as walking that always knows where it is headed. Meaning is an orientation of movement and walking generates possibilities. “The relationships between the direction of a walk (le sens de la marche) and the meaning of words (le sens de mots) situate two sort of apparently contrary movements, one extrovert (to walk is to go outside), the other introvert (a mobility under the stability of the signifier)” (Certeau, 1984, 103). Walking and meaning, introversion and extroversion, stability and mobility twist within one another so that walking becomes a creative introversion and linguistic meanings become the extroversion of expressivity. All walking—even that which goes repetitiously between A, B, and C—is a potential dérive, since from a “dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” (Debord, 1958, 1).



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Currents, fixities, vortices, zones without access or with access only under certain conditions (and these, of course, are rapidly increasing in a screenomic society of ubiquitous cameras and biometrics). Hong Kong is in constant movement, but this is not a homogenous movement and new atmospheric eddies can arise at any moment. The weather changes, a mood drops for no apparent reason, the unforeseen always appears right next to us in the underground and polished and endless corridors of East Tsim Sha Tsui. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive [through the dérive] their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. (Debord, 1958, 4, my emphasis)

Philosophy, walking, and the city—with their distinctively idiosyncratic rhythms, pitch, timbre, and beats—are inseparably entangled. The red taxis coming and going over the Lantau Bridge, the minibuses idling beneath the Banyan trees, the ferry to Discovery Bay backing out of its slip at the Central Ferry Pier, walking the ten sections of the MacLehose Trail, or sitting amid the uncanny creaking of the bamboo groves in Lai Chi Wo all resonate in rhythms that we cannot contain. All of these are things, movements, assemblages, metaphorai, and potential pivot points. We move with them. Certeau’s migrations and metaphors, poetic and planned geographies, and strategies and tactics move through all modern cities and we have almost memorized, by now, the opening paragraph of his classic essay “Walking in the City”: Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. (1984, 157)

The sea is a shore and the shore is afloat on a deep sea. The sea becomes a skyscraper and a skyscraper is a sea of voices. Certeau is setting up the tension between urban planning and the perruque of the tactics of resistance, between the oversight of the spectator and the street walkers who know the grittiness of a surface and the being partially blinded by the buildings that block their gaze. We are situated, for the moment on high—on an observation deck of the World Trade Center—but even from on high we are reminded that we are

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on an island and that the island is a “sea in the middle of the sea” (Certeau, 1984, 157). Cities are islands; cities are the sea: the contingent coincidence of differences. The sea very often appears in the very center of the city and the city, a series of waves always swelling across the vast reaches of the sea, undulates. Hong Kong, like New York, is a floating city. Blues swim through the urban fields. Setting the stage for what is to come, Certeau reminds us that “the spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniature and mystical textures . . . the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production” (1984, 157). The city is a Kabalistic text and Certeau is a reader of its mystical letters, the “tallest in the world.” The Tower of Babel; the texts of Nag Hammadi; and Icarus and Daedalus as the up and down, the rise and the fall, the desire to extend beyond one’s capacity, and the circumlocutions of the labyrinth are all mapped onto the map of Manhattan. But the tallest letters, in this case struck by a pair of airliners in an age when everything is being weaponized, all fall down in smoke and ash. A point, a perspective that frames everything. A twenty-four-hour news cycle that frames and repeats, pounding like a piledriver plunging into the hard Earth. As Heidegger has argued, the “fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as a picture. From now on, the word ‘picture’ means the collective image of representing production” (2002a, 71). Modernity is not the perspective of an individual, but, instead, every perspective of the individual, in particular as the “individual” emerges as a representative of the Cartesian sub-jectum that Heidegger identifies as the figure of the metaphysics of our age, which is inseparable from the objectivity of scientific precision and the entire machinery of re-presentation (Vor-stellung). Representation is the emergence of the categories of subject and object framed within the worldpicture, the world as a framed picture, which depicts itself as the capacity to totalize the world through the technoscientific deployment of capital into the interstices of everyday life and far beyond the boundaries of the solar system. The world-view is a collective image of the means and ends of production as the human capacity to transform the world into the subject of our subjectivity. Hong Kong is presented as a scopic skyline or as the images that surge from everywhere on our handhelds as our hands become devices. The age of the world-picture is the age of the change of media regimes and the internalization of the digital, all of which permeates thinking. “To the essence of the picture,” Heidegger continues, “belongs the standing-together of ‘system’ [and] when the world becomes picture, system achieves dominion and not only in thought” (2002a, 76). The systematicity of the system—which we could follow up in innumerable ways but which



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Heidegger simply encompasses with the term Ge-stell, en-framing—takes multiple forms in the city, with its power grids and population statistics, and is ineluctably aligned with the desire for utopian planning of a putatively transparent rationality. But there is always another city within the city, a nonsystem within the system, an art that haunts the sciences of the world as a framed calculation of calculability, and the demands of rigorous science to find an accompanying form of art-making. There is a social poetics at work, a myriad of invisible entities coursing through the streets and turning the city topsy-turvy, like certain tables in the history of philosophy. What will happen? What is happening? We are recomposing the city, philosophy, and modernity, loosening and rebinding the strings of the urban texture. Walking, one of the very ancient activities by which hominization occurred, is also one essential means for an opening of the streets as we move forward, still one foot at a time. (Scooters and wheelchairs can also be used in a more mechanized form of the dérive.) Walking, if we are lucky and attentive, breaks apart the apparent seamlessness of the world-picture and the picture as the world. For Certeau it is the swarming life of the streets that is the most salient means of creation, rather than the abstract diagrammaticism of the so-called rational viewpoint of the bureaucracies, statisticians, planners, and the modernist utopians of the hierarchical anti-materialism of the gnostic technofantasists of urbanity. This swarming of singularities is neither the destruction of the image of the individual’s autonomy, free will, and sovereignty, nor is the swarm a regression toward the inauthenticity of the “they” that Heidegger outlines. Swarming, with its anonymities and its dissolutions of individualities, is a modality of life in the contemporary city. It holds within itself other cities and it, too, can be a pivot point. What now strikes us most powerfully about the initial positioning of the emblematic World Trade Centers, from the top of which the swarming far below seems a matter of utter randomness and indifference, is that they have been destroyed by a technology directed by an anti-technological dream and have crumbled into their own foundations, into the broken heart of the global urban imaginary. Humpty Dumpty has cracked apart and global capitalism’s Tower of Babel has collapsed (to be replaced, quite predictably, by all the other efforts to be the “highest” in the land). There is now only the emptiness of a ghost-space in place of what were once the Twin Towers. The first sentence turns to ash and the ash drifts indifferently through the rest of the text, through every text, through all the cities of the world. There is a scourge at work on the face of the Earth, one that we cannot take as monocausal, but Jean-François Lyotard has very succinctly defined this destruction of the social bond as “terror”: “By “terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language

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game one shares with him” (1984, 63). The city is linked with terror as multiple brutalities attempt to silence all language games other than its own. As the fantasy of the purity of the same roars back against cosmopolitanism, globalization, and a politics of difference, the politics of ever narrower identities, all of whom have media amplifiers, intensifies and the list of acts of terror multiplies. Walking, this most basic of freedoms, is also threatened by terror—we pay attention differently now—but walkers will keep on walking in the face of all of the attempts to immobilize the pedestrian through knives, trucks, or bombs. Walking creates, a step at a time, a dialogical space of actualization and potentialities. In those days before airliners became weapons and when the Trade Towers still stood, however, Certeau could consider from atop the world the relationship of the utopian planners—which he related to the history of both orthodox and heterodox Christianity and to the “all-seeing eye” of medieval painting as it passes through Dürer on its way to modernism and its separation of art into a separate sphere of aesthetics—to the “ordinary practitioners” (1984, 158) who walked the streets far below, “writing without being able to read” the urban text they were inscribing with their feet, a text that “eludes legibility” and writes “unrecognized poems” (1994, 158). A poetics of transmigrations and metaphoricities traverse the grids—of streets, transportation, and power—of the planned city. Walking, in a certain rhythm, crisscrosses habits, routines, normativities, and perceptions. The city from this perspective of everyday life on the streets is “no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer” (Certeau 1984, 160). This “taking hold of ” the inhabitants of a city is radically different than an affordance or a landing-site through which we take hold of the flux, a will-to-power exerted by the administrative institutions of the urban. The putting into place, storage, and dissemination of the traces of passing— especially as we have entered into a digital age of terabytes of surveillance— are useful in many ways, but such behavior, in which we are all implicated, nonetheless “exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but it doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten” (Certeau 1984, 161). There is an affordance or landing-site that enables us to exist and translate chaos into chaosmosis and there is the “taking-hold-of ” as a means of political and economic control. This is, in part, why the practice of style is so essential for both writing and for walking the city. Style, the mark of singularity, does not dispense with the codes of communication into either silence or nonsense, although these are complicated, but always inflects those codes toward a



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recognizable distinctiveness. “Style is the supplest of lines, the one that passes through every series, that traverses the surface of concepts, and that draws together the philosophical plane, the plane of immanence, a plane of consistency” (Flaxman, 2011, 10). Each of us is a style of writing, living, and walking in the streets, all of which are profoundly imbricated in the space in which we find ourselves and create for the next step. The goal is to become, in the Deleuzean sense, the mime, the actor, the ethical stylist of the event. “Charlie Chaplin multiples the possibilities of his cane; he does other things with the same thing and he goes beyond the limits that the determinants of the object set on its utilization” (Certeau, 1984, 98). The cane is a conceptual persona, a détournement that opens and (re)articulates the urban assemblage. All of these forms of idiomatic styles of walking, experiencing, writing, or swinging a cane create a “poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical orders of movement” (Certeau, 1994, 162). This wearing away of the normative proper names of functionalism that rejig the poetic geography create a “strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of ‘meanings’ held in suspension” (Certeau, 1994, 162). This is precisely the “mist,” “film,” and “optical effects” of the event of sense. The experience of the material poetics of walking the streets is an experience of the double movement of urban space as determined and yet-to-bedetermined, of the literalisms of the grid and the swarming space above, below, and alongside the city in all of its forms. The sieve-order will resonate with that little extra-être and the micro-cracks in the surfaces of sense. Which way will we turn? Do we need to speed up or slow down? The drift of walking creates a concatenation of sense and the senses. There is a punctured surface of the explicit city, but the city is not completed by the punctum of a period, the full stop of a sentence of the whole. Instead, it expands and contracts arrhythmically through an endless series of ellipses marking the interminable to-be-determined that radiates in all directions. The punctum, which is precise but not predictable, organizes each of our own idiosyncratic ways of making our way across the city. This sieve-order takes on a denser resolution and a more intense affect as the city becomes the city of the revolution of industry, the extended moment during which technoscience and capitalism become ever more tightly intertwined with one another. The sieve, the openings of the knots of the urban fabric and the openings for way-making, is always historicized. Hong Kong is not Seattle is not Amsterdam. And, yet, there is also translation. The ambling expressivity of the urban everyday—with its tracings, memories, anxieties, and flares of projection—is an incessant reconfiguration of the

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infinitely oscillating rhythms that we call the “city.” There are long monotonous stretches when it seems as if nothing is happening, the blandness of one repetition after another, and there are the frantic cascades when everyone is pushing each other slowly through Mong Kok or crossing Queen’s Way, swarming to get to the platforms of the MTR, to the luxury stores, or to the bars of Lan Kwai Fong. The sinoatrial nerves networked throughout the city spark with an electrical impulse of choreostemics; sympathetic and parasympathetic innervations begin to speak to each other and exchange roles: paired but in tension. Billions of neurons exceed their thresholds and send ions crashing through membranes, creating waves that recall the Greek alphabet to name alpha, beta, and theta waves that catalyze spikes and event-related potentials. There are heartbeats full of rhythms and arrhythmias, brainwaves that register the indigo, amber, aureolin, azure, harlequin, viridian, and crimson moods of the city. The city is a field of fluxious blue pocked by dead zones and marked by estuarial zones of emergence. The thinking of the city must think itself thinking, but reflective thinking, as we have seen, does not symmetrically double the world in the medium of mimetic re-presentation. Thinking is an intermittent and interspersed parsing we call perception, memory, anticipation, reading, writing, and rhythm. There is no single beat, no ur-word: things, spaced, syncopate themselves in time. The city is a synthetic mechanic-organism, a work of collective and anonymous art, nature becoming artifice and artifice always remaining nature. The traffic is intense, the signals vertiginous. It never adds up to one. The individual and collective modalities of the body lags behind, stays ahead of, and steps to one side of the utopian task of completing the conceptual and material determinations of the city. As Elma van der Boxel and Kristian Koreman, the founders of ZUS (Zones Urbaines Sensibles), an architectural firm in Rotterdam, have put it, “We have learned that city-making is a verb, an activity of constant attention and love, which ensures that a city remains alive. This requires active users, who feel responsible as co-owners and cocreators . . . The City of Permanent Temporality is temporarily complete and permanently unfinished. That is its ultimate strength” (2019, 417). This is a tensile strength and thinking on and through one’s feet requires tenacity, flexibility, technical skills, imagination, and a good pair of shoes. This fundamentally irresolvable dissymmetry of desire, politics, economics, and the logics of city streets produces the semiotic, conceptual, and affective gaps—like the air that flows over the edge of a wing—that pull all of us into making a different city, a city besides the city, even while traversing the city that appears in its immediacy. The city consists of different rhythms of urban existence, a constant shifting of perspective, a learning to tune the ears, the nose, the eyes, the feet. This tuning took a turn when the machine accelerated capitalism into a higher gear.



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The appearance of this new gear of an emerging global machine was adumbrated in 1840, in the still early stages of the industrialization of the emerging world-city, by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” a short story that appeared in his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. The arabesque was on the move, taking on a new form knotted to the grotesque, the night, the living dead, the gothic, the emergence of the crowd and its social physiognomies, mechanization, the factory, statistics, and the criminal, the detective, and the police force with its many emerging sciences of surveillance, photography, and fingerprints. The city was morphing, its assemblage preparing itself for the elevator, the air-conditioner, the combustion engine, the surveillance camera, and the migration of millions. The central question Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”—a precursor of all the writing to come on the flâneur in the capitalist city of windows and fetishes— asks about the fundamental legibility of urban space. How might the city be read, if, in fact, it is finally a text to be read? The story opens with an epigraph from La Bruyère, Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul, and its first sentence contains a reference to a “certain German book that ‘er lässt sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read” (1840, 1). Solitude and readability, with the question of crime soon to follow. The man of the crowd has been announced but is not yet visible, and already we have questions about unhappiness, the capacity to be alone, the multiplication of languages, and a book that contrary to the laws that apparently govern explicability does not allow itself to become legible, does not allow itself to be captured by the tight mesh of understanding. The suffering endured by the conscience of some, the opening paragraph concludes, is too profound for expression—it exceeds a capacity for expression—so it is cast into the grave and therefore the “essence of crime is undivulged” (1840, 1). The essence of crime, inseparable from the city, is locked away and buried, which will be the conditions for its return. Out of this incapacity to bear the truth of the horror of the world and out of this act of burial that will come to be called repression, writing proceeds: “Not long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow-window of the D—Coffee-House in London” (1840, 1). The night is closing in on the narrator, an elderly man convalescing from a recent illness, and he is happily ensconced behind the “smoky panes” (1840, 1) of the windows of a café—the very figure of passive reflectivity and the framed illusion of seeing-through an apparently transparent rationality—and watching the crowds of imperial London flow by. The narrator is enjoying a happy moment and his intellect “electrified, surpassing greatly its everyday conditions, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias” (1840, 1). The ratios and the analogies are established: the electrification of reason surpasses the banality of the everyday just as the sound philosophy of Leibniz surpasses the rhetoric of Gorgias. Plato

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would be pleased. Poe, however, is writing cross-wise and we must learn to read in a similar manner. Circulating in a kind of quiet delirium through the café there is a history of the traditionally embedded relation between philosophy and rhetoric—the truth of the Idea and the falsity of the simulacrum that writing entails—but, suddenly, the narrator, upon spotting a peculiar figure outside the window, dashes onto the street to follow him in a circle of repetitions through the boulevards and back-alleys of mid-nineteenth-century London. The solidity of the reason of calculus and the best of all possible worlds surpasses the flimsiness of rhetoric—with its ties to persuasion for the sake of persuasion and the exchange of a bit of money—but both are exceeded by the narrator’s compulsion to follow the singular man of the crowd, which, in turn, is surpassed by our own compulsion to follow the peculiar wanderers and to make our own attempt to read that which does not let itself be read. There is always a beyond within the world that bars reading, and, more generally, understanding, from occurring in a trustworthy manner within the limits of finitude. (Descartes will make his attempt at skirting this bar.) As the chase begins—and what and who are being chased?—there is no ontological argument to help the man of the crowd, whomever that is, escape the contingencies of repetition, singularity, and existing on the edge of death. Let’s take a step back. From the safe warmth of the café, the narrator first closely observes all of the passers-by, classifying them by physical traits and their place in a class structure in an indexical moment of the emergence of urban sociology when, just across the English Channel, Auguste Comte was also completing the six volumes of The Course in Positive Philosophy. The city creates its own disciplines of reflection and interpretation. Passing by outside the window are businessmen, clerks, gamblers, Jewish peddlers, professional beggars and mendicants, young working girls of all stripes, and then the lowest classes of “pic-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibitors, and ballad mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artisans and exhausted laborers of every description, and all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye” (1847, 3). The sensorium inflicts pain on the narrator and rational division is needed to calm the ear and eye. The inhabitants of the city, gathered from every geography, are noisily swarming through the streets, but the swarm is then ordered, controlled, and ranked in preestablished physiognomic categories from high to low, which the narrator is apparently able to read quite clearly. He is, for the moment, a positivist. From the perspective of the expert separated from the swarm, the social order is clearly legible until “suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age)— a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on



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account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression” (1840, 3). It is the countenance, and not the table of judgments, that counts—that acts as the ­punctum—and as night comes on an uncanny double has appeared on the other side of the window, inside the looking-glass that both reflects back and opens onto the outside. The readability of the urban order is instantly disrupted. “Absolute idiosyncrasy,” after all, cannot be compared or categorized; it is the ­un-incorporable outside that exceeds all determinative and positive taxonomies. Only the determinable is knowable and though the double enables a certain type of experience—one of obsessive tracking, a discovery of new territories beyond the domains of the normal identity, and a necessarily distorted r­eflection—it will never accede to the empirical knowledge of statistics, tables, facts, or of a census. The city, as an empirically accountable space, is punctured by the phantasmatic countenance of the idiomatic. It is a sieve that is full of the holes necessary for the occurrence of virtuality, thinking, ethics, politics, and art. The apparition of the appearance on the other side of the framed window sets things into motion as the narrator attempts to “form some analysis of the meaning conveyed” (1840, 4), but there emerges only confusion and paradox. The order of signification in the city that is projected by all its institutions and their disciplines is interrupted, but it is also thereby intensified by the presence of an idiosyncrasy that cannot be absorbed into the usual codes of hierarchical observation. It is difference—that which cannot be assimilated by the normative categories of meaning and forms of rationality—that instigates attention and catalyzes the compulsion to follow the traces. Walking must replace sedentary ratiocination. As the narrator follows the stranger through the streets of London, they eventually reach, long after midnight, the nadir of their wanderings at the “verge of the city” (1840, 5) where “everything wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty and of the most desperate crime” (1840, 5). We have traversed the spaces of inequity and the edge of the city, far from the centers of the polished and monumental corridors of power, is the site of poverty and crime. In this urban organization, there is a center full of riches that is systematically depleted as we move toward the edges of the banlieues. What, really, is our narrator after as he leaves the sites of his professional and personal life, his daily round, behind in order to follow the erratic path of the idiosyncratic into the grim zones of gin and crime? The buildings are falling in on themselves—the erect propriety of the city is collapsing—and the “paving-stones lay at random, displaced from their beds by the ranklygrowing grass . . . the whole atmosphere teemed with desolation” (1840, 5). The planned world—in both its social and its technical infrastructure—is unhinged by poverty, crime, and an upsurging of nature that breaks through a repressive surface of stone. There is not only a beach beneath the streets but

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also weeds, disease, a volcano. The socius, individuals, and nature are topologically entwined, which should help us reimagine the possible structure and functions of the city, since not only do we always have to account for all three modalities but we also need to make spaces for those, whose voices are for the most part silenced, who often do not count in the building the equations of the well-being of the city. After a night of frantic following, dawn breaks in London and the old men are still walking through the streets as the cock crows, returning by an apparently erratic route precisely to the “street of the D—Hotel” (1840, 6) in a return that resonates with Sigmund Freud’s description in “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919) of his own triple return to the red-light district of an Italian town on a hot and deserted summer afternoon. Gradiva and ghosts are close at hand in those Mediterranean lands where the sun shimmers in its own mirage and this vignette of a vignette—only a paragraph, but what a paragraph—is like the Poe story inseparable from an architectural and erotic geography of streets, piazzas, windows, doors, and desires that are traversed through the act of repetitious and compulsive walking through which Freud will encounter his own multiplying phantoms. When Freud vacates the quasi-panopticon of his chair behind the couch at Berggasse 19—the surveillance-post from where he listens, watches, and doodles notes—and heads into the streets of an Italian village for a bit of well-deserved summer relaxation, his consulting room travels with him as he respatializes his life along the cobblestones.2 “The ‘Uncanny’ ” is an essay that begins with Freud’s admission of the anxiety that arises when psychoanalysis strays too far from home into the vicinity of aesthetics, but then, as if by necessity, it finds itself not only within the aura of the aesthetic—of art, literature, language, history, desire, and affect—but in an area that “usually proves to be a rather remote region of [aesthetics] and one that has been neglected in the standard works” (1959, 368). Freud, according to the map of his own orientation, is walking and writing outside the norms, outside of the city wall like Socrates in the Phaedrus—while staying very much inside as well as the one who wants to set the standards—in a neglected and remote region of aesthetics, philosophy, and of an Italian town in the heat of the summer. This is not an encounter with “absolute idiosyncrasy,” but nonetheless it is the “remote” as a form of the nonstandard—Freud wants to become the standard-bearer of the classical concept of knowledge via the means of his explorations as an iconoclastic adventurer—that catalyzes reflection. Thought begins outside the norms of the common sense of thought as one walks into a new, but somehow familiar, territory. Poe and Freud write analogously resonate stories—about streets, windows, Doppelgängers, and the doublingbacks of desire—and we keep rereading, retracing our tracks, which have



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been almost but not quite obliterated by our previous passage, to see what we can see yet again. “One continually has the feeling of getting lost while retracing one’s steps. What is a door doing when it opens onto a door? And above all onto a door one has already passed through, in the passage of what comes to pass, in the passage to come?” (Derrida, 1995, 46). Doors open to streets and streets to doors. What is the threshold of the surface-between? Freud’s text is a fairy tale that unfolds inside a Giorgio de Chirico painting: “Once, as I was walking through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was strange to me, on a hot summer afternoon, I found myself in a quarter the character of which could not long remain in doubt” (1959, 389). There is no doubt; there is the indubitable certainty of the clear and distinct apprehension. This scene, if criminal, can still be read. The streets are deserted—the locals know to stay out of the heat—except for our lone and intrepid walker, dressed no doubt in a formal suit but far outside the lush classical aesthetics of his rugs, couch, and figures in the consulting room on Berggasse. Outside his normal routine and his normal language, Freud has temporarily vacated his office and his hotel; after all, he is on vacation and the same rules do not apply when we vacate our work-ego. It’s just a lark. There is a vacancy at work in the heat and even before he begins his perambulations to see what he can see, to stretch his legs and get a little fresh air, the town is already “strange.” Nothing at all needs to happen for the whole place to be strange. This is an essential characteristic of everyday life, depending as it does on time and space, objects and apparitions, all of which are strange to the highest degree, although there is not a graduated scale of measurability in these regions of desire and aesthetics. The thin thread of the paradox of sense must be followed, unraveled. As he wanders through the midday glare, that time of the ghost, Freud is struck with a certainty about the district into which he has unwittingly stumbled. The obscure, that which is around the corner, is suddenly front-lit with the glare of the heliotropic sun. The unconscious takes on architectural form and the densities of desire multiply: “Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention” (1959, 389). Here, too, there is an aesthetics at work, an ornamentalism of faces that are painted as a mask, a lure. Zeuxis of Heraclea—who is said to have died laughing— appears in the shadows of the text and the birds are coming for the painted grapes, although Parrhasius’ veil of a curtain, one that opens only on the surface of painting, is close by as well. The painted women are at the windows, beckoning in welcome if only with a smile or their eyes—or perhaps even the pose of their disinterested interest—and Freud, unlike Poe’s narrator

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inside the café, is on the outside looking in, though the scene remains framed by the windows. One veil after another. Freud, having traversed a labyrinth that he thought was a line by walking away from the face-paintings, picks up his step and hastens away. But the future, the past, and the present are not so simple, co-implicated as they are with one another. Time is entangled and things were picking up speed with the presence of the foreign man with money from the north. The Viennese cosmopolitan, however, properly “hurried away once more, only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before” (1959, 389). One can feel his heartrate decrease as he approaches the familiarity of the public space. And yet: a third time, always the number of trials in a fairy tale, he arrives “by devious paths in the same place,” with the same faces, windows, walls, flagstones, and, perhaps, a rising sense of excitement that he tries to cast aside, to cast behind him. The uncanny, that feeling of being un-homed that Freud traces back to the earliest home of the mother’s uterus, is prepared for by crossing borders, seasons, and certain forms of almost deserted architecture: winding streets, windows and walls, doorways and piazzas. The heat creates mirages. “Freud’s ‘unintentional return’ occurs as a result of the pedestrian equivalent of free association” (Haughton, 2003, xlx). The feet know what the ego does not. The body speaks beyond consciousness. Free association is of course a misnomer, an exemplar of a word that says the opposite of what it actually means (much like the divagations of the unheimlich): it looks as if it might be free—just say whatever comes to mind—but is, in fact, completely determined. The pathways, which may seem as if they lead out into the open, are actually an enclosed, if disguised, walk through maze that returns time and again to the same scenario. The smoky panes of the café at the Hotel D— in London; a district where the women, painted, sit in the windows. Time, a form of repetition, always brings with it the “again,” although as it fans out it also offers opportunities to change the shimmering of the re-flectere that is experience. Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (Virgil, Aeneid, VII.312). Virgil, singing the founding of Rome, roves freely across the entire Freudian corpus, across all the “strange” cities that Freud visited, all of which, like psychoanalysis, were immersed in the aesthetic, both as the sensorial basis of perception and as the formations of an artistic technique. For Certeau, Virgil’s line that “the goddess can be recognized by her step” (Aeneid I 405) initiates and frames his reflection on the “chorus of idle footsteps” (1994, 97) across the maze of the city. The poetic manifests itself by the gait and speed through which we traverse the streets and the streets stream through the fissures of our own spacious identities.



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There is another moment of shimmering heat during the time of the “midday ghosts” in Gradiva when Freud wants to “explain the haunting of the archaeological [in fiction] with a logic of repression . . . wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint than the one around which the other archaeologists of all kinds of bustle, those of literature and those of classical objective science, an imprint which each time is singular, an impression which is almost no longer an archive but which almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep which leaves its stillliving mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of origin. When the step is still one with the subjectile” (Derrida, 1995, 61). But no surface of any body of any sort remains stable and the subjectile moves along with the step. Metaphysics is not about essences, cities are not techno-rationalized grids, and a walking that writes keeps an idiosyncratic rhythm of its singular gait. While this writing is not normative and no rule can be given except for the rule to step outside and explore, it does orient us to the city and to other walkers. We are in movement together. The city “can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind,” Barthes muses. “You must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing” (1983, 36). A text of the city is not a simple whole transparently laid out on a surface of paper, screen, the pavements of a street, or on the sides of a building. A citytext is a Wunderbloc, an enigmatic machine of repetition and difference, a peculiar virtuality generated by material actions of inscribing and lifting, that is simultaneously both readable and unreadable. It is a sieve full of passageways and whorls and like any event it emerges along the edges of excess, remnants, remainders. Along the traceries of the arabesque, the “ ‘trace’ is the movement, the process, really the experience, that both tries and fails to do without the other in the same . . . A trace is never present, fully present, by definition; it inscribes in itself the reference to the specter of something else” (Derrida, 2005, 152). Memory, futurity, the iterability of twoness that enables the ideal and the taking-hold of the city or of thought. Out of the ashes of Pompei, with a calm Vesuvius rising in the blue distance, comes the sense of Gradiva and “The Uncanny,” which we as readers repeat, differently, yet again. To take account of; to account for; to be accountable to. To give reasons and to exercise rationality. Er lässt sich nicht lessen: we read this sentence about that which cannot be read. An explication dependent on the clarity of the rational has a dark impenetrability as one aspect of its operations. There is an empty space—a paradox of sense—that is part and parcel of the spectrality of the truth of the city and of the meaning of the evanescence of the event of sense as the city.

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Walking, too, has its idiomatic styles as we perform a multitude of the genres of walking each day. Poe’s man of the crowd, whichever figure that we identify as such, including ourselves, and Freud on vacation in Italy are both obsessive walkers. They keep circling about the elusive object of desire with the repetitions of the feet in step with consternation, anxiety, and an obscure wish. We have, though, almost lost the trace of the absolute idiosyncrasy of the delirium of the man of the crowd. We left the pair, these asymmetrical doubles, arriving back at their point of departure at the Café D—when the cock was crowing at the break of dawn. There are triple betrayals close at hand and a history of painting that will take shape around these betrayals. Wake up. The cock has crowed and the night is giving way to the fissures of the day. All of these questions of walking, profoundly imbricated with the questions of philosophy, remain in motion. The step-by-step of walking is translated into the circuitous complexities of the tasks of reading and into our own mimetically inventive walks through the city as we create our daily itineraries, keeping one eye open and the other squinted to catch the glimmer at the edge of vision. We walk in the place of others, on behalf of others, and through the barely touched histories of swarms of ancestors. There are also the more languorously erratic wanderings through the city of the dérive as a mode of urban peripatetics. “In its Latin roots derivare means to draw off a stream, to divert a flow. Its English roots include the words ‘derive’ and also ‘river.’ Its whole field of meaning is aquatic, conjuring up flows, channels, eddies, currents, and also drifting, sailing or tacking against the wind. It suggests a space and time of liquid movement, sometimes predictable, but sometimes turbulent” (Wark, 2015, 22). This is the entirety of walking the streets as the event of thought and perhaps the predictable, the turbulent, the obsessive, and the free are not so far apart as we might usually think. There are diversions and swerves as we move through the rivers of the streets, sometimes before the wind and sometimes tacking against it. If there is a beach beneath the street, cities within the city, then the sea is always lapping at our feet, edging the land with its immensity. The blues sparkle. The feet not only move across the street, but the streets move beneath the feet as Hong Kong whirls ahead of itself into the future. We are carried along in this turbulence of the event of happening and must reach out for a hand-hold, learn when to let go, and learn how to swim against the currents. Heidegger calls this “authentic resolution,” while Deleuze uses the radically different conceptual field of “counter-actualization.” Deleuze asks, as the waves are rising beneath Des Voeux Road, “how are we to stay at the surface without staying on the shore?” (1990, 158), encouraging us to learn how not to be submerged by an actualization, but, instead, take to the seas of thought, everyday life—what else is there?—and the expressivity of the event while



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staying on the surface through a counter-actualization. We have to learn to double, or refold, the actualization of the state of affairs: We must accompany ourselves—first, in order to survive, but then even when we die. Counter-actualization is nothing, but . . . to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a distance, like the true actor and dancer, is to give to the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualization. (1990, 161)

In order to articulate the transversal empiricism of the streets, which recognizes G. M. Hopkins’ “All things counter, original, spare, strange” of “Pied Beauty” (1877/1918), we must become artists—actors, dancers, mimes—of the actual. We must “establish a distance” that creases our identification with the streets as we walk, perhaps by a simple act of attentiveness, perhaps by developing streetwise tactics during the “long poem” of walking, perhaps by hitting the streets in protest, or perhaps by writing, painting, or making architectural space. All of these breach the given. In the very moment that we are engaged in traversing the city, our senses alive and attentive, but not discombobulated by the swarming, there is always something around the corner that remains not only unread but also unreadable. Walking as reading as thinking: Walking in the city is inexhaustible. The city spreads itself generously before us—sometimes in the form of the greatest danger—as it awaits our first steps outside, our first steps turning the corner of the next street on the left. The walker is always right to roam . . . it is always right to step outside, to go and see what is happening to one side, to continue to walk wherever your footsteps— and not other people’s—take you. (Rancière, 2003, 122)

Create, then, a dérive of a line that is a labyrinth, that skirts the programming of the Ge-stell and that cuts up the city in an unforeseen manner. Go outside. Walk in your own style, at your own pace. Be idiosyncratic. See what’s around; see what is happening on the streets.

Chapter 9

Stepping Outside: Rhythms of the Streets

We all know this, but Dung Kai-cheung reminds us, “To be inside a place means at the same time that you are outside an other place, and vice versa. . . . all outsides are a form of being inside and all insides are a form of being outside. . . . From this perspective, the fixing of boundaries is a way of making a place a place” (2012, 20). Boundaries are activations and there are only the transversal movements of the event. The city shimmers in an urban arabesque that undulates, tightens, loosens, coalesces, disperses, becomes yet another city, keeping time in its own timing. Heidegger reminds us that “rhuthmos does not describe entities that appear temporally, but rather indicates the temporal structure by which the entity remains in appearance as bounded by the absences of non-being. It is only in rhuthmos that being can articulate itself, that is, set itself into relation with its surrounds, and take an intelligible form” (Nowell-Smith, 2012, 43). Rhythm is not a “separate thing” or a “substrate” but a composition or a configuring of a syncopation of relations among fluid entities such as the “city”: within the city, across the city, beyond the city, and as the city. The arabesque, figuring the as-structure of a rhuthmos that provisionally holds-in-place, opens the cities within the city, all of which are excesses of the swerve. As we move more deeply into the history of the technocity, we are learning again—enhanced, subjugated, and distracted by the digital—to feel with different eyes, to listen to the pavement and subterranean rumblings with our feet, to see images within images of all the streets. Metaphorical and migrant cities; cities of the imaginary. The concept of the city swarms with concepts; the image of the city swarms with images; and the image-concept keeps the event of the city on the move with its possibilities for experience, encounters, and thought-in-motion. We cannot keep up; we cannot master the process; we cannot hold it in place. 152



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Philosophy and the city, two flourishes of a self-producing arabesque, zigzag vertiginously through Hong Kong. Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot, both of whom have a prodigious knowledge of philosophy but neither of whom “belongs” to philosophy “proper”—as if there were such a thing—have each created an idiosyncratic style (always the mark of a genuine thinker) that is not-quite and just-a-bit-more than philosophy, literary criticism, urban studies, and sociology. Blanchot is a “philosopher for whom philosophy is never a possibility; a philosopher who remains within the space of poetry or writing, as if refusing philosophy” (Bruns, 1997, 61) and Lefebvre occupies an analogous position, although he moves more toward political economy and sociology than toward literature. Aslant; askew; transversal: both thinkers write their own rhythms within the more encompassing rhythms of the city.1 “If we look at the city,” Lefebvre reminds us, “we will quickly notice how difficult it is to understand this masterly work created by social groups and by society as a whole. It bears the traces of struggles which stimulate the force of creativity, and yet this force tends to obliterate such traces” (2008, 308). The city is in constant creation, and constant erasure, not just because temporality is always at work, but because human work—as both an anonymous and credited collective art—must always be jack-hammering around the clock in both a day and a night shift. Work makes things, relationships, and assemblages of the made and the given, but the work of citification can never be completely calculated as an equation of symmetry, since it is fundamentally a social piece of work springing from multiplicity. The interplay of all the forms of urban signification—walking, architecture, screens, art, politics—necessitates that the flows and eddies create rhythms and arrhythmia, consonance and dissonance, and that this myriad of tempos is never resolvable into any form of “higher” dialectical unity of a unity of composition. The concept of the city keeps them playing together, but the concept of the city is itself under constant revision. Nietzsche contra Leibniz via Deleuze. Hong Kong does not stay still: it hums, rumbles. The city is the stage par excellence for the essential paradox of the everyday: a transitory material-speculation, a relatively stabilized set of efficiencies, and a virtual object yet to appear, all of which oscillate but not in the order of a linear sequence. Vectors radiate in all directions as it all happens all at once in the event of the urban that instigates thought. Both Lefebvre and Blanchot raise the question of the function of philosophy in and of the city by posing the question of the everyday. Blanchot—commenting on Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life II—claims that the everyday “belongs first of all to the dense presence of the great urban centers. We need these admirable deserts that are the world’s cities for the experience of the everyday to begin to overtake us. The everyday, if it is anywhere, it is in the street” (1993, 242).2

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The street serves as the essential figure of the everyday because it is quasistable; signed by language, but partially illegible; a hybrid space of politics, commerce, eros, and art; and because, fundamentally, it is a platform for movement of every sort, including the traffic of affective thought. The metaphorai move along the tracks between Kennedy Town and Happy Valley, but they also leap the tracks and take off for a spin of their own. This transversability opens the city to a thinking-in-motion that is almost philosophy, not-quite philosophy, a bit-more-than and a bit less-than philosophy. This assemblage of the city opens both the possibility of empirical action as well as the speculative moment of thinking that transcends the empirical in the sense of that which is (apparently) simply given. The event of sense is a thin film that hovers, a mirage in the desert of the city. The as multiplies, but this immanent transcendence is always that of a superior empiricism that enters in an ever more nuanced manner into the textures of experience, all of which are capturable in causal nets and all of which are, finally, contingent, exposed on all sides to the weather of the Earth and its spacious environs of parsecs and dark matter. The causal, the contingent; linearity and the swerve. The ordinary street—Tai Po Road or Sha Wan Drive—is the emblem of the everyday and “nothing could be more superficial: it is banality, triviality, repetitiveness. And in yet another sense nothing could be more profound. It is existence and the ‘lived’, revealed as they are before speculative thought has transcribed them that must be changed and what is the hardest of all to change” (Lefebvre, 2008, 47). The street is the crossroads of absolute superficiality—this is what we all take for granted without thinking about it—and of the absolutely profound: the street is the manifestation of the appearing of the platform of possibility. It is the open site of change and of the clamorous resistance to change. The everydayness of the street establishes a site-for-thinking that is not only about the many empirical questions that all cities must ask of themselves—in urban planning, architecture, commerce, waste and energy management, communications, and transportation—but also about that philosophical questioning beyond, before, beneath, or across those empirical necessities of the denotative state of affairs. The techno-empirical does not need an explicit articulation of philosophy to do its work, but the empirical, which Blanchot names the “work of the day,” is always backlit by what he calls the “work of the night,” a neutral unworking of all that works as a productive force. Erasing, eroding, scraping. This is to think the differences as syncopations and stutterings and to hold open the question of how cities pose questions to us that incline away from the “merely” technical and toward the philosophical. This is not, needless to say, a difference between the material and spiritual. Thought and extension go together. To think rhythm is to think the relationships of tempo, pace, and the multitude of temporalities that course across the terrain—from the depths of subterranean tunneling to the heights of satellites beyond the atmosphere—of



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the urban. F. T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” (1908–1909), hurtling out of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, begins in the night, passes through a car crash, and extends itself toward the explosion of the world in both speed and Fascism. In the short introductory section, “The Joy of Mechanical Force,” Marinetti writes, “We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose copper domes, as open-worked as our souls, yet had electric hearts. And while we trod our native sloth into opulent Persian carpets, we carried our discussion to the farthest limits of logic and covered sheets of paper with insane scrawls” (1973, 1). The night is bleeding toward the day, with the mosque and the Persian carpets close at hand speaking in the Orientalizing language of commodities of the opulence of the East. Writing has already become a series of “insane scrawls” that border on the necessity of nonsense. (This at the same time, of course, as physics, with its relativities and quantum leaps, is also profoundly and rapidly changing). The emerging modernity of the industrializing city is careening toward the future with the “rumbling of enormous double-decker trams, passing in fits and starts, streaked with lights . . . hungry cars roared beneath our windows . . . [and] the great broom of folly tore us from ourselves and swept us through the streets” (1973, 1). The speed of speed had arrived and a certain anxiety is showing itself as both the blasé and as the hyperenthusiasm that appears in the growing world-cities. This is the techno-speed, now digitized, that continues to sweep along not only through the streets but also through the all the intimacies of place and body. The speed of the electron as a kind of universal relation, translated into the other modes of the techno-sensorium of contemporary perception, in and through which we are awash would have been unimaginable for Marinetti and his friends, but they would have celebrated it. Faster! Faster! Accelerate!3 Expression for the Futurists occurs at the very edge of logic and art for them would be the violence, cruelty and the celebration of the machinic pacing of the modern city. For our own age—living as we are in the mechanico-digital global capitalism and violence that the “Manifesto” conjured—Marinetti’s text sounds a bit histrionic, but it stands as a marker for a new phase of the ancient and ongoing dream of the techno-human, often aligned with the fantasy of male auto-creation that “scorns” women, and seeks the elixir, or nano-conductors, of the immortality of a techno-singularity of a new beginning. The contemporary city is being constructed in the image of binary code and machinic learning. In a recent example of this, describing the image of the “stack” as developed by Benjamin Bratton, Tristiana Terravova explains that as a “megastructure,” the stack implies a “confluence of interoperable standardsbased complex material-information systems of systems, organized according to a vertical section, topographic model of layers and protocols . . . composed

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equally of social, human and “analog” layers (chthonic energy sources, gestures, affects, user-actants, interfaces, cities and streets, rooms and buildings, organic and inorganic envelopes) and informational, non-human computational and “digital” layers (multiplexed fiber optic cables, datacenters, databases, data standards and protocols, urban-scale networks, embedded systems, universal addressing tables). (Terranova, 2014, EuroNomade)

The “insane scrawl” of a speed-writing that none of us can possibly comprehend—its speed and scale are both far beyond our capacity to understand its effectively infinite determinations, but it is still thinkable—is shaping itself within the intricacies of the transversal assemblages in which Persian carpets, philosophy, oriental lamps, LED screens, and computers are interwoven with one another. The empirical is never left behind by the speculative—each accompanies the other—and for Hong Kong this is not only the massiveness of an electronic and physical infrastructure of the Hong Kong-Macau-Zhuhai Bridge or the High Speed Rail Station in West Kowloon—with its shared jurisdiction of the Mainland and of Hong Kong—but also the women under the overpass who, for a slight fee, beat shoes and put curses on bosses, lovers, mothersin-law, and other miscreants. Everyday urban life is on the one hand “an empirical modality for the organization of human life, and on the other a mass of representations which disguise this organization, its contingency and its risks. Hence the impression given by everyday life as ‘reality’; inconsistency and solidity, fragility and cohesion, seriousness and futility, profound drama and the void behind the actor’s empty mask” (Lefebvre, 2008, 138). The “mass of representations” does have as a part of its function to hide the “real” organization of human life, but we now have sufficient experience with ideological critique of different stripes and the affirmative philosophies of difference to be cognizant of the many of lures and ruses ideology. We know, too, that we are always at least half-submerged in these lures and that we do not have a divinely situated view of anything, including the city. The “mass of representations” are also forms of signification that allow us to write, read, inhale, and be touched by the city. Everydayness exhibits the structure not of the either-or, but of the both-and; it is (dis)organization always at work creating skids, frictions, scratches, and rhythms.4 The capacity to hold these two oppositions together without collapsing one into the other is an index of what Hegel explicitly names “speculative reflection” as opposed to the empirical, transcendental, and Romantic modes, arguing that “speculative thinking consists solely in the fact that thought holds fast contradiction, and in it, its own self, but does not allow itself to be dominated by it as in ordinary thinking, where its determinations are resolved by contradiction only into other determinations or into nothing”



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(Science of Logic, 440–41, cited in Gasché, 1986, 44). If one is to live in the city, one must—like a philosopher or like an artist—keep oppositions in play without expectation of a final Aufhebung (though certain types of provisional resolutions of course occur). A speculative pragmatics with the dialectic. The writing of the urban always occurs in a milieu of the in-between, in the midst of a street crisscrossed by every sort of traffic. It is everydayness itself, simultaneously strange and familiar to itself. The rhythm is one of the varying speeds of walking, the MTR, the monthly replacement of shops, and the signals from all the digital cameras that are breeding out of control. We are swept into these rhythms. In Rhythmanalysis, his final book, Lefebvre links the empirical with non-boundability by beginning to develop a “rhythmanalysis” that will take account of both the ungraspability of the city as well as its recognizable patterns of cognition, affect, and materiality. As Lefebvre steps onto his balcony on Rue Rambuteau overlooking the plaza of the Pompidou Center in Paris, we see the object-and-subject of the everyday being constructed. “Noise, when chaotic, has no rhythm,” he writes, Yet, the alert ear begins to separate, to identify sources, bringing them together, perceiving interactions. If we don’t listen to sounds and noises and instead listen to our body (whose importance cannot be overstated) usually we do not understand (hear) the rhythms and associations which nonetheless comprise us. It is only in suffering that a particular rhythm separates itself out, altered by illness. Analysis is closer to pathology than to the usual arhythm. (2004, 220)

An alert ear makes distinctions among sounds and begins the task of sorting that itself depends on the rhythms of the always individualized body and on illness as an image of the condition for manifestation of the rhythms that we are: temporarily organized, dissolving, fading, glitching. “The everyday invokes something that holds these things together, their continuity and rhythm, or lack of it, something that is adverbial, modal, and ultimately therefore ethical, because it has to do with the individual and collective art de vivre . . . [it] is dependent on the forms of attention that grasp it as a totality that only exists modally, at the level of practice or usage” (Sheringham, 2009, 361, 363). The habits of practice, a modal style of living, creates the everyday: the city calls us to practice the multiple hows of everyday life that are nothing special even though they are miraculous. Practicing making it through the day, however, includes alongside itself the thought-in-motion of the what-if and as-if of the possibility of philosophy. “An attentively listening writing produces the rhythms of the streets; the rhythm of the streets produces (more) writing . . . At stake is thus the demand for something like a philosophically

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reflective form of trans-disciplinarity which would, nonetheless maintain a speculative horizon of totality in relation to a theoretical knowledge of urban form as an immanently fragmented whole” (Cunningham, 2009, 526). Listen; write; listen again. Look around; cross-over. The trans- is always an aspect of the working-through of philosophy, but as such it keeps itself open to a horizon—trained in the history of thinking which posits a “totality” not in fact or in sensible intuition, both of which are impossible, but in the modality of an “immanently fragmented whole.” There is not a whole that has been broken asunder, but only partialities that we imaginatively synthesize into an image of the whole. We cannot “know” the totality as a determined object of knowledge, but we must necessarily always pose the totality as an as-if. Words like “city” or “urban form” help accomplish this speculative task in a certain domain, though we know that these are fragmented constitutively as an “inside” and “outside” of the city and of a philosophy that take a provisionally mutable shape. The everyday is “not exactly” an object—although it is also the case that no object is “exactly” an object—but, instead, it is a “fleeting” object around and within which collective and individual work needs to be done to “hold it in place.” It is a temporarily stabilized evanescence in the space of urban experience. In the modality of betweening or inter/vening, this “holding” is a “making-fast” of the fleeting mercuriality of existence that philosophy—at least in its idealist guises—has perennially attempted to overcome. In only one example, Heidegger asserted in an early stage of his career that “philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast (festgemacht hat) the guiding-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns” (1962, 62). Philosophy has consistently made the immense effort of holding-fast the guidelines that crisscross the sensory cacophony of the world—and what else can we do?—but the edge of the arabesque that keeps thought in motion always unties the guidelines even as it is knotting itself together in other locales. The nomadic thought of transcendental empiricism takes a different track than transcendental idealism (which Heidegger’s fundamental ontology was not) and carves out other ways of orienting itself than following the tracks already laid down by our wayfaring precursors. How do we hold the everyday close enough to listen to its static, its speech, to feel the beat of its pulsations? To let the noise precipitate, quickly or over centuries, into the rhythmic patterns? A balcony—like the activity of the trans- of philosophy—opens out from a threshold and gives us a provisional placement of perspective from which we can participate in both the inside and the outside. Always situated at multiple crossroads even as our situation extends itself in all directions, we think the placing, emplacement, and displacing of thought. Laboring on that which cannot be worked at the edge



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of what can be said, Blanchot notes that this is not really an experience, but rather a “limit-experience” in which there is “affirmed the ascendancy over which there is no longer any hold” (1993, 210, my emphasis). There is, finally, no “holding within itself ” of the urban everyday, for it forms no stabilized conceptual or material content at the level of signification and can, therefore, never give rise to a determinable dialectic that then definitively shapes the caca-phonē on, and of, the streets. Planning and the unplannable occur in tandem. The city is jazzed up: it does not “hold fast” anything for long, but, instead, makes itself up as it goes, creating its own vibe. Rhythms create connections and the “passage from the subject to the object requires neither a leap over an abyss, nor the crossing of the desert. Rhythms always need a reference; the first persists through other perceived facts. Philosophical tradition has raised half-real, half-fictional problems which by staying within speculative ambiguity are badly resolved” (Lefebvre, 2004, 227). An inescapable ambiguity belongs both to the formally speculative efforts of the logics of idealism as well as to the pragmatics of the everyday; and, while resolution requires nonambiguity—and rationales are indeed offered and decisions do indeed get made—the ambiguities are the nonessential essence of the everyday. There is a power of the dialectic, of rhythms rather than of ideas, that Lefebvre draws upon as he makes a Marxist critique of “classical” philosophy as well as of contemporary society: “Here, as elsewhere, opposites find and recognize each other, in a unity both more real and more ideal, more complex than its elements already accounted for” (2004, 227). Dialectics, in this context, is not the Hegelian formalization of a speculative logic un- and re-folding itself teleologically toward an absolute self-conscious recapitulation of knowledge, but, instead, deals with constellations of the empirical with its “fortuitous particularity” (Blanchot, 1993, 210). These swarms of fortuity—and we are very close to Deleuze here—are not elevated into the next stage of conceptuality, but do create new configurations of the actual. Particularities reformat themselves into unexpected constellations, a fundamental difference from the universalizing thrusts of deductive metaphysics, logic, and classical physics. This shift is also explicated in the work of Michel Serres, for whom “procedural reason”—which is related to walking with an irregular rhythm of a donkey more than to the monotone of an urban metronome—is a more humble and more subservient reason, which calculates, organizes, adjusts and goes from local model to circumstantial solution . . . From now on, [reason] can offer another figure [to the deductive logic of the declarative]: what is flexible, woven and circumstantial. Diagrams, maps, landscapes are no longer unworthy of the most sophisticated knowledge; they are knowledge itself. Indeed, it is to this type of knowledge that disciplines like cartography or meteorology, so long considered minor, should be connected. (Hénaff, 1997, 73)

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The sciences of the city are coming into their own, but as sciences that deal with local particularities rather than with generalizable models that can be transported across places into only apparently homogenous spaces. The “smart” city will be smart differently in Capetown, Toronto, and Hong Kong; the subterranean trains will pass through different sedimentations and topographies. While these of course rely upon “normal” sciences, they create differences that open toward other options. Physics, however, always produces pataphysics; the lobster is continually slipping its leash; and the Banyan trees whisper among themselves as the day cools down and the night arrives. Lefebvre’s “work on dialectics [is] inherently practical,” (Elden, 2004, 39) and his “dialectical conception of totality . . . allows difference to become visible and meaningful, rather than one that surpasses difference in order to define a teleology or unitary definition of society” (Hoa, 2014, 2). Meaning inheres in the city, subsists in propositions, but it emerges through causalities, tears, and the nonsense of contingency. Syntheses are always disjunctive; differentials syncopate, create rhythms. The city generates philosophy; philosophy seeks to understand the city (and itself ), but there is no higher “third term” that gathers them together into the same. There is only the beat. The Hegelian image of the dialectic might be replaced with the “successive regressive-progressive steps . . . that allow us to explore the possible, that is both a historical analysis of the conditions of possibility for the present, and a revolutionary, progressive analysis that opens us to the future, to the possible” (Elden, 2004, 38). This is a more erratic dialectic that moves backand-forth in a zigzag that creates new possibilities, new futures, with each segment of the ramifying lines of the arabesque that holds-fast and releases itself for the appearance of the next moment. The balcony of his apartment on the Rue Rambuteau overlooking the Pompidou Centre is for Lefebvre the perfect vantage point for “holding this fleeting object, which is not exactly an object, since on a balcony one must be at the same time both inside and outside. A balcony is perfect for the streets and it is to this placing in perspective (of the street) that we owe this marvelous invention of balconies and terraces from which we also dominate the street and passers-by” (2004, 220). As he continues his survey of the street from his balcony, Lefebvre comments that we will begin to experience the visibility of the seen “polyrhythmically, or if you prefer, symphonically” (2004, 227). The former term is far preferable, for it does not come with the intentionality, order, and embedded meanings that accompany the concept of symphony. The poly-, indeed, is inseparable from the everyday as Deleuze articulates it. The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of



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speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence . . . It is not just a matter of music, but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms. (Deleuze, 1988, 123)

One takes up or lays down rhythms. One slips in. Deleuze, unlike Marinetti, understands that speed alone cannot sustain itself—no wonder there was a crash—but that the composition of pluralized speeds is what is required to take up the rhythm of others or create a new beat for oneself. There is no tabula rasa, only adagio, lento, andante, allegro, prestissimo. Keep pace. Slip in at the time that the other instruments invite one in to take up a new riff. One must change the rhythm of the beats as they stabilize, temporarily, into objects and subjects. “The classical term in philosophy, the ‘object,’ is not appropriate to rhythm,” Lefebvre remarks. “ ‘Objective’? Yes, but spilling over the narrow framework of objectivity by bringing to it the multiplicity of the senses (sensorial and meaningful)” (2004, 223). This is precisely correct if “object” is taken, in the supposedly “classical” sense, as a static form based in substance. But if all objects and all subjects—including the city as both— are rhythmic events provisionally heldfast in a temporarily stabilized form of velocities, then both are also always excessive to their points and moments of instantiation. The re- and the de- are incessantly doing and undoing one another. The city, in a kind of off-kilter dance spilling beyond itself, producing meaning amid the fortuity of the sensorium. Serres also points toward a different type of object, one with different spatialities, temporalities, and structuralities than those we usually associate with this term. “The object of philosophy, of classical science, is the crystal and, in general, the stable solid with clear outlines. The system is closed, it is in equilibrium. The second object-model has fluid outlines, it is the wheat sheaf or the cloudbank” (cited in Connor, from Serres, Hermes V). Sheaves and cloudbanks: objects that in their fluid multiplicity demonstrate the truth that all objects exceed every possible framework, including those of a balcony, a page, a screen, a genre, a discipline, a street, or a city. But each of these spillways is also a provisional platform, a surface that generates the next instantiation of the event of the poly- of the urban everyday. We require these surfaces, with their affordances and landing-sites, but these surfaces are always coming undone as we take-hold. Describing her “experiment” to return to Lefebvre’s site of his observations and take up his place at the window of the flat, Claire Revel notes that it is Sunday, 4PM. The sun is shining. Spring is beautiful. A lot of people are outside . . . If we follow Lefebvre well, we must go outside and feel the rhythms in order to think or analyze them adequately . . . So I make my way to the Rue

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Rambuteau, in front of the Centre Pompidou, trying to guess which balcony is Lefebvre’s. I approximate by looking at the orientations given in the book. Lefebvre had to leave this apartment at the end of his life because of the rise in prices. . . . People change, rhythms continue. (2012, 5)

Capitalism, in the end, cast Lefebvre from his home. It priced him out. Rhythms weave, swerve, syncopate, flow, punctuate, and break out and down, but capitalism is always working to capture and monetize all flows, create that dialectic of speed and speculation called profit. Treating the balcony as a window—and windows are inseparable from frames and screens—Lefebvre declares that the “window overlooking the street is not a mental place, where the inner gaze follows abstract perspectives: a practical space, private and concrete, the window offers views that are more than spectacles; mentally prolonged spaces. In such a way that the implication in the spectacle entails the explication of this spectacle” (2004, 33). When implication and explication are in-formed by one another there is an event of transversal reflectivity in which re-flection simultaneously both bends back upon itself, deepening understanding, as well as radiating in all directions, including into the “past” and the “future,” beyond the boundaries of the moment. For Lefebvre philosophy and sociology in their classical forms—and “classical” is always a retrospective formation—are transfigured into a kind of musical duet of improvisation, a social poetics of the city: The sociology of everyday life is reinvesting specific knowledge with the philosophical requirement philosophers have too often neglected. Its science never becomes separated from poetics, in the sense given the term by Diderot in the Encyclopedie—a set of rules which one applies to create a work in a given genre. Poetics here is the transformation of everyday life in and by praxis. It extends philosophy, it satisfies the requirements of philosophy, and it supersedes philosophy. (2008, 106, italics mine)

The rationality of philosophy requires a practical poetics of the social and the rule of the genre of the city is free verse, not alexandrines, villanelles, sonnets, or heroic couplets. It is, in Serres’ sense, a procedurally percolating rationality, not the declarative methods of deductive logic, and, as such, is always generated around particular situations and sites. Hong Kong catalyzes thought with its own demands. The “looking out” that occurs from the balconies of Paris or those along Robinson Road in Hong Kong’s Mid-levels, the scopic heights of the World Trade Center or the IFC, or from the (quasi)divine position of a self-reflective subject of idealism depends on a prior division into an inside and an outside, a here and a there, an up and a down. The outside, in turn, constitutively



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partitions itself into a plurality of outsides, some of which are the apparently simple empiricisms of the everyday and others the unsurpassable limits of thought. The first is the outside in the very ordinary sense of the term. “It’s sunny outside, let’s go out to play.” This outside occurs within the vernacular and depends on an inside as form of habitation, work, or leisure. The streets in this outside are swarming with people; the lights at the crosswalks regulate traffic; and fumes from the cars, buses, and motorbikes fill our lungs with particulates. This is the givenness of the empirical outside, before the question of an interior of consciousness arises and before philosophy makes a run at the meaning of the empirical as a category of experience. This is the outside of ordinary language. The second partition of the outside—this numbering, as if there is such a sequencing, is simply a useful fiction—is the outside in a Kantian sense of an a priori form of space and time that he analyzes in the transcendental aesthetics of the Critique of Pure Reason. This is a part of a transcendental logic, that “other logic” of which Kant speaks as that which is outside experience but that nonetheless grants the possibility of experience and remains, at least in a negative sense, thinkable if not knowable. “The concept of a noumenon is thus merely a limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility; and its therefore only of negative employment. At the same time, it is no arbitrary invention; it is bound up with the limitation of sensibility, though it cannot affirm anything positive beyond the field of sensibility” (2007, 272). This creates a host of historical philosophical conundrums and generates immense and ongoing responses for post-Kantian philosophy. “The problematic thought which leaves open a place for them [purely intelligible objects] serves only, like an empty space, for the limitation of empirical principles, without itself containing or revealing any other object of knowledge beyond the sphere of those principles” (2007, 275). It is this “empty space” that opens toward the third partition of outside, an edge of the empirical, a wall that is unbreachable for the desire for epistemological mastery. This outside, set into place by who knows what, is already an unbreachable outside for sensibility, though it can only be thought as a negative limit. The third outside is an outside best defined by Marx—but already framed by Hegel—and is an outside formed from the violent, if often almost silent, forces of alienation by which we are dispossessed of our productive capacities as they are fetishized in money, commodities, and consumerism. There is an extrusion of the essence of subjectivity that turns back on the subject to create an object of enslavement, a zombie in today’s mediascape, that can be traced back to Marx’s analysis of reification: A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped

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upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses . . . It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. (1867, 72)

Fantastic, uncanny, spectral. Each object carries with it a spectrality that, as commodity, can be analytically resolved into a product of labor and ideology. But there is always a leftover, a metaphysical virtuality whose actualization will come as a surprise. Lefebvre compresses this dynamic when he notes that reification indicates that “his essence is outside of him” (2008b, 165), but he is also quite cognizant of the subtleties of the various modes in which the dynamic operates when he outlines a “typology” of reification organized around the vocabulary of Marx and Hegel, which includes terms such as “Entfremdung (to become ‘estranged’ from oneself ), Entaüsserung (to be torn from oneself ), Verwicklichung (to find in fulfillment the principle of one’s decline and loss), Verdinglichung (becoming more thing-like)” (2008b, 214). The Ent- of the away-from and the Ver- of the toward are both engaged in dis-engaging us from ourselves, in casting ourselves from an inside taken as authentic toward an inauthentic outside. This is an outside as an exteriorization of our essence that we experience in an unconscious or fragmented manner when we become a hybrid of an “it” produced by capitalist production, an “it” that pretends to be the more fundamental givenness of the “it” of the il y a. This is the claim of the real. We have been dispossessed of ourselves, but we do not recognize this loss except in the dull misery of whiling away our time at work, grieving over the loss we are experiencing, or in the paranoid violence that fantasizes that it can set the record straight. There is, in this outside of ideology, only depression or acting-out, not working-through. There is only repetition without revolution. The robots and AI are coming as body-snatchers. This trajectory, however, does not imagine the materialism of new materialism and the unfolding of the living-machine, both terms of which need to receive equal attention. Finally, the fourth outside is the absolutely peculiar outside that Blanchot has called the neutral over which we have no hold at all. No affordances, no landing-sites except a word that is perhaps not a word. A gesture of the hand. Blanchot works assiduously to extract any possible content, including that negative content of the noumenon, from the (non)concept of neutrality, the nocturnal murmuring of an outside that cannot be deciphered, but that does, like the noumenon, set a limit and at least allow—for it does not create—the significations of language. Blanchot says this unsayable across the



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entire range of his corpus: “The limit-experience is the experience of what is outside the whole when the whole excludes every outside; the experience of what is still to be attained when all is attained and of what is still to be known when all is known: the inaccessible, the unknown itself ” (1993, 205). As with the Kantian noumenon, this outside serves as a limit, that which is inaccessible to any form of possession, including, in particular, that comprehending grasping that we translate through the varieties of philosophy as knowledge. Since it is along the very edges of all empirical experience—as a boundary and as a catalyst for that experience—the so-called empiricists will not have any truck with investigating it, for it is, from that perspective, complete nonsense. Useless. The idealists will have no better luck, for they will always have to deal with one or another of the forms of the transcendental a priori that also does not allow for a fulfilled knowledge of the thing itself. Neutrality is nothing and reflection is here involved in securing the dimension in which all the parts are carved out so that a dialogue and vision can occur in the first place. No light, no transparency, no clarity, no evidence, and, properly speaking, no certainty any longer characterize this “space” and “time.” . . . This space, this region in which everything without exception turns into its opposite, or its underside, is that of a “dissimulation,” in which all determined meaning is erased and nothing firm remains. Blanchot designates it as the outside, or the night. (Gasché, 2011, 228)

Blanchot’s outside is the impossible, the impenetrable. “The outside, the absence of work; I hold such words in reserve, knowing their fate is bound up with the writing outside language that every discourse, including that of philosophy, covers over, rejects, and obscures through a truly capital necessity” (1993, 33). Philosophy necessarily hides this outside, for it must hide it in order to become, and remain, what we call philosophy. The logos is light. The outside is incapable of becoming an object of knowledge in order that objects of knowledge can come to appearance before being captured by the determinations of the “known.” This “unemployable vacancy” (1993, 206) is lived as a “double relation” (1993, 207), one side of which is lived in everyday life on the streets near Beaubourg or the Temple of Lo Pan on the Ching Lin Terrace and the other side of which is “thought thinking that which will not let itself be thought; thought thinking more than it is able by an affirmation that affirms more than can be affirmed” (1993, 209). That which refuses to let itself be read. It is thought that holds itself in reserve; it is thought that, without the self-articulation of Absolute Knowledge, spills beyond itself as a strange joy of affirmation. No wonder the good and sensible empiricists eschew such ridiculousness. This is a moment when the impossibility of Blanchot’s thought as writing overtakes, as it were, the socio-philosophical determinations of the thought

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of Lefebvre. It is not that philosophy might somehow trump sociology, geography, history, urban studies, or politics; it is that all of these habits and discourses, including that of philosophy in its always pluralized forms, are generated along the edges of the outside which can have no cognizable edges, but, instead, sets up oscillating rhythms along the anarchical sinuosity of an infinite tangle of lines. It is unsayable as a rational, reflective, logical or speculative proposition, but only sayable in a series of stuttering sentences that include the “squared circle,” or as the appearance of the paradoxical element as the geste of a fool, the scuttling of a lobster, or the wandering of a donkey through the heat toward the shade. Saint Meinong. Thinking is emptiness that awaits. The blues of the night are beautiful. Thinking remains on the streets, walking laterally down Des Voeux and looking in all directions at once. The work of the day, which is the mode in which our lives exist as experience, emerges from the neutral lack of workability of the night outside, where this space of the outside is defined by the work that language and discourse accomplish in the world; a world governed by the light of the day, and that tends toward unity, identity, and the attendant notions of dialectical struggle and accomplishment. By contrast, an infinite holding to a plural (anonymous and neutral) speech would open onto an outside of speech and language wherein these would abandon their work, and no longer answer to the demand for unity (or homogeneity) of the concept and the selfsubject. (Hanson, 1993, xxviii)

This is important in our context because we once again touch upon the incapacity of the city or of philosophy to be contained in a unified concept of identity. Each is a swarm of heterogeneous predicates that multiplies itself beyond comprehensibility. Blanchot pushes farther—although there is not actually a proximity or a distance in this relation of nonrelation—toward this uncanny liminal relationship than does Lefebvre, who always brings to his observations a sociologically shaped Marxist imagination, even when that imagination is primarily operating in the mode of philosophy (which for him is in the mode of a deconstructive revolutionary constructiveness). For them both, however, the simplest action or experience of the urban everyday—that as which our lives stretch out as if a musically vibrating string—appears and dissolves “back” into itself, but this is not a simple chronological “back,” much less the “step back” of reflective consciousness of a self-transparent subject of knowledge. It is, instead, a transitional formation from and back into the anonymity of being(s) and of the neutrality of murmuring before speech or action become recognizable as such. And it is occurring in the very midst of the city of crowds, capitalism, and the swarm of signals crisscrossing each other in an abuzz of meaning and nonsense. “Anarchy, in other words, is to be understood in its original sense of that



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which is outside, on the hither side, of the concept of principle: an-arche . . . the anarchic is outside the relation of identity and difference; it is the domain of the singular, the aliquid, the aleatory, and the neutral (that is, neither one nor the other, neither the other nor the same)” (Bruns, 1997, 6). This outside is in propinquity to Deleuze’s idea of the virtual, for it is not present, is not a thing, is not part of the program, and its manifestation is not predictable. Rereading Lefebvre, and rereading Blanchot “on” Lefebvre, gives us another opportunity to again think the streets, the city, the dialectic of subject and object, the framing and spillover of the everyday in all of its forms, and the enigma of the partitioning of the outside. As Foucault reminds us, “Reflection tends irresistibly to repatriate [the outside] to the side of consciousness and to develop it into a description of living that depicts the ‘outside’ as the experience of the body, space, the limits of the will, and the ineffable presence of the other” (1989, 21). This is, as we have seen, a legitimate and absolutely unavoidable practice as long we acknowledge that this is only a kind of first outside, but not the only outside, not the outside of the outsides. Indeed, this is what most of the time we mean by “research into everyday life,” though there are of course different types of methodological formalizations possible for the different refractions of the outsides. For Blanchot, however, “the outside is there, open, without intimacy, without protection or retention (how could it have any when it has no interiority, and, instead, infinitely unfolds outside any enclosure?), but that one cannot gain access to that opening because the outside never yields its essence” (Foucault, 1989, 27). There can be no dialectical advancement, no work of the positive or of the negative, no grasping of new knowledge. Instead, there is only the edge of the being of, not the positive signifying power of, language “with its power of dissimulation that effaces every determinate meaning and even the existence of the speaker, in the gray neutrality that constitutes the essential hiding place of all being and thereby frees the space of the image— is neither truth nor time, neither eternity nor man; it is instead the always undone form of the outside” (Foucault, 1989, 57). This radical outside, however, always gives place to an Alltäglichkeit that is always at its work of constituting the banality of the everyday, of the virtuality of inventiveness, and of the virtuosity of the (im)possible. This intimacy between the absolutely strange and the absolutely familiar stuns us, makes us think, makes us make. It is all so strikingly commonplace, these streets outside the door, the woman who greets me in the café, the bus that brings me from Star Street to Sands Street, this walking through a city in the very milieu of communing-with. This is the inside as the outside and the outside as the inside, neither separable except through the lightness of a word, an orientation that opens yet another path for what might still be called philosophy: “The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated

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by peristaltic movements,” Deleuze explains, “folds and foldings that work together to make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside . . . the inside as an operation of the outside . . . as if the ship were the folding of the sea” (Deleuze, 1992, 96–97). And the sea an unfolding of a ship as the sea surges throughout every street. Philosophy’s old dream of itself as an autonomous self-sufficiency is troubled as the everyday exceeds the limits of the logical, the empirical, and of the speculative. The city oscillates, tosses, hums, and vibrates as it does and undoes itself in an oceanic movement of differentiations. The rhythm of the day takes hold of us and releases us as we move through the glare of a mall and into the shadows that deepen as evening comes on. Walking, as we have seen, is thinking, and both are forms of entering the outside that can be entered: The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it . . . one aspect of the history of walking is the history of thinking made concrete—for the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can. (Solnit, 2001, 5)

The city surprises us with the generosity of both the predictable and the unpredictable, that which we expect and that which overtakes us. And these rhythms have consequences. Speaking of a tonality, and a rhythm that is the subjectile for this tonality, from which everything is summoned, Derrida admits that “all in all, it is upon rhythm that I stake everything . . . Everything is at stake, but may the loser win” (1998, 48). Double or nothing, but it all comes down to what happens when we lose or the loser wins again. Repetition and difference, an exchange of positionalities, a justice yet to come. The throw is cast and must be taken up: this is actualization, the untimely, ethics. The streets with their distinctive rhythms are the milieu for urban thoughtin-motion and rhythm is “knowledge-production at its most material: blocks of movement across time and space combine to build, every time anew, a form of identity that is radically divorced from similarity and fully given to the difference and individuality of every beat” (Philippopoulos-­Mihalopoulos, 2016, 84). Every beat may be different, even if is of the same note, but there is nonetheless a continuity of similarity-difference that constitutes rhythms: It is a movement along movement, something equivalent to stepping out of a door and being carried away by a crowd irresistibly pulling this and that direction. One finds oneself right in the middle of things, surrounded by a movement that cannot be controlled . . . One is lost in a horizontal plane of movement, and on



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this plane one begins by ebbing and flowing between knowledge and ignorance. So what do you do? You cluster around similarities, you institute affinities, you even, without perhaps realizing it, become part of a collective atmosphere. At the same time, you mark your territory, you find a way of communicating your presence to others, you hum your individuality. (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2016, 80, 81, italics mine)

Individuality is a humming—touch your throat or listen to the virbroacoustics of bees—and this “movement of movement” is the peristalsis of becoming; the oscillation of temporality; the fluctuating entanglements of the quantum-city. The Pink Panther is always ambling through the streets. There are ghosts and trams; money changes hands. A lobster waits for a traffic light and a donkey wanders down Queen’s Way, past the Wall of 1000 Thoughts. A strange whistling—starting from who knows where?—winds through the city. The street is alive. It speaks, it responds. It is inside-outside and outside-in. The city is a rhythmicity. We ride that rhythm; traverse that rhythm transversally; are crushed by that rhythm; create that rhythm. We and the city, philosophy and the urban, are that syncopative dissonance of rhythm. The city, outside and inside, extends itself to keep the beat. It demands our attention, calling toward us day and night.

Chapter 10

Everyday Life and the Urban Arabesque

Le Corbusier has famously claimed, “Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal; he knows where he is going . . . A donkey ambles absent-mindedly along, zigzagging to avoid large stones, skirt steep inclines, and stay in the shade” (1967/1925, 11), but that philosophical fabulist Italo Calvino has put him straight: “The shortest distance between two points is not the straight line but a zigzag” (1974, 88). The city is an arabesque-in-motion: a lobster scuttling along with unimaginable and unbearable slowness; a Pink Panther whistling; a ghost, dissipating as it collects its cash from the fire; a charred text unscrolling; a rhythm, irregular. This movement performs an affirmative critique by breaching the everyday, the normal, the status quo, the given. The state of affairs of the what-is. I prefer the way of the donkey. This movement—which is constructing, walking, building, thinking, reading—provisionally provides affordances and landing-sites, while releasing each hold for the sake of a next step. A rearticulation must accompany this breaching for the critique to become visible, to become effective before it dissipates back into the movement of movement. The arabesque is the movement of a city, of sense, of thought and the zigzag is its intensification, its eruptive surprise. The event of the city figures the complex surfaces for the roundabouts of philosophy, with its repetitions, differences, velocities, and judgments. Its entrances and exits. There is no inside of philosophy—no closed loop of a conceptuality of identity—that is not lined with multiple outsides; there is no outside of philosophy that does not make its way inside. Urban membranes are all porous; all four types of the Deleuzean propositions are intertwined. Traffic, smog, sunlight off of the IFC that towers over the harbor of bluegreen chop: denotation (with its criterion of “true” and “false”); manifestation (the who who speaks); signification (the word’s relation to general concepts 170



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that form the “condition of truth”). The city is a proposition in this sense, but it can never become a determined sentence with a determined syntax, a fulfilled denotation or a finalized signification. Language languages as one wave follows the next. This is the urban arabesque-at-work with heteropoetic material forces shaping themselves on the surface of the city as one of the curves of its nomadic immanence. The city as an event of sense is uncontainable in its creation of disjunctive syntheses from morning until night. Every city and every part of every city is an edge city, existing only as the threshold of an interface in motion. It greens. As Poe said in the virtualized voice of a fictional character: “it does not let itself to be read.” This odd resistance and with-holding of the “does not let itself ” then gives rise to the necessary act of continuous reading of the signs of the streets, but, as we have seen, there is an asignifying nonsense, an illegibility, internally enwrapped with all the propositions of meaning. A mobile multidimensionality that denotes, manifests, signifies, and make sense, the urban proposition makes room for engineering, planning, architecture as a technics of buildings, politics, economics, cafés, love affairs and the end of love affairs, and the moon through the skyscrapers backed by the jagged darkness of the Peak. The actualization of the urban arabesque is twisting, torqueing, zigzagging. Meaning subsists at each intersection, but always along the most fragile of surfaces. It must be created, shaped, nurtured, protected, and re-exposed to its own passing. The city is in its entirety an empiricism, but it is a strange empiricism—there is, finally, no other kind—that emits incorporealities. A nexus, the city is a transport hub. Money, people, mobile phones are all in a hurry to cross borders. The metaphorai run on time and surprise us. The writing that writes the city and that the city writes, depending as it does on a polyphony of types of expressivities, must be a writing that indicates that philosophy’s own relation to a specifically modern urban space must evidently be conceived in a quite different form from its classical relation to the ancient polis, which presumed a fundamental theoretical unity of knowledge(s) that would organize the city. In other words, it entails a question of the inter-disciplinary relations between philosophy and the various forms of more or less specialist knowledge from sociology to geography to cultural studies. (Cunningham, 2009, 524, my italics)

Philosophy always has a backbeat of accompanists. The trans- that motivates philosophy is always at work, breaking apart the positivisms of both the urban sciences and of philosophical discourse, providing pathways along which other discourses can interweave with the porous network of philosophy. Knots, entanglements, and a blue ribbon leashed about a hand on one end and a lobster on the other. There are parrots and birds of paradise close by.

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The positive sciences cannot, and do not need to, exceed themselves toward the speculative thought that connects meanings across the varieties of positivisms, that gestures toward the whole—which can never become a fact—and that keeps questions in motion that do not address the “what-is” or the “how-to,” but that surround the conditions of possibility for knowledge in both its formally scientific or in its everyday sense. They do not need to think about how presence intercalates with origins, pasts and futures of temporality, (un)consciousness, and histories and they do not care how the Möbius strip of the “empirical” and the “transcendental” operates in the city. Even less can these sciences speak of that murmuring of the neutral outside of which Blanchot writes or of the little extra-being, that mysterious minimum, that courses through the Deleuzean lexicon. This, for them, is simply the ridiculous, the inane, a waste of time. There is no need to consider the sieve-order of the city for there is no object to measure and utilize. The positive sciences cannot write the speculative, but the speculative—not as idealism, but as a pragmatics of the workability of the world—must be tied both to the empirical experience of art, knowledge, the city and to the nonexperience of an outside that both limits and opens to the beyond that is within all experience, including that of the city. Derrida, analyzing the multiple uses of the trans- in the folies of the architect Bernard Tschumi, notes that “trans- (transcript, transference, etc.) and, above all, de- or dis- . . . These words speak of destabilization, deconstruction, dehiscence and, first of all, dissociation, disjunction, disruption, difference. An architecture of heterogeneity, interruption, non-coincidence. But who would ever have built in this manner? Who would have counted on only the energies in dis- and de-? No work results from a simple displacement or dislocation. Therefore, invention is needed. A path must be traced for another writing” (1997, 333). This other writing meanders through the city as it-is and the city as it might-become, a series of cities within the city. Blues, tinged with pink, wash through the streets of dawn. Josep Ramoneda has argued that there are three elements that crisscross in the contemporary city: “a perfectly rational concept that, at some points in this epoch, has been nourished by the traditions of architecture and town planning; the city that is symbolically under the control of the politicians; and the other city that has burst at the seams and is now thrust before our eyes by reality. And somewhere between these three elements, two that are over-controlling and one that has escaped our control, there is a frontier space, and that is where practical philosophy must move” (2004, 4). The rational city, the political city, and the city that has burst out of its limits, but it is in the “frontier space”—liminality, betweenness, the fissures—where the “practical philosophy” of speculative pragmatics must do its analytically creative work.



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Philosophy is always practical, a pragmatics at work, a cutting-up—like a joke or Matisse at work with his scissors—and a recomposing. This recomposition emerges from divergent contingencies and “unity is not the object of the city because the city is pluralism, as Aristotle said. And it is precisely this recognition that constitutes the crack through which the capacity for dissociation is articulated or, in other words, where rational thought is introduced into the organic homogeneity, and, with this the possibility of philosophical thought” (Ramoneda, 2004, 4). Without a breach, there is no thinking. Dissociations, cracks in the surfaces, microkinetic fissures: these instigate vortices of change into motion. The relationship between philosophy and the city occurs not as a relationship between already stabilized built environments, but, as rhythmic waves that intersect and interfere with one another with all of their vortices, diffractions, refractions, and reflections moving at once. It takes a certain knack to begin to get the hang of these crosscurrents. These ideal incorporealities, virtualities, singularities, and conceptual personae activate our thinking of the city and the urbanization of thought as making, not simply as the perception of the already-established real. The city is, like everything, historically saturated, but history—like the city and thought and art—is a chaosmotic series of spatiotemporal flows whose disequilibriums create eddies and riptides. History always comes, as Serres has said, at the crest as a wavelike curling of time that causes us both to writhe and to write, that brings us to the very edge of the precipice of the sea surging across great distances or to the shallow shoals where we are cut, scraped, scarred, and scoured. In its illusory moment of self-identification, philosophy, replacing the surfer with a street-cleaner, serves as a sorter of (dis)order, as a speculative land-excavator who clears the wilderness for the sake of the habitability of the city. This “purification,” as one defense against chaos, is constantly underway, but philosophy, if it is to outlive its regressively defensive forms in order to become an affirmative inventiveness, must not prematurely stop its work by participating in the police sweep to clear the ragpickers from the city with its command-and-control framework of coordinating all experience along the preestablished x, y, and z axes; ubiquitously recording the whole scene by CCTV cameras; or joining in with the moralizing judgments of the common sense of thought. “Be rational; be calm; be harmonious.” We are tumbled and cut by the force of the waves, which, if we can and if we are lucky, we must learn to celebrate. At a certain moment, and in a certain manner, philosophy must affirm obscurities, shadows, blurs, muzziness. It is Ionian—in style as well as geographically—before it is Athenian and is always already on the loose. Aphorisms, poems, fragments: not just treatises. It must consent not to know everything, not quite and not for sure, and must cohabitate with opacity, shadows, and the chiaroscuro of experience. Movement, then, is a force that

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produces, exemplifying that “what is in movement or transition is not by that token to be reduced to mere variation or change. What is at stake is the discovery that what is in movement can for that reason create a network of relation and connections with other things and only in this way actualize its meaning” (Symons, 2016, 124). Transversality is an inhuman movement that breaches the city and breaches philosophy. “We” are one of its outcomes and, on occasion, we can ride its force in a moment of chance and a moment of skill, and, transfiguratively, translate it into thought, action, politics, art. Philosophy will continue the slow crustacean scuttle through its own construction of a skein of arguments and the gestures of architectonics, but it must also weave audaciously through traffic, leap over the skyscrapers in Central and Wan Chai, and disappear down the slippery alleyways. It must move more jauntily. It must keep the weather always in mind and must itself become a kind of nonrhythmic rhythm, a new kind of street music that lifts the step of all comers. Welcoming phantoms, the monstrous, the migratory, and the metaphorical, philosophy transposes from the pure conceptual speculation of metaphysics—though metaphysics is always operating, however displaced into cybernetics, media, or the capital construction of the microand macro-spaces of surveillance it might be—toward the city as curiosity engaged with the weaving of the pragmatics of speculation: the event of thinking, the event of making. The city remains off-balance and therefore moves, gives itself to multiple directionalities. It frames and unframes everything simultaneously. Inhabited by multitudes of otherings, philosophy exceeds itself even against its own will, learning yet again to write idiomatically across multiple genres. The city in the simplicity of its complex everydayness calls forth this sociotechnical and technopoetic writing not as a necessary demand from the Generals of Thought—not as proof, application, or even demonstration—but as a quiet invitation to think-on-the-move in which the streets become a resonating emblem of all of the outsides at work in the enigma of the trans- that, forming an arabesque, crisscrosses in all directions philosophy with the city. The city is a mobility that travels in short straight lines, that zigzags like a slow ass, and that spreads like parasitical contagions. The fundamental enigma of the mobile city is not that different forms of empirical ­mobilities— people, goods, money, viruses—pass through a quasi-stabilized site we call a “city.” The riddle that each of us experiences, living in the city, is that the city itself is the event of mobility. Hong Kong emerges as a transversal empiricism, a virtuality, a mist rising from the streets of the paradox of sense. Real and not actual, an immanent idealization without abstraction. A breeze ruffles the plastic bags in the alleyways. The sky oscillates in the glass panes of the skyscrapers in the complexity of the simple movement of our existence as the banality of urban everydayness. The banal, though, is not self-evident. Related



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to “bandits,” “contraband,” “compulsory feudal service”—among others— the banal is enigmatic, for it keeps the day-by-day moving along. It opens our days, stretches us along for the course of our lives, and closes our nights. It gives us time and steals away our time. The city is a labyrinth and when we enter a labyrinth—knowing full well what lies at the heart of all labyrinths— it is a good idea to carry a ball of string. The compass, as Nietzsche told us so long ago, is unfortunately no longer useful, or, perhaps, it may still be possible to invent new uses of the compass as we proceed with living the cities that we build and that build us by living through us. All of this sets the stage for a conjuration of the naming of the mobile city. Does this mobility have the vision and rhythm of Descartes and Le Corbusier or of the donkey? As I have said, I prefer the way of the donkey. It is slow. It enjoys shade. Not quite knowing where to go or how to get there, it meanders. It does not wish to raze everything to the ground for the sake of a new beginning, and it longs not for a tabula rasa, but for a lanx satura, a plate overflowing with a variety of delectables (from which we also get the word “satire” and which was linked to the Greek satyr plays). The table scraped clean ahead of time as the flecks of the facades of time are erased and repetition becomes standardized in a move antithetical to the continuous variation of the arabesque, of repetition with a twist of difference. The city of straight lines arising from a tabula rasa is an eradication of the past for the sake of a standardize future. The urban imaginary, the cities within the city, emerges from the erratic walk of the donkey. For Le Corbusier, however, the difference between his “early approval of the meander—rendered as the donkey path—and his later criticism can be measured by his recognition of the importance of the automobile: ‘Here is a suburban street (a former donkey path) that has become very lively with its activities necessary to neighborhood life’ . . . Yet, as with Wright, the donkey path was never rejected. It reappeared, for example, as the promenade architecturale [in the] City of Tomorrow [222, 280–83], which recommend straight streets for traffic and meandering lanes for pedestrians” (Leatherbarrow, 2009, 289, 291). The automobile, soon, will have had its day and perhaps the donkey, aligned with the digital and a new animality, will return more visibly to the drama of the city. The image of the donkey driver that Le Corbusier copied and then had cast into concrete along the promenade of the lake in Chandigahr is emblematic.1 “Having it cast into concrete represented the cementing of an unspoken pact. Concrete was Le Corbusier’s chosen material of modernity, a material that had the ‘clarity of spirit’ and strength necessary for the liberation of the primitive man. Casting the donkey driver’s drawing originally made in mud, into concrete symbolically represented the liberation and transformation of that primitive man” (Prakash, 2002, 94). Modernity’s materiality is now shifting and the encasement in concrete both preserves and

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negates the donkey’s meanderings. One image of the donkey is a capture of affect frozen in time—a passage of the arabesque from the wild Dionysian foliage into the regularities of the Apollinian column—but the arabesque will break apart the concrete. Dionysos breaks out of his chains and breaks out of the palace. The movement of the donkey creates the wider topological proximities and distances in which the lines and grids are laid out. Certeau, that proponent of the tactics of metaphor and migration, notes that “the geometrical space of urbanists and architects seems to have the status of the ‘proper meaning’ constructed by grammarians and linguists in order to have a normal and normative level to which they can compare the drifting of ‘figurative’ language” (1984, 100). The fantasy of the rational in its numeric form as the monarch of rules and methods, is just that: a phantasia that obscurely haunts the logos, a force that is always on the move, dis-placing itself ahead, behind, and to the sides of us as it spreads like a cascading epidemic through the streets of a city. The logic of the logos moves, but it stutters as it speaks, blinks as it sees, and limps as it walks. Without this dis-equilibrium of the dis-abilities of the logos there could be no experience at all. There is a drift—punctuated by straight lines, to be sure—that languorously moves across the un-numbered slopes of time. The donkey is metaphor in action. The street is the crossroads of absolute superficiality—this is what we all take for granted without thinking about it—and the absolutely profound: the street is the manifestation of the appearing of the formatting of possibility. The street multiplies into a city, opening upward and downward and incessantly receiving signals from elsewhere; it is an evanescent surface, a logical and phantasmatic poetics of relations. The donkey zigzags; our thoughts zigzag; and cities zigzag. All is always in a de-tour, a turning around that attempts to reach certain ends, but must incessantly be doing work-arounds via various roundabouts in the traffic flows. The traffic, somewhere all the time, is jammed. Things, apparently, have come to a standstill. Circuits are jammed; frequencies are jammed; highways are jammed. But all of this is just one form of the urban jam session operating incessantly across and as the city that no single participant, or collective, can ever begin to master. All we can do is to jam-together and see if we can pick up the threads of a common rhythm that goes its own way. Both human thinking and the city thinking express themselves. “The urban assemblage is itself a political machine. . . . The supposed technicalities of urban provisioning turn out to be an enormous political hinterland of access to resources, of proximity to and distance from contamination, of scripts of spatial and social selection written into objects which have broken out of frames in which human thinking had formerly confined them” (Amin and Thrift, 2017, 161). The frame never frames exhaustively and the frame is



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always a re-framing. The city as a “fragmented whole” moves in a stutter-step of currents that flow around obstructions to make space for solutions to small and large problems: what route can I take to avoid the traffic jam, what transportation systems should we implement, how can we catalyze that movement of thought called joy? Sense provides both direction and dimensionality: an orientation of thought and walking. The arabesque is neither a concept that gathers a determinate group of characteristics under itself—this would continue to act as the “concept of identity”—nor is it a thing that is itself determined by a higher-level concept that would limit its proliferations. There is nothing above the arabesque, no transcendent height of sky in which it occurs or which determines its flows, and no below of the arabesque which might ground it like a foundation. Definitions cannot contain its movement; experience cannot exhaust its possible futures. We have made a long circuitous detour and are once again passing close to the beginning, although everything now looks and feels differently. How, then, to frame the city? How to know what belongs inside its visible or invisible walls and what roams outside its boundaries? What is migration, the nomadic, the settled, and how does originary metaphoricity travel, become transposed and translated? Torqued? The major planetary work of art is that of the city itself and so architecture and all the punctuations of the city create a moving work of art. In motion, touching. As such, it always indicates a complex and finally indeterminable poetics of relations, in which the body is always at stake, the body of the city, the person, the cockatoo, and the Banyan trees. The metropolis, even as it is inseparable from the body, nonetheless can invoke a different image of the body than that of the symmetry of the perfectly proportioned Vitruvian male diagrammed within the perfect circle. The body is always a plurality, the human always inhuman, differently material. The body of the contemporary city is a planned body, a scrawled body, a pandemic, a ruined body, a coded body, and a confused buzz of signals tunneling into the Earth’s core. This urban body is also a virtual body and “every real object has a virtual content” (Cheah, 2008, 154). Every object, situation, scenario, subject, and street corner exist as a potential to exceed its current instantiation. Distinct, but indiscernible; a circuit right then-and-there. Glitched, jammed, moving. A fragmentary whole, resonant partialities, a double-movement of the pincers of thought and matter, of critique and creativity. This movement is a transversal empiricism that follows the furrows of critique in order to make something new. There is a capacity to slip in-between things, to actualize the virtual and counter-actualize the actualizations. One learns to walk alongside the materiality that gives rise to the incorporeality of the event of sense and to follow the emergent meanings of multiple materialities expressing themselves simultaneously. The walls speak, have ears.

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The streets are a polysymphonic cacophony. The stairs sing of the movement between the up and the down; the towering banks brag of their wealth. The alleys keep secrets; the parks languish almost speechless in their lush greenery; and the Banyans extend their tendrils tuned to the air and water, as well as to each other. The sea keeps its distance and then comes close. Lamma, Cheung Chau, Peng Chau, and Po Toi beckon as if they were sirens. We must grow different ears, eyes, fingers, toes. The urban arabesque is a dynamic force; an assemblage that catalyzes; a mutability with its (dis)continuities; a movement of thought that sweeps through the streets and hovers above the city. At any given point, the arabesque is a determination of an event, a metonymy, an exemplar of the opening of the framings of the movement of the (par)ergon as it is enframed in Kant’s Third Critique: hem, column, frame. Arabesques, translations, and the mobilities of cities are all contagions. This knotted weave opens the event of meaning in that parasitical series of relations called a “nomadic assemblage” in which “every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 380). Parasite, relations, static, relays, and stations; nomadic assemblages and the masked interlude of the intermezzo, a precursor of the high drama of opera. This is the event of the sense of the city. The wanderings of the ass— language, footsteps, daydreams, flame trees, and ghosts—keeps the city in motion, incessantly make it into a singularized idiosyncratic work of art that is determined as emerging, provisional, and evanescent. Cities surge up in the city and each instance of space; each space of time; each rhythm of each step along each street are all are corners, doors, windows, thresholds. This is the complex simplicity of everyday life. Hong Kong is the banality of everyday life—the heat, the crowds, the mountains, the wild boars, the skyline, the winding streets, and the Banyans— that is itself a miraculous apparition enabling the fissuring of the what-is so that perception, sensibility, thought, and something unexpected might appear. Philosophy, with its multiple forms of rationality, depends for its catalytic inception on provocative and demanding invitations, the fissures and cracks, of conceptual personae and the swarming of the virtual, of the urban-there, the always departing arrival of thought and of the city. This is the movement of the urban arabesque, in which, greening along the edges, everything traverses through everything else, ecstatically.

Conclusion: Immensity

“This is open space, I said to myself, this vast country: here I work” (Blanchot 1953/1993, 27). This is the open space of the city, exceeding its own scrawled inscriptions. Here. The opening that opens the city. I work here. It is a vast country, an infinity. Twisting, turning. Corners, joints, mirrors. A torque, I. Here is the sorrow of dying, the presence of ghosts that precede and await us. The city is a scintilla, a scintillation. Traversing. Here I take delight; here is the work of joy. This vastness, this immensity. The city is on the move, an arabesque-in-motion. Turn the corner. See what’s there. Here, now. Work, here. There, then. Listen, write. Turn back around, pivot. Let’s step outside, then, step into the streets, step into the coolness of the evening air.

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INTRODUCTION 1.  Derrida’s analysis of metaphor and metaphysics is condensed into the phrase “white mythology”: What is metaphysics? A white mythology [the term is from Anatole France’s dialogue] which assembles and reflects Western culture: the white man takes his own mythology (that is, Indo-European mythology), his logos—that is the, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that which it is still his inescapable desire to call Reason. It’s not so easy to get away with this. . . . What is white mythology? It is metaphysics, which has effaced in itself that fabulous scene which brought it into being, and which yet remains, active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible drawing covered over in the palimpsest. (1974, 11)

I am oriented toward the metaphorai primarily by this text, by Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life, and by the trams, busses, taxis, and ferries of Hong Kong. For the classical Greek and Roman background of the use of metaphor, see Zanker. For a company offering the transformative services of the metaphorai, see Metaphorai: Possibilities of the Impossible: http://metaphorai.net/about/. 2. Max Decaudin, Mathew Pryor, and Gavin Coates—landscape architects extraordinaire—have been very generous with their knowledge not only about Banyan trees but about Hong Kong and the history of the discipline as well. I am also grateful to many other members of the Faculty of Architecture at HKU for their inspiration and generous sharing of their knowledge, including Roger Chan, Alain Chiaradia, Cecilia Chu, Nikolas Ettel, Ashley Lee, Ho Yin Lee, Jae Hyun Lim, Vincci Mak, Eunice Seng, Nasrine Seraji, Wei Jen Wang, and Koon Wee. 3.  Anaclitic is a term I borrow from Freud and then displace. See Laplanche for the best exegesis of its development in Freud’s corpus.

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CHAPTER 1 1.  For analyses of this new technomediation of experience, see, among others, M. B. Hansen, M. Lazzarato, D. Perara, and L. Parisi. 2.  This reading of Leibniz, like all readings, is contested. See, for example, Vincent Descombes, in Taylor and Lambert (2003, 124). 3.  Michel Serres, Latour’s teacher, is the great adept at transversal prepositioning. 4.  I have attempted to clarify this irreality at work across all genres of thinking in Philosophy, Art, and the Spectres of Jacques Derrida.

CHAPTER 2 1.  Winfred Menninghaus’s “Hummingbirds, Shells, Picture-Frames: Kant’s ‘Free Beauties’ and the Romantic Arabesque” traces the history of the arabesque from the Enlightenment’s condemnation of its “senselessness” through Kant and the early German Romantics—especially Schlegel and Tieck—as they come to praise the arabesque for that very power as it is taken up into a reflexive-ironic experience of art. I am completely in debt to his account. For a concise account of Goethe’s changed understanding of the arabesque, see Cometa (2004). 2.  For the appearance of the Nine, see J. L. Nancy, The Muses: “Plurality exposes or expresses unity in the sense in which it puts unity outside of itself at birth, in the sense, consequently, in which the One of unity is not One ‘once and for all,’ but takes place ‘every time for one,’ so to speak. Each one of the arts exposes in its way the unity of ‘art,’ which has neither place nor consistency outside this ‘each one’—still more, the unity of a single art is ex-posed in this sense only in its works one by one” (1997, 31). This exposure binds and distinguishes philosophy and art. 3. In a review of Michael Angelo Tata’s Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality, Leanne Gilbertson notes, “Tata continues to explore the idea of the sublime as it is reformulated by Warhol by returning to two philosophers, Friedrich Schlegel and Georg Hegel, who first put the question of the potential end of art in circulation and tied that end to Romanticism proper. In Schlegel’s theorizing, Tata identifies a fixation with the concept of Romantic Irony, the art of bracketing and presenting a fragment of the social world in vital ‘situations,’ which he refers to as an arabesque. Schlegel invokes this concept of the arabesque, a variant of the grotesque, to propose an aesthetic that is inherently sportive and embodies a principle of play. Tata traces how this Romantic fascination with the arabesque cuts through modernism and postmodernism, reaching an apex in Warhol, for whom the diurnal flux, the twists and turns of his social world’s inhabitants, constitutes a supreme artistic content in his films and writings” (2010, 91).

CHAPTER 3 1. My thanks to MacLoud, whose offices for sound and video production now occupy Descartes’s old house and who generously gave me a tour inside Westermarkt 6. 2.  Le Corbusier is, of course, more complicated than this and I am focusing only on the major thematics of his design work in relationship to the street. For a more



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nuanced reading of his various concepts of the street over time, see Monteys and Fuertes (2016). In only one instance, in the fourth of Le Corbusier’s “Urbanism et le régle des 7V,” they show that the “street, all inconveniences of which were addressed in previous years, is sinuous, with the legacy of the pack-donkey’s way, calm and traced with the usage and by the routine. Perhaps the most eloquent name for it would ‘rue vivante’ and it can be found in the antipodes of the ‘rue usine.’ The news is not its position against ‘machinism’ but the fact that it is an adopted street, that is already existed, and that it would be compatible of the layout of the new city” (2016, 157). They point out that Le Corbusier “uses the expression ‘Mort de la rue,’ as in Plate 3 of sketches for a lecture on 19 June 1934 at the Circolo Filologico Milanese” (2016, 156, fn5), and, in a hesitant conclusion, note, “In this up-and-down evolution of streets in his urbanism, with advances, regressions and options—which prove contrary on occasion—some elements that seem to be missing could be considered as reflections, though diffident, of fragments of cities which he visited in his youth, before becoming Le Corbusier” (2016, 158). 3.  Descartes doesn’t stay as enamored of Amsterdam later on and also has questions about the wisdom of making public all of his thinking: Three years have now elapsed since I finished the treatise containing all these matters; and I was beginning to revise it, with the view to put it into the hands of a printer, when I learned that persons to whom I greatly defer, and whose authority over my actions is hardly less influential than is my own reason over my thoughts, had condemned a certain doctrine in physics, published a short time previously by another individual to which I will not say that I adhered, but only that, previously to their censure I had observed in it nothing which I could imagine to be prejudicial either to religion or to the state, and nothing therefore which would have prevented me from giving expression to it in writing, if reason had persuaded me of its truth; and this led me to fear lest among my own doctrines likewise some one might be found in which I had departed from the truth, notwithstanding the great care I have always taken not to accord belief to new opinions of which I had not the most certain demonstrations, and not to give expression to aught that might tend to the hurt of any one. This has been sufficient to make me alter my purpose of publishing them; for although the reasons by which I had been induced to take this resolution were very strong, yet my inclination, which has always been hostile to writing books, enabled me immediately to discover other considerations sufficient to excuse me for not undertaking the task. (1637, Part IV)

Let me, in this context, only point to that parenthetical phrase, “yet my inclination, which has always been hostile to writing books.” An entire trajectory of a history of the idea, writing, and philosophy lies within this phrase. 4.  For the development of the (non)concept of phantomenology, see my TechnoLogics.

CHAPTER 4 1.  The leash can be thought of as a philosophical tool of control in a number of contexts. Kant, for example, at least until toward the end of his life, was very regular in his habits. “The most public articulation of this regularity was his daily walk through the city. It is doubtful Kant took a dog along on his constitutional; nevertheless, at

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the moment in the Critique of Pure Reason that he determines the possibility of the conceptualization of sense perception, which Heidegger considered the very heart of Kant’s critical project and which ultimately turns on the regulation of the synthesis of time, Kant trots out man’s best friend. Although he needs this dog in order to demonstrate the trick of temporal synthesis that makes any sensible conceptuality possible, it is also clear that he needs to keep this dog on a tight leash; he cannot afford to let it run off or go astray. On one reading, then, the Critique of Pure Reason institutes a sort of philosophical leash law. Indeed, Kant holds the dog so tightly that it is always already a dead dog?” (Johnson, 2004, 18). In our case, the lobster will be unleashed and the ribbon become not a leash but a lovely ornamental twist. Still thinking about the possibility of the synthesis of time, Johnson then makes a felicitous leap away from Kant and into the “Funes the Memorious” of Borges, who lets the dog, like the lobster, loose forever. 2.  For a delightful auto-ethnography focused on BLAD, an acronym in reverse of the Double Articulated Lobster Body, see Rachel Douglas-Jones and Salla Sariola’s “Rhizome Yourself ” (2009). See also Marc Ngui’s fantastic drawings, paragraph by paragraph, of A Thousand Plateaus. 3.  Donna Haraway and Vera Bühlmann, among others, have created neologisms that attempt to bind the two together in a new interface: “natureculture” and külturlich, respectively. Neither works adequately, but we haven’t yet moved the entirety of the language system far enough in another direction for adequate terms to emerge and link-up. For now, the “and” will have to continue to flexibly bear the weight of both. 4.  David Vessey summarizes Foucault’s analysis of the empirico-transcendental double clearly and succinctly: “The analytic of finitude manifests itself in three different ways, the first of which is the account of the subject as an ‘empiricotranscendental doublet.’ The empirical conditions of the subject have been presented as the condition of the possibility of the subject’s knowledge. This reduction of the transcendental to the empirical takes one of two forms. The ‘positivists’ e.g., Comte, explain knowledge in terms of the processes of the body which operate in the production of knowledge; the ‘eschatologists’ e.g., Marx, explain knowledge in terms of the historical, cultural, or economic process that operate in the production of knowledge. Foucault’s Kantian analogy is that the positivists perform the transcendental aesthetic, while the eschatological philosophers perform the transcendental dialectic. Each, however, uncritically accepts the givenness of initial knowledge of the body or of society which, in turn, is used to ground the account of knowledge. Thus they both fall into uncritical circularity” (Vessey, 1997). This is only the first of three impasses that Vessey summarizes.

CHAPTER 5 1. A version of this chapter was previously published in the journal Culture, Theory and Critique: see Kochhar-Lindgren (2017). 2.  Latour uses “the Middle Kingdom” to indicate the nonmodern throughout We Have Never Been Modern, linking it on occasion explicitly with China. Although



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I take his point that everything occurs in media res—without origin or endpoint— I am not sure that “middle” is the best translation—since it indicates known and measurable “ends”—to indicate the emergence of a network sensibility. I prefer the “between,” but there is no perfectly adequate descriptor. Milieu, at this point, can just stand on its own. The Middle Kingdom in the traditional Chinese sense is certainly not applicable to rewriting the Modern Constitution. 3. For excellent analyses of the historical development of these practices see Blake, Hou, and Scott. 4.  In the preface to his 1841 dissertation, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Marx identified his own, and philosophy’s, task with that of Prometheus. “Philosophy makes no secret of it,” he writes, “The confession of Prometheus: ‘In simple words, I hate the pack of gods’ (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound) is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and Earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other beside. But to those poor March hares who rejoice over the apparently worsened civil position of philosophy, it responds again, as Prometheus replied to the servant of the gods, Hermes: ‘Be sure of this, I would not change my state/Of evil fortune for your servitude./Better to be the servant of this rock/Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus’ (Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound). Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.” 5.  See Lawrence Weschler’s Boggs: A Comedy of Values for delightful discussion of the many-faceted relationship between art, money, the “original,” and value.

CHAPTER 6 1.  This ecosystem of screens, satellites, sensors, and signals is unprecedented and spans geographies, disciplines, and experiences. Robert Peckham’s “Viral Chatter” (2019), for example, draws on “scholarship concerned with the inter-relationship between the life sciences, digital technology, and biological processes. “The aim in much of this network-orientated work has been to demonstrate how human systems mimic nonhuman worlds (Parikka, 2010) and to show how technology and biology, information and life, are becoming ever more enmeshed in bioinformatics, systems biology, and biocomputing (Sampson, 2012; Thacker, 2004, 2005)” (141). From the final frontier of extraterrestrial musicology, Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding’s Music from Earth (forthcoming, 2020) keeps us traveling out and out and out, with no guarantee of a return. The city, in different ways, is implicated in all such envelopments, far beyond but including the “smart city.” The sensorium is becoming the sensor-ium that is related to the censor-ium. As the visual is digitized—visit your nearest airport or look up at the nearest camera—we become a digitized simulacrum of the warp-andwoof of the geolocation, surround-sound, and facial-capture mechanisms of the city. 2.  For an overview of the films in which Hong Kong has played a central role, see quick lists at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_set_in_Hong_Kong. For more theoretical readings, see Karen Fang’s Arresting Cinema: Surveillance in Hong Kong Film (2017) and Michael Shapiro’s “Hong Kong and Berlin: Alternative

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Scopic Regimes.” Shapiro, commenting on Nai-Hoi Yau’s Eye in the Sky, notes, “The film’s shots enhance the surveillance thematic by emphasizing the densely saturated surveillance environment of Hong Kong. As the Shan gang’s robbery is developing, the camera occasionally pans upward to show surveillance cameras both on the street, aimed at pedestrian and vehicular traffic, and in stores, aimed at customers. And some of the shots of the characters simulate the lenses of surveillance cameras. As the film cuts back and forth between the robbery dynamic and the education and professionalization of Piggy, the viewer is introduced to the vagaries of the two, intimately connected vocations, crime and policing” (2010, 7). These technologies, and the structural links between crime and policing, will always be overdetermined, overlapping, and blurred.

CHAPTER 7 1.  The relationship between Occupy Central, the Umbrella Movement, Scholarism, and multiple aftermaths is complex. For a summary written as the events were unfolding and as they have impacted one aspect of university politics, see Johannes Chan, “Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement” and Johannes M. M. Chan and Douglas Kerr, “Academic Freedom, Political Interference, and Public Accountability: The Hong Kong Experience.” For a collection of documents, images, and a journalistic history of the Umbrella Movement, see How the Umbrella Movement Unfolded: A South China Morning Post Guidebook. PDF Pt 1; PDF Pt2 SCMP Books, 2014. I must emphasize that as a non-Cantonese speaker, I am working only in Englishlanguage materials or translations. This means there is a great deal that I am missing from the local press, as well as scholarly and artistic commentary. For background to the linguistic reverberations at work, see Gwynn Guilford (2014). 2. The politics of the carnival has produced an immense literature, much of which could be brought to bear on the Umbrella Movement. In this context, however, let me point quickly to two possible trajectories. The first is Stuart Elden’s analysis of Lefebvre’s study of Rabelais. “These are festivities marked by a freedom and a collective intoxication, with an interdiction to eat as much as possible, to drink to the point of drunkenness, and through this festival to realize the communion between the members of society and nature. The peasant festival was orgiastic, and celebrated order through the momentary disorder created when the discipline of the community came undone” (2002, 100). The second is Gavin Grindon’s analysis of Lefebvre’s post-romantic politics in the light of the fête: “Despite particular moments being doomed to compose a history of tragic failure by their own vitality the moment’s vital movement is nonetheless always beyond the particular finite closure of any system, even a dialectical one. Lefebvre argues this is the beginning of a revolutionary possible/impossible dialectic, to be solved by the future” (2013, 212). This is very close to what Deleuze means by the “virtual” and what I am gesturing toward with the futurity that haunts the Umbrella Project. In any case, the carnival, the fantastic, and the dissensus are not always congruent, compatible, or synonymous.



Notes 187

3.  Polemos is usually taken to have begun with Heraclitus’s famous fragment, although, like all words, it goes back behind itself to provisionally consolidating otherings. Heidegger makes a great deal of polemos translated as Auseinandersetzung (which is quite a word in its own right). See, for example, Gregory Fried’s Heidegger’s Polemos (1994) for a history and interpretation of the term in that particular context. 4.  The most visible instances of Umbrella-related films since 2014 have been the many neighborhood screenings of Ten Years and the general refusal of local cinemas to show a recent documentary, Yellowing. In relation to Ten Years, which won the award for the Best Film at the 2016 Hong Kong Film Awards, Wikipedia notes that on “1 April 2016, with no cinemas screening the film despite high demand,  Ten Years was simultaneously screened at 34 different public locations around Hong Kong, including the underside of motorway flyovers (in Sham Shui Po and Mei Foo), the public steps leading to the Sha Tin Town Hall, and the forecourt of the Legislative Council Complex. The screenings were organised by a variety of community groups, educational institutions, and churches. They were attended by thousands, many of whom were frustrated to have been unable to get tickets before the film was pulled from cinemas” (Wikipedia). Yellowing is currently seeking distribution outlets. See, also, the collections focused on Hong Kong Women Filmmakers: https://hkwomenfilmmakers.wordpress. com/; Umbrella Archives: https://hkwomenfilmmakers.wordpress.com/occupyand-women-on-the-internet/; https://www.facebook.com/umbrellaarchive?fref=ts; Umbrella Art: http://umbrella-art.com/; Hong Kong’s Art Scene: http://www. artnews.com/2015/01/06/art-during-hong-kong-umbrella-movement/; Umbrella Movement Art Preservation: Hong Kong Women Filmmakers: https://hkwomenfilmmakers.wordpress.com/. 5. For an overview of the September 2016 Legislative Council (Legco) elections, see the Hong Kong Free Press (https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/09/05/ legislative-legco-hong-kong-election-2016-triumph-for-pro-democracy-newcomersas-opposition-camp-maintains-veto-power/) and for a short video, see the South China Morning Post (http://www.scmp.com/video/legco%20winners). Recent newspaper commentary focuses on the current status of Hong Kong and its autonomy under the “one country, two systems” arrangement. See, for example, Yuen Ying Chan, Clay Chandler, Ned Levin and Chester Yung, and Li-Zheng Lian. It is impossible to keep pace with all the current developments and ripples associated with the Umbrella Movement that are still reverberating through the city. As of April 24, 2019, the South China Morning Post reported that the leaders of Occupy with Peace and Love and others had been sentenced to a variety of jail terms. “Benny Tai Yiu-ting, 54, and Dr Chan Kin-man, 60, were given the longest jail terms, at 16 months, while legislator Shiu Ka-chun, 49, and League of Social Democrats vice-chairman Raphael Wong Ho-ming, 30, received eight months each. Because of poor health and his years of contribution to society, Reverend Chu Yiu-ming, 75, the third founder, had a 16-month sentence suspended for two years. Lawmaker Tanya Chan, 47, had her sentencing adjourned after her lawyer dropped a bombshell in court, revealing that she was suffering from a life-threatening brain tumour and would have to undergo surgery

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in two weeks. Former student leaders Tommy Cheung Sau-yin, 25, and Eason Chung Yiu-wa, 26, were sentenced to 200 hours of community service and eight months’ jail respectively, but Chung also had his prison term suspended. Their ages were taken into consideration. Former lawmaker Lee Wing-tat, 63, had his eight-month term suspended for two years in light of his years of public service” (https://www.scmp. com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3007414/occupy-sentence-hong-konglawmaker-tanya-chan-be). On June 9, 2019, there was a major protest in Hong Kong against the government’s proposed extradition law. Since then, as I indicated earlier, as I write in “real” time those protests continue touching upon a wider geography, demographic, and range of issues.

CHAPTER 8 1.  Derrida notes that “the problem of Bewegtheit as non-Bewegung was the most important problem in the eyes of Heidegger himself. Naturally, his gesture is here merely destructive. Heidegger tells us only that historical movedness is not-movement, that the concept of history must be liberated from that of movement. But he does not tell us here what the Bewegtheit proper to Geschehen is” (2016, 211). Peter Sloterdijk concurs with this judgment, although perhaps there is no Bewegtheit, but only an onto-kinetics in which the movement of the everyday just is the “ontological.” As Sloterdijk puts it, “Heidegger, the one who remains there, is a thinker in inhibited, restarted, reserved motion. That is the reason why one can learning nothing from him about the movement of existence in world-opening relocations and departures, or rather can only learn something about this ex negativo” (2017, 29).This considerably complicates onto-kinetics, although it is still a useful concept to indicate those flows in which we are always already immersed. The first house, perhaps, is a house floating on a river. 2. If Heidegger is a thinker who cannot think the city in any depth—primarily because he stays put in the Black Forest of Beyng—then Freud is his antipode, on the go all the time and in more ways than one. See, for a summary of his travels, the Vienna Psychoanalyst (https://www.theviennapsychoanalyst.at/index.php?wbkat=1850). We know their histories with the Third Reich. Freud is forced to make an exodus; Heidegger stays in place.

CHAPTER 9 1.  Jen Hui Bon Hoa observes, “Whereas for Lefebvre, the everyday is valuable as a complex object of sociological analysis that establishes connections between practices and experiences generally considered distinct, Blanchot presents it as a space of semiotic instability” (2014, 3). This, from my perspective, is too sharp of a distinction, since for Lefebvre the everyday is a “fleeting object,” and, for Blanchot, the everyday has political possibilities, although—remembering how very brief Blanchot’s response is—I agree that the emphasis is different in each case. Hoa also



Notes 189

speaks at length about Blanchot’s political commitments, which is where, although their theorizing differs in significant ways, the two “come closest to one another” (2014, 24). 2.  “La parole quotidienne” originally appeared in the Nouvelle Revue française with the title “L’Homme de la rue.” It was translated by Susan Hanson for Yale French Studies 73 (1987), a special issue on Everyday Life before being incorporated into the English version of The Infinite Conversation. 3.  The recently self-named “Accelerationists” have picked up the mantle of the new advocates of speed from the Futurists and Paul Virilio, complete with a new “Manifesto.” Cunningham offers a useful contextualizing of accelerationist politics and philosophy in “A Marxist Heresy? Accelerationism and its Discontents.” See, also, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicke’s Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013); Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds., Accelerationist Reader (2014); and Benjamin Noys’s Malign Velocities. Cunningham concludes that “acceleration maybe the key determinant of modernity’s ‘new experience of transition,’ as Koselleck suggests, but an accelerationism remains constitutively unable to think through the full historical-political meanings of modernity itself ” (2015a, 38). 4.  There are many points of contact between Lefebvre and deconstruction, though Derrida develops this strategy of thought far more systematically in relationship to the history of philosophy. “This proves the general methodological principle of double determination,” Lefebvre writes, “this principle is essential to dialectical thought, which is not restricted simply to discovering links (differences, oppositions, polarities and reciprocal implications, conflicts and contradictions, etc) between determinations. It discovers differences, dualities, oppositions and conflicts within each determination (by conceptualizing it, i.e., thinking of it within a concept” (2008b, 47).

CHAPTER 10 1.  For a critical historical analysis of the relationship between the new city of Chandigarh and a second choice for an architect, see Vikramaditya Prakash’s Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India: “The important questions of historiography . . . often do not lie in determining origins, but in assembling situational explanation, coherences where validity can be judged within the context of their production, rather than against principles that are claimed to be foundation and universal. This is critical historiography—an assemblage of situational explanation, a textual strategy of reading” (2002, 26).

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Index

acceleration, 20, 80, 105, 160, 189 actualization, 29, 30, 32, 48, 53, 67, 111, 125, 140, 151, 164, 168, 171, 177 affordance, 3 – 5, 30, 49, 51, 66, 70, 104 – 5, 136, 140, 164, 170 Amsterdam, 23, 30, 60 – 63, 183 arabesque: history and theory, 33 – 51; urban, 1, 6, 14 – 16, 32, 34, 40, 47, 50, 73, 87, 152, 170 – 78

donkey, 6, 11, 42, 55, 59, 76, 159, 170, 175 – 76 double-pincers, 1, 58, 74 dwell, 4, 12, 41, 48, 66, 72, 92, 120, 178

Banyan, 8 – 10, 34, 51, 71, 160, 177, 181 beach, 145, 150 breach, 1, 14, 34 – 36, 151, 173 choreostemics, 70, 116, 142 cinema, 5, 49, 104 – 17, 124, 131, 177 corner, 4, 115, 24, 33, 47, 56, 87, 130, 151, 177, 179 counter-actualization, 2, 17, 20, 32, 58, 72, 125 – 27, 151 critique, 2, 5 – 6, 13, 18, 26, 31 – 32, 40, 69, 74, 96 – 97, 102, 118, 170, 177 dappled, 104 dice, 49, 86, 99 differentiation, 1 – 2, 8, 15, 20, 26, 32, 53, 72, 77, 135, 168 dissensus, 126, 131, 186

empiricism, 14, 26, 52, 54, 77, 110, 163; superior, 40, 52, 67, 69, 123, 154; transcendental, 6, 40, 54, 69, 181, 86, 123, 158; transversal, 2, 6, 14, 38, 45, 51 – 73, 174, 177 ergon, 25, 37 – 38, 42, 46 – 48, 178 event of sense, 2, 11, 19, 26, 32, 50, 55, 106, 141, 154, 171 everyday, 15, 27, 33, 49, 70, 82 – 85, 113, 153, 154, 157, 168, 188 exposure, 1, 28, 102, 120, 182 expressivity, 2, 7, 10, 15, 23, 53, 87, 105 figure, 5 – 7, 25, 29 – 32, 35, 43, 46, 71, 77, 85, 123 – 24 foothold, 5, 49 frame, 26, 29, 33, 37, 46, 54, 108, 117, 122, 138, 161 – 63, 174 – 78 ghost(s), 6, 9, 25, 31, 63, 72, 81, 89 – 104, 146, 149, 179 green, 2, 26 – 28, 50, 73, 134, 171, 178

203

204

Index

hybridities, 14, 64, 112, 115 idealism, 52, 70, 81, 98, 111, 158 – 59, 172 ideality, 2, 28, 31, 54, 80 (il)legibility, 14, 136, 140, 143, 171 imagination, 5, 11, 38, 43, 46, 60, 93 impossible, 14 – 16, 27, 56 – 60, 67 – 68, 140, 165 infrastructure, 17, 19, 23, 25, 29, 56, 66, 70, 104, 145 inside, 24, 31, 46 – 47, 58 – 59, 72, 122, 131, 152, 164, 168, 170 joints, 4, 33, 46 – 47, 56, 179 landing-site, 3 – 5, 10, 15, 30, 51, 70, 111, 169 language, 1, 3, 13, 16 – 18, 22 – 23, 54, 58 – 59, 73, 86, 91, 94, 140, 164 – 66, 171, 178 lobster, 1, 6, 25, 31, 40, 53, 74 – 88, 169, 184 membrane, 24, 49, 68, 104 metaphorai, 5, 23, 53, 73, 77, 80, 94, 123, 136, 171, 181 milieu, 14, 30, 65, 71, 125, 130 – 32, 157, 167 – 68 modernity, 24, 54, 55, 59, 62, 67, 72, 77, 90 – 91, 97, 102, 115, 138 new materialism, 2, 21, 60, 116, 164, 115 non-philosophy, 1, 62, 77, 106 nonsense, 10, 16 – 17, 21 – 22, 29, 63, 65, 71, 110, 113, 155, 166, 171 outside, 72, 152 – 69, 170, 174 paradox, 15, 18, 25 – 26, 28, 66 – 69, 149, 153 parergon, 25, 37 – 39, 46 – 49, 108 phantomenology, 63, 183

Pink Panther, 6, 22, 40, 112, 118 – 34, 170 pivot, 8, 31, 43, 70, 77, 99, 125, 137, 179 prepositions, 21 prolepsis, 132 purifications, 36, 59, 62, 67, 93 quoins, 33, 46 – 47, 56, 66 rhythm, 4, 8, 17 – 18, 26, 29, 40, 73, 76, 83, 113, 135, 142, 152 – 69, 174 screens, 5, 31, 36, 104, 107 – 11 simulacra, 111 speculative pragmatics, 1, 7, 14, 32, 40, 52, 123, 172 surface, 8, 14, 17, 24 – 25, 33, 44, 47, 53, 68, 104 – 17, 123, 141, 149 – 50, 161 tain, 52 text, 22, 33, 52 – 53, 61, 73, 140, 143, 149 Tin Hau, 9, 57, 73 torque, 18, 33, 36, 44, 79, 111, 171 traffic, 23, 84, 127, 154, 169, 175 – 76 trans-, 6, 12, 25, 35, 56, 65, 83, 95, 97, 99, 101, 123, 136, 158, 171 – 73 translation, 6, 10, 44 – 46, 64, 72, 92, 95, 100, 129 – 30 transversality, 2, 6, 15, 35, 56, 101, 174 turbulence, 2, 18, 22, 31, 38, 56, 150 umbrella, 30, 120 – 21, 130 – 32, 118 – 34 virtual(ity), 1, 6, 13, 26, 44, 54, 71, 104, 109, 111 – 12, 135, 149, 167, 177 walls, 4, 10, 51, 79, 85, 134 zigzag, 7, 19, 26, 40, 57, 74 – 76, 125, 134, 170 – 78

About the Author

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren is Professor and Director of the Common Core at the University of Hong Kong. A Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of four teaching awards, he has, in addition to Hong Kong, also taught in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States and is the author of Kant in Hong Kong; Philosophy, Art, and the Specters of Jacques Derrida; Night Café; TechnoLogics; Starting Time; and Narcissus Transformed.

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