Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities 9780773577077

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URBAN ENIGMAS

the culture of cities s e r i e s e d i t o rs : k i e r a n b o n n e r a n d w i l l s t r aw The Culture of Cities project is an international, scholarly endeavour devoted to the study of four cities: Berlin, Dublin, Montreal, and Toronto. Books in the series examine the many ways that these cities confront the forces transforming urban life around the world. Through analyses of multiple aspects of city life, the series takes up the larger question of each city’s uniqueness and identity. The Culture of Cities series offers a reflexive, interdisciplinary perspective on key issues in the analysis of urban culture. Each of the four cities studied by this project faces the potentially homogenizing changes resulting from globalization and other forces. In the response of each city, we witness a tension between the vibrancy of a city’s culture and its sense of its own vulnerability. This tension reveals itself in multiple ways in the life of cities – in the appeals made to history or to future development, or in debates over the distinctiveness of each city at a global level. Case studies, comparative analyses, and theoretical accounts of city life offer tools and insights for understanding urban cultures as they confront these tensions. The Culture of Cities series is aimed at scholars and interested readers from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The Imaginative Structure of the City Alan Blum Urban Enigmas Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities Edited by Johanne Sloan

Urban Enigmas Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities Edited by JOHANNE SLOAN

McGill–Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007 isbn 978-0-7735-3181-9 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3182-6 (paper) Legal deposit first quarter 2007 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Urban enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the problem of comparing cities / edited by Johanne Sloan. (Culture of cities project series) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-7735-3181-9 (bnd) isbn 978-0-7735-3182-6 (pbk) 1. Arts and society – Ontario – Toronto. 2. Arts and society – Québec (Province) – Montréal. 3. Toronto (Ont.) – Social conditions. 4. Montréal (Québec) – Social conditions. 5. Sociology, Urban – Ontario – Toronto. 6. Sociology, Urban – Québec (Province) – Montréal. I. Sloan, Johanne II. Series. nx180.s6u73 2007

306.7609713'541

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/12 Sabon.

c2006-904924-6

Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

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Introduction 3 jo h a n n e s l oa n Part One: Practising Comparison 1 Comparing Cities: On the Mutual Honouring of Peculiarities alan blum 2 Comparing the Cultures of Cities: Epistemological Perspectives on the Concept of Metropolis from the Cultural Sciences 52 jean-françois côté 3 “To Squeeze a Single Sentence Out”: Estrangement and Disenchantment in Benjamin’s “Marseilles” 94 k e v i n d ow l e r Part Two: Fragmented Cities 4 The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi: Staging Polyphony in Montreal and Toronto 119 m i c h a e l da r r o c h a n d jean-françois morissette

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5 Imagine-Nation in the City: Seriocomedy and Local Democracy greg m. nielsen

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6 Ethnicity, Social Organization, and Urban Space: A Comparison of Italians in Toronto and Montreal nicholas demaria harney

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7 At Home on the Street: Public Art in Montreal and Toronto jo h a n n e s l oa n

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Part Three: Global Narratives 8 Divergent Diversities: Pluralizing Toronto and Montreal jenny burman

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9 Reflexive Theorizing while Travelling through Montreal and Toronto: The Global Cities Discourse, New Urbanism, and the Travel Essays of Jan Morris 258 kieran bonner

Acknowledgments

This book benefited from the many encounters and conversations that occurred over the five-year span of the Culture of Cities research project. I would like to thank the contributors to the book for their sustained engagement throughout this process. I also want to thank all the graduate students whose intellectual commitment and lively participation in the Culture of Cities project guaranteed its success. This book would not have been possible without the financial support offered to the Culture of Cities project by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, through the Major Collaborative Research Initiatives (mcri) program. In a more immediate sense, the book has come into existence due to the collective efforts of the editorial staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press; they have been consistently helpful and encouraging. I would like to note our appreciation for the comments and suggestions provided by (anonymous) reviewers of the book. On a more personal note, I thank my colleagues in the Department of Art History at Concordia University for providing a stimulating and supportive environment in which to work. Finally, I’d like to single out the series editors – Kieran Bonner for his unflagging generosity and good advice and Will Straw for his good company.

Preface: The Culture of Cities Project

Urban Enigmas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Problem of Comparing Cities is the second book in our McGill-Queen’s University Press series for the project The Culture of Cities: Montreal, Toronto, Berlin, Dublin, which is a five-year enterprise (2000–05) funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada as part of its program Multi-Collaborative Research Initiatives. This interdisciplinary research project, bringing together researchers from the humanities and social sciences in universities in Ireland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and France, is based in six universities in Canada: Université du Québec à Montréal, McGill, and Concordia in Montreal, York University in Toronto, the University of Calgary, and St Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo. The focus of the project is to understand the city “as a collective force that fertilizes a range of encounters over questions connected to the uses of particular sites and the part these usages play in its everyday life, as well as questions of its status in relation to the populations that engage it both functionally and symbolically at one and the same time” (Blum 2003). Thus the idea of the city and its usages as well as the concepts and methods used to engage such usages are neither taken for granted nor treated as secure in this research. As part of both its collaborative commitment and its obligation to disseminate its research findings, the project team organized, over its fiveyear existence, international conferences, graduate workshops, and special seminars. Students have completed their graduate programs under the supervision of faculty researchers; student and faculty members have presented their research at various annual meetings of their respective

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disciplinary societies; and there have been keynote addresses at various national and international conferences on urban life. In terms of publications in particular, graduate researchers edited and published the collection of essays Culture of Cities: Under Construction (2001), and various project members have guest-edited special issues of scholarly journals on ideas like scenes, space and place, spectacles, and globalization and Dublin, most notably in Public 23/24 (2001), in The Canadian Journal of Urban Research 11, no. 1 (2002), in Sociologie et Sociétés 37, no. 1 (Spring 2005), and in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 30, no. 2 (2004). This McGill-Queen’s series is one of our outlets for disseminating our research. The series was launched by Alan Blum’s The Imaginative Structure of the City (2003), which demonstrates our distinctive approach both to the city and to culture as well as to their joint relationship as part of the imaginative structure of modern societies. Here, the city is treated “as a mobile phenomenon that both constrains and fertilizes a dense and richly layered landscape of interpretation and action concerning the meaning and value of collective practices” (294). Urban Enigmas continues this tradition by focusing, in different ways, on the comparison of cities as itself a problem of modern life, a problem that is not only part of academic and scholarly discourse, but also part of everyday experience. Urban Enigmas, therefore, brings to the surface the many-sided layering of comparison itself and its relations to city life. As Johanne Sloan says in her “Introduction” to this volume, “Whereas Montreal and Toronto seem to belong to a broad category of cities, it is rare to find references to ‘cities such as Paris’ … [I]f the identity of Paris or New York has been rendered iconic, this also implies that the collective maintenance of a strong urban identity has not been as successful in the case of other cities.” The choice of this research project to examine cities that are not primary global centres is based on the expectation that the historical distinctiveness and inheritance of nonprimary centres is challenged by the hospitality and openness that such cities show to the technological and economic influences that all contemporary cities have to face. Such changes raise for examination specific manifestations of the common tension between a city’s commitment to its own sense of uniqueness as a particular place (as expressed by appeals to its particular history, its film festivals, its ethnic makeup, its public art, etc.) and its hope to prosper in its collaboration with new and global forces. “Coming to terms with the uniqueness of cities,” as Sloane says, “is crucial at the present time given that the forces of globalization seem poised to gobble up local particularity,” raising the problem of the comparison of cities that are subject to similar global forces. The problem of comparing cities, typically treated with ease in urban research, is nevertheless always problematic for reflective thought. The

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opaque nature of any identity is a configuration of oppositions that are synthesized or reconciled in ways that invariably leave a remainder. Such oppositions become a necessary resource for our complex yet everyday negotiations of a relation with the identity of the city. Part of such complexity includes the comparability of cities, states, and the range of social formations that we regularly engage as limits or conditions for navigating our relationships to social boundaries. Comparison of cities raises questions pertaining to these issues of identity, boundaries, limits, similarity and difference, the comparability of like and unlike things, and the prospect of coherent research in the face of the aura of incoherence that haunts the apparent heterogeneity of social life and its forms. As a resolute solution in the face of this irresolute problem of comparison, each contributor to Urban Enigmas, in Sloan’s words, “has developed a comparative process whereby the case study and the city are shown to be thoroughly entwined and mutually constitutive.” Acknowledging that “it could even be said that the desire to decipher the uniqueness of a city remains a kind of utopian project,” Sloan adds that the contributors nevertheless “seek to understand how both Montreal and Toronto succeed at becoming embodiments of collective life.” Forthcoming publications in this McGill-Queen’s series include, among others, Circulation and the City; Metaphysical Deadlocks as Ethical Collisions: Case Studies in the Culture of Cities; Citizenship and Locality; and Hockey Night in (Two) Canadas: Montreal, Toronto, and the Culture of Cities. Series editors Kieran Bonner and Will Straw October 2006

URBAN ENIGMAS

Introduction JOHANNE SLOAN

In Claude Jutra’s remarkable film A Tout Prendre (1963), Montreal of the 1960s is apparently comparable to other modern cities around the world: the characters move through international-style glass architecture; the female lead models new-looking fashions atop Mont Royal; various bohemian types jump onto mopeds to navigate the streets of the city. If there is something self-conscious about how the characters enact such cosmopolitan gestures, it is in any case the stylish construction of the film itself that most bespeaks an updated urban consciousness. Jutra’s Nouvelle Vague innovation was to conjoin these cinematic glimpses of the city in an improvisatory manner, thus suggesting both the spatial mutability and social mobility of late-twentieth-century urban life. Moreover, the cityscape in A Tout Prendre doesn’t serve as a mere backdrop to the characters’ struggles over changing social roles, sexuality, racial politics, or art. Instead, the urban environment is represented as a dynamic, dialectical realm, where objects and spaces have a kind of agency. In this way, we become witnesses to Montreal’s evolving cultural identity. The identity of a city emerges not as an enduring essence but as something to be constantly renegotiated. Indeed, Jutra’s striking picture of Montreal in the 1960s becomes intelligible only in relation to other articulations – past and present, recorded in words or images, whether fictionalized or imbued with documentary realness. This is the case for all cities: Mike Davis has presented Los Angeles, for instance, as a veritable collision course of competing stories, images, and metaphors; it is alternately and simultaneously a noir labyrinth, a dream

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factory, a fortress (Davis 1990). Chapter 3 of the present book, by Kevin Dowler, focuses on two strangely contradictory texts that Walter Benjamin wrote about Marseilles, the first depicting it as a crude workaday city and the second as an enchanted dream city. And Dowler suggests that this kind of two-facedness must mark all attempts to construct a methodology for urban cultural analysis. Whether it is the description of one city or several cities that is at stake, the practice of comparison is implicit in the process of imagining, representing, and studying urban experiences and cultural forms. We recognize features of one case because of their resemblance to and difference from those of another case. We might begin with Montreal and move on to investigate how some aspect of Montreal is different from an aspect of Toronto, but this initial comparison will certainly fracture and multiply, inviting further differentiations and comparisons. This book approaches the comparison of cities as a compelling methodological problem. The contributors to this volume have all been part of a collaborative research project, The Culture of Cities: Montreal, Dublin, Toronto, Berlin, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada over a five-year period, 2000–2005. From its inception, the Culture of Cities project involved professors and graduate students from disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, art history, communication studies, film studies, and literature. Over the course of the project, we met at conferences and seminars and also engaged in a great many informal and friendly conversations. The chapters in this book are therefore part of an ongoing discussion, whereby we set out to describe, analyze, interpret, and theorize the culture of cities. Even though we imagined that the result of these encounters would be something greater than the sum of the project’s disciplinary parts, such interdisciplinarity cannot be regarded as a fait accompli. The Culture of Cities project has instead sought to provoke a series of interdisciplinary encounters through the introduction of distinctive concepts and interpretive modes. The chapters of the present book approach comparison, therefore, as a methodological contribution to the interdisciplinary study of urban culture. Comparative methods are of course integral to many disciplines and modes of inquiry in the social sciences, humanities, and arts: pairing up objects of study seems to shed new light on the proximate phenomena, while each individual act of comparison can serve as one small step in moving an entire research project forward. It should be noted, however, that disciplines have their own logic of comparison, their own understanding of how the process of comparing is to be accomplished, and why it is important. Sociology even includes the subdiscipline of

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“comparative sociology,” so the scholars writing for this book who have a formation in that discipline must contend with deeply inscribed methods of compiling, measuring, and assessing data. Within my own discipline of art history, the comparative method perfected by Heinrich Wolfflin in the early twentieth century is embedded in research and pedagogy alike (side-by-side slide projectors dominated classrooms until the recent arrival of digital projectors). Art historical comparison is undertaken to prove the conventionality and iterability of pictorial modes and to discern a particular artwork’s departure from the norm and the nature of its aesthetic innovation. The production of knowledge through the subtle play of similarity and difference will be recognized by experts operating within the framework of disciplines – within relatively closed systems, in other words. When scholars decide instead to compare their objects of study within the context of the city, those disciplinary codes and boundaries must be to some extent relinquished, but in recompense there is the promise of an epistemologically expanded field of inquiry. As was the case with the Jutra film mentioned above, we do not regard cities only as the background scenario, against which a given cultural case study (the process of civic amalgamation, the staging of a play, ethnic festivals, public art, etc.) is framed. Rather, each contributor has developed a comparative process whereby the case study and the city are shown to be thoroughly entwined and mutually constitutive. The specificity of Montreal and Toronto might therefore complicate the question of diasporic identity, but there is a reverse effect, too, whereby the investigation of diasporicity allows us to gain insight into the cultural specificity of these cities. If Toronto and Montreal are so often paired and compared, this occurs in a variety of circumstances. Comparison can be a matter of lining up government reports and polled responses, but it very often occurs at the level of the interpersonal conversation, the anecdote, the joke. And when people passionately pronounce one city to be better than another, what is usually at stake is an ineffable sense of a city’s rhythms, the textures of urban sociability and exchange, and simply what it feels like to be immersed in the city on an everyday basis. Each act of comparison, no matter how casual, can be understood as a contribution to the identity of a city. In chapter 1 the principal investigator of this research project, Alan Blum, introduces comparison not only as something performed by experts, but as a deeply embedded, “everyday social practice” and as a “kind of action.” Such gestures of comparison are part of how the city is remade, rethought, and renarrativized on a daily basis. To discover and study a city, it is therefore not enough to amass a bank of sociological data, as if these “determinants” will deliver up an objectively rendered account of urban experience or explain

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how one city’s identity is to be differentiated from another. This is not to discount political or economic factors, nor is it meant to entirely relativize or subjectivize the phenomena of cities, as if every Montrealer and Torontonian merely projects his or her own desires onto the cityscape. But Blum insists that city dweller and city are in an “animistic relation,” that they are mutually constitutive. “Whether we are dealing with cities or persons, each is emplaced and shaped in the mould of peculiar influences, betraying these influences as if a stigma.” Blum also addresses the figure of the cosmopolitan, as someone apparently in an ideal position to compare cities. There is a danger, however, that cities can become not only comparable but interchangeable; indeed, for the person who has difficulty recognizing the city that was his or her home, the collapse of identity is imminent because “home is the place of self-recognition.” Thus we come to understand that if comparison is an everyday act, the stakes are nevertheless high. This book is divided into three sections: “Practising Comparison” leads off with the chapter by Alan Blum, followed by contributions from Jean-François Côté, and Kevin Dowler; “Fragmented Cities” has chapters by Michael Darroch and Jean-François Morisette, Greg Nielsen, Nicholas Harney, and Johanne Sloan; “Global Narratives” has chapters by Jenny Burman and Kieran Bonner. The first three chapters address the problem of comparing cities in theoretical and methodological terms, while the chapters in the following two sections take up comparison as it pertains to Montreal-Toronto case studies. The book does not aim to provide comprehensive coverage of the two cities’ cultural activities; rather, we zero in on exemplary cases of cultural exchange and transformation. Inevitably, as we compare Montreal and Toronto, other cities enter the picture – either specific cities or types of cities, those that are more cosmopolitan, more violent, more affluent or perhaps less gentrified, less culturally diverse, less safe, and so forth. Some authors have pointed to the disjunction between so-called “second-tier” cities and uber-cities such as Paris and New York, which seem to exist in a class of their own (Markusen, Lee, and DiGiovanna, eds 1999). Whereas Montreal and Toronto seem to belong to a broad category of cities, it is rare to find references to “cities such as Paris.” The staggering amount of scholarship about Paris is conspicuously noncomparative, and the city’s singularity and exclusive status are reinforced by author after author. Even so, to designate a city as “incomparable” means just the opposite, in a way; if the identity of Paris or New York has been rendered iconic, this also implies that the collective maintenance of a strong urban identity has not been as successful in the case of other cities. The identity of Montreal, Toronto, or any other particular city is thus continually calibrated in terms of iconic, ideal, or even utopian cities. Even if it is true, as

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David Harvey has suggested, that “no one believes any more that we can build that city on a hill, that gleaming edifice that has fascinated every Utopian thinker since Plato and St. Augustine” (Harvey 1993, 18), urban experience continues to be transformed, on a daily basis and under vastly differing circumstances; and it could even be said that the desire to decipher the uniqueness of a city remains a kind of utopian project. We are indeed committed to the uniqueness of each city, which means that we seek to understand how both Montreal and Toronto succeed at becoming embodiments of collective life. The Culture of Cities project has focused on each city’s idiographic qualities, zooming in on what is unique about an urban configuration, even while we cannot avoid recourse to a taxonomy of cities in our evaluations of urban identity. In chapter 2 Côté brings together some important theorizing about the evolution and classification of cities by authors such as Mumford, Simmel, and Weber, providing a historical perspective for the methodology of the book as a whole. Côté reads these authors off against each other to better understand the conventionality of cities, the genealogy of certain types, and the adherence to certain “ideal types” of cities. Inasmuch as each city bears an unmistakable spatio-temporal imprint, Côté argues that Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope” is invaluable for the project of identifying specificity. When Dowler addresses the doubled appearance of Marseilles in two essays by Benjamin, it is to show how individual moments of urban experience will inevitably coalesce into the articulation of distinct urban identities or cultural templates. The “remorseless” and alienated city of “Marseilles” is dramatically opposed to the enchanted, aestheticized city of “Hashish in Marseilles.” Can these two images be considered as moments in the (dialectical) life of the city, or are these two types of city, or two sides of the same city, incommensurate, resulting in a kind of impasse? In Dowler’s words, “the reunification of aesthetic experience and everyday life takes on the character of a tragic impossibility.” Dowler also suggests that the terms of this opposition have become part of the logic of urban comparison, which continues to surface in contemporary discussions of how Toronto is different from Montreal. The city is fascinating because it perpetually moves and changes, but this is also what makes it an equivocal object of study for scholars of all disciplines. When we study the culture of a city, we are obliged to provisionally isolate certain people, actions, objects, or moments for heuristic purposes, but the greater methodological challenge is to present these fragments as parts of a dynamic, interconnected world. The title of this book, Urban Enigmas, does indeed suggest that the city never resolves itself into a static or entirely coherent cultural entity. It was Benjamin who suggested that the “traces left behind by the modern

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city dweller must be carefully preserved by the urban physiognomist, and their meaning deciphered” (Gilloch 1993, 6). At first glance, the density of buildings, streets, and people-in-motion might appear to characterize any large city, but a configuration of ephemeral encounters, relationships, and experiences can form a pattern or cipher. The authors in the “Fragmented Cities” section take up the challenge of giving methodological credence to the urban fragment and its particularity while also recognizing that the city’s ephemeral cultural expressions will be conjoined and narrativized in many different ways. In this section, chapter 4 by Darroch and Morrissette and chapter 5 by Nielsen examine the cacophony of voices contributing to the distinctive soundscape of a city. The traumatized protagonist from Larry Tremblay’s play The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is caught between English and French, speaking fragmented, hybrid utterances, and here language functions as a totalizing entity and also as something registered in individual psyches and bodies. Darroch and Morrissette focus on this linguistic instability in the text while also analyzing the staging and critical reception of the play, which eventually join up with the conflicts over language that inform the everyday dialogic space of both cities. Nielsen’s chapter examines the public expression of humour and publicly voiced opinions about civic amalgamation in Montreal and Toronto, and while these speech acts occur within the institutionalized context of radio programs and newspapers, they also resemble conversations overheard on the streets of each city. Taking seriously these ephemeral and folkloric bits of speech, the author uses the concept of “answerability” to address how citizenship gets negotiated in popular terms. Thus these enunciations acquire significance in relation to the cohesion (however phantasmatic) of nation and city: if the nation implies a long-term collective destiny, the promise of civic amalgation is the more immediate suture of urban fragmentation. The city can present itself as an accumulation of ephemeral traces, but this sense of urban life necessarily comes up against the monumentality and ideological fixity of the city. The vitality of the city is unceasing, in other worlds, but much of this everyday vitality will be channelled into a range of institutions, traditions, and built forms. We are interested in the urban fragment, therefore, not only for its singularity, not only for the (romantic) possibility that it might trigger a psychogeographic response in the individual urban dweller. We want to consider the process by which a particular urban detail acquires cultural meaning and gains social momentum, eventually becoming integral to the identity of people and communities and eventually of entire cities. Chapter 6 by Harney, for instance, shows how seemingly ordinary urban activities such as gardening or an evening walk through the

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streets can become signifiers of Italianness that are linked up to more explicit assertions of Italian identity, such as public fairs and parades. The author also shows how a “Little Italy” can get imprinted onto the cityscape in different ways – by successfully adapting to the imperatives of Toronto’s multicultural festivals or by accommodating Montreal’s francophone paradigm. But this comparison also reveals how similarly conservative forces in both cities attempt to ensure the maintenance of a coherent, traditional, and patriarchal narrative about Italian Canadians. My own contribution to this book, chapter 7, also considers the status of fragmentary evidence, albeit in terms of the contemporary public art debate. Instead of permanently installed, monument-like public art, many artists today opt to emphasize the ephemerality of urban objects, signs, and gestures. A comparison of such art practices in Toronto and Montreal during the 1980s is revealing because the identity of the two cities at that moment seemed antithetical – the mediatized business capital versus the capital of bohemian decrepitude. In both cities, the fleeting bit of signage or installation in an abandoned building could be construed as a critical intervention into the built environment, but these aesthetic gestures came accompanied by different attitudes toward architecture, public space, memory, and technology. I have argued that these paradigmatic case studies shed light on the increasingly global practice of public art. The research initiatives in this book tap into the global phenomenon of conurbation at the beginning of the twenty-first century and into the ever-expanding interdisciplinary research field that focuses on cities around the world. In the Culture of Cities project, the comparative study of two Canadian cities and two European ones has allowed for innumerable new insights: we have come to regard Montreal’s linguistic and political dividing lines differently because we have studied Berlin’s deeply-incised schisms, for instance, and we understand Dublin’s recent gentrification in a new way for being familiar with Toronto’s neighbourhoods. This book narrows the focus to address two of these cities, but we have nonetheless remained conscious of a larger, international comparative field. The chapters in the “Global Narratives” section assert the importance of this global consciousness. Nor are the cities examined primarily within the national contexts of Quebec or Canada. Indeed, it could be said that much of the current intellectual furor about cities as social formations is linked to the potential for conceptualizing culture in non-national terms. If the nation provides a ready-made ideological framework for the discussion of culture, the city, in contrast, has an immediacy, vitality, and materiality that seem to demand a more dialectical understanding of culture. The process of diasporization within Canadian cities, as described by Burman in

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chapter 8, must be understood as a social exercise qualitatively different from the multiculturalism that is often still touted as a quasi-heroic national project. Instead of regarding the formation of new identities in Canada as inevitably unfolding against the backdrop of the nation, Burman discusses the more complex interplay of identities that occurs within the urban context, focusing on some recent examples of music and film produced in the two cities by artists with Carribean, South Asian, and North African “backgrounds.” And if Montreal still seems beholden to an outdated multicultural rhetoric, Toronto comes across as a more genuinely diasporic city because “otherness” is constantly being renegotiated across multigenerational lines of immigration and through the shifting dynamics of urban scenes. Coming to terms with the uniqueness of cities is crucial at the present time given that the forces of globalization seem poised to gobble up local particularity. It is easy to imagine a generic cityscape where the stamp of multinational capital is everywhere evident, where neighbourhoods are indistinguishable, where shops are carbon-copy franchises of those in every other city, where there is no discernible “otherness,” and where the streets have none of that mystery that once enticed flâneurs – but certainly at the present time no such dystopically generic city exists. Rather, Montreal and Toronto are recognizable for the distinctive nature of their global connectedness. Chapter 9 by Bonner, which closes this book, quite appropriately sets in motion a reflexive line of questioning about the kind of writing that might do justice to the culture of cities at the present time. Focusing on the travel writings of Jan Morris, he takes up the problem raised by Blum in the opening chapter, regarding the cosmopolitan figure – who is forever visiting and traversing new cities but possibly no longer able to recognize the specificity of any city or able to genuinely feel at home in any one city. Morris has been visiting and writing about the cities of the world for many years and rejects a high degree of theorizing about urban experience in favour of an immediate and personal testimony that is ostensibly more attuned to the vitality of each place. Bonner nevertheless situates Morris’s writings in relation to current theories about cities, whether this is the nostalgia of the “new urbanism” movement or the antiglobalization critics, who regard the city as a site of competitive, opportunistic actions on the part of global actors. And perhaps Morris’s biased insights are valuable, in the end, because they do so convincingly mimic the conversations, storytelling, and everyday comparative activity that legitimately contribute to a city’s identity. There is no such thing as a completely balanced and unbiased comparison of Montreal and Toronto. The chapters in this book sometimes

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reveal a more profound immersion in one city or another, while the vantage points of the various chapters are multiple and shifting: we study examples of highly orchestrated cultural exchange such as film festivals but also those urban fragments that have not yet been fully endowed with a Montréalaise or Torontonian identity. If we have attempted to do justice to both cities, this is not because we are able to practice comparison from an ostensible position of outsideness, whereby both cities would be equally illuminated by a neutral and objective gaze, located somewhere exterior to and above the city. We are inevitably insiders, albeit with a heightened consciousness about the “shadows and ambiguities” (de Certeau 1984, 101) created by the movements of people and objects through the cityscape. I began this introductory text by referring to a film that foregrounded the changing identity of Montreal, and I shall finish by mentioning a recent novel that very effectively manages to defamiliarize the prevailing image of Toronto. The City Man by Howard Akler (2005), set in depression-era Toronto, includes a newspaperman’s authoritative-sounding accounts of labour unrest and urban crime, but we are also permitted to see the city through the eyes of the novel’s other protagonist, a pickpocket who hangs around Union Station observing the crowds, attuning herself to the pattern created by so many individual bodies, gestures, and trajectories, and waiting for her moment to move in on the victim/object of desire. And if these perspectives represent some of the methodological options explored in the Culture of Cities project, Akler’s book erodes this split perspective through the libidinal collision of his main characters. What is perhaps most remarkable about The City Man, however, is how this depiction of a moody, criminal, and eroticized underworld in Toronto comes to imaginatively invade the present day. Here is another past we didn’t know about, another type of city that Toronto might have been or might yet become. Once again, the city has been reinvented.

references Akler, Howard. 2005. The City Man. Toronto: Coach House Books. Davis, Mike. 1990. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York and London: Verso. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilloch, Graeme. 1993. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Harvey, David. 1993. “Cities of Dreams.” Guardian, 15 October. Markusen, Ann, Yong-Sook Lee, and Sean DiGiovanna, eds. 1999. Second Tier Cities: Rapid Growth beyond the Metropolis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

PART ONE

Practising Comparison

1 Comparing Cities On the Mutual Honouring of Peculiarities ALAN BLUM

introduction The problem of comparing two cities such as Montreal and Toronto requires a consideration of the notion of comparison and its relationship to place. As an opening into the problem, I begin by laying out certain discursive options. With regard to the comparison of cities, I suggest that there are believers, nonbelievers, and agnostics. Thus, on the one hand, it might be that cities, like persons, seem to have a complexity and resonance that exceeds our capacities to speak about them comparatively. Of course, we can compute and classify patterns of relationships among cities in ways that permit us to compare them (in the same way that we speak of persons) as though they are bodies measured by configurations of variables, or even as though they are types (the phlegmatic city, the extroverted city), but in all such cases, we often feel that the individuality of the city escapes us (exceeds our abilities?). But then we might ask how we can even claim to describe one city if its singularity is inaccessible? Comparing cities seems only to intensify this problem. In contrast, atheists might claim that such talk about singularity is in the grip of a superstitious vision of “excess” in the same way as those subject to a myth appear as docile victims of a form of bewitchment, as though we are picturing cities in terms of some image of hidden depth. Finally, to escape this problem, we might choose agnosticism and decide to cut our losses by comparing cities in ways that could satisfy us for all “practical purposes.”

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Then again, we do compare cities: it is part of social life, a form of life. We compare cities, frequently, typically, and in many ways. The comparison of cities remains a popular activity. Should we say of such an activity that, while popular with the ignorant, it is inaccurate, or impossible, or dependent upon an illusion of mastery that can never be realized? Perhaps we have not explored the discourse sufficiently to begin to understand its aim and the intellectual stakes of the problem. I propose in what follows that the need and desire to compare cities, to search for likenesses and differences among and between them, is part of an interest in the question of how places manage to retain an aura of individuality in the face of overriding impressions of their substitutability in certain external respects. This “contradiction” seems vexatious but is stimulating. Simmel (1971, 10) says: “every individual has in himself a core of individuality which cannot be re-created by anybody else whose core differs qualitatively from his own … All relations … are determined by the varying degrees of this incompleteness.” Even if we are tempted to hear such talk as essentialist, obsolete, or “imaginary,” it does register individuality as a social phenomenon, as a site at which the fundamental ambiguity of such an “inner core” comes to view as a discursive topic even if and as it is denied in practice. If Simmel is correct and every city, just as every person, has in himself “a core of qualitative individuality” different from any other, then comparison (of different “cores”) remains provisional in just this sense. On the other hand, what seems irremediable despite such incorrigible differences (in points of view) is an experience of singularity, almost like a secret that is just one’s own, as though an intimate connotative surfeit that belongs to the one and not to any other. If the experience of the individuality of the city belongs to the city as its secret in a way inaccessible to any other city, then the person intimate with the city might be marked transitively by virtue of sharing this secret and might be related to other kindred spirits as those in some way connected by this mark. A city can burden us with its secret in a manner so indelible that it becomes part of our secret as well. That is, all who are marked by virtue of sharing this secret, perpetuate the individuality of the city as their “core” by extension, as part of their own “qualitative” difference in ways that might mark them as peculiar in relation to those from other cities. Wittgenstein (1965, 13) calls this domain of ambiguity the ethical: “In ethics, one constantly tries to say something that does not concern and can never concern the essence of the matter … But the tendency, the thrust, points to something … this thrust against the limits of language is ethics.” Comparing cities might be situated within the framework of such an ethical vision of the relation between “selves” and “others” as part of the problem of solving such “incompleteness” and of developing ways and means of negotiating positions within such a space of fundamental ambiguity.

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I propose that the (so-called) individuality of a city vividly engages us as we encounter its peculiarity, stigmata, even perversity, as though in becoming formed as a collective, it overemphasizes or exaggerates one aspect of itself. The peculiarity of a city seems to reside in its overdetermination by the mix of influences that mark it as parochial. These influences can include the various ways that a city attracts and repels desire, empowering it to serve as an imaginative focal point in the circulatory movements of humans. That is, the aura of parochiality mobilizes interests, often challenging old ways and stimulating images of self-formation. Whether the city is our own or an “other” to and for us, insofar as we are touched by it and have a degree of intimacy with it, it is this peculiarity that strikes us and (as Wittgenstein might say) charms us. One point that I suggest in this chapter is that comparing cities rests upon certain interests in emplacement, interests that might fruitfully be conceived as part of the social process of mutually honouring peculiarities.

conventions The conditions of comparing cities are straightforward if we accept the conventions in circulation in the various social sciences. In these cases, cities are simply identified in terms of apparent criteria and located in some empirical space in terms of variables thought to be relevant. Such interests reflect long-standing conventions of comparison in philosophies of experimental design. I want to disrupt such a homeostatic model of comparison in several ways: by showing the comparison of cities to be an ordinary social practice that empowers these models in ways that have significant consequences; by highlighting as one decisive consequence, an aura of cosmopolitanism that animates modernity in many shapes; and finally, to begin to develop through this narrative a conception of the comparison of places as a mutual honouring of peculiarities that has to be acknowledged, endured, and renewed through the course of the mixing and matching of human lives and their trajectories. The current ways and means of comparing cities popular with urban researchers form a very small part of the discourse on comparing places that we have inherited over time. When researchers rank cities or develop indicators to differentiate cities, their practical purpose is always to bring to view some quality that differentiates cities, a quality thought to be general to the cities that it means to differentiate. If urban researchers know that there is always a problem achieving complete assurance about how the measure and the quality are meaningfully joined (in as much as this is elementary know-how for any researcher), they are less attuned to the implications of the recognition that comparing cities is itself one

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move in a language game (Wittgenstein 1958, part 1), one way in which the practice of doing comparison is done. It is important for us to ask how the civilization that we often typify as global induces researchers of today to become subject to certain views of comparison and thus to the use and privileging of certain rhetorical tactics for comparing cities. If we think of comparing cities such as Montreal, Toronto, Berlin, and Dublin, we must assume that they are comparable or the same in this respect, yet we also assume that their names betray their differences from one another despite their being the same. If each city appears (in this respect) to be the same and different from one another at one and the same time, then each city seems to violate the law of identity, being the same as itself and other than itself. Each city is the same (as itself) in being a city and other (than itself) in being unlike the cities that are different from it. Each city is the same as other cities (that is, comparable) and other than other cities (that is, specifically different in relation to those to whom it is comparable). However, could Montreal and Toronto belong to each other not simply by being comparable but in the way that Athens and Sparta belonged to each other insofar as understanding one requires understanding its relation to the other (to its other)? This seems to change the stakes of the discourse, of the very notion of comparison, by seeing the other place not externally as comparable or “other” in this sense, but as internal to (one)self – that is, as part of the otherness within. This preamble alerts us to the ways that the same and the other (identity and difference) could function as a collective problem because our capacity to see the city as either the same or the other or as both the same and the other is (in the words of Socrates) not so wonderful. Since any classification makes the items classified comparable by virtue of the artefact of classification, this kind of similarity is not so wonderful. What we must appreciate is that the robust sense of similarity concerns not the simple comparability of cities but how a city can be said to show in practice a reflexive relation to similarity and difference regardless of how similar or different it is to another city. Given that by virtue of their names, the cities of Montreal and Toronto are both the same and different vis-à-vis one another, how does this two-sidedness function in the lives of these cities? In this sense, the name of the city as a living distinction always confirms that we begin with the difference of the city as the environment of comparison, the “given” so to speak. For us, the problem that the city exposes in practice is its engagement with the question of how its difference makes a difference in the life of a civilization. A city is the same as itself as it differs from the others and different from itself as it becomes similar to the others. A city might be

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the same as itself when and as it persists in its difference from what is unlike it. A city might be different from itself when and as it persists in its sameness to what is unlike it. This raises the possibility that a city may begin to lose a sense of what it is as it covets becoming similar to the others, just as it may begin to come to itself as it covets becoming different from the others. Yet Athens’ desire to remain apart from Sparta and Montreal’s desire to remain apart from Toronto still persist as part of what Athens and Montreal are, part of their “identity” in ways “internal,” not external. Montreal might begin to lose itself as it loses its grip on how its apartness from Toronto is essential to it as the place that is Montreal. This possibility and the collective anxiety that it both stimulates and discloses is an ever-present research opportunity when we locate specific occasions on which it materializes. Here, we note the difference between learning from another city and wanting to be the other city, the tension integral to mimetic desire. Learning from the other city might be the kind of “internalization” that Freud described as “introjection” rather than incorporation, where the “object” (say, Toronto for Montreal) is taken to reflect a stimulating sense of limit rather than buried alive as an adversarial voice. Not-being-Toronto is given verbal expression in order to intensify what Montreal is rather than given free play as a domineering and censorious voice that dictates to Montreal what it should be. The other city can model for us one of the many ways that a city is done, one of the many ways that urbanity can appear and materialize in collective life. Or in contrast, a city can arouse covetousness by inspiring other cities to mindlessly chase after what it has that they seem to lack. In both cases, comparison could risk making the other city into an opportunity and nothing more; and the mean of comparison seems to lie somewhere between these extremes. Mobility and the capacity to move about has always given us opportunities to compare and contrast, to collect and differentiate the same and the others. Further, comparison is not limited to such calculation, extending as well to all sorts of interpretations that we make – for example, in trying to understand works, texts, and authors from different periods. Our need to interpret and “read” the past in any shape (a text, a film, a monument, another era) always participates in a discourse on comparison and suffers all of its ambiguities. Yet even here, if a constant hermeneutic readiness is presupposed in our desire to encounter such differences even as the differences that they appear to be, the appropriation is always problematic. That is, in approaching the (other?) text, its very appearance “in its time” makes reference to a horizon not at all unambiguous: “Homer, Vergil, Descartes, Goethe all are situated within ‘the context of their time.’ But this is to place them within the precise dimension from

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which their genius was employed to detach them. The discontinuity between genius and mediocrity is covered over with a porous mesh of self-dissolving historical platitudes” (Rosen 1987, 166). When we read Hobbes and situate him in his time, we do more than “contextualize” him by seeing his prejudices and choices (say, as the dead white man in Cromwell’s England) but try to disclose his dialectical relation to these conditions. Such a disclosure establishes some common ground between the interpreter (who is animated by her own interests and selections as she writes) and the author, the common ground revealed as the notion or problem that is shared yet specified in different ways. Because comparison is always “distorted” from the perspective of its present, as Plato said in Sophist, its participation in what it compares must always be “corrected” for this effect of distance. That is, comparison is always an image. In the same way, a place can reveal to a discerning eye not only its positioning within “the context of its time,” but the dimension through which its “genius” (its “peculiar expression,” its parochiality) can be seen to appear as ways and means of separating itself from the context of its time (for example, from the “mediocrity” of globalization). In part, the mark of a place comes to view in its displays of such detachment, its distancing itself from the context of its time, but always in ways that are internal and peculiar to it and that we ourselves recognize as part of our common situation, a different vision of the same kinds of influences that play upon us in any present.

th e m i m e t i c fa c u l t y The comparison of cities strikes me, at first, as an everyday social practice that occurs as part of the ways and means of making sense of our routine actions and thus as a social practice that appears immediately in this way as something that is done in action. This leads me to begin to address the practices of comparing places as a feature of everyday life expressed in practices that can be seen as “invoking ordinary notions and experiences” and also “discrepancies from the ordinary” (Payne 1995, 2.) Although we might each and all set out to compare cities and every sort of thinkable thing, it is important at some point to ask ourselves what we are doing when we engage in this action, the action of comparing. This means, at first, that we need to conceive of comparing cities as a kind of action, as something that is done in the course of life. Here, we begin to think about the notion of comparison by recreating a discourse that we might gather from the detritus of opinions and views on the matter. I start by reflecting upon the action of comparison as a human endeavour that references a certain elementary problem to which any and every

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comparative gesture makes reference. Note Walter Benjamin’s (1978, 333) comment on the “mimetic faculty”: “Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.” On the one hand, this tells us that comparison itself – and thus, of course, the comparison of cities – is a “higher function” and therefore a human art form. The formulations of urban researchers do not typically reflect upon this “higher function.” If comparing cities is an art serving a mimetic function, this suggests that urban research presupposes an art of creating similarities and “seeing resemblances” that involve the city as an object in interrelated ways. The city can be related in a variety of ways to other objects that it seems to resemble and from which it seems to differ through interpretive structures that “produce” similarities and differences. This is because seeing resemblances is an anthropological phenomenon where we might expect differences and similarities between cities and other collectives to constantly appear and evolve as recurrences: city and country, city and hinterland, city and nation, city and world, one city and another. Academics and ordinary folk regularly produce such resemblances in conveying opinions about economics, politics, and the like. These mundane comparisons can be treated as operating distinctions in practice that govern the organization of typical textbooks on the city and, certainly, the various lay versions of social attachments that are used to distinguish cities from other levels of collective life (the city as an anthill, the city as a jungle). In this sense, we might anticipate the “mimetic faculty” to be linked to city life in specific ways. Just as the mimetic faculty seems to work in broadcasting and area studies when “seeing oneself in others” becomes a basis of security (for making connections), anthropologists have long documented more interesting and stronger cases of such “projection.” From at least Herodotus on, we have learned of the capacities of human societies to see themselves reflected not only in other societies (for example, as in “ethnocentrism,” when all others are viewed as valuing in the same way as us), but in the cases where humans discover themselves in nature and the cosmos. Humans have been reputed to make gods in their own image, to create animals resembling themselves, and to construct representations and arts that imitate nature. Seeing the self in the other has often been treated negatively under the rubrics of projection or of colonization or as two-sided in the way that the imitation of divinity can be seen either as tyrannical or, in Aristotle’s sense, as part of the aspiration toward excellence.

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While it might be more difficult to imagine seeing the other in oneself, this could be recognizable as the ground of psychoanalytic practice. The difference is heightened in the contrast between seeing animals as people (Disneyland) and discovering animality in people (the idea of the “heart of darkness”). Thus we see the same in the other when children are viewed as unformed adults, whereas we discover the other in the same when we recognize the person as infantile. For cities, there are two crucial occasions when such a mimetic faculty can be expected to come to view, the occasions of implicitly engaging time and space. For example, when anything is done in the city in the way of an initiative, it invites comparison with the situation that it alters over time, just as what the city is reputed to be at any moment is implicitly measured by what it was and/or what it is likely to become. As with time, any initiative is implicitly measured by its position in relation to what it excludes (and here, the figure of the stranger is most relevant). The distinction between the temporal and spatial is ontologically decisive to any action because it derives from the primordial relation of self to other: to recover constancy in what changes (temporality) and to discover diversification in what persists (spatiality). Indeed, the interdependence of the species memorialized by Ovid (1955) always testifies to the fertility of any view that grasps ongoing exchanges as a demonstration of the resemblances that rule the world (the same in the others, the others in the same). In this way, perhaps most vividly described in Bakhtin’s (1984) work on Rabelais, transformation and dismemberment become glosses for the grotesque interpretation of becoming where the notion of disguise describes the endless and reciprocal passage of self into other and of other(s) into self as a constant and diversified process of mutation in which everything exists as both one and many, as both the same and the other. Specifically, the notion of change permits us to approach the ways that collectives recognize resemblances and differences between times, particularly between now and then, and between the present and the past. Are past and present extensions of the familiar present (the same) or, in some sense, interruptions in which the ineffable and enigmatic appear to disrupt visions of constancy? In relation to space, the collective concern to distinguish the customs of other people always distinguishes the collectives who do the distinguishing in relation to the ways that a people sees things not its own. Here, we can always ask how the disciplines of history and anthropology function, in terms of the mimetic faculty, to “handle” the problems of time and space in very special and exclusive ways. In conceiving of the mimetic faculty in relation to space, the problem of boundary becomes essential, and in relation to time, the problem of

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perpetuity becomes essential. This means that any city is engaged by its difference from the other to which it is assumed comparable and that any city is engaged by its difference from what it is assumed to have been or to have an opportunity to be. Now, we are beginning to specify certain ways that collectives do comparison of themselves and others, gestures that are particularly relevant for the city. This is to say that our comparison of cities is always an exploration of the ways that cities compare themselves: we conceive of the city as understanding itself dialectically in relation to its existence in time and space, how it distances itself from the very influences that it digests and perpetuates as the place that it seems to be. Thus an important way that the mimetic faculty comes into view is through the conception of the persistence of the past and the inevitability of the future, both in relation to the present. In contrast to this kind of view of uninterrupted continuity between past, present, and future marked by seeing sameness and resemblance everywhere, we might imagine conceptions of incomparable disjunctions between past, present, and future as though each is a discrete fragment unrelated to the other. Even more, if the past is viewed as obsolete and the future as unknowable, we have the conditions for a nihilistic conception of a present unhinged in time. What we mean here can be illustrated by Wittgenstein’s use of the duck-rabbit example, where the drawing could be seen either as a duck or a rabbit (one of two things) or as a duck-rabbit (two expressions of one thing). To demonstrate the fluidity of the either-or in this case is not so wonderful (to paraphrase Socrates) because it merely affirms the law of social construction. It is not so wonderful to say that we can see one city in different ways or that we can see two different cities in the same way because of differences in perspective or points of view; but what is wonderful is to see one city as the same as its other and as other than itself as part of its very perpetuity as both the same and the other. That is, we see its “identity” as a problem that it is constantly working out: as the city becomes similar to the others, it might become other than itself, and as it becomes different from the others, it might “return” to itself. We could search for practices in which this difference materializes, practices in which the denial of similarity to other cities and the affirmation of difference from other cities comes into view in a single visible gesture or case as a locus of collective action. Thus, while it is quite easy to say of any one city – for example, Montreal or Toronto – that it can be viewed in different ways and, indeed, that the same fact about one of the cities can be treated differently in the other, in the very same breath, we might say that all cities are alike in this way, in this capacity to stimulate a range of different views. None of

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this is so wonderful: it is a function of the mimetic faculty. But is there a difference between the different ways of seeing one city’s relationship to the others? How does a city induce us to encounter its sameness and difference in this sense? When we interpret cities in this way, we are exercising the “higher function” of the mimetic faculty, just as our finding such opportunities in cities leads us to search for their higher functions. In the same way as the duck-rabbit, the city seduces us when we can imagine on occasion that it remakes and reshapes its generality in ways that transcend its factual status as an entity in the world (that it has these kinds of powers, agency). Seeing the city as simultaneously two-in-one is to note its self-transcendence as a city, its manner of cancelling and overcoming itself as it both (at the same time) preserves and surpasses its wordliness as a city. In this way, as Kieran Bonner says (2002), cities make a place for their imaginative endurance past the life span of their constituent parts by transcending and remaking their own collective absorption in the functionalism of everyday life, each appearing only then as having the manner of an individual city. Yet seeing resemblance everywhere is only a beginning, not an end, and it is “not so wonderful” because it is just the exercise of a faculty and thus always remains to be developed. Exercising a faculty such as the ability to see resemblance everywhere might be a sign of skill, as in the capacity to locate patterns and to generalize and connect very powerfully, but it remains to be seen whether it is anything more than intelligence (cleverness). Perhaps we can make this clear through some examples of the practice of comparison. In seeing resemblances, we engage in various shapes of figuration, whether as conventional tropes, analogies and personification, exchanges and reversals (Deleuze 1985, 1, 183), but the aim of such an action always remains to be developed.

l a y ve r s i o n s o f c o m p a r a b l e c i t i e s The idea of comparison’s having a mimetic relationship to viewing resemblances and differences allows us to treat such “seeing” as mediated by conceptions that we might think of as formulaic and thus as grounded in lay versions of comparability that begin as rudimentary displays of collective representations of comparability. Nowhere is the abstraction of social research so vivid as in the conception of comparing cities through examples such as policy and planning or in concerns about tourism in the varied official attempts to use comparison externally as a yardstick for gauging progress rather than as part of a process in which we learn from other cities as a way of finding our place.

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In everyday life it is typically said that we compare to “broaden our horizons” even in the way that an entrepreneur checks out competitors to learn from them and to cultivate better methods. Much of such comparison in the best sense is not simply a case of copying one’s enemies, but of searching for models or glimpses of practices worth emulating. If comparison gets done in practice and if cities are among the items or objects in such interpretive structures, these structures can themselves be conceived as circulating in the way of material modes. Thus cities can be compared because they are neighbouring and convenient to one another or because their remoteness from one another makes them seem relevant for a “complete” experience; cities can be complementary (first city/second city), contrasting (New York/Los Angeles), members of a set (territorial, as in region and nation) or of a category (such as “global city”), or in certain cases, can be related in the way that something (civilization) stands to nothing (barbarism). On the other hand, cities can be connected on the basis of friendship and kin affinities or for respite in ways that mark their connectedness as functional extensions of home. Conversely, the exoticism of cities can be treated as opportune and friendly occasions to test character in the ways that cities in some parts of the world package terrifying trials and tribulations (safaris, tours and excursions, arduous ordeals). Such “other” cities become destinations for safe and intelligible adventure in ways that seem varied but that are the same as in the functional welcoming spots for “visiting friends and relatives.” In all such cases, we deal with rules of relevance for comparing cities, rules that can be observed and studied not only within cities, but also by using cities as objects of analysis (how do Montreal and Toronto compare as differentially relevant for visiting friends and relatives and other tourists?). That is, are we likely to need to have friends and kin in these cities to want to visit them – or do they differentially exercise a spell independently of such “advantages”? While travel industry employees speak proudly of a city’s high “vfr” (visiting friends and relatives) score, they might be fooling themselves into thinking that the city is visited for reasons that are strong. The decisive test relates to how cities are visited or not in the absence of friends and relatives. For some special cities, one might pray to have friends and relatives in order to conveniently visit the place. The identification of the local often and typically gathers its specificity from a comparison with other places. Thus a journalist enjoying a night out in Toronto reports: “And as we headed back out onto the sidewalk, talking about the opera we had just seen, and about how extraordinarily good the coc [Canadian Opera Company] is becoming,

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and about how exciting it will be when the new opera house is finally built, I had the oddest thought about Toronto. I thought, well, it may not be Paris. It may not even be Montreal. But you know something: It’s getting there” (Macfarlane 2002, R3). An intrinsic feature of saying what the place is like, of saying what it is, is to say what it is not, and even here, the relationship of “getting there” speaks about Toronto by virtue of its not being Paris or (“even”) Montreal. It is difficult to speak about the place directly without bringing in other places. This not only confirms the entanglement of identity talk with difference, but leads us to ask if all places refer to themselves in such ways and how such self-reference is exercised by such a vision of comparability. Would we expect (“even”) Montreal (and Paris) to speak of themselves in such ways, and further, how might we anticipate such characterization to work differently for and in differing cities? It might be that Toronto, as compared to Paris and Montreal (“even”), is the kind of city that is always in-between, selfabsorbed in becoming like the others in some special way. In fact, this might be a strength of Toronto, registered in its peculiarity as a place always wanting to catch up (say, to Montreal) even though it seems ostensibly so much more powerful. Indeed, for purposes of this chapter in this volume, it could be that the major axis of difference between the cities of Montreal and Toronto is less language policy, commercial primacy, and municipal politics than the ways that they relate to and make this difference – that is, how they subvert this relationship in practice and in so doing, develop their own specific manner. Another way of saying this is that these cities might differ in terms of how they formulate their needs and lacks as well as the obstacles that they see as separating them from their objectives. For example, if Toronto received all the funding it wants and says it needs to become world-class, would it still catch up to the others? Again, what does Montreal have that Toronto lacks, and reciprocally, does Toronto have anything that Montreal thinks it needs? If both Montreal and Toronto need funding to support their everyday life and culture, is such funding more important to one than the other because in its absence it fears having (and being) nothing? Note in the following examples how the same city, Toronto, appears in different guises as an object of comparison. We see that a city can be treated as comparable because it is an extension of home, offering to extend the same security one finds in the safest domestic environment. “Vancouver and Toronto are the best cities for expatriates to live, while Uzbekistan’s capital Tashkent and Bosnia’s Sarajevo are the worst, a new survey says … The survey assesses such factors as political and economic stability, crime, pollution, health, environment and education.

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The world’s best two cities were in Canada … with a combination of social stability, excellent infrastructure and good leisure facilities” (Kaban 1996, C3). This comparison, produced from the point of view of the expatriate and purportedly designed to represent that voice, does not tell us whether it is reporting on what expatriates say about the cities that they prefer or whether it is ranking cities on the basis of what it expects expatriates to take into account. Further, the very notion of “expatriate” is problematic here since cities have been compared and chosen as colonies for visitors in a variety of ways. Presumably these expatriates’ desire for “stability” and “excellent infrastructure” (unlike James Baldwin or Gertrude Stein) identify them as “senior citizens” or as ones who have business in the place, those such as the mobile employees of an international corporation, and the notion of “good leisure facilities” adds weight to this interpretation. This type of comparison suggests that cities can never be both incomparable and desirable since their appeal grows to the extent to which they resemble home. Comparison involves searching through the cities of the world in order to determine whether they resemble our home place, making the incomparable city both indigestible and unappealing. The force of Toronto as such an image is that it might induce this type of expatriate to see its resemblance to home and thus can function as a kind of anyplace and anywhere. Curiously, this might be one of the powerful factors in such a city’s make-up. Its capacity to make many feel as though they have not left home is similar to its capacity to be and appear as a “universal” location for the shooting of films. In this sense, a cosmopolitan city able to extend the recognizable appearance of familiarity to all can lead to the view that its accessibility (digestibility) eo ipso is a paragon of secular universality and thus an intrinsically welcoming destination.

nation as mediator In any comparison between cities of different nations, the uncontrolled variation from different “levels” (nation, city) disturb the comparison, making it unclear if the differences between Barcelona, Brussels, and Montreal are due to their differences or to differences between the nations of Spain, Belgium, and Canada. As part of the concern with comparison, it is always important to address the question of how the city is paradigmatic or exceptional in its country (and region) and how this relationship is the same as or different from that of the other city. In some sense, a major city is always peculiar in its nation by virtue of its centrality and urbanity, but any comparison of Montreal and Toronto would try to move beyond such a notation to explore their peculiarities. For example, if the

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uniqueness of the cities of America such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia seem to disturb the homogeneity of the America that Tocqueville compares to Europe, this refers not only to differences among these places but to their idiosyncrasies in the country at large. Perhaps these cities are less peculiar in relation to each other than they are with respect to their nations. Cities typically resented in their nations for their arrogance and spendthrift ways can be revered in the world, and cities lumped together in their nation for their ways are often still competitors for the scarce supply of affection (funding) available. Policy makers typically say that what cities have in common is more than enough to stigmatize them collectively in their nation (and thus they can serve as an opportunity for common political action.) But then is a great city such as New York, Paris, or Rome so unique as to show itself as doubly peculiar, both in relation to its country and in relation to the other cities? Such an indigestible city might be seen as truly incomparable. When cities such as Montreal and Toronto are compared, the relevance of Canada-the-nation as mediator is apparent, but always remaining to be developed is the different way(s) that this relation (between city and nation) is worked out. That is, if it seems in this case of comparing cities within the same nation that the problem of national differences is controlled, this ignores how these different cities can be said to relate differently to the same nation, Canada. This means that the cities of Montreal and Toronto can be expected to bear the function of national mediation differently not only by virtue of provincial and federal constraints or local linguistic policies, but with respect to different regions, parts, and peoples of Canada. A city’s relation to its own nation cannot ultimately be conceived with satisfaction as undivided, secure, and self-evident or as microcosm to macrocosm or part to whole. The metaphors of centre and periphery and of dominance and submission are only the starting points for calculating the mimetic character of the relation in each case. Typically, these relations are reflected in terms of political power (municipal autonomy) and budgetary flexibility, but we need to formulate the way(s) that similarity and difference between each of these cities and their nation are made problematic, perhaps in differential systems of rivalry within the nation in each case. Thus separatism in Montreal might be structurally analogous to commercial primacy in Toronto as a sign of the incommensurable place of each city in its nation, signifying conditions that differentially identify each city as an exception to the rule (the nation). As noted in terms of the dialectic of identity and difference, it might even be expected that a city stands to lose itself to the extent to which it comes to resemble its nation and stands to come to itself to the extent

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to which it differs from its nation. This interesting proposition has been a central locus of collectivization in Canada (not to mention other citynation relationships around the world). Ignoring measurement problems for the moment, this proposition invites us to reflect upon the ways that cities might work to sustain their identities within the nation through the very gestures that affirm their exceptionality. Part of the argument over separatism in Quebec is directed to the question of how the exceptional aura of its position in the nation is good or bad for both or for neither (or for one at the expense of the other). This feint reassertion of the problem of the General Will adumbrated by Rousseau always asks this same question: does the rule not have to be formulated in a way that invites its exception to excel, or does such an invitation invite its own destruction? Yet, if Toronto cannot be said to be a city incognito that buries its distinctiveness in Canada, its difference from Montreal lies not in this direction but by virtue of how its claim for commercial primacy and uniformity in most other respects contrasts with Montreal’s claim to differ and to be exceptional. Both cities claim to add wealth to their nation (to add to their “cultural capital”) and are comparable by virtue of such a claim. How do these cities compare in making themselves different in ways that make a difference? How are the resemblances and similarities of each city to its nation represented in civilizational discourses?

vi s i t i n g There might be an expectation that the value of other places increases as they occasion images not only in the form of typical horror stories or recitations of trials, tribulations, and joys, but also through a range of materials such as post cards, photographs, and tokens of sites visited. Such materials help to ground visiting with the earnest sense of having been to the place and having seen and suffered the best that it can offer. Here we see vividly how the comparison of places is a medium of selfrepresentation, a way of proceeding that is perhaps built into the nature of self-reference, demanded by it so to speak. The perishable character of human memory, in conjunction with the desire to use the other place as a telling moment of revitalization, inexorably links the practice of comparison to reported speeches and recollections of the eventfulness of journeying. Here, cities are often determined as entertaining or not by virtue of how they might be positioned as theatrical sites in a world circuit of dramatic moments. “The world exposure for an Olympic city is so saturating that following the games the rest of the world is drawn to the host site as curious tourists … the Games … provide the biggest

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exposure a city can expect to get, short of a nuclear or natural disaster. Torontonians like to think of Toronto as a major city, but beyond our shores it hardly registers on the radar” (Royson 2001, A1). In this view, the impact of the city in the world is constructed in terms of a rhetoric of publicity and product recognition. The ideas of “registering” and of “exposure” identify the city as an object of attention, desperately trying to gather itself together to be noticed in a world where it can make no claim upon “curiosity” beyond “our shores.” The history and situation of the city combines to create this “emergency,” where it risks oblivion and requires the spectacle of a natural disaster or the gift of an award to make itself legible to a world that has come to have no interest in seeing it for what it is or for visiting it. The question to consider concerns the way that such a city produces a situation for itself in which it can be rescued only by an external event of such great magnitude that it will be forced upon the attention of those who have been indifferent. Here, it is suggested that the city has produced a situation where the world cannot see it as it sees itself. The capacity of the city to distinguish itself is not registered in the view of the other and it is the desire of the city to bridge this gap that creates the pathos of its situation. The problem of making accessible to all what is specific to us, of making the local “universal,” counteracts the typical strategy of bringing the far near because in this case what belongs to us, to the local, needs to be represented in ways that will make “everyone” concerned for us and our place. Extraordinary events and disasters occupy the same structural position as awards and prizes, mediating market desire by affiliating our place with the event in ways that make us noticeable by virtue of this link. When a great disease strikes, it can be seen to be both bad for its effect on tourism and good for the attention and notoriety that it brings to the place. Just as Akron Ohio is noticed because of its rubber tires or Niagara Falls because of its waterfall, the legibility of places is viewed as though tied to external events in ways that are made to appear essential and that ultimately risk making such cities caricatures, noticed for these signs and nothing more. These various ways of constructing cities as objects of comparison illustrate the burdens that a city could suffer in evoking an aura of strong distinctiveness. In such cases, “best practices” always seem to counsel cities to strive to be among those that are “second-tier,” neither incomparable nor invisible and pathetic but somewhere in the middle, as safe and secure occasional havens for visitors from anywhere and everywhere. Still, to be among these uniform cities requires comparable access to resources (or else a city cannot compete for the scarce supply of attention and revenues in the world market). In contrast to such average

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cities whose marginal differences from one another appear at best as differences of degree, the incomparability of a city always seems to rest upon an act of God. In many cases, comparison enters into the description of a place when what is happening here is made part of what is happening everywhere in ways that make there relevant for here on the basis of such an involvement. Comparison enters, as Sacks (1992, vol. l, 246) says, “when the isolating character of experience gets undercut … if what one is dealing with is that there are others who had the same experience.” Reciprocally, if the crisis that we are undergoing is the same as everyone’s and everywhere’s crisis, a solidarity between here and there is created that makes it important for those of us here to attend to what is happening everywhere and elsewhere. For example, the isolationist foreign policy assumed to characterize much of America’s political diplomacy was regularly undermined by appeals to the interdependence of states in ways that could provide for the national relevance of any international incident, making anything happening around the world a matter of concern for what was done in the United States.

n o t i n g va r i e t y Comparability – at first, the question of our identity and difference, how we are the same and/or the other – seems to appear in our selfreflection upon our history. Thus the anecdotal attempt to compare passes through the fantasy of a utopian standard of experimental design to the practice of historical understanding. Abu-Lugod (1999), among others, argues for a conception of the differences between (similar?) cities (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York) based on her inspection of the detailed application of what is comparable (political conflict, changing borders and boundaries, social movements). Yet, if we can cite “history” only in answer to the question of how these cities are different, and if it is history that produces the very differences with which we started (i.e., that makes these cities what they are), then “history” is an unanalyzed gloss for difference. If these (city) histories are different to start with, how do they make a (further?) difference? History does not explain or make anything, for as Marx said, men make history. If men make history, this suggests that history is a story of how “men” act on conditions and influences and that such actions are the materials or events represented in the imitations that we call history. Continuously citing “history” is one of the intellectual habits that we have evolved to instruct our comparison, and we might now approach the practice as part of the family of actions oriented toward collecting and differentiating, as part of seeing resemblances and connections.

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Wittgenstein (1979) suggests that a historical explanation is a hypothesis that is only one kind of summary of the data, of their synopsis. What he calls a perspicuous representation makes it possible to see the connections or the passages in the data. This then causes us to recognize how the cliché that “men make history” itself has to be expanded to emphasize this aspect of method, for the “making” here refers not only to the simple agency of action, but also to poiesis, to the creation of a story, account, representation. History is simply one part of a discourse that makes connections and organizes the passages in events, both in time and space. If this tells us that comparison belongs to this family of practices, it must also assist us in locating its specificity, for comparison must be of a particular kind in relation to, say, inference, diagnosis, or history that belongs to the same family. If the generality of comparison seems to reside in its method of telling its story (of making connections), could it be this that distinguishes comparison?

stories of friends, enemies, a n d a dv e r s a r i e s Besides the perspicuous representations favoured by science and history, a most popular story today says that the market positions us all to be in the same boat, struggling for scarce resources in a sea of differentially advantaged competitors. This is inevitably a story of exchanges of influence(s). Sophie Body-Gendrot (2000, 258–9) is instructive here: From the perspective of architectural shapes and identity, cities differentiate themselves because they are in cultural competition. In that respect, Paris is more Paris than ever and New York is more and more New York … The process is specific and local. It is the relation between flux and space that makes the new city. This is why the identity and modes of operation of New York are different from those of Chicago and from those of Los Angeles. A prosecutor or a judge does not behave in the same way in Dallas, Texas, or in Brooklyn, in Paris, or in Nice, in London, or in Liverpool. Expectations, pressures, and collective cultures have a lingering effect on individual behaviors … They reveal the power of place. People invest places with social and cultural meaning.

This evocative paragraph needs some surgery. Is the very first sentence meant to produce the last? If so, then the “power of place” with which she concludes seems to be a result of what she first describes as the way that cities do comparison today (cultural competition, as “players” in the cultural marketplace, as adversaries in the struggle for “cultural capital”). What she calls “identity” and “modes of operation” differ from city to city because, she says, cities are competitors in

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ways that affect expectations all the way (down!) to “individual behaviors.” The exposition is authorized by a distinctive conception of the ways that cities do comparison that is pervasive in social science. Cities are viewed as collective actors “working” to reproduce the marketplace, its logic of optimization and its restricted economy of exchange, profit, and loss. In this social world, it is hard to imagine comparison as anything other than competitive calculation, and it is certainly true that part of comparing as a practice rests on a notion of commensurability that produces this world of adversarial relations just as international politics, especially in its realpolitik form, produces a world of friends, enemies, and allies. A more interesting question for us to consider would be directed at the need to make a place in relation to this environment. That is, how can a stronger vision of difference be developed in relation to this ruling view? This grammar provides us with a rule of thumb and nothing more because we need to recover the point (and problem) of comparison or else risk assimilating it to a variety of undifferentiated practices that create intelligible links in material such as “synthesis” or interpretation in general, diagnosis, inference, and the like. For example, although synthesis evidently engages in the comparison of materials, we would not necessarily think of comparison as the form by which it is engaged. Body-Gendrot links the passage of events animating the competitive relations among cities and the “effects” of place upon their “identities and modes of operation” in a perspicuous representation that leaves everything interesting to be developed, including the view of the agency and courses of action of cities as collective actors. In this conception, the agency of cities is seen as determined by the marketplace, which compels them to be competitive at best and to develop the meaning of place as part of their “cultural capital.” The obviousness of this view is confirmed through examples of judges or prosecutors in different cities, who, as “anybody knows,” are the same and different, just as the cities in which they work are both the same and different. In some unspecified way, all of this is driven by the invisible and impersonal force of the market, which makes everyone compete and compare through such a restricted economy. In respect to such a constraint, Kieran Bonner (2002, 3) notes: “The modern alliance of the city with capitalism … and now of the globe with capitalism, raises the question of whether there is any place for making a place in cities like Montreal, Toronto, Dublin and Berlin … Can contemporary cities that desire a place in the global economy claim to be ‘a place like no other place?’” We might appreciate how the “global economy” can be heard as a gloss of the notion of commensurability in which cities are rendered comparable by virtue of their exchange value. In this sense, making a

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place makes a difference that is different (“like no other”) only by virtue of orienting to what it is unlike. In the same breath, the unlike is unlike only by virtue of its comparability. Making a place appears as the making of a difference between these two senses of comparability as a living dialectic registered in and for the city as an object of desire. In this special sense, place making can become visible as ways and means of making differences.

s t o r i e s o f fa r- awa y p l a c e s : to u r i n g a n d te l l i n g If classics of travel literature have long recognized that the comparison of places occurs as part of a ritual structure of journeying, edification, and the desire for cultivation, modern versions of well-informedness might be seen to dramatize the de-ritualization of the practice as information gathering. Notice how the journalist Thomas Friedman (1999, 19) explains his method for understanding changing events in the “new” world and, particularly, for grasping the complex interchanges between places separated in space: “I learned to do two things at once – look at the world through a multilens perspective and, at the same time, convey that complexity to readers through simple stories, not grand theories. I use two techniques: I do ‘information arbitrage’ in order to understand the world, and I ‘tell stories’ in order to explain it.” Presumably, arbitrage provides him with a way of collecting disparate events that he had previously treated as the domain of different “fields” – for example, economics or politics. Now, however, he is able to see interconnections: “Arbitrage is a market term. Technically speaking, it refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of the same securities, commodities or foreign exchange in different markets to profit from unequal prices and unequal information … One can do arbitrage in markets. One can do it in literature … But whether you are selling pork bellies or insights, the key to being a successful arbitrageur is having a wide net of informants and information and then knowing how to synthesize it in a way that will produce a profit” (Friedman 1999, 20). Friedman grounds this method in the practices of novelists or researchers who, he thinks, “buy” information cheaply by virtue of their observations and then “sell” their “syntheses” in stories for a profit. Certainly, this view could collect practices of ethnographers, journalists, novelists, or social researchers if we accept this conception of observation as profit-oriented information retrieval in the way that television editing searches out informants and information for syntheses in sound bites. Moreover, what is important for our purpose is not

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simply his vulgarity, but his introduction of “networking” to theorizing. The “world” is then conceived as a market in the extended sense, as an opportunity for collecting and using information, and worldly attachments are best seen as opportune occasions for being productive by making the qualities of other places palpable for the places that we inhabit. Comparison not only broadens our horizons, but is profitable since it creates a class of pundits who can buy cheap and sell dear. “That is the essence of information arbitrage. In a world where we are all so much more interconnected, the ability to read the connections, and to connect the dots, is the real value added provided by a journalist. If you don’t see the connections, you won’t see the world” (Friedman 1999, 20). Aside from its preoccupation with profiting from scarce information, arbitrage does not address what its dots connect or how it tells its story and what kind of story it tells. Its creativity is exercised in “discovering” scarce sources of information (“informants”) in order to make its story noteworthy for those in places other than where it journeys. Arbitrage thinks that it can make the far interesting – that is, bring it near – only by domesticating exoticism through a spectacle that makes the strange familiar rather than the familiar strange. Yet Nietzsche (1967, 45) cautions of such views: “And the power of gradually losing all feelings of strangeness and astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture. The crowd of influences steaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge. The young man has become homeless: he doubts all ideas, all moralities. He knows “it was different in every age, and what you are does not matter.” The example of arbitrage allows us to imagine the comparison of places under conditions of mechanical reproduction, in Benjamin’s sense, because in the same manner that many have talked of how history de-ritualizes memory (or really time, in Baudrillard’s usage), arbitrage permits us to appreciate the erosion of the aura in comparing places under conditions of mechanical reproduction. The model here is the spectacle of contemporary journalism or broadcasting, which makes the story of the relation of near to far digestible even if reported as terrifying because such reports convert the encounter with the other place into an external moment of fascination without seductive allure. This conversion is done through the prosaic language of reporting, which exemplifies how journalism is to look at another place in the ways that people such as us need and desire – that is, how we ought to gather information in order to master the uncanniness of a world inhabited by strange spirits. If technology makes it possible for the

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strangeness of the world to invade our most secure spaces, the prosaic language of broadcasting and the rule of its expertise helps to defend us through its continuous accessibility to, and interpretive mastery over, these very influences that surround us. In this respect, arbitrage seems a contemporary variant of conventional travel or exploratory literature, where the visitor returns to tell the story of the place visited. This invites us to tread the thin analytic line between ethnography and exposé – that is, to ask how the recovery of what is concealed figures in the comparison of cities and, indeed, invites us to question the status of the concealed and its connection to the secret of locality. Yet de-ritualized information gathering risks losing the specificity of the “far” when it brings the far near, thus sacrificing an experience that could be unsettling and challenging for the mastery and security of what is already known. The traveller tries to render the “foreign” intelligible to the local, perhaps making it so palatable and digestible that the difference evaporates. In seeing the other through our eyes, we risk viewing it in such intimate relation to us that it becomes simply an extension of us, of the same, as though it has no existence of its own (except to display “codes” or norms that are different, deviant, “marginal,” even exotic). In this way, as Vico (1970) noted long ago, comparison might domesticate the strange in order to survive the threat that it poses for every secure distinction; thus he created an opposition between the desire to make the strange familiar and the desire to seduce the familiar and thereby make it strange. In this vein, travel has been described as a practice of learning to lose one’s way (Rancierre 1994, 32, 36) – that is, of challenging what we have rather than of simply extending and consolidating our empire of information – and this desire is seen to be ratified in stories of losses that can testify to regained strength. This counsel to accentuate discomfort, in contrast to the strategy of arbitrage, has often been recognized in novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Malcom Lowry, Paul Bowles, and others who are reputed to dislocate the familiar by registering its uncanniness as an influence that must haunt the aspiration to “connect the dots.” Such examples begin to show how, as an activity, comparison is connected to assurance in striking ways, typically aiming to establish an unassailable vantage point. This means that the apparent dependence of comparison upon travel and the encounter with the near or the far (the familiar or exotic) should not obscure its roots as an ordinary practice that might be visible in the very indeterminacy of the mundane (in a glance, for example) or, conversely, in representations that normalize what at first appears extraordinary (for example, in newscasting, punditry, expertise, and formulaic talk that domesticates unusual or rare events in order to bring them under control as

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intelligible). That an extraordinary trip or event does not necessarily persist as extraordinary in its telling is regularly confirmed by television news and the tales of travellers and in much everyday talk that seeks to provide a scenic sense for “what happened.” Comparing cities is practised as part of a narrative structure, and in studying cities we try to address the various ways that self-reference is done through the telling of stories. So far in this chapter, in pointing to several functions of comparing places, such as the acquisition of information and mastery, the cultivation of urbanity, and the journey of selfdiscovery, I have been discussing the operation of the mimetic faculty and its prosaic uses (including, of course, “comparative research”).

secrets of places Although the relation of nation to city is typically glossed in classical notions of comparison and in the great texts of Herodotus, Montaigne, and Montesquieu, these texts bring into view, in the work of comparing, the mediation of notions such as exploration, detection, and edification that links the mimetic faculty to bildung, self-cultivation, tact, and in some way, ends of inquiry. Most of these examples of the social practice of comparing places come from the travels of gentlemen in a position to move about freely because of wealth and status who have sufficient free time and curiosity to expand their horizons by exploring other customs. Today, we might also note how the enlightenment aspiration of modern life has greatly expanded the possibility of comparing places through the accelerated mixing of groups typically represented as signs of diasporic movement. Whether classic texts or diasporic migrations, all such examples of people on the move provide materials for analyzing the comparison of places insofar as such practices enter into the narrative structure of all journeying. De Tocqueville (1954), for example, explores, detects, and tries to uncover the secret of a place for the purpose of edifying Europe about new ways, as perhaps a catalyst toward rethinking old ways. He recommends that our movement from the external to the internal in the narrative is designed as a story of the ways that the tension between the universal (the comparability of the old and new worlds that grounds the comparison and permits us to recognize the “departure” of the new from the old) and the particular (the difference claimed to be made by the new world in a way that diversifies the possibilities of what a society can be) materializes in the present case as individual and thus as fundamentally ambiguous. At first, it is to someone like Wittgenstein that we might turn in reflecting on the practice of doing comparison as our object of study in a

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specific place. Wittgenstein locates a rite practised in another society and tries to find the elementary problem that binds our life to this other as his way of comparing both. Thus he claims of the Rain King ceremony, described by Frazier of the Beltrane Festival in Scotland, that it expresses in that place something sinister much in the way that sharp words from a man or an arresting look does the same among us. He uses this “language game” of “finding something sinister” in outward expressions as a measure for both relating and differentiating these two places: what is common is this “game” and what is different is the shape that it takes here and there (Wittgenstein 1979, 14c). In this way, culture begins to identify the problem solving that a population faces in working out a relation between what is common (the game) and what is particular (the rite). Here, language or expression operates as a universal much like the influences in circulation that we earlier identified, and our anxiety, on the one hand, or the festival, on the other, expresses different local manifestations of the universal. Wittgenstein often claims to make a secret of our place transparent (that “finding” an expression sinister is done as a practice in ways that are revealing) by looking to the other place. So we might compare our place and the other place by viewing one place in terms of whatever we can identify as a shared problem, the assumption being that each place is engaging this problem (implicitly). The one place is implicitly all places, any place, because it is made to appear as a specific realization of a common problem. We would never want to say that comparison is being done in the way of the theorist, for whatever is done becomes comparative only by virtue of the theorist’s capacity to see it as two-in-one – that is, as a local expression of a (our) common problem. How, then, might we begin to situate the practice of doing comparison so that it becomes an object of comparison that permits us to speak of places in terms of the ways that they compare themselves? Since the practice of comparison involves both identifying and differentiating, we try to imagine occasions in collective life when engagements with identity and difference (with resemblances and differences) materialize around the question of place in ways that are visible, telling, and ambiguous.

th e s p e l l o f c o m p a r i n g p l a c e s On the one hand, we might ask if comparing places is seen to help or hurt us, to render us idle and superfluous as external observers or to provide us with an uplifting experience? Or perhaps it makes no difference, as some have said. Henry James (1958, 214–15) is a good spokesman for the view that links cosmopolitanism to the classic journey of self-discovery, the European road show called the Grand Tour:

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It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of neighbouring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially true if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite – that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none. To be a cosmopolite is not, I think, an ideal; the ideal should be to be a concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopolite is an accident, but one must make the best of it. If you have lived about, as the phrase is, you have lost that sense of the absoluteness and the sanctity of the habits of your fellow patriots which once made you so happy in the midst of them. You have seen that there are a great many patriae in the world, and that each of these is filled with excellent people for whom the local idiosyncracies are the only thing that is not rather barbarous. There comes a time when one set of customs, wherever it may be found, grows to seem to you about as provincial as another; and then I suppose it may be said of you that you are a cosmopolite. You have formed the habit of comparing, of looking for points of difference and of resemblance, for present and absent advantages, for the virtues that go with certain defects, and the defects that go with certain virtues. If this is poor work compared with the active practice, in the sphere to which a discriminating Providence has assigned you … there is nevertheless something to be said for it. It is good to think well of mankind and this, on the whole, a cosmopolite does … The consequence … is to initiate you into the merits of all peoples; to convince you that national virtues are numerous, though they may be very different, and to make downright preference really very hard … Compare then, I say, as often as the occasion presents itself. The result as regards any particular people, and as regards the human race at large, may be pronounced agreeable, and the process is both instructive and entertaining.

Here, becoming gracious, civilized, or open-minded marks the doing of such comparison in ways that ostensibly broaden horizons but do not yet put into question the being of the traveller because there does not seem to be the expectation of a loss as great as possible (Bataille 1985). Moreover, just who is this traveller and what is the relation to action and its limits exhibited in such journeying? If this moving about is both “instructive and entertaining,” James seems to put his finger on one feature of the everyday life of comparing places: its capacity to be done as painless “entertainment” and thus, perhaps, as movement through which we do not have to risk losing ourselves. Cosmopolitanism shows more, however, insofar as we treat it as something other than a quest for information or universalism. Comparison is not simply entertaining but often revealing and in ways that must suffer self-reflection and possibly modification. James hints at this in his description of how the encounter with the foreign contributes to

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an inflection of voice. It is not that we become exposed to an emancipatory relativism but that seeing how the other lives begins to sharpen our focus on our own life by showing how it is not developing in a way that it might. Thus it is less the relativity of the discovered customs that comes into view than the transparency of our absorption, the force of our limits and emphases that need to be “corrected” through our rethinking our own ways. This shape of cosmopolitanism is typically linked to modernity, but traces can be discerned in classical Greece as well. For example, Herodotus (see Bernadette 1969) personifies the practice in the figure of an envoy (historian?) who visits other places for the purpose of enlarging the horizon of his homeland and who addresses the peculiarity of other places as alternative ways of life, revealed in local distinctions between words and deeds, profane and sacred, modesty and publicity, nature and artifice, and conceptions of the best regime. These “customs” and the ways of life that they disclose become part of an indirect speech for challenging the limits of the home place. The lesson that the other place offers and the possible affront that it might present to local customs is concealed in stories that play as though reporting the speeches of other cities. Here, the practice of comparing cities exhibits its links both to challenging and “radicalizing” the home place and to the narratives that gather other stories for use in illustrating collisions between ways of life, collisions that might be instructive resources for the selfunderstanding of any place (if used with care and prudence). Although I would not think of the Greeks as cosmopolitan in this sense despite such foreshadowing, they serve to raise an important problem. For example, the names of each of the interlocutors in the Socratic dialogues are linked to their places in a manner that, if taken up, might begin to show this difference. Both Herodotus and Socrates in their ways focus upon how the place of the foreigner (the one from or in the other city) is expressed in the stories that they tell, but this interest in such self-representation does not lie in using them as a means for edification or for disclosing their curious customs per se. The Greek tries to situate the other speaker by reflecting upon how it represents that in which the Greek is interested but in a way that is peculiar. This seems similar to Wittgenstein’s advice to recover the common problem in the peculiar custom of another: the Beltrane Festival is seen as an image of our relation to the “sinister expression” of a man. This connection does not “broaden our horizon” as the enlightenment aspiration toward a universal “map” of other points of view. We do not learn to be relativistic from this “information.” The image illuminates something that we routinely do in a new light (our reaction to the “sinister expression” is seen anew, is revisited), and it illuminates our connectedness in

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a new way. The foreign rite expresses the conceit of a people in the same way as our innocuous response to the “sinister expression” of a man expresses our conceit. What is shown is the hubris of place, its conceit, and the peculiarity that it expresses as the inflexible and universal relation of any people to its own – that is, the universality of selflove (what we typically call “pride”). This collective amor propre is always comic when it appears mechanical, always showing the conceit of hubris, of individuality itself, as though it is an inflammatory tic or manner that is laughable. The Greek knows that the other could treat the place of Greece as laughable in the same way. What the Greek truly knows is that perspectives are laughable. The self-representation of the other in narrative is an opportunity for our narrative elaboration. The comedy of such comparison comes to view in the strict Bergsonian sense when the self-representation of the other mirrors for us both the conceit of the parochial, mechanical, or habitual in the way of a manner that is laughable and a sign of the inflexible totemic relation to our ways that all humankind shares. In this sense, the peculiarity of the other confirms our differences and, at the same time, makes reference to what Jean-Luc Nancy (1993) calls our “shared being.”

h o m e c o m i n g a n d t h e t w i n te r r o r s Notice how the ambiguity of the name of the city functions in the novel The Man without Qualities, where Robert Musil (1953, 3–4) offers a rumination on the occasion of his character Ulrich’s return to the city of Vienna after a long absence and how he is able to recognize its specificity in the face of the typical tumult of urban sound: “Even though the peculiar nature of this noise could not be defined, a man returning after years of absence would have known, with his eyes shut, that he was in that ancient capital and imperial city, Vienna. Cities can be recognized by their pace just as people can by their walk. Opening his eyes, he would recognize it all again by the way the general movement pulsed through the streets, far sooner than he would discover it from any particular detail.” If Vienna as an “ancient capital” and “imperial city” is not dead, it is only alive by grace of democracy, of the “general movement” and sounds of people. The impotence of aristocratic discrimination in terms of “particular detail” becomes vivid now through the vivacity of street life that attests to the crowd whose pulsing movement produced the sound that he can now recognize. The promise of the imperial city that it would be forever recognized in its particular details cannot survive the “general movement” of life itself. In fact, the ancient capital and imperial city can live as such, in this conceit, only by virtue of the people and

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their unruly democratic “noise” that dissolves all distinction and detail of pre-democratic distinguishing but in ways that keep its name alive. This “noise,” neither external nor disruptive, is part of the city, its interval between distinctions in the way that communication theory speaks of the absorption of extenuating circumstances as the digestion of influences. The general movement and noise of the people, materializing in the crowd that pulses through its streets, redeems Vienna from the death that seemed its fate. Yet, if Ulrich can recognize the city in this noise, the sounds of the people must have existed prior to the decline of the ancient city. The ancient capital Vienna must have included, along with its imperial classifications and hubris, some anticipation of the “peculiar nature of this noise” in order for Ulrich to recognize it (to come upon it as if for the second time). Even more, the peculiarity of this noise recognized to be Vienna might just be a function of how the ancient capital and imperial city worked to separate itself from such a context, from such an understanding of itself. That is, it might never have been a homogeneous ancient city but a city only appearing as one in such a way, but also different (one and many, the same and the other), riddled with the stirrings of diversity, which, although latent and accessible to Ulrich, were to become manifest later. The name of the city must have always pointed to a tension that was implicit and seen but unnoticed in its apparent unity. This division inherent in the category (in the name) is reproduced in the tumultuous limits of self-understanding, for just as the ancient capital struggled with the “noise” of indeterminacy, with the “general movement” and life of its own living language as it sought to separate itself from itself, as it sought to divide and reconcile the relation of its name to its living claim, the modern city now distinguishes such stirrings as both indefinable and recognizable. If the stirrings of democracy were implicit in the pre-democratic city as a sign of what was to come, these stirrings are suffered in the modern city of Vienna through the sign of this tumult that has left its scar. These stirrings, which Ulrich now recognizes again as Vienna, are possible to hear because they were heard before as the undeveloped, implicit, and abstract pulse of the collective life of the ancient capital and imperial city. These stirrings begin to point to the peculiar nature of Vienna: “So no special significance should be attached to the name of the city. Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence in between … of paved ways and wilderness, of one great rhythmic throb and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms, and as a whole resembling a seething, bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of the solid material of buildings, laws, regulations, and historical traditions” (Musil 1953, 4).

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The city is registered in ways that seem to exceed both the conceptual and the empirical. Conceptually, its comparability to all other large cities makes it indistinguishable because it cannot be recognized by its particular qualities or specific details. The limits of the concept suggest that the city is recognizable in spite of what it shares or its comparability. On the other hand, we do not seem to require the capacities of sight to identify the city as individual, for even in the absence of sight (and in the absence of a concept of “city”) anyone who has been intimate with the city can recognize that he is in Vienna. The name of the city relates all who share it, establishing their relatedness by virtue of the name. Having lived in a place deeply affects how we encounter it because in some way the experience has been imprinted as an unshakeable part of the person, which, although apparently lost, still leaves traces or remains. It is as though the fundamental experience of living in a city leaves a scar. Yet even if Vienna can be distinguished by its “pace,” the text concedes how this quality (this distinctiveness) is, in a sense, shared with all cities. That in some way the city is recognizable even to a blind man in spite of its comparability to other cities causes us to ask how the blind man manages to pick out Vienna from all of the others? This is to say that one who cannot see can still recognize the city in two ways at once: as comparable to all big cities and as the particular and unique place that it is felt to be. If such a one does not need vision, neither does he seem to require “concepts” and the general qualities or aspects upon which they focus (“the particular detail”). It is the very indeterminacy of the city – the way that its special name and language remain ambiguous, thus maintaining the city in this ambiguity – that calls out to anyone and everyone to determine what it is such as it is. The name of the city strikes all who share it and who are related to one another by virtue of it with the scar of an irrevocable intimacy that persists as though a reflection shadowing their bodily movement. The qualities of the ancient city do not help one such as Ulrich to know who or where he is. These qualities, as though reputed by old Vienna of itself, stand as the mortal remains of its absolutism and of the “consensus” that this spell evoked. In response to such aristocratic distinguishing, the “stirrings” of old Vienna were part of the sound of the common desire to see for oneself, to test the authority of what is reputed to be by the empiricism of moving about and seeing for oneself other cities of the world. It is necessary and desirable to leave the old city and to see for oneself. These stirrings, part of the worldly movement of free spirits, belong to the city as much as every one of its reputed “qualities.” Yet Ulrich notes that as he sees for himself the comparable big cities of the world, his vision becomes blurred almost like that of a blind man.

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The fear of being blinded by the sun of the ancient city and its absolutism makes it necessary for those like Ulrich to see for themselves everything to be seen including the cities of the world but in ways that now risk blinding him to the difference that is Vienna. This is the risk and cost of “cosmopolitanism.” The name of the city has no special significance if its comparability to all other big cities makes it look the same: the city resembles a cadaver. Yet in the same breath, Ulrich concedes that even one without vision can recognize this city. Thus the legibility of the city exceeds vision, for the city is more than a visual object (just as the city is more than a “concept” as a composite of “qualities”). The city is a haptic phenomenon. If the city is dead or invisible, how do we come to see it as though for the second time? This question invites the aporia that physiognomy might begin to address, the problem of approaching the peculiar nature of the city (what Ulrich calls its “pace”). The materiality of the city exceeds both the rational and the empirical in the way that the “pulsating movement” and “rhythmic throb” of the place inscribes itself upon the subject. Just as the influences of the dead inscribe themselves upon us in ways that we are not free to leave behind without being scarred by these remains, the irrevocable influence of our being made as human in a place persists even as we become unmade. Living decisively in the city amounts to being made in the city and thus to being in the way that the city makes, to being in the mould of the poesies of the place. It is no accident that Musil uses music as his image for the primordial structure of emplacement. The power of place, analogous to how rhythm is said to write itself upon the soul in the idiom of Plato’s Republic, is brought to life in the figure of the body, in the figure of reciprocal corporeal excitation through which we are condemned to imitate the place because we can escape its deadliness only through the very gesture of life that it offers, a gesture whose mortal remains are traced in music. Our mimetic gestures are inevitably distorted in ways proportionate to the manner in which a specific city distorts the idea of the city-in-general. If every place bears the mark of the labour of negation in separating itself from its common time (from all other cities), those who live in the city must still bear the mark of such distancing even as they move around the world (in the same way that children inherit the mark of their parents’ excess). More than this, living in the place requires that we live in its space of separation from the others and in our space of distance from this very gesture. This two-sidedness, itself a scar, remains as we attempt to redeem the universality of the city just as it works to achieve its separation: in defending ourselves from the separation itself (in separating ourselves from the irrevocable excess of the city’s genius), we can still remain only one of the city’s mortal traces,

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one of its offspring. Musil suggests that the poesies of the city, and its visible trace in the scar that it leaves upon its subject, is bound up with its own ways of inducing the one whom it makes to need to escape from the limits of its very making. As in the case of mimetic desire, the city functions as both our ground and rival (we imitate it and seek to separate ourselves from this resemblance, often by seeking to destroy the very tie). This impersonal force beyond conceptualization and sensory discrimination seems much like Durkheim’s (1912, 228) conception of mana as the elemental and “original matter out of which have been constructed those beings of every sort which the religions of all time have consecrated and adored.” It is the pulsating movement of the city that makes it recognizable, even more than any “particular detail.” It is important to see that Ulrich had been in Vienna and now, upon return, brings it to life again. That is, movement among cities might lead not only to the death of the name of Vienna for the one who has lived there, but also to the death of this wanderer himself. That is, if the “peculiar nature” of the city is part of the one who was made there, then such a peculiarity is part of the peculiar nature of such a wanderer, part of Ulrich himself. The identity or peculiarity of the person includes the peculiarity of the city (just as the peculiarity of the city includes the mass of peculiarities of all who have decisively passed through and made it their own). We cannot escape the curse of the incorrigible intimacy of our city as a fate empowering us to both love and hate it, hating its peculiarity enough to need to leave and loving its sovereignty enough to need to return. The homecoming remains crucial since if the name of Vienna is dead for him, he might truly be a dead man. And if the city is dead for him, it might be a city dead in its way. Death and renewal haunt the homecoming. The homecoming raises the spectre of the twin terrors of such movement among places: on the one hand, he might fail to recognize Vienna, while on the other hand, Vienna might fail to recognize him. He might fail the test of the homecoming because Vienna could appear to him like any other city that he has visited. He might fail the test of the homecoming because his movement may have caused him to lose himself to the other places of the world, never to recognize Vienna again. The city is saved by its peculiar expression that exceeds concept and vision through its uncanny, rhythmic sonic pulse. The “not” that poisons epistemic discourse (Rosen 1987) makes reference to this register of indeterminacy haunting speech as the primordial musicality of its violent (dis)emplacement. Of this primary music written on the soul, as Plato put it, we might say with Durkheim (1912, 229–30): “Those who represent it most clearly in a concrete and visible form, think of it, at the same time, as an abstract power which cannot be defined except by

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its own efficacy, or as a force spread out in space and which is contained, at least in part, in each of its effects.”

emplacement Ulrich suggests that the name of a city carries no weight. But this cannot be true since, as he says, even a blind man can recognize the city named Vienna. Ulrich is right on both scores, for if Vienna is truly similar to all big cities with its arbitrary name, it remains peculiar enough for the blind man to know it for what it is. The blind man, most likely to confuse Vienna on this score, still does not say that he is anywhere; he knows that he is in the place named Vienna. Vienna remains peculiar in the way that those tested by the generality of the city can still see it for who it is and in the way that those tested by the absence of sight can still see it for who it is. The city is magical in this sense: its sensuality can overcome the force of viewing. Perhaps the name of the city has significance only for those who are peculiar in its way, those who are peculiar enough not to need anything more than what they ever had. The idea of comparison is irretrievably connected to emplacement, for location is always resonant: it is not only being here rather than there, but being here rather than existing here. That is, the connection between being and place or between emplacement and a manner of being makes place less a matter of geography than of a physiognomy that can begin to disclose the distortion (of a place, a person) that is essential to its nature (Diderot 1995). Whether we are dealing with cities or persons, each is emplaced and shaped in the mould of peculiar influences, betraying these influences as though they are a stigma. Emplacement speaks to the issue of how our separation collects us and how our collectivization remains a mark of distinction. Diderot’s (1995, 192) comparison of looking at paintings with inquiry into nature makes it possible to see any outcome or result as the materialization of peculiarity intrinsic to a manner of being: “A crooked nose in nature does not offend because everything is of a piece. One arrives at this deformity by way of little adjacent alterations that sustain and redeem it.” In other words, instead of prejudging the deformity as anything other than what it seems to be as the deformity that it is, start with the deformity as though it is a puzzle that invites us to find the “little adjacent alterations” sustaining and redeeming it. Beginning with the identity of a place not abstractly as though we are searching for a conceptual composite but as though the irregularity that it brings to view for us (its “crooked nose”) invites inquiry into the deformity itself. Treat every place as though the problem of its “identity” is the secret of its crooked nose.

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Montreal is not simply a place different from Toronto, but a manner of being. These “little adjacent alterations that sustain and redeem” the city seem to make reference to a history that is somewhat like poesis as a kind of formative process integral to its name. The formative process, as poesis, is not uniform and linear but an irregular trajectory marked by contingencies, ruptures, and discordances that extend and perpetuate the persistence of the name in the circumstances that disrupt it. The name remains as the voice that digests the extenuating circumstances of influences. These “little adjacent alterations” mark the city’s preservation of itself as something other than these influences as it maintains itself in these influences and retains these influences in itself as a sign of appropriation. In the struggle with its generality as a city, Montreal makes throughout its history “little adjacent alterations” in the very notion of a city, still sustaining and redeeming this notion in its distorted shape as the city that it is.

conclusion Recalling Simmel’s notion that the inarticulate “core” of individuality that haunts us as secret and “incomplete” remains throughout a life, we begin to understand the conception of the soul and the imperativeness of an animistic relation to the self and the other, to the city or to the person, and to each and every distinction that we make. The remains of this claim to distinctiveness haunting us as a kind of covert hubris, persisting as both incomplete and sustained in “little adjacent alterations,” condenses and displaces itself as a “core” inscribed in the body, appearing as “normative” and binding, almost as a caricature, the conceit of place invariably showing itself in the aura of its physiognomy. If habit is the mechanization of self-feeling in Hegel (1971, 139– 40), emplacement beginning to appear as such habituation defends itself from the anxiety of “incompleteness” produced by the excess of individuality and its demands upon us to dispose of the struggle between the general and the particular, the ambiguity persisting in the conceit, the bias, and the hubris of “little adjacent alterations” that are both prideful and parochial displacements of the self-presentation of a city. Ultimately, the places to which we have been and the places that we want to be become parts of our biography, an intimate archive of telling or passing moments, of missed opportunities, of very slight indications of how much we feel that we have made of ourselves or of how little, of reveries of loss and longing, of detail that makes up at any present moment what we are to ourselves and how we might appear in the world. Here, the idea of biography as something other than an essentialist fiction, as ongoing work in progress, points to the “peculiar nature” or

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“peculiar expression” of the person in ways that include the frustration of eternal happiness. The phenomenology of such “incompleteness” often appears in the separation of body and soul: “the soul is what is best and most profound in ourselves, and the pre-eminent part of our being; yet it is also a passing guest which comes from the outside, which leads in us an existence distinct from that of the body, and which one day should regain its entire independence” (Durkheim 1912, 283). If, as Durkheim suggests, the typical interpretation of lives describes the body and soul of each and all as travelling partners who journey together and apart, perhaps controlled by the promissory vision of a redemptive reconciliation at some point, passages through different places in a life can be understood as intimations of the elemental moving force of the desire for self-understanding in the life of any one person. For all persons alike, each trajectory can mark the convoluted and peculiar history of the desiring psyche. Simmel might say that it is this “incompleteness” that accompanies us through life as a problem to solve, a problem exacerbated and tested by conditions of generality that exaggerate the vexatious division as a matter always needing to be put to rest. Home is the place of self- recognition where, in putting to rest the interpretive conundrums released by the incompleteness of our self-understanding, we acknowledge our distortion as the “something other” that belongs to us. That is, we belong at home because home is the place where we must acknowledge who we are, our peculiarity, in a way that needs to accept it as it is. Need we say at this point that comparing places always occurs as part of this search, a process of “seeing resemblances and differences” between home and other places, part of the impossible search for settlement, to settle the problem of individuality in this sense? Just as such a life includes these meaningful passages, so does the life of a civilization name the places that mean most, whether as destinations or sites of critical occasions, at which collective energies invariably materialize as marks of history. This is to say that just as persons are collections of their passages through places over time (in the way that any person could be marked by the story of such passages), so, too, is a civilization a “peculiar expression” of the circulation of persons, and their stories, whose movement marks its cities, stigmatzing them in a way analogous to the marking of persons by the cities that they endure and pass through. The peculiarity of the city is sustained by the spirit of ancestors who have passed through: “The sentiments of veneration which they inspire … are common to the whole tribe … It is to them that men ascribe all that is most esteemed in the … tribal civilization” (Durkheim 1912, 321). Each place, appearing as both body

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and soul, as a site for the passage of spirits, is in its special and peculiar way both a graveyard and an occasion for prosopopeia. This narrativeness of both places and persons is an undeveloped, implicit, and abstract feature of places and persons as stories always remaining to be told. So the story of any one place, in part, is the story of those who have meaningfully passed through it, just as the story of any one person, in part, is the story of the places that she or he has meaningfully passed through. In these ways, the comparison of places joins stories of such reciprocal markings, of people by places and places by people, in ways that dramatically centre places as loci of stigmatization in terms of those whom they have marked (subjected) and those by whom they have been marked (subjected to), and that are capable of isolating the peculiarity of any one place as a collective physiognomy, the musical ground of the “general movement” of the city.

references Abu-Lugod, Janet. 1999. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. 1984. Rabelais and His World. 1st Midland Book ed. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Trans. Alan Steohl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1978. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. with an “Introduction” by Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books. Bernadette, Seth. 1969. Herodotean Inquiries. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Blanchot, Mauricem. 1982. The Space of Literature. Trans. with an “Introduction” by Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Blum, Alan. 2003. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Body-Gendrot, Sophie, 2000. The Social Control of Cities? A Comparative Perspective. Maiden, ma: Blackwell. Bonner, Kieran. 2002. “Understanding Placemaking: Economics, Politics and Everyday Life in the Culture of Cities. Canadian Journal of Urban Research 11, no. 1: 1–17. Brady, Erik, and Debbie Howlett. 1996. “Ballpark Construction’s Booming Cost to Hit $9 Billion by Decade’s End, but Who’s Paying for It?” USA Today, 6 September, 14C. Cavell, Stanley. 1995. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Oxford, uk, and Cambridge, ma: Blackwell.

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City of Toronto. 2001. The Creative City: A Workprint. Toronto: City of Toronto, Cultural Affairs Division, April. Deleuze, Giles. 1985. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1954. Democracy in America. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books. Diderot, Denis. 1995. Diderot on Art: The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting. Ed. and trans. John Goodman. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1938. The Rules of Sociological Method. 8th ed. Trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John H. Mueller. Ed. George E.G. Caitlin. Chicago, il: University of Chicago Press. – 1912. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. Reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1961. Friedman, Thomas. 1999. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books. Gans, Eric. 1985. The End of Culture. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Girard, Rene. 1965. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Hegel, G.W. 1892. The Logic. 2nd ed. Trans. William Wallace. London: Oxford University Press. – 1971. The Philosophy of Mind. 1894. Trans. William Wallace. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jacobs, Jane. 1970. The Economy of Cities. New York: Vintage. James, Henry. 1958. The Art of Travel. Ed. M. Zabel. Garden City, ny: Doubleday and Anchor Books. Kaban Elif. 1996. “Survey Ranks Vancouver, Toronto as Best Cities: Places Ranked by Geneva Group for Expatriates.” Toronto Star, 11 November, C3. Macfarlane, David. 2002. “Toronto Has Moved by Degree Closer to Paris.” Globe and Mail, 30 September, R3. Matthiessen, W., A. Winkel Schwartz, and S. Find. 2002. “The Top Level Global Research System, 1997–1999: Centers, Networks and Nodality.” Urban Studies 39, nos 5–6: 903–27. Morson, Gary Saul. 2003. “Narrativeness.” New Literary History 4, no. 1: 59–73. Musil, Robert. 1965. The Man without Qualities. New York: Capricorn Books. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Birth to Presence. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, Fredrich. 1967. The Use of History. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Ovid. 1955. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Trans. Mary M. Innes. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.

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Payne, Micheal. 1995. “Introduction.” In Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, 1–11. Oxford, uk, and Cambridge, ma: Blackwell. Rancierre, Jacques. 1994. “Discovering New Worlds: Politics of Travel and Metaphors.” In David Robertson et al., eds, Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, 29–37. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rosen, Stanley. 1987. Hermeneutics as Politics. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Royson, James. 2001. “The Five Days That Can Change Toronto Forever.” Toronto Star, 3 March, A1. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Vols 1 and 2. Ed. Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell. Simmel, Georg. 1971. “The Problem of Sociology.” In Donald Levine, ed., On Individuality and Social Forms, 23–36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stouffer, Samuel A. 1950. “Some Observations on Study Design.” The American Journal of Sociology 55, no. 4: 355–61. Tiffany, Daniel. 1995. Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press. Trillin, Calvin. 2001. “Letter from Canada.” The New Yorker, 17 December, 62. Vico, Giambatista. 1970. The New Science of Giambatista Vico. Trans. Thomas E. Bergin and Max Fisch. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. 2nd ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. – 1965. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review 74, no. 1: 3–12. – 1979. “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough.” Trans. A.C. Miles and Rush Rhees. The Human World 3: 28–41.

2 Comparing the Cultures of Cities Epistemological Perspectives on the Concept of Metropolis from the Cultural Sciences JEAN-FRANÇOIS CÔTÉ

In his book The Culture of Cities, published in 1940, Lewis Mumford proposed to define the whole spectrum of the historical development of cities that led culture to take the form of civilization – a term that synthetized for him the apex of human development, the latter being also threatened with decay under its contemporary situation in the twentieth century. In fact, although he slightly reinterpreted Patrick Geddes’s vision of cities as comprising different types according to an evolutionary order within an apparent “biological-organismic” scheme, to which he added a social and cultural dimension, Mumford situated the contemporary world-cities as presenting the symptoms that appear in the form of the “megalopolis,” this being precisely for him the first stage of the decay of civilization.1 Mumford also envisioned, on the other hand, the possibility of a renewal of the culture of cities (i.e., of the active cultivation of cities) that would counteract this progression toward decay, putting all his trust, then, in an emerging “bio-technic” culture that would reconcile both the natural and the social dimensions of life. The task that remains in understanding the culture of cities today, I would argue, is not so much to evaluate whether contemporary culture corresponds to this “bio-technic” order called for by Mumford (in fact, one could propose that cybernetics – and “cybercities” – have become today the best representation of such an order, particularly in their systemic applications to social life) or whether the evolution of contemporary cities has further “progressed” in the other stages of decay, but to evaluate how the culture of cities can be (re)defined according to a different perspective that allows for the recognition of a different symbolization of things. The perspective, here, would be to think about cities in radical cultural terms.

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The issue is not an easy one to solve. In a recent and very ambitious book that also tries to envision the whole spectrum of the evolution of cities in history, Edward W. Soja proposes to look at the problematic of the “postmetropolis” in such a way that we are led to think that the example of Los Angeles, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, is the model of development for contemporary cities; while exploding over the limits of the prior “metropolis” that it embodied until the 1970s, the new type of urbanization produced in Los Angeles since then is shown to carry on the idea of a new revolutionary order that requires a new understanding of “the spatiality of human life as it is simultaneously perceived, conceived and lived” (Soja 2000, 351, original emphasis). While generally trying to cope with the development of a “postmodern culture” reflected primarily in the forms of life in contemporary cities as well as in the conceptual representations of them, Soja stresses the exemplary case both of Los Angeles and of the “Los Angeles School” of urban studies, which is thought to show the direction of our future, within an apparent inevitable scheme of self-destruction, and he does so without any conceptual way of interpreting the evolution of this situation, even in a Mumfordian sense of the “megalopolis,” except in the way that the idea of the “metropolis” is left behind by our contemporary developments, while general decay lies ahead.2 From Mumford to Soja, then, the following questions are at stake: What is the type of city involved in the contemporary development of cities? Or, in other words, is the metropolis really outdated as a typical form of city life nowadays? And how and why could such a type (whether called postmetropolis, megalopolis, or otherwise) appear to lead the historical evolution of cities in the near future? To this we could add: to what extent can we identify with this evolution of the culture of cities? And for our present purposes, we could also ask: how can analyses such as these apply to cities like Toronto and Montreal? Although these questions ask for a long and steady course of research and investigation of a theoretical and empirical nature, I will suggest instead that we turn here to the epistemological dimension of things, focusing as a starting point on the issue of comparative studies. This will slightly change the questions that we address to the issue, focusing reflexively on the cultural dimension of things in asking: How can we take the measure of culture in contemporary cities? How does this culture inform us about city life, the relations between cultural life forms and the city, the state of civility, and the actual state of civilization? And how can we compare not only the culture of our cities, but the culture of cities in general, as it appears through both its present state and in the course of a historical evolution? What are the concepts involved in such an inquiry, and how do authors deal with these issues? These questions are significant for contemporary studies of our city life, as the latter also means something for the development of our present state of civilization.

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Looking at the epistemological dimension requires that we look only indirectly at cities, focusing our attention instead on the conditions of possibility of looking at them. Thus, while I talk of comparisons, or comparing cities, I do not talk here primarily about cities as such but about scholars who talk about cities and about theories and concepts that enable them to do so. In other words, I talk about the theory of knowledge involved in the contemporary discourses of/on cities. Epistemological issues such as this stand at the very beginning of any inquiry, from the moment one reflects on the problems of knowing any thing or object that is given beyond our “immediate” acquaintance of it. And here, in addition to this cognitive dimension, one could refer to other dimensions such as the normative or ethical and the expressive or aesthetical, and one could add any other concern about the “power” to speak, the “legitimacy” of speech, and so forth – which are issues that we can leave aside for now. At the moment, I propose to deal instead with a more “fundamental” and “reflexive” issue, strictly tied to the symbolization of the culture of cities: how can one talk about the city in a comparative perspective, and how can one compare cities? According to which epistemological principles can we envision the formulation of the discourses on the culture of cities? The immediate response that I provide to these questions is informed by the broader dialogue about cities that has been formed as part of our contemporary concern; thus this dialogue belongs to a very long theoretical history but leads to specific and concrete analytical practices. Cities are what they are today by embodying the whole spectrum of the historical development that led to their contemporary form, yet the latter is still in the making and will never be definitely closed. This “openness” of cities provides the occasion for discussions. The transformations of the cities essentially belong to their capacity to invent new forms of expressions of their cultural life, based on their capacity to act as the precise location of dialogical practices – in which the analyses of cities themselves participate. Cities, since their very inception, have been the places for putting into practices dialogues, both practical and theoretical, that involve the development of their characters and characteristics; in another way, cities are also in dialogue with each other, and this dialogue involves their respective characteristics and characters that inform the theoretical discourse about them. In other words, cities embody, each in their own time and place, the cultural practices that also belong to the wider history of civilization, and this should be reflected in the analytical discourses about the cities. In this respect, the way that cities create the space-time limits of these cultural practices make the cities the main “chronotopes” of our times – that is, the main “space-time” of representation of the human experience of

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our contemporary life. And in saying this, I am arguing that analysis should actively participate in the culture of cities. In using the notion of “chronotope” to refer to the cultural life of the city, I am proposing that the way Mikhail Bakhtin (1978) introduced and developed this notion makes it easy to link it to the cultural-sciences approach and, more specifically, to apply it to the study of the dynamics of any cultural life form.3 The essential aspect of Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope is that, being based on the representation of space-time human relations, it becomes the embodiment of a specific symbolic form that characterizes a particular socio-historical context or experience, but also, and still as a symbolic form considered in its very plasticity, the chronotope is being trans-formed from one context to another – the way that a novel acts both as a representation of something specific while participating in the history of literature. In this respect, there is a renewal of forms that accompany any and all cultural practices, based on past or ancient forms that are being reproduced in different socio-historical contexts. And cities do belong to this process of transformations of symbolic forms. Indeed, whereas the emphasis is put, for Bakhtin, on the historical evolution of the novel, and as far as he broadly followed the lines of Ernst Cassirer’s (1953) study of the philosophy of symbolic forms, any symbolic form can be read more or less the same way and according to similar theoretical principles. Cities in themselves are thus considered here primarily as symbolic forms, and they participate in their reproduction as symbolic forms through their own transformations (see Brandist 1997; Côté 2000). The notion of chronotope embodies, here, something not unlike Gadamer’s idea of “historical efficiency” (Wirkungsgeschichte), developed in his hermeneutic theory, since it supposes that any cultural expression belongs to a cultural tradition that it carries along in forms, sometimes in unexpected or even contradictory ways.4 An interpretation of the culture of cities is possible, then, when we take into account how cities develop in reinventing the tradition of city life according to the symbolic forms of their expressions. The chronotope is not tied to any form of historicism that would define its ultimate achievement but is left open to renewal as the latter takes shape in any cultural context. We can thus see how this applies to the culture of cities: in themselves, cities are chronotopes since they always represent the definition of specific space-time human relationships of some sort, presented in some kind of conflicting (or dialectical) unity that elapses in historical time, thereby producing and reproducing cultural manifestations; cities always present meaningful representations of these relationships in the manifold experience that they offer for the development of human relationships, and this “manifoldedness” is being dynamically formed and transformed, in its unlimited versions, in any city that develops in

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changed and changing socio-historical contexts.5 At the same time, and to the extent that – from the very first cities that we can think of to our contemporary types of metropolises – this experience varies extensively in its signification, the chronotope of the city is transformed in many ways, each of them embodying the particular type of socio-historical expression to which it corresponds. In this perspective, even the “megalopolis” would reproduce the characteristics of the metropolis, and all that remains to see is to what extent and according to which forms this reproduction occurs and how the transformations that happen on this occasion reintroduce the essential meaning of its former embodiment. This is what enables us to talk about the culture of cities and about comparison.

c o m pa r i s o n Comparison has first to do with measure. Measuring things (ourselves included) – although not exactly or not only in a mathematical fashion (which is also a possibility)6 – is what gives comparison its usual place in our lives, and it is therefore a very important part of our judgment. Comparison is a fundamental issue for sciences in general since it deals not only with “measures” (be they quantitative or qualitative), but also with matters of identity and difference (these two terms having of course a highly reciprocal relation: you cannot talk about identity without implying difference, and conversely you cannot talk about difference without implying identity). If sciences use comparison, or if scientific discourse has to do, as one of its main tasks, with comparison, it is simply because when two phenomena are the same, they may belong to a “class” or “category” of phenomena, they may embody a specific “type” of phenomena, and they may even represent the manifestations of some “principles,” or “laws,” according to which you can infer a general identity for these particular phenomena. Comparison then brings something out (a certain relation, we could say) that did not exist between things in themselves; a certain knowledge about what is essential to these things is thus constituted through the practice of comparison (see Hegel 1970, 376–7, 551–2). Saying, for instance, that Montreal and Toronto are “metropolises” already engages judgment on a certain level of revealing their “nature” – that is, their type and their evolutionary stage and to some extent the cultural practices one should find there – since a “metropolis,” in the proper sense of the word (“mother-city”), should be seen as a point of reference, or even as the point of origin, of a cultural milieu.7 And it is from there that we can try to focus on some of their specific aspects in order to deepen the comparison between them. I should add that comparison, here, is as much about cities conceived as metropolises as it is about “culture,” and it thus supposes that beyond

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the differences implied in the practices that one finds in a city, there is also something common to everyone in a city and even to cities in general – be it only the multiple social and human relations that constitute them (Blum 2003, ch. 1). “Culture,” here, means something that belongs to any city, but as a “mean of comparison,” it is also in a way “external” to cities as such – and for this reason, “wider,” as a measure, than any particular content of any city and even of all cities altogether.8 As a preliminary definition of culture, I would then propose that we start with the idea of “meaning,” as it is always embedded in forms (symbolic forms of expressions, cultural life forms, practices, discourses, representations, etc.) and as it is always fundamentally animated by a “dialectical movement” that posits and negates at the same time. This dialectical process, which is the very basis of meaning as such, appears then to be what is embodied in “culture” in general; symbolic forms of expressions always refer to their object in this dialectical way since, as symbolic forms, they are not what they are (i.e., the objects that they represent) and since they are what they are not (i.e., representations of their objects). This can highlight the idea that culture can be both different and similar, or common, in different cities. Yet this does not solve the problem of comparison; rather, it adds more questions to the matter. Indeed, if there is such a diversity of meanings in practices, how can you envision a unity of some kind? If a city is crowded with different, conflicting, and even contradictory meanings, as we generally believe it is, and rightly so, how do you refer to the identity of this city as a whole? How can a city have “a” meaning? Or again, how do you synthesize this diversity into a unity of meaning? Moreover, is this unity not a prerequisite for the very possibility of comparing two (or more) cities? Questions such as these require that we go in the direction of the theory of knowledge that has developed arguments to help clarify the issues at stake.9 In other words, before saying anything of the comparison between the metropolitan character of Montreal and Toronto in terms of the culture of cities that they both embody in their common as well as in their respective ways, we should pay attention to the very possibility of defining in which terms we can do so since there are many aspects or dimensions of things to be dealt with and many perspectives to be taken into account.

heinrich rickert’s distinction between natural sciences and cultural sciences A good – in fact, necessary – starting point for outlining the main epistemological questions involved in comparison is Heinrich Rickert’s Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, originally published in 1899 but republished several times since then.10 In this book, Rickert

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establishes a difference between cultural sciences and natural sciences from the point of view of their objects, their methods, and their respective aims. Very briefly summarized, Rickert’s argument is that natural sciences will try to generalize their observations of various phenomena in order to be able to establish a “law” for their development; this “law,” or theory, will be interested in the particular cases only to the extent that they “fit into” the theory – and if they don’t, this means that the theory is problematic and needs to be reformulated. On the other hand, and in an opposite manner, cultural sciences are more interested in particular cases since it is these particular cases that count; a general “law” of development would not apply to cultural phenomena since the particularity of each phenomenon is, in itself, sufficient to establish its identity.11 Rickert states that this way of defining both the specific and respective aims of cultural sciences and of natural sciences presents itself of course as a limit: natural sciences to a certain extent are interested in the particularity of a case (since, according to them, theory can be formulated and revised), whereas cultural sciences are to a certain extent interested in generalizing (since they can then “typify,” “discover laws,” “formulate principles,” or as I would rather have it, simply “theorize”), but most of the time, their work follows the respective paths indicated above. The reason for this is quite obvious: each works and thinks according to its respective object. For the natural sciences, the particularity of this singular object is of little importance (one animal being like any other one of its kind, one planet, one electron, etc.),12 whereas for the cultural sciences, it is on the contrary the particularity of a case, as an “event,” that makes it what it is (a person, a social situation, a historical event, a cultural meaning, etc.). This particularity is never entirely reproducible, and its uniqueness is what matters. Cultural sciences in this sense are interested in particular cases because of the specific meaning that is attached to them. This meaning is what differentiates one case from the other, giving it thereby its own identity, and this particularity is embodied in what is then called an individuality (which can be of a personal, social, cultural, or historical kind – we will return to this point later). For Rickert, individuality does not exist in the natural sciences – rather, the latter have to do only with “singularity,” not with individuality properly speaking. In this respect, cultural sciences are committed to an idiographic method, whereas natural sciences are committed to a nomothetic method. To give a concrete example of how this translates into our own preoccupations with the study of cities: the Chicago School provided, in its classical and systematic work on the city, a model for the development of cities that assimilates it to an ecological “law” – that is, makes the city a

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“natural” phenomenon that explains both its external growth and form (as an “organism” in relation to its environment) and its internal life, seen as a balance between “struggles” and “equilibrium” that animate its main groups of people as they define their own “living space” within it (in the various neighbourhoods, fields of activities, cycles of life in generations, urban movements, etc.).13 Robert Park, as the leading theorist of this approach (together with Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth) provides a view of urban phenomena (growth of the city, neighbourhoods, juvenile delinquency, community organization, etc.) that fits them into this model. One can say that this kind of approach – which was developed in the 1920s, drawing quite extensively on an almost Darwinian “law of natural evolution and adaptation” (although it was also much more strongly inspired by Eugenius Warming’s concept of ecology and its ideas of equilibrium and interdependence, instead of competition) – is outdated today, but one will notice that sometimes, in fact, only the terminology has changed. Indeed, most of the studies of cities that we find today refer to a model of development that belongs to political economy, where we encounter the same kind of vocabularies, such as “adaptation” of cities to their changing environment, cities “struggling to position themselves” in the world economy, or cities internal “fast turnover” (not of plant varieties, but of uses of certain areas, reached by gentrification, for example, or by revitalization of downtown by “spectacularization”) – the “law of evolution” involved here being that of capitalistic interest. In other words, the “laws” of capitalism (given apparently as our new “nature”) and of political economy (given as its proper “science”) are what apply (or are applied) to the city in such a way that the city will follow, for instance, the principles of “flexible accumulation” for the development of its external forms and its internal life. The current ideologies that talk about cities nowadays are often deeply influenced by such views, but sometimes even the critical discourse does not escape them – and here I have to refer only to famous works such as David Harvey’s The Urban Experience and The Condition of Postmodernity or Sharon Zukin’s The Cultures of Cities to hopefully make my point very clear.14 Even though intended to be critical, political economy, when covering the study of cities, can be as positivistic as natural sciences, especially when it is applied without a reflexive account of historical development in the analytical works that it develops. I could add that the essential aspect of works of this kind is that they emphasize more than anything else the dimension of space in their analysis without trying to look for the particularity of the cases to which they refer – in terms of time, or better, of historical time.15 On the other hand, one also finds approaches that deal with the city according to an idiographic method, paying attention not to the

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“laws” of development of cities but to the case of a particular city. Any monographic study that we can think of that deals with the history of a particular city does so, but we have specific sociological examples that are particularly interesting, such as Walter Benjamin’s Paris, capitale du XIXe siècle. In this study, Benjamin is interested in how some very specific dimensions of Parisian life in the mid-nineteenth century appeared to define a particular state of things, reflected in the characteristics of the city life of the time and place (the passages, the arcades, etc.); these characteristics, as Benjamin comes to acknowledge, are reflected in the general cultural life of Paris, as its own identity or personality of the times – as they were also more or less synthesized in Baudelaire’s notion of modernité. Paris, here, becomes the “most significant” place of the nineteenth century in Europe; it epitomizes Western modernité, the particular place where the zeitgeist manifests itself. Here, what you have is a study that concentrates on the particularity of a city in its precise spatial and temporal locations; attention is given not so much to the “law” of this development as to the particularities of the “case” that makes it so significant. Other examples of this idiographic approach include Siegfried Kracauer’s microstudies of Berlin in the 1920s (see Lacelle 2000), or even, and more recently, Mike Davis’s (1990) study of Los Angeles in City of Quartz, or again, Thomas Bender’s (2002) study of New York city. If anything, we could maintain here that the dimension of time (in the sense both of the “present state of things” and of “evolution,” whether actual or historical) becomes the central preoccupation of analysis, centred on the particularity of a case. We can also see, from there, how a “particular case” can be made into a “general law,” a process that becomes possible when we are able to locate a case’s specific characteristics that can be universalized in such a way that we are witnessing the formation of a type – that is, the embodied essentiality of a phenomenon that can be reproduced – in the way that Edward W. Soja tries to do with Los Angeles. In this respect, the city of Los Angeles would come to represent its own time, the essence of “postmodernity,” as a cultural phenomenon that would eventually spread to all the cities in the world. And this would make “postmetropolitan” Los Angeles the “prototype,” the nexus in the future evolution of the culture of cities – instead of being just a “case” walled in its own particularity. It is here that Los Angeles would become the symbol of our time. In fact, one can argue against this approach that the study of the concept of metropolis, in its reference to space and time, still appears to be relevant for the understanding of the symbolic evolution of cities at the dawn of the twenty-first century and that Los Angeles does not necessarily belong to the universal typical symbol that it pretends to represent – or else that if Los Angeles underwent a “megalopolitan” transformation, this process

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has not been truly successful for its cultural life. Indeed, a simple look at other comparable cities in terms of its population size, such as Mexico City for example,16 shows that lots of problems encountered in Los Angeles (like the riots of the 1990s) are not necessarily located in its type of development gone beyond its metropolitan definition, but are more probably linked to the specificity of how the city and its cultural life dealt with these recent developments. But what does this tell us about studying the city, other than that the two different approaches thematized by Rickert, nomothetic and idiographic, can be used – given that they lead to relatively different results? I think that it tells us mostly that the tension between the particular and the general, reflected in the idiographic and nomothetic methods respectively, is something that we can never totally escape when trying to study cities according to some recognized standards of knowledge. We can thus say that, ideally speaking, comparison requires that we pay attention to both methods. In a recent survey of the whole field of urban studies methodologies, David A. Smith (1991) argued that the best way to arrive at a satisfying method is to envision the mix of nomothetic and idiographic methods in order to see, for example, how the local and the global meet in the context of the evolution of contemporary cities. We can further add that methods that try to envision the “time-space” of cities, or the mutual relations of time and space in the reproduction of city life, develop according to a similar possibility (see the essays in May and Thrift 2001). But a more precise formulation would be that we pay attention to the dialectics between the general and the particular that constitute the meaning attached to the study of cities, and this meaning remains centred on the metropolitan character of their cultures. How do you generalize one aspect of your object to make it a case among others, and, on the other hand, how does a particular aspect reveal something specific to your object? Or again, what is the most significant aspect of the development of contemporary cities to be found in the specificity of a particular development that would lead us to think about the evolution of cities in general? This appears to be the most significant task for comparison since it leads us to conceptualize the metropolis as being the essential standpoint on which the culture of cities can be based today – and to talk about their “nexus” (be it the megalopolis or the postmetropolis) as mere hypothesis. This also leads us to envision a series of possible comparison “stages” that would allow us to further distinguish the epistemological reflection while dealing with comparing cities: a first one would refer to a city compared to itself – that is, in a historical and idiographic way – how the city has evolved through time and space and passed through some “phases” of evolution, in such a way that it appears at some point, let us say, to

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pass from a “polis” to a “metropolis” – to use Mumford’s terminology; here, one can locate for instance when and how Montreal or Toronto became metropolises in the course of their respective historical development, defining at each step their own characteristics and characters. A second one would refer to a city compared to others – that is, according to broader characteristics of identity and difference among a certain type that is embodied, as we can talk of different kinds of metropolises (economic, political, cultural, etc.); again, this allows us now to talk about Toronto as a financial metropolis in Canada and about Montreal as a cultural metropolis, thus underlining both their common and respective metropolitan character. And a third, in a more nomothetic way, would refer to a city compared to the more universal historical evolution itself – that is, to how a specific particularity comes to embody a significant point in history that becomes a universal cultural reference for the development of a “type” or even a “new type,” as when we refer to “postmetropolis” in Soja’s sense or to the “megalopolis” or the “tyranopolis” in Mumford’s sense – and to this extent, to historical cases that appear to have led the historical evolution of cities, the way that Rome did in antiquity, Paris or London did in modern times, and Chicago and New York have done in contemporary society (especially during the first half of the twentieth century). Here, the concept of metropolis in reference to cities reaches a universal significance, which is embodied in a specific kind of phenomenon, and also confers a general understanding of its development; Montreal and Toronto, in this respect, both embody a metropolitan character of a universal kind, although neither of them can pretend to be a “universal cultural reference” in the sense of having developed the specificity of the type – rather, they reproduced something that was already given, albeit to the point of being able to appear as a “cultural reference” for their respective contexts. For that matter, their respective meanings are rather, and remain at best, national even though they may each represent interesting general examples of contemporary metropolises at the international level. Such a position would appear, then, to be the “surest way” to avoid the pitfalls of formulating (or complying with) too-abstract “laws” of development, on the one hand, and of shrinking our interest down to the smallest particularities of things, on the other. Such an approach would be best, in other words, if we were not also aware of the post-Foucauldian epistemology that requires that we face the reflexive participation of knowledge in the meaning of our very life in cities – with all their constraints, rules, contradictions, pleasures, and so forth – which in turn requires that we can also give the full measure of its significance. This does not do away with the distinction between natural sciences and cultural sciences; rather, it moves this problem to the onto-epistemological level

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(indeed, here the problem is more the recognition of the active participation of our own knowledge activity and practice in the development of the objects of both natural and cultural sciences – an onto-epistemological problem that only the cultural sciences can deal with openly, when they accept the reflexivity of their own discourse produced by a subject of knowledge in relation to its object). In fact, as Foucault demonstrates in Les mots et les choses (1966), any form of knowledge is relative to its own time, and it is especially important to recognize that the representation given of “nature” – or natural phenomena, as well as any representation given to any cultural phenomenon, but in this case the point is less problematically recognized – is based on an objectivity found not in nature but in the objectivity constituted by its representation, a representation that is always historical and, as such, dialectical.17 This is a fundamental issue since it precludes any pretension that natural sciences would escape the particularity of their own time when examining their object, allowing only the “transparency” of their language to give us access to “nature in itself”; what this historical relativity introduces, on the other hand, is precisely the idea not only that any form of knowledge, any epistemology, belongs to the social, cultural, historical, and ideological contexts of its production, but that it belongs to cultural sciences to establish the understanding of this context in a meaningful, and reflexive, fashion. If the problem becomes, then, as it remained for Foucault, to envision how this relativism of knowledge can be overcome out of a strict oppositional strategy to the forms of power constituted in any socio-historical context (as became more or less the general motto of poststructuralist thought), we can nevertheless see that it is now the understanding and the active interpretation of the process of historical evolution that are at stake (see de Certeau 1987, 15–65). In this respect, and as far as cultural sciences deal with meaning in a dialectical fashion that allows for the recognition of the reflexivity involved in the process of generating knowledge, analysis, and discourse of the cities, this approach seems to be more appropriate – and the challenge becomes how do you “generalize” the particularity of your findings according to a vision of historical evolution. With this, we are back to Mumford’s and Soja’s respective evaluations of the evolution of cities in history and their place in the process of civilization according to their specific location in Mumford’s evolutionary scheme – except that we have now acknowledged that this scheme is always culturally and reflexively situated by the analysis itself, or in other words, that it belongs to a historical dynamic with which we are always actively engaged in theorizing in terms of our own relation to representation of objects through concepts. In a word, the concept, or the symbol, of the contemporary city is what we are always

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after, not any “biotechnic” or “natural” order, nor even any “postmodern” context per se that would reveal itself in the cultures of cities. This means that we cannot envision, as Mumford did, that a metropolis such as New York City will reach and go beyond some “natural limits” for its development18 nor, as Soja did, that the “postmetropolis” is the inevitable future of the metropolis; instead, the “cultural” limits to the development of cities, and of city life, are always what provide the measure of their evolution – and a case like Los Angeles might remain an exception, not the nexus of historical evolution, if its cultural significance cannot provide such a universal validity.19 The problem with contemporary cities and their evaluation, in Mumford’s sense, and likewise with Soja’s approach, is that we could not yet conceptualize this measure in order to understand the present dialectical evolution of the culture of cities. What matters here, however, is again a problem that belongs to the cultural sciences themselves; the particularity of a case becomes, at this point, the problem of relating to our own “individuality.” If we can talk about individuality in cultural sciences, this “individuality” can be on a personal (as an individual), a social (as a city), a cultural (to which any national or civilized identity pretends), and a historical level (as in the world that we live in today, where Western civilization has acquired the recognition of its own particular and specific development and where one finds the tension of this, as expressed in the pretension to the universality of contemporary world development). The range of individuality, then, reflexively brings in the problem of the generality of meaning involved in the individual object that we study and ultimately leads us to envision meaning of this individuality according to a philosophy of history, which is the highest level of generality that you can think of reaching in the cultural sciences. At the end of Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, Rickert recognizes the pretension to a coherent knowledge of their object, in its “universality,” to be the main problem faced by the cultural sciences (and this as against any form of relativism). We have something slightly different with Max Weber’s development of the cultural-sciences orientation, which is marked by his movement into the symbolization of the cultures of cities.

m a x we b e r ’ s i d e a l - t y p i c a l m e t h o d in the cultural sciences Max Weber talked about historical individuality in his works, using, then, the idiographic method, but in a way that allowed him to analyze massive cultural phenomena – such as Western culture as a whole – as a specific individuality. As we know, his great haunting question has

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been, throughout his work and his life: what is the meaning, the specificity, the particularity, of Western development, compared both to other civilizations and to world history? In terms of method and epistemology, Weber, then, went a step further than did Rickert. Among other things, he also distinguished himself from Rickert in developing an “ideal-typical” method, according to which you would evaluate a particular phenomenon by comparing it to an “ideal-type,” something that does not exist as such in the objects under scrutiny but that would be the product of a certain idealization – abstracting characters from particular phenomena up to the point that you can build a model of your own, to which you could compare particular objects.20 It is also from this ideal-typical method that Weber developed his study on the city, in which he identifies some types of cities. For the Western historical development that interests him, he refers to three main types: the patrician city, the plebeian city, and the democratic city, every type cutting across many geographical examples (from Greece to Italy and Germany, etc.) and periods of time (from antiquity to the Middle Ages and to modern times) and not necessarily according to a strict chronological nor topological order (Weber 1965, 1982). In doing this, Weber breaks with an idea of linear historical evolution (he avoids identifying any “law of development,” as in a strict naturalistic or even Marxian perspective) and opens instead the latter to the recognition of historical contingency. While Weber links the idea of the city to economic life, he does not try to apply the “laws” of economic development to the life of the city; rather, he draws attention to the reciprocity of forms of city life and forms of economic relations, these being one type of relations as important as political relations, or even military relations, for the development of cities. This means that the development of cities, according to Weber, even though it implies some specific “types,” also implies the contingent possibilities of defining different kinds of social relations as being the essential ones related to one type. For example, when he refers to the patrician city of antiquity, Weber makes clear that this type is constituted mainly of the sociopolitical power that the patricians derived from land property and of everything that this involved in terms of economic and military organizations; on the other hand, when he refers to the cities of Western Europe peopled by the “bourgeois” who gradually freed themselves from the domination of the feudal lords, he also makes it clear that it is the jurisdiction (or “pledge of alliance”) that linked together these bourgeois in the cities and defined the specificity of their “communes” – that is, their communal life in the city. The kind of commitment demanded of the bourgeois individuals by this civil bondage (going from the pledge of alliance to taxes, to autonomous military defence, etc.)

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was then typical of the development of the democratic cities in Europe at the dawn of modern times – something that was not to be found anywhere else in the development of world history and that thus conferred its typical meaning on Western development at the time, reinventing the “polis” in a transformed socio-historical context. Michel Freitag (1971) goes even further than Weber on this point, arguing that the “city” actually finds its unique realization of a self-defining and completely autonomous phenomenon in this specific context – a point that leaves the other types of cities, ours included, with a definition that is always dependent on phenomena (like economics) much larger that the city as such, to the extent that it erases its proper existence, or transforms it into a mere “plebeian” city. Weber (1989, 475–6) also understands the new types of cities that contemporary society gives way to; in his brief and late article “Die Grossestädte,” he remains both amazed and fearful, or in a word, fascinated, by the form of the contemporary metropolis – perhaps already on the verge of becoming a “megalopolis” if we use Mumford’s distinctions and thus akin to the latter’s view on the fate of civilization as a decay of the contemporary culture of cities. But we shouldn’t go too far here in extending Weber’s conclusions over their own limits. These example are interesting regarding comparison, since they show how Weber could, for instance, refer to any Western European city after the Middle Ages according to how it compares to the “ideal-type” of the communes of the modern bourgeois era. Here, I would like to point out that using a “type” (if not a well-identified “ideal-type”) as an explicit epistemological and methodological device in comparison already bears the implicit evaluation of the object; for example, referring to “world cities” or “international cities” or even simply to “metropolises” calls to mind a type that differs from other types, such as “postmetropolises,” or perhaps “megalopolises” (New York City, Paris, London, Mexico City, etc.), or small towns and villages. It becomes obvious, then, that one of the issues of comparison is to define a city’s “type” in a very precise way, identifying what this “type of city” is like, what differentiates it from other types, and how it appears to create specific conditions for the city life in various conditions – since one wants to be able to compare things that are comparable to each other.21 We already assume, if only intuitively, that metropolises such as Montreal and Toronto, as they are found in the early twenty-first century, like all the metropolises of the Western world, have become so from the nineteenth century on, accompanying the industrialization movement, and are now usually considered to be “postindustrial” cities, under heavy reconstruction, flourishing (more or less) with arts and entertainments, tourism, consumerism, and the like. These characteristics would

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all be part of contemporary metropolises and would suggest that this “type” among cities is formed according to social activities of all kinds, with economy (or communication) being perhaps predominant over politics as such;22 this simply puts emphasis on the fact that, during the nineteenth century, the rise of states everywhere in the Western world created a political sphere of national proportion – not only one of urban dimension, as was the case during the modern bourgeois era – thus loosening, to a certain extent, the relation between “cities” and “citizens” or citizenship.23 While cities became crowded with “masses” of individuals, oriented by a somewhat more abstract “market,” they also became in general, more than ever before, linked to the national and international system of relations that would develop in the twentieth century, and their direct role in politics also became accordingly both more diffuse and more intense.24 On the strictly apparent level of things, economic phenomena and activities (production, consumption, circulation) became the prominent features of cities, to the point that the creation of contemporary metropolises with their “downtown” areas and their skyscrapers symbolizing this new economic power of corporate industrial capitalism reflected this change, particularly in the United States at the beginning. We will come back very shortly to this, but for now it is important to acknowledge only that the general and fundamental characteristics of contemporary metropolises developed along these lines since it is from then on that their existence has been linked to mass society.25 But the cities of mass society, or what one could call the “mass metropolises,” also underwent a significant transformation of their own characteristics in the twentieth century, and their “plebeian” character gradually led the way to a more “democratic” character, accompanying the transformation of the political definition of their populations along the lines of mass democracies (see Romero 2004). Here, however, it seems to me that the interesting point is not only “how to compare these cities” but to ask, for example: What makes particular cities like these ones mass metropolises? Is it that they possess some significant characteristics that give them a specific meaning, not only for us but, let’s say, for theorizing about the type that they involve at this particular time in history? If so, what are the significant characteristics of this type? And how do we define these characteristics and bring them together to make something that will be both respectful of what defines each of these cities and that will make them comparable units at the same time under the shared type that they embody?26 One way of doing this is to define the contemporary metropolis according to its American realization. Indeed, we can acknowledge that the general type of cities that has developed in the twentieth century, the one that accompanied the vast and profound movement of capitalist

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industrialization and that motivated the double spatial movement of vertical and horizontal development of the city, was based on the type of urbanization that first appeared in New York City and Chicago in the late nineteenth century (see Bender 2002). Even though there is still a debate on the idea that North America would have developed a specific type of metropolis (see Goldberg and Mercer 1986), I do think that there are enough characteristics, even on a purely phenomenal level, that would lead us to think that the socio-historical development of cities in North America since the nineteenth century has taken a specific orientation in the form that cities have given themselves, a form quite different from that of their European ancestors and counterparts of the previous centuries, as well as in the content of social and cultural relationships to which this form relates; this would only be normal, considering not just their own geographical and socio-historical situation, but also that they participated in the beginnings of the contemporary mass society that was then emerging while leaving behind the typical development of the modern bourgeois society.27 Indeed, mass production, mass consumption, and mass circulation, as well as mass communication and mass culture, characterized the early development of the cities of North America, to the point of giving them a typical form, general content, and meaning. And while Toronto and Montreal can be said to belong to this type of development, as typical “mass metropolises,” they nevertheless still embody significant differences that become of particular interest for our understanding and interpretation of their status and their contribution to the culture of cities as North American metropolises;28 for instance, and as John Mercer (1991) has analyzed, in the elements of housing, in transportation system and usage, and in institutional structures and social geographies, Canadian cities such as Montreal and Toronto differ from their equivalent in the United States in the way that they show less segregation in neighbourhoods (in terms of revenue distribution and multicultural relations), are more open to provincial and federal government interventions, and are generally oriented more toward public transport systems than toward automobile usage and infrastructure, namely streets and highways. Although we could go on with further differentiations between Toronto and Montreal on the basis ofthe very elements identified by Mercer, he wants to emphasize here, in his comparison, that “Canadian cities are more public in their nature and US ones more private” (63). The type of metropolis that was formed in this context was typical, then, and even the shift from Montreal to Toronto as “the metropolis of Canada” that occurred in the middle of the twentieth century points only to the duality of these two cities as still being references in terms of the cultural development that they symbolize in their own way.

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Even the development of massive suburbanization that took place after the Second World War, spilling over the limits of the metropolitan area to create suburbs like Laval or Longueuil, on the North and South shores of Montreal, and North York and Scarborough, in the North and East of Toronto, although it had a serious impact on the evolution of the metropolitan form, did not entirely transform the status of these cities as metropolises, even though it might have slightly changed their internal meanings. This movement might have threatened, for a time, to totally disorganize the metropolitan character of cities, emptying them of their population in emphasizing, for example, their fiscal problems, but the reaction to this has been, roughly since the mid-1970s, to recentre their development in integrating greater suburban areas within direct metropolitan control. And here, one could think of this phenomenon as being one of the utmost interests to evaluate, in terms of the debate over the “next stage of development” for contemporary metropolises, since the culture of cities has taken a new form according to this dynamic.29 Indeed, what happened with, as well as concurrently to, the development of suburbanization was the rise of the “second-tier cities” – that is, a new type of urban agglomeration that seemed to challenge the idea of the urban centralization of the metropolis. As a new form of urbanization, second-tier cities present some typical characteristics that both link them to and differentiate them from metropolises – even up to a point of possible confusion.30 How do important (at least in quantitative terms) second-tier cities like Oshawa or recently formed Hull-Gatineau compare to Seattle or Silicon Valley? And how do they qualify, or not, in their recent and coming evolution, as metropolises? These are questions of great significance for the evolution of contemporary cities in general since they can point to a radically different way of envisioning and defining the future development of urbanization on the whole. But even more interesting is the relationship of these developments to the development of metropolises. One could argue here that Los Angeles, for instance, dealt in a very specific fashion with this kind of evolution but perhaps in such a way that it finally could never act significantly to recentralize itself as much as did Toronto and Montreal, or other metropolises; the net result could thus be the decentralization and disorganization of its own urban form as a metropolis, and consequently its new status as a “postmetropolis,” in Soja’s sense – that is, as a city that loses its capacity to synthesize its cultural development in a symbolic unity of some kind and that thus appears to fall prey to any kind of manifestations that threaten its very existence as a unified and participatory culture of metropolises while shattering its very existence as a city into uncontrollable parts. Here, one indeed finds the symptoms of decay so well described by Mike Davis in City of Quartz and Dead Cities.31

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Compared to such a process, the respective developments in Montreal and Toronto again show some typical features that would allow us to see the kind of engagement that they continued to sustain in their metropolitan existence; while significant differences appear to qualify the recent developments of these cities, Toronto and Montreal did commit themselves to more centralized, although different, strategies of urban politics, strategies that led their recent evolution – and this, at the moment when they were respectively fighting two totally different, and even two opposite, contexts of economic development (see Greenberg and Athik 1988). How can we qualify the change that they have undergone in doing so? Have their “status” or “type” been affected by these transformations? How can we grasp the figure of this movement? I will leave aside here the issue of the “type” involved in such a Weberian perspective and turn briefly to Georg Simmel in order to show a more specific device used in establishing the particularities of a case according to a general vision of things, pushing again a step further the reflection on the theory of knowledge and methods of the cultural sciences. Simmel indeed shows how the measure constructed and used to compare cities links both the judgment about cities in general and the judgment about a particular city to a reflexive criteria of cultural dimension, specifying again the symbolization at work.

g e o r g s i m m e l’ s a e s t h e t i c d e f i n i t i o n of the city as portrait Simmel wrote a very significant analysis of the city and was highly influential, albeit in quite different fashions, for sociologists like Siegfried Kracauer and Robert Park (Lacelle 2000). In his most well-known piece, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1971), Simmel takes up the reflexive analysis of the metropolis that Weber (as well as Freitag) approached only negatively and unilaterally and practically as a sole betrayal of the modern bourgeois autonomous cities. While doing so, Simmel reflexively theorizes the subjective dimension of the objective development of cities in displaying the conditions according to which the contemporary form of the city is acting on the development of individual’s subjectivity, opening up the possibility of establishing the conditions for defining the spiritual interrelation between them in the element of their mediation – more or less the same way that psychoanalysis, through a different path, will come to acknowledge the exchange between the symbolic and biologic universes.32 Simmel also published lesser known shorter pieces on Rome, Florence, and Venice, to be discussed very shortly, in which he shows how the aesthetic judgment can, in return, inform the subjective relationship that we develop

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with the objectivity of the symbolic life of the city. Working in the German cultural-sciences tradition (and thus remaining very close to Rickert’s and Weber’s preoccupations), Simmel chooses to develop his own analysis of the city by paying attention to how you can draw a portrait of a city, like a painter draws a portrait in a painting. Simmel, then, gives us not only some general insights about the characteristics of life in a metropolis, such as the constant stimulation and the abstraction that it provides for individuals, but also principles outlining how an aesthetic description of the city should be incorporated in the study of particular cases. In Le problème du portrait (1990), for instance, Simmel shows how the painting of a portrait, more particularly of a face, requires that the painter be able to select the most significant traits of a person for inclusion in the painting and be able to give them the appearance of real life and to convey the vividness of the person (149–63). Given that it is impossible to reproduce exactly an object by its representation, the problem becomes the “abstraction” involved – that is, the choice made among the specific traits selected and put together in a way that will reveal their “way of being together” (163) so as to create the impression of resembling the object. Important for the painter seeking to (re)present a subject are the relations between these traits that are put together, and no matter how abstractly this is done, the outcome should be a living equivalent of what is being painted. As one can figure, any portrait in this respect is thus unique, and this uniqueness is similar to the uniqueness of the individuality that it “depicts” – whether this be the individuality of a person or of a city. But this raises a problem: as far as each city is always particular, and especially so in the portrait made of it, you cannot compare a city to any other one – unless you compare both cities to something that is totally external to each of them – that is, not only external to the portrait itself, but also to what it reveals from the point of view of the “artfulness” of its object. This is what we learn from Simmel’s (1989, 253–64, 265–70, 271–77) texts on Rome, Florence, and Venice, in which he takes the city as a work of art and asks himself how these three examples express this idea in their very forms through the portrait that he draws of each one of them.33 For him, then, Rome appears to embody, among the pure heterogeneity of the elements that it contains (in terms of historical eras and architectural forms), the magnificent unity and force of a work of art of “a superior order,” as he puts it.34 Florence, because of the richness of its artistic life and because it was the cradle of the Renaissance, still bears this harmony and this equilibrium of the work of art but at a more “human degree” – which makes it an aesthetic ideal middle term.35 Finally, Venice, because of its beautiful ornementation, which is so overtly willed to be so, appears to show some

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external forms that do not harmonize with its own internal life – making Venice something quite artificial, like a museum or an embalmed work of art.36 These three different portraits of cities, “painted” with words by Simmel, with which we can agree or not, show that there is a possibility of having at the same time a particular vision of different things according to a method that unites them in their differences; comparison is thus achieved on the basis of comparing cities to a work of art (something that they are not in themselves), thus revealing each identity at stake and the possibility of the general principle according to which they are posited as such. One has to underline here the active part played by the aesthetic judgment in this process, and Simmel’s inventiveness finally shifts to the side of comparing cities to the practice of art, abstracted from its usual definition, in order to bring to light some relations that exist not in the objects compared themselves but for us. The metropolis can be subjected to the same portraying process, and given here the aesthetic and poetic principles at work that respectively allow for judgment and creation, the metropolis becomes the very location of an aesthetic experience that is the first and foremost feature of its existence in its massive dimension – that is, both of its massive form in itself, and of the internal life of the mass of people that crowds its space and time. Thus it is through the expressive figure of the metropolis that its experience can be revealed, through the symbolic means that are expressed as various symbols to be found there, be they individual, social, cultural, or historical. As an entity, the metropolis can be portrayed according to an aesthetic that ranges from the sublime to the grotesque, from the drama to the comedy and the tragedy of its existence. This reveals the character of the metropolis – just as when one refers, as is still sometimes the case today, to the “puritan” Toronto or the “exuberant” Montreal on the basis of their respective cultural ways of life; in this sense, Montreal may have embodied a more “Pop aesthetic” since the 1960s, while Toronto might have taken on a more modernist and functionalist appearance.37 It is, then, according to an aesthetic evaluation that Simmel situates the particularities of the cases of the cities that he portrays, not according to a naturalistic perspective that would pretend to situate their respective evolutions in an abstract scheme (like the “natural order” or the “law of evolution”). Reflexively linking the aesthetics of the city to the act of “painting its portrait” becomes his own contribution to the meaning that the cultures of cities embody, without losing in doing so the capacity of comparison. And here, when Simmel remarks that Venice appears like a “dead city,” it is in relation to the artificiality of its own cultural life, reflected in its general appearance, that it becomes

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so. In a way, then, Venice has become for him a nekropolis – that is, according to Mumford’s (1940, 292) definition, a place where the “names persist [but] the reality vanishes,” where the “living forms of the ancient city become a tomb for dying.” But whereas for both Mumford and Simmel this means the “death” of the city, their respective views on this issue are quite different: Mumford associates the nekropolis with a definite historical situation where the city is almost totally abandoned and falls prey to pillaging by barbarians, whereas Simmel sees only that the “spirit” has escaped its former habitat, leaving an empty shell, a sheer empty form, nevertheless still inhabited (or at least “visited”), where there used to be a concrete expression of a full cultural life form related to more authentic human and social relations. Yet the analogy between the two perspectives is still telling, going in the direction of realizing how historical evolution has transformed “barbarians” into “civilized barbarians” (an oxymoron that is very telling about our dialectical contemporary situation); who is it, indeed, that would “invade” and “rack” the cities nowadays, for the sake of their pure empty forms expressly made and presented in a sheer aesthetical pretension (as ornementation), if not the mass tourists for whom the actual life of the cities becomes a mere appendix to their organized tours of all the “beauties” especially prepared for them in our contemporary nekropolis? Visiting the “dead cities,” the cities turned into museums, empty works of art, suggests that generalized mass tourism is part of a contemporary process by which cities now allow – and even encourage – themselves, or at least significant parts of themselves, to become to a certain extent “nekropolitan.” But again, this does not have to do with a historical situation presenting the terminal evolution of the life of cities per se; rather, at stake is a city’s capacity to keep a balance between its internal life and the external forms of its manifestations, to the extent that it is always the meaning of this balance that counts. Any metropolis can become a nekropolis when losing its internal balance of symbolic activities, but it can also allow such a development as only a part of its own metropolitan character. After all, a certain degree of hospitality toward “strangers” is also at stake in mass tourism. There is certainly something strange about the “city in ruins” that we find in its historical situation (Babylon, Nineveh, even Rome at some point in its history) and about the parallel phenomena in those of our contemporary cities that seem to represent simultaneously also the dynamics of contemporary civilization, which both turns itself into ruins and turns its ruins into new forms of life or construction – but this something belongs to the symbolic life of our cities and the civilization of our postmodern times, not to any “natural law” of evolution or to any “cultural determinism” of contemporary society. And again, it is

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not sheer “size” alone that would allow us to qualify a city as a typical “postmetropolis,” or as a “megalopolis,” or again as a “tyranopolis”; these types or categories go along with characteristics that impinge on an evaluation of the social and human relationships that they contain and contribute to generating. In other words, what we are truly dealing with here is the contribution of human relationships to the culture generated in a city, or even the evaluation that we make of the contribution of the culture of cities of some type to civilization. Still, even referring at this point to the metropolis always demands that we can appreciate the specificity of the type that each metropolis embodies. In other words, the contemporary metropolis can symbolically embody and subsume forms like the nekropolis (or, for that matter, the tyranopolis),38 which were regarded by Mumford (1940) as part of a linear historical evolution, as long as, in doing so, it does not entirely lose its metropolitan character. Still again, if this rapprochement between Mumford and Simmel is correct, it would suggest that we have reached a curious situation in the historical evolution of culture that shows the entwinement of the life and death of cities, of civilization and barbarism, of nekropolis and metropolis, or of megalopolis and possibly “eopolis,” the latter being the very first stage of reflection of cities – a situation representing not the completion of the cycle and its total renewal but the possible encounter of all these categories in contemporary cities, in the very form of our own actual development, as if these former stages were both “overcome” and “preserved” in the memory and actual symbolic constitution of the contemporary metropolis. Something would be at work here, symbolically speaking, that would prevent us from seeing the contemporary state of things as simply a “final” stage of some kind. The culture of cities in mass society reflects precisely this: this culture is as much a state of things as a project of keeping the metropolitan character alive. On an issue parallel to this one, Hannah Arendt has reflected that, given its activities based on consumption, contemporary mass society can lead only to its own self-destruction – and that, in doing so, culture comes close to resembling a simple “natural process,” which eliminates the possibility of creating a significant cultural object that lasts, like a work of art.39 This would actually be both the limit basis for comparison and, perhaps paradoxically, the very starting point for a reconsideration of the “renewal” of the culture of cities in its contemporary situation40 – just as when consumption turns into “recycling” or collecting, which are in themselves activities that show alternatives to sheer destruction of the objects that are produced and then simply engulfed in the process of the reproduction of merchandise and capital.

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Such a vision developed against the simple rejection of mass culture suggests a dynamic of cultural reproduction that is common to the concept of “fashion,” with its constant renewal, recycling, and reactualization of forms and contents (see Straw 2000). But to get back to Simmel and the issue of cultural-sciences epistemology of comparison: how, then, is it possible to deal with the portrait and to link this individuality to a more general, namely historical, picture according to such a perspective – say, not only as a “picture,” but more specifically as a “moving picture”? The recent evolution of cities tells us something about how this is done: the reconfiguration of metropolises that has taken place since the mid-1970s has put at stake the very definition of the cultural development to which they subscribe, thus moving the meaning of their general forms in the various directions that each has taken in pursuing its symbolic reintegration, in such a way as to reveal its own specific character. At the level of the metropolises, these reconfigurations have also been accompanied diachronically by suburbanization and the creation of “second-tier cities,” as noted above, but the more recent reaction to this double movement has been characterized by the recentring of the metropolis on itself and by its reintegration – this has defined the phenomenon of “amalgamation,” as it was called when it took place almost simultaneously in Toronto and Montreal. This was a political process that included international, national, and local dimensions, and one can argue here that it contained the conflicting positions embodied by actors animated by one level or another of these political interests, as reflected in the debates that took place (see Nielson, Hsu, and Jacob 2002; Boudreau 2000). This movement toward amalgamation – which, in changing its physical size, involves the transformation of the form of the metropolis, among other things – has been designated the “synechism” of contemporary cities by Edward Soja. The particularity of this synechism, or amalgamation of nearby agglomerations and smaller cities with the metropolises, has produced various results, but it is precisely to the extent that amalgamation could take the direction of a meaningful integration within the cultural life of these cities that it truly produced, or not, an impulse toward another form and type of city that represents the meaning of the metropolis. Losing sight of this movement leads the cities to “disintegration” – that is, a symbolic collapse of the meaning of metropolitan life that is eventually expressed in destructive social phenomena, as in the example of Los Angeles, while undertaking this integration, on the other hand, can be seen to “regenerate” the metropolitan definition of cities, as occurred in Montreal and Toronto. We can be even more specific, then, about this character of cities that is displayed through this movement – and I

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turn finally to Mikhail Bakhtin to get an idea of how this can be done and how, on the other hand, this can also incorporate the “renewal” that is the sign of a vitality of culture in cities, given that the latter is expressed in its symbolic dimension.

th e c i t y a s a c h r o n o t o p e a n d the chronotopes of the city: bakhtin’s aesthetics and ethics To look at a city as a chronotope is, as mentioned above, to look at the dynamics of a particular mode of constitution of human relations in a specific way that belongs at the same time to a cultural tradition extending historically to any mode of life in any city that social memory has recorded and that social imagination allows us to produce and reproduce in its concrete actualization. It is the cultural tradition of city life that is being formed and transformed, consciously or unconsciously, according to such a historical process. The “portrait” that Simmel referred to is thus understood here not only in relation to itself, but also according to the aesthetic tradition to which it belongs (in terms of culture, genre, style, etc.) and that it reinterprets through the actualization that is given to it as the typical figure of the culture of cities today; this means that any aesthetic judgment made about a city through its portrait belongs itself to a tradition of judgments about the city and is thus part of the “civilizing process” into which the cultural representations of the city enter as part of its own internal dynamics. In other words, any chronotope, any representation of a city, calls for an aesthetic tradition of which it becomes a part and that it embodies in a specific fashion as a living reopening of its meaning (see Bélanger 2005; Davies 2000; Allor 1997; Straw 1992). And this reference to the living tradition of the city becomes ultimately what gives comparison its irreplaceable role and status in the understanding of the culture of cities since it is through this kind of comparison that a city finds its own dialectical specificity. In fact, if there is a historical generality to be found in the culture of cities, it is located in the living dialectic that cities, particularly contemporary metropolises, embody in their various and own fashions in the expressive forms that they generate. In this respect, the fundamental character of the contemporary culture of cities lies in its capacity for dialogical invention, which now involves the intense dialogue of cities among themselves and the intense mixing of genres that we are witnessing in the forms of cultural expressions that take place in cities, as far as cities have come to reflect the composition of this never-ending social process that now involves cities in international cultural development within themselves. It is here that aesthetics meet the ethical dimension of the culture of cities.41

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Indeed, to say that the city in itself is always a chronotope is also to say that we find many chronotopes of the city and even many different chronotopes of cities in one and the same city. This attests to the many different temporalities and many different spatialities that coexist in a city – that is, the plural space-time relationships that are established – and it relates, on the other hand, to the different socio-historical experiences of city life that are being reproduced in one city at any particular moment of its existence.42 The city embodies these divisions in the way that it constantly opens itself up for diachronic and diatopic experiences – and this is what makes the uniqueness of an experience as it appears among the diversity of the culture of cities.43 The literature of the city can of course testify to this diversity, at the same time that it stands as an example of the multiple ways that the experience of the city is expressed – but this suggests, in turn, that any expression found in a city (from dance, theatre, music, film, or any other artistic expression, down to common social practices found in everyday life, passing through the building and rebuilding of the city, and up to political forms of relations that can eventually lead to a particular historical development) always makes at least an implicit reference to different chronotopes of the various aspects of the cultural tradition that are being reproduced and represented in their transformed versions. What characterizes the vitality of the metropolis in this respect is precisely that it allows the multiplicity and interactions of the chronotopes to develop, not only aesthetically, but also ethically and politically (see Ferrarotti 1995). This development, for Bakhtin, reveals the historical poetics at work in the “great temporality” of cultural expressions, the understanding of which becomes the problem to address in theory. Indeed, if civilization means this process of transformation of meaning, a process whose historical movements and moments are reflected in cities at a particular time and place, then the comparison that is established between cities belongs to how we define culture as this enduring phenomenon that imprints its specific dialectical determinations on the fabric of social life, as the very response of the latter to the culture of cities as a whole. This is what the character of a metropolis finally is: the particular way that the cultural practices embody specific characteristics that define the meaningful experience of the movement of city life in its relation to the broader historical movement of civilization. Mass metropolises today become the typical stage of civilization through their own character – that is, through the role that they play in the historical development of culture – as long as they maintain the vitality of this dialectical movement. This process takes place along the lines of the culture of cities’ life perceived and conceived in the display of social phenomena of various

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kinds: here, the scenes that are simultaneously lived and represented portray the creation of cultural forms of life that are typical of a contemporary metropolis. A scene in this respect means more than a simple “encounter,” made at random in the course of urban life, but also even more than a simple “stage” with specified purposes; rather, it is defined by the process of representation of conflicting positions and propositions, a representation that constitutes the very embodiment of the drama (i.e., action) of social life.44 There is a normal theatricality in the culture of cities, or even better, there is a theatricality at the core of the production and reproduction of the norms of social life that appears to manifest what is essential to those norms.45 And for this very reason, the scene becomes precisely, in itself, a measure of what is essential to the vitality of the social life of a specific place that positions it within the broad spectrum of the culture of cities, as though the latter is always the implicit background – that is, the relation that is inescapably established between any scene of social life and its urban context. Here, what is manifested through this theatricality is thus as much the “foreground” of the metropolitan scene as the “background” of the culture of cities, and the persistence of this relation is so determinant as to be embodied in the construction of the city itself; as one of the best examples of this, architecture – cities’ buildings and the process of their construction, or the constant rebuilding of cities – displays the fundamental tensions of social life as represented in the forms inhabited by tensed debates that inevitably shape collective issues (see Grenzer 2001, 2002).46 Thus the explicit relation of aesthetics to ethics is at stake as much as the internal tension of any expression of social life, as this expression is always divided between forces that show and hide, that display by mirroring and masking, forces that can shout or mute their respective places in the city in the constant struggle of the various voices and narratives that echo from the past as much as they project into the future along the transformations that make culture both an evanescent and lasting thing.47 If there is any chronotopic tension alive in the culture of cities, it is located in the present state of things, the “here and now” of the manifestations of social practices that truly reveal the specific content of the dialectical meaning of the social life of the metropolis while linking it to the past and the future – as well as to the “elsewhere.” This is what defines the culture of cities in terms of its symbolic resonance and what simultaneously comprises the uniqueness of its manifestation in the very form of its existence at a particular place and time. The character of each city can play, and has played, a crucial role here. If a city like Los Angeles portrays the disintegration of city life and culture, because its disarticulated development has given way to riots, this is not the only example characteristic of our time, nor is it representative of

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our inevitable and predictable future. Indeed, compared to Los Angeles, a city like Toronto embodies a more peaceful integration of its population, and a city like Montreal has seen the emergence of very significant cultural forms alongside these developments – such as contemporary dance, for instance, which has been acknowledged to contribute to the evolution of this art form; the contemporary dance scene in Montreal since the 1980s has definitely contributed not only to the cultural life of the metropolis, but more extensively to the culture of contemporary dance itself. Metropolitan expressions such as these reveal how the evolution of cities shows a sort of permanence in the role played by the culture of cities. And this is portrayed in the relation that the metropolises develop with contemporary culture in general, becoming the attractive centres of populations; major transformations of the culture of cities have thus reflected this level of international politics, or even simply the international relations that entered the life of the city, and here, phenomena such as international immigration, commerce, markets, and fashion present the manifold aspects of this development.48 Mass metropolises have become today so much related to the image of the world at large that it is the world at large that is being reflected in mass metropolises. The current culture of cities is being “universalized” in this sense of being attuned to our contemporary civilization, thus reflecting its cosmopolitan order in the manifold expressions found in this context. Nothing “confirms” the presence of cosmopolitanism in the context of the transformed metropolis, as a fixed norm, if not precisely the measure by which it reveals how social life in both general and particular practices is actualized in the universalized context of contemporary cities (see Côté 2005a). Thus the gauge by which we appreciate the development of urban life is the degree to which the social divisions become so trenchant as to lead to racism or to encourage ethnocentrism or economic and political segregation – that is, the degree to which the culture of cities cannot integrate these sources of social tension in a synthesis that goes in the direction of a contemporary cosmopolitanism.49 But it is precisely how a city achieves some sort of a synthesis of these cosmopolitan processes that provides us the measure of the culture of cities reflected in the practices and representations of the symbolic forms produced in our contemporary context.

conclusion The culture of cities and its theoretical reflection did not begin with the twentieth century, even though the latter added significant dimensions to this reflection, dimensions of the experience of the contemporary metropolis that we want to consider in order to conceptualize our own

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relation to cities. With this idea, we are brought back of course to fundamental discussions about the essential dimension of social life in its relation to the history and culture of cities. Both Plato and Aristotle come easily to mind here for their reflections about the “polis,” as well as reflections by Augustine and Cicero, Machiavelli, or Hobbes; representing the city in all these cases meant linking aesthetics and ethics – that is, the forms of city life and their “norms” – in such a way that a conceptual synthesis could be reached that would give sense, positively in the case of Aristotle and Plato, negatively in the case of Augustine and Hobbes, to the actual experience of these thinkers’ experiences of and relations with the city. But what is so significant about the contemporary reflection on the city is the relation of this reflection to “civilization,” as Mumford has put it. The implication of this for comparison should be clear: you can compare a city not only to itself according to how it is portrayed in a certain chronotope, but also to others in reference both to a type and to the “ideal city” that lies either behind or beyond, in terms of historical experience, the possibilities of cultural expression – since it is only through the projective comparison that cities finally exist in their own specificity as civilized units. Comparison means here that cities always belong to something that is at the same time themselves and not themselves, or something other than themselves, a culture of cities that takes the form of civilization as the ongoing process of self-transformation of human and social experience. The culture of cities thus embodies a constant tension between identity and difference in the process of renewal and regeneration of the ways that cities are experienced and also gives birth to representations that belong to a cultural tradition that forms the process of civilization, culminating in how we cultivate the cities and in how they, in turn, cultivate us. Nothing is left outside of this self-development, no “law,” no “particularity”; instead, there appears the living dialectical tension of the symbolic expression that is embodied in the human and social experience of the cities. There is an inchoate meaning of the culture of cities that still has to be expressed in a way that reaches both the characterization of mass society in its urban milieu and the significance of this historical development according to its actual dialectics. The meaning that is still to be told belongs to our capacity of comparison, as far as the latter entails, in a dialectical fashion, the relation between the particularity of the many levels of individuality involved and the general movement of this evolution. This dialectic of meaning requires that we criticize and go beyond the knowledge already constituted about the culture of cities, and the orientation of cultural sciences in this respect provides us with important indications for doing so. This reflection bears important

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consequences for sociological analysis as well. Almost from its very beginning, sociology identified industrialization and urbanization as the two main phenomena animating the development of contemporary society, with industrialization leading the way according to most analysis; this has led to an analytical view (whether liberal or Marxist) of cities that depends heavily on their economic life to understand their development, and, more often than not, this process has been understood and assimilated either to a “natural phenomenon” or to a “historical law.” Perhaps it is now time to envision the opposite: urbanization as the fundamental process, the historical agent of civilization, in the development of historical poetics; the “polis,” the “political,” which predated industrialization, will postdate it also, and while the polis escaped the city limits when it was made a “national” quality by the state, the city as it involves the international situation of our time has now replaced the state at the core of our concerns. This is what Mumford has in mind when, in The Culture of Cities (1940, 402–93), he reflects on “the social basis of the new urban order.” Here, the movement(s) of the city reflected theoretically can become a way of defining the character of each city both in its own way and, in a more general fashion, as something that belongs to a particular historical development. Metropolises, here, have a character not only because they embody the individuality of characteristic elements of their movement drawn together, but also because they “move” within a historical field of action that helps to define their role in the life of culture – that is, the part that they embody and play in and for everybody’s lives. If historical renewal of representations of cities means anything at all today, it is precisely the reopening of the poetics of cities, as this aesthetic points to the ethical and logical dimensions of the life of the metropolises. And to the extent that we learn how this reopening of meaning belongs to the course of our contemporary civilization anchored in our present situation, we certainly learn also why cities have an important role to play here: they are the living centres of dialectics. When our own judgment takes part in the culture of the cities – that is, when it takes form in a discourse that participates in the very definition of the meaningfulness of its object – it should do so in revealing the full measure of our own contemporary symbolic experience of our metropolises.

notes 1 Briefly stated, Mumford (1940, 283–95) sketches out the six stages that represent the “cycle of growth and decay” of cities, broadly following Geddes’s model, the types being eopolis, polis, metropolis, megalopolis, tyranopolis,

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and nekropolis; these stages/types represented also historical examples of the development of cities in ascendant (the first three) and descendant (the last three) phases. In Mumford’s view, New York, for example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, took on the aspect of a megalopolis, thus starting the descending phase of the cycle toward decay. In a similar context, Soja (1996, 426) writes: “Between 1965 and 1992, the metropolis of Los Angeles experienced a dramatic transformation. Always at the forefront of new urbanization trends ever since its rapid growth in the late nineteenth century, Los Angeles again came to exemplify the dynamics of yet another round of accelerated urban restructuring, in this case one that emerged from various crises that ended the long postwar economic boom to profoundly reshape the American city in the closing decades of the twentieth century … and at the very point when the restructured Los Angeles was comfortably consolidated as one of the paradigmatic metropolises of the late twentieth century, the ‘new’ Los Angeles exploded in the most violent urban insurrection in American history. Compressed within the spatiotemporal brackets of this period and place is a remarkable story, one that has implications far beyond the local context. Through its telling can be seen as a symptomatic history and geography of the contemporary world, a revealing glimpse of what it has meant to be alive over the past three decades not only in Los Angeles but nearly everywhere on earth.” That this would apply to cities like Toronto and Montreal is explicitly stated in Soja’s book Postmetropolis (2000, 230–2). How the notion of chronotope is linked to the broader vision of a “historical poetics” that belongs to the epistemology of the human sciences developed by Bakhtin is obvious in most of the essays presented in Bakhtin’s Esthétique de la création verbale (1984). On the dialectic of cultural forms, see Côté 1997. On the idea of Wirkungsgeschichte, see Gadamer 1996, 322–9. On the comparison between Bakhtin and Gadamer, see Cusson 1998. What comes to mind here are examples of cities that are referred to in the history of the world as landmarks for this history: Babylon, Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Paris, and New York all appear to have embodied a meaning that lasted symbolically and became a point of reference when we think of cities; in this respect, biblical, philosophical, and historical literatures have provided us with representations of cities that have become chronotopes of their own. In fact, this is usually how it is done: in contemporary society, a city of over 1 million people is considered a metropolis. From a qualitative point of view, however, it is rather the significance of the city that is at stake, and a metropolis has a “meaning” that goes far beyond the quantity of people living in it, extending its limits in space and time for the larger community (see Jones 1990). As Jones (1990, 10) writes: “Toronto and Montreal vie for supremacy, but they can also be regarded as the capitals of the two major social groups in Canada.”

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8 In its original meaning, as defined by Cicero at the beginning of our era, “culture” was transferred from the “natural” domain (as in agriculture) to the “spiritual” domain (“culture” in our sense) because both implied the care and reproduction of things over time, cycles, repetition, and the like. This aspect of reproduction in particular (and one can say cultural reproduction) is what defines our interest here (see Arendt 1961, 212–13). But we should also be aware that “culture,” as it is understood by anthropology in general, belongs to every and any human community, not only to “cities” as such; this is why talking about the “culture of cities” implies talking about something that goes at the same time “under” and “over” the existence of any city. The specificity of city life appears then as the typical cultural development that it produces. 9 Jane Jacobs (1961, esp. 558–85) has called this the problem of “organized complexity” and has argued that the epistemology of “life sciences” (what is called here natural sciences) has, roughly since the mid-twentieth century, provided tools with which to think this way. While I share her critique of previous epistemologies that influenced city planning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to favour this “organized complexity” approach, I propose here a quite different view of how this approach is developed in, and for, cultural sciences since the problem is essentially a symbolic one that starts with dialectics as the fundamental process in structuring the culture of cities. 10 I say “necessary” since we want to avoid the possible confusion here between the city as a “natural” phenomenon and the city as a “cultural” phenomenon. I am using here the French translation of Rickert’s Science de la nature et science de la culture (1997). 11 One could think that what we have here is a reformulation of the opposition between induction and deduction, applied respectively to cultural sciences and to natural sciences; but the issue is really somewhat different, and even more radical, since the particularity of a case, in the cultural sciences, does not exactly mean that we are looking for a “general law” to be established with the accumulation of cases. Rather, the recognition of this particularity in itself is what finally matters as a socio-historical event that cannot be reproduced as such (as an event), although it can be reproduced in its representation; thus our relation to this representation is what appears to be at stake, inasmuch as its own reflexivity participates in the symbolic modelling of city life. 12 That is, until the singularity demands a revision of the whole generality (theory) into which it doesn’t fit. This is how dialectic reenters the reasoning of natural sciences. 13 See the classical works of the Chicago School: Park et al. 1925; Burgess 1926 (esp. the contribution of McKenzie, 63–79). To get a good view of the epistemological perspective developed by Robert Park with respect to the specific question that we are debating here, see the first chapter of his The Crowd and the Public (1972, 23–62), where he discusses Heinrich Rickert’s book The

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Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Sciences (Die Grenzen der Naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, 1986), on the concept in the natural sciences, while ignoring the opposition that Rickert acknowledged between natural and cultural sciences and adopting instead Windelband’s position on the issue. As Jane Jacobs (1961) would put it, approaches such as these rely on an epistemology of “disorganized complexity” and make reference to the possibility of managing this “chaotic order” through statistical models that give the perception of a general “law” of development that only recognizes the probability of singular events, among the course of their development. As she criticizes this model, she makes the point that the singularity of events, and the multiplicity of them, is precisely what gives a city its character and richness. Jacobs, then, follows quite closely the argumentation of the cultural-sciences orientation on this point but still remains committed to the “life sciences” version of the debate on “organized complexity.” It is in this respect that Robert Park (1926, 17–18) states, totally obliterating the symbolic definition of the categories of “person” and “individual” always defined historically: “Ultimately the society in which we live invariably turns out to be a moral order in which the individual’s position, as well as his conception of himself – which is the core of his personality – is determined by the attitudes of other individuals and by the standards which the group uphold. In such a society the individual becomes a person. A person is simply an individual who has somewhere, in some society, social status; but status turns out finally to be a matter of distance – social distance. It is because geography, occupation, and all the other factors which determine the distribution of population determine so irresistibly and fatally the place, the group, and the associates with whom each one of us is bound to live that spacial [sic] relations come to have, for the study of society and human nature, the importance which they do.” In fact, Mexico City, with a population estimated at more than 20 million, is “bigger” than Los Angeles (see Garcia Canclini 1998, 2004, 2005). We find a similar argument, although much less developed, in Rickert’s Science de la culture et science de la nature (1997, 190–1). In saying that such a perspective is “post-Foucauldian,” I am in fact arguing for an approach rooted more in a Hegelian perspective, stressing that the dialectical process at work in the phenomenon and its logical understanding are what lead the way to the phenomeno-logy, a problem that Foucault faced when he referred to the problem of the “empirical-transcendental doublet” that intrigued him in the human sciences and that he preferred to deal with from a more relativistic perspective. And in fact, the “regeneration” of New York city in the twentieth century proved Mumford wrong. This problem goes back, as we know, to Plato and Aristotle trying to give the measure of what seemed to them to be, if not an “ideal,” at least a “reasonable” way of envisioning the limits to the growth of a city. The argument today about overcoming the limits of the ancients (“as far as the voice can be heard”)

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by the media of communication is fallacious in this sense since the technological diffusion does not correspond at all to the cultural significance attached to the metropolis “limits” that we are addressing. Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002) is of course the best known example of this. The epistemological status of the “ideal-type,” here, should be put in the perspective of what has been said before: it is “ideal” (and, in Weber, almost in a Kantian sense) only in the way that it embodies the relation that we have, and develop conceptually, to our object. For this reason I would add that the “ideal-type” cannot be said to be simply “invented” but is part of a larger process of interpretation that instead recalls, because it is rooted in concrete experience and conceptual reflection, an hermeneutic process of a dialectical kind. This also means, of course, that any “type” used is simultaneously subject to validation (see, for example, Abbott 1997). Nevertheless, this has to do with the analysis of ideological orientations and epistemic considerations (see Hall 1984). This evolution is better understood through the development of the category of “citizenship” itself, a category that applied in the nineteenth century, as we know, only to the bourgeois – that is, to the male inhabitants of cities who were endowed with property – and to, of course, the “lords” who were present in parliament as the personal representatives of their “subjects,” and also to the different “corporate bodies” constituted in civil society. While “citizenship” as a political, legal, and social category was gradually extended to everyone as a “person” in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including, first, individuals (males) without property and, eventually, women, then the national political sphere became something universally both more inclusive and more “abtract” in terms of the direct relationship to the city. This would become clearer in North America, or at least in Canada and in the United States, than in Europe, where the national capitals (Paris, London, Madrid, etc.) still maintained their role both of national capitals and of metropolises, whereas Washington, dc, and Ottawa, some newly created national capitals, came to symbolize the (marginalized) national political power of such cities, while New York, Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal kept developing their metropolitan role, which was more centred, then, on social, economic, and cultural activities. I use the term “mass society” here to refer to phenomena such as mass production, mass consumption, mass communication, and mass culture, which all appeared in the nineteenth century, contributing in their own way to the formation of the contemporary metropolis. On this, the characterization established by the Chicago School is still relevant (see Park 1925, 1–46). This would be particularly obvious for the development of the “downtown” areas, which would open themselves quite rapidly to the emergence of skyscrapers,

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whereas the same areas in Europe were already occupied by civic buildings and earlier developments that left their main imprints on the form of cities; even the Hausman’s developments in Paris in the nineteenth century, while they opened up the city to bigger and wider avenues, still understood this in the manner of reflecting the “circular” organization of the civic space, opposed to the more “grid-radial” pattern that would become generalized in North America. And here, one could point also to internal differences that would differentiate Montreal and Quebec City in this respect; Montreal has integrated more features of this kind of development than has Quebec City – and this for historical reasons since its own development as a metropolis took off in the middle of the nineteenth century, much after Quebec City had established itself (on Montreal, see Linteau 1992; on Quebec City, see Morisset 1999). Here, again, the issue is mot a matter of “size” since “smaller” or “bigger” has no special virtue; it is a matter of significance, of meaning, for the cultural life of the metropolis – that is, as a place where any addition to its form implies a difference that participates in the enduring identity of the city. On this, Ann R. Markusen and Sean DiGiovanna write: “Second-tier cities may be the creatures of multinational corporate strategies of innovation, market penetration, or cost reduction. They may arise from national government priorities for economic growth, national security, environmental protection, or balanced regional development. They can be the joint product of entrepreneurship and a willingness to subsidize economic activity on the part of the boosters, sub-national governments, trade associations, or universities … Our second-tier cities are entire metropolitan areas, spatially separated from previously dominant or ‘primate’ cities. Unlike edge cities, which are attached to existing metropolitan areas and whose labour sheds overlap those areas, our second-tier cities constitute separate labour-market areas whose growth cannot primarily be explained as spill-over from a maturing or congested successful metropole” (Markusen, Lee, and DiGiovanna 1999, 9–10). I find this definition, where a second-tier city is not only both a metropolis and something different on the basis of the “overdevelopment” of metropolises, but also independent of a metropolis, too confusing. I would rather have this category, or type, singled out as a typical development of the second half of the twentieth century, where the effect of modernization, for more convenient purposes, was “annexed” (be it at a national or regional level) to the already developed metropolises and was driven by very specific motives, instead of being motivated by the multipurpose life of a metropolis. Davis (1990) insists, in the same way as Soja, that Los Angeles presents the characteristics of our future “postmetropolis.” While Simmel (1971, 338–9) notes the “atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture” that characterizes the life of the metropolis, he also maintains that this conflict represents “an entirely new value and meaning in the world history of the spirit,” in which is “to be found the external as

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well as the internal history of our time”; from this perspective he adds: “It is the function of the metropolis to make a place for the conflict and for the attempts at unification of both of these in the sense that its own peculiar conditions have been revealed to us as the occasion and stimulus for the development of both.” I rely here partly on Landry’s thesis Ville et esthéthique dans la sociologie des formes de Georg Simmel (2001). Simmel (1989, 256) writes: “À la division entre la multiplicité et l’unité des choses que l’oeuvre d’art porte à l’intuition et à l’impression, se mesurerait ainsi son degré de valeur esthétique. En un tel sens Rome est comme une oeuvre d’art d’un ordre supérieur.” Simmel (1989, 269–70) writes: “Parce que la forme de la culture domine ici partout la nature, parce que chaque pas sur ce sol touche à l’histoire de l’esprit, qui s’est indissociablement mêlé à lui – les besoins que la nature ne peut satisfaire dans son être originel, avant toute histoire de l’esprit, ne peuvent pas être comblés; les limites intérieures de Florence sont les limites de l’art … Florence est la joie des hommes tout à fait mûrs qui ont atteint la vie en son essence ou y ont renoncé, et ne veulent plus chercher que sa forme, que ce soit pour la posséder ou pour y renoncer.” I am quoting Simmel (1989, 273) again: “quand derrière l’art, si achevé puisset-il être, le sens de la vie a disparu et a pris une direction opposée, l’art devient artifice. Florence est comme une oeuvre d’art parce que son caractère plastique est lié à une vie certes historiquement disparue, mais qui l’habite encore fidèlement du point de vue idéel. Mais Venise est la ville de l’artifice.” In fact, it is more accurate to associate Montreal with the “Ti-Pop aesthetics” that it produced, a mix of modernist, traditional, and Pop arts mostly expressed by the confusion of genres than by anything else (on this, see Côté 2005b). In comparison, the modernist and functionalist twist adopted by Toronto is best exemplified by its Town Hall, which came to symbolize the high modernization of the city starting in the 1960s. About the megalopolis, Mumford (1940, 290) writes: “the city as a means of association, as a haven of culture, becomes a means of dissociation and a growing threat to real culture. Smaller cities are drawn into the metropolitan network: they practice imitatively the megalopolitan vices, and even sink to lower levels because of lack of higher institutions of learning and culture that still persist in bigger centers. The threat of widespread barbarism arises. Now follow, with cumulative force and increasing volume, the remaining downward movement of the cycle.” Reflecting on the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Edward Soja (2000, 396–415) presents a vision of things quite close to Mumford’s. Arendt (1961, 207) writes: “Mass culture comes into being when mass society seizes upon cultural objects, and its danger is that the life process of society (which like all biological processes insatiably draws everything available into the cycle of its metabolism) will literally consume the cultural objects, eat them up and destroy them.”

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40 Here again, Mumford (1940, 294–5) hesitates between a “natural” and a “cultural” perspective on the process of regeneration of cities, explaining that cities “can take on new life by a transplantation of tissues from healthy communities in other regions or civilizations,” before adding that “the collective organs of culture, signs, symbols, forms, the abstract and etheral essences, may likewise exercise a decisive effect.” 41 Commenting on this aspect of Bakhtin’s thought, Ken Hirschkop (1999, 262) writes: “The languages of the public square do not strive to convince, but to maintain a constant pressure on one another, so that each and every ideology will be reminded of its necessary unfinished character. Social struggle is therefore not the cause of historical becoming in Bakhtin’s schema, but the index of it. And it is its social rather than the individual struggle so beloved of liberalism and bourgeois civil society which counts, precisely because the latter ends (in victory for one or the other side, or in compromise), while the former is inexhaustible.” 42 As Janine Marchessault (2001, 73) writes: “In the shadows of cities, alongside their most trivial and idealized occasions, we can locate narratives, habitual actors and settings envisioning a rhapsodic history of ‘the city.’ Paris, New York and Toronto are very different cities, yet a history of scenes allows us to better consider the imaginative and utopian constellations that connect them and make them particular.” Perhaps the most famous example that comes to mind here is Joyce’s Ulysses, which uses the chronotope of the Homerian epic to translate the experience that its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, has of Dublin. To get an idea of how the chronotope works in these circumstances and how it helps analysis to conceptualize its object, see Lassave’s “La ville entre les lignes de la science et du roman” (1998) as well as Crang’s “Rhythms of the City: Temporalized Space and Motion” (2001). 43 On the issue of the transformations of representations of traditional practices of cities’ identifications, see Becker 2005 and Rinaudo 2005. 44 On this, Alan Blum (2001, 33) writes: “The scene is the fundamental ambiguity which its name and connotations arouse in social life. This is the symbolic order of the scene. And the scene is the myriad courses of action directed to solve the problems released by such ambiguity, including the ethical collisions and forms of collectivization which it inspires. This is the imaginative structure of the scene. The scene is both symbolic order and imaginative structure, a locus of collectivization and a catalyst of problem solving.” 45 On this, Alan Blum (2001, 14–15) writes: “The element of theatricality integral to the scene marks the importance of its site as on occasion for seeing: the scene is an occasion for seeing and being seen and so, for doing seeing and being seen. Seeing and being seen is done at the scene … If the scene is marked by the reciprocal engagements with seeing that it requires, it is also marked at the very same time by its capacity to evoke the deeper bond that grows from such reciprocity.”

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46 Grenzer (2002, 108–9) writes: “The built building is a theatre of memory because whatever it purports to remember is transgressed by the spectacle of the architectural act, and in that transgression risks being effaced, distorted and indeed lost. Yet, architecture is itself a commemorative gesture because it wants to commemorate its action in its present as something that might not be lost in the future. In this way, architecture tries to give the future a gift in the form of an enduring trace – an art of rhetoric – that will be a past regained for that present. The reinvention of social memory expressed through the medium of (post)modernist architecture articulates the ambiguity that inheres in the preservation of the event of the Holocaust in Berlin.” 47 On this relation of buildings to power struggles and cultural memory and imagination as they participate in the life of a city like Montreal, Anouk Bélanger (2002, 88) writes: “The acts, the tasks and narratives of memories produced in Montréal and inscribed in the present and the past are not inscribed in mute stones, in a particular building. The workings of memory are inscribed in the ‘murmurs’ of the idioms that haunt it. These murmurs are multilple and diverse, and even contradictory, as we stroll through different spaces of the city … Therefore, we need to look into the terrain of multiple production of urban collective memories in order to begin to understand the processes of transitions of the city. Memory becomes a heuristic area only when our analytical framework allows it to be expressed in its multiple forms, in its noncompletion and its contradictions.” 48 On how the various contents of this broad movement affected cities like Montreal and Toronto, see Sloan 2001 and Burnam 2001. 49 The limits of a city’s inability to integrate social tensions can reach the point where they are made apparent; in the context of economics, this might take the form of the resistance of the poor to the developments that the “rich” command, “disturbing” their neoliberal agenda (see esp. Porter 2001). In the context of aesthetics and in relation to testing the limits of resistance that deal with the creation of a lifestyle, see Stahl 2001.

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Jones, Emrys. 1990. Metropolis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lacelle, Marc-André. 2000. “Projet de cinématique comparée; vers une transcription symbolique de la ville-métropole: Siegfried Kracauer et Rober Park.” ma thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal. Landry, Jean-François. 2001. “Ville et esthéthique dans la sociologie des formes de Georg Simmel.” ma thesis, Université du Québec à Montréal. Lassave, Pierre. 1998. “La ville entre les lignes de la science et du roman.” Espaces et sociétés no. 94: 11–29. Linteau, Paul-André. 1992. Brève histoire de Montréal. Montreal: Boréal. Marchessault, Janine. 2001. “Film Scenes: Paris, New York, Toronto.” Public, nos 22–23: 59–82. Markusen, Ann R., Yong-Sook Lee, and Sean DiGiovanna, eds. 1999. SecondTier Cities: Rapid Growth Beyond the Metropolis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. May, Jon, and Nigel Thrift, eds. 2001. Timespace. London: Routledge. Mercer, John. 1991. “The Canadian City in a Continental Context: Global and Continental Perspectives on Canadian Urban Development.” In Trudi Bunting and Pierre Filion, eds, Canadian Cities in Transition, 45–68. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Morisset, Lucie K., ed. 1999. Ville imaginaire, ville identitaire: Échos de Québec. Quebec: Nota Bene. Mumford, Lewis. 1940. The Culture of Cities. London: Secker and Warburg. Nielsen, Greg M., Yon Hsu, and Louis Jacob. 2002. “Public Culture and the Dialogics of Democracy: Reading the Montréal and Toronto Amalgamation Debates.” Canadian Journal of Urban Studies 11, no. 1: 111–39. Park, Robert. 1925. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigations of Human Behaviour in the Urban Environment.” In Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, eds, The City, 1–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1926. “The Urban Community as a Spacial [sic] Pattern and a Moral Order.” In E. Burgess, ed., The Urban Community, 3–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1972. The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays. Trans. C. Elsner. Ed. H. Elsner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – et al., eds. 1925. The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porter, James N. 2001. “Intentional Disturbances: Making the Toronto Movement Scene.” Public, nos 22–23: 175–93. Rickert, Heinrich. 1986. The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Sciences. Trans. Guy Oakes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 1997. Science de la nature et science de la culture. Trans. A.H. Nicolas. Paris: Gallimard. Rinaudo, Christian. 2005. “Carnaval de Nice et carnavals indépendants.” Sociologie et sociétés 37, no. 1: 55–68.

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Romero, Jose Luis. 2004. Latinoamérica: Las ciudades y las ideas. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno. Simmel, Georg. 1971. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In D.N. Levine, ed., On Individuality and Social Forms, 324–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1989. Philosophie de la modernité. Vol. 1. Trans. J.L. Veillard-Baron. Paris: Payot. – 1990. Philosophie de la modernité. Vol. 2. Trans. J.L. Veillard-Baron. Paris: Payot. Sloan, Johanne. 2001. “Biennalism in Montréal.” Public, nos 22–23: 123–32. Smith, David A. 1991. “Method and Theory in Comparative Urban Studies.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 32, nos 1–2: 40–58. Soja, Edward W. 1996. “Los Angeles, 1965–1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis.” In Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, eds, The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, 426–62. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. – 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell. Stahl, Geoff. 2001. “Tracing Out an Anglo-Bohemia: Musicmaking and Myth in Montréal.” Public, nos 22–23: 99–121. Straw, Will. 1992. “Montreal Confidential: Notes on an Imagined City.” Cineaction 28 (Spring): 58–64. – 2000. “Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music.” Canadian Journal of Communication 25, no. 1: 175–85. Weber, Max. 1965. Essais sur la théorie de la science. Trans. J. Freund. Reprint, Paris: Presses Pocket, 1992. – 1982. La ville. Trans. J. Freund. Paris: Aubier. – 2002. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles: Roxbury. – 1989. “La musique des engrenages.” Trans. L. Teller. In Pierre Ansay and René Schoonbrodt, eds, Penser la ville: Choix de textes philosophiques, 475– 6. Bruxelles: Archives d’architecture moderne. Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, uk: Blackwell.

3 “To Squeeze a Single Sentence Out” Estrangement and Disenchantment in Benjamin’s “Marseilles” KEVIN DOWLER As Hellenic man at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo, and, above all, as everybody sacrificed to the gods of his city, so do we still nowadays, only the bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity. Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” 1958, 148

One of the clichés of comparison, at least in English Canada, contrasts Toronto “the good” or “the city that works” with Montreal the city of “culture,” with its aura of European prestige. In this moral universe, Toronto stands as the fulfilment of bourgeois values of order and hygiene, versus the chaos and dissipation of cosmopolitan hedonism ascribed to Montreal. In short, Toronto is about work, and Montreal is about life. If this is a fantasy of English Canadian imagination and desire, it is nevertheless acted upon in such a way as to make it self-fulfilling. For example, Montreal is a place to which Anglo-Canadian students flock; it’s cheaper (both for rents and tuition) and it’s more fun. It provides, for anglophones, a measure of exoticism and foreignness without the suffering entailed by the exorbitant exchange rates to which the Canadian dollar is subject elsewhere. However, the students infrequently stay. After all, when the fun and school are over, it’s time to move again – or, if staying is in the cards, time to go on welfare (Stahl 2001, 101, 105). It is this imagined opposition, or comparison if you like, that is interesting, between work and life, productivity and leisure, and so forth, particularly the ways that these distinctions are projected onto places.

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Indeed, they seem to represent all the binaries that we have come to suffer in the study of culture under capital. Montreal has culture and therefore life; Toronto doesn’t because those who reside there are too busy working to pay attention to its being. This is of course patently absurd: presumably there is culture of some kind everywhere. So why do we think this way? Why is Toronto so good that it isn’t any fun? Does Montreal have to be bad to be fun? And does this logic actually produce the very thing that it imagines? Any comparison, then, must in some way address the issue of how the imagination and desire come to play a mediating role in making sense of place and in organizing differences between places. The production of difference, I want to argue, occurs precisely as a relation of comparison, which is to say that it appears always in relation to another. “The encounter with the Other is antagonistic,” writes Kieran Keohane (1997, 26), and we might add agonistic as well, as part of the continuing reproduction of difference. If Toronto prides itself on being a “working” city or the scene of the fulfilment of multicultural coexistence, it does so by not being Montreal, where things (putatively) don’t work and where nationalism threatens to erase cultural distinctions. As Keohane comments mirthfully, “Canadians contrast cold, anal-retentive Toronto with lively Montreal, which has that ever so slightly decadent (and alluring) excess” (34). Here, the vivacity of Montreal threatens to spoil Toronto’s fun. The strangeness of this, as Zizek (1993) points out, is the threat that the other poses with respect to the enjoyment of one’s “thing” (whatever that city “thing” might be) since the other appears to be having more fun. This is obvious in the case of Toronto, where the imputed vitality of Montreal threatens to ruin Toronto’s enjoyment. More to the point, however, is how this threat undermines the belief in identity since it points to the fundamentally contingent character of identity. As Zizek states: “What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us” (203, original emphasis). What opens up before us, then, is the radical contingency and uncertainty of meaning. Thus it is the anxiety of the potential recognition of the lack of certainty that produces the symptoms that become the clichés with which we began. The problem stems from the indeterminate ground upon which to base identity (and hence difference, and hence comparison); there are no secure ontological characteristics with which to define essence of identity. If anything is there, it is the nothing itself, which constantly haunts the scene of the production of identity and representation (see Borch-Jacobsen 1991). The city, then, becomes a contested terrain, in part over the spatial distribution of power (de Certeau 1984; Zukin 1995), but also with respect to the production of dispositions and the

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power of social formations to both configure and represent space and place in particular ways. Arguably, the city offers itself up in multiple ways to its inhabitants; in turn, there are multiple determinations regarding how dispositions will be formed in relation to the city. We can ask whether these are given as such or, as Alan Blum (2003, 40) argues, made through collective action. If, as Blum suggests, “the crisis of indeterminacy characterizes the modern moment of any civilisation” (219), we can view the sets of normative or regulative patterns that nonetheless emerge to orient action in the city as contingent and thus troubling vis-à-vis the issue of comparison. To bring this problem of comparison into further relief, in this chapter I want to turn away from a discussion of Montreal and Toronto, instead undertaking a reading of Walter Benjamin’s essays on Marseilles. The impulse to do so rests with the claim that this reading can provide a heuristic with which to engage the problems that comparison presents. This also coincides with the Culture of Cities Project’s interest in issues raised by the examination of “second-tier” cities – that is, “cities that cannot rest secure in their primacy as global cities” (Culture of Cities Project). Marseilles, like Toronto and Montreal, is just such a city, since it is situated in an unstable position between centre and periphery. Montreal and Toronto are both at the centre with respect to their own national periphery and marginal in relation to primary global cities (such as New York). Likewise, Marseilles is central as a continental crossroads, while at the same time peripheral with respect to the centrality of Paris. Marseilles thus shares a similar fate with Toronto and Montreal, and therefore an analysis of Benjamin’s essays may prove instructive. “Marseilles” (1929) and “Hashish in Marseilles” (1932) provide a unique site for investigation. This uniqueness is to be found in their contrasting dispositions; as we shall see, the difficulty in reconciling their differing attitudes toward the city makes the essays a curious pair. They thus prove symptomatic of the difficulties that comparison creates for us. Both, in their own way, signify the surface and subsurface tensions that characterize the problem of constitutive attitudes toward the city. Further, the essays raise questions about the relationship between material space and disposition since Marseilles is, for Benjamin, a troubling enigma. From the outset, Marseilles presents problems that apparently do not arise with respect to other cities. It is unlikely that, in Benjamin’s (1986d) terms, Marseille could ever be called, like Paris, the “capital of the 19th century,” and we can take this as an invitation to inquire into why that might be the case. Marseilles presents an interesting limit case, since it seems to refuse to surrender itself to the strategies of engagement with the city characteristic of Benjamin’s reflections on

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Paris and other major cities. The essays therefore invite us to reflect on what differences may be at work that make Marseilles a provocative and contested site. Benjamin’s work has drawn considerable attention in recent times, particularly his work on the city; much of this attention has been concentrated on the writings about Berlin and, most especially, Paris. One could argue, however, that this focus represents a one-sided view of Benjamin’s “theory” of the city and that the examination of all his writings on cities together may yield valuable insights otherwise unavailable. Little attention appears to be paid to the relations of difference and comparison that emerge from a broader perspective on Benjamin’s writings about the city. Graeme Gilloch (1996, 4) points out that many of Benjamin’s essays on cities “have been deemed, and largely dimissed as, ‘travel pieces’ and Sunday newspaper material.” As a consequence, “there has been little attempt to explore the relationships, interconnections, thematic continuities and contradictions in the various city writings taken as a whole.” For instance, how might we grasp how Naples stands in relation to Berlin or Marseilles with respect to Paris? Much is made of the “capitals,” and little attention is paid to the cities in the provinces. The Marseilles essays are of particular interest because they bring into the foreground the issue of difference and comparison while underlining the threat that this difference poses by exposing the contingency of the “meaning” of the city. Marseilles symbolizes a serious problem for representation, and for Benjamin this becomes a struggle that potentially undermines the disposition worked out vis-à-vis Paris. A closer reading of the two essays on Marseilles together brings to light for us the instability that any comparative analysis of cities must address.

going south In his essay on the cinematic imaginary of Marseilles, Daniel Winkler (2002, 2) refers to a comment by Arlette Farge (1995), who claims that a city is “not only a lived place, but also a dreamed one” (quoted in Lindner 1999, 289). If so, then there is a moment in which these two cities come into comparison with each other, in which the lived is ranked against the dream or vice versa. The city comes up against its representation and, for better or worse, either lives up to it or not. This imaginary is not however entirely autonomous from the material but is itself marked by the particular location in which it arises. In the case of Marseilles, writes Winkler (2002, 3), the city’s position “at the crossroads of Europe and Africa, Occident and Orient” is the stimulus to the imaginary and, at the same time, a source of a profound ambivalence.

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This ambivalence is a product of the oscillation of location between “internationalisation and localisation,” according to Winkler, “evident in the French context where Paris occupies the role of the global city, in the sense of a place of political, economic and social power (symbolic capital), and where Marseilles is/serves as the metropolis of industrial/economic crisis and immigration … In this sense Marseilles can be seen as both, a global and peripheral city” (4). The location is thus unstable, most particularly with respect to Marseille’s parochialism as viewed through the imaginary optic of Paris; Marseilles is thus for Paris a crisis since, as other, it is a source of anxiety, a threat to the self-confidence and enjoyment of the centre. There is a tension, then, between core and periphery, capital and province, cosmopolitanism and parochialism, which leaves its abiding mark on thinking about and imagining Marseilles. According to Winkler, Marseilles suffers in this relation – for example, in the way that its imaginary comes to rest in cinema, overwhelmed and overlooked by the cineaste culture associated with “urban intellectualism and prestige” that accrues to those living and working – and imagining – in Paris. The only exception to this, apparently, is Godard’s A bout de souffle (1959), which lingers “in the beginning scene on the old port and the church and city symbol Notre Dame de la Garde for some twenty seconds before the protagonist, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, fires several shots and then leaves the South for Paris” (Winkler 2002, 6). If for Winkler this is an exceptional case, in terms of its explicit gesture toward the gangsterism associated with the port city, one still can’t help noticing that – after a mere twenty seconds – the protagonist nevertheless abandons Marseilles for Paris. If these observations have an immediate import in making clear how the imaginary finds itself in tension with a multiplicity of comparisons linked to place, one might also note the historical persistence of these tensions within the representation of Marseilles. If the problem of comparison mediates Winkler’s contemporary discussion or the form of representation of Marseilles as it emerges almost half a century earlier via Godard’s film, then we can begin to detect the outlines of a particular problem of margin and mainstream that finds its unique expression in the tensions manifest in Marseilles. We can also observe how these same tensions find literary expression some years before the cinematic apparatus captured the imagination in the essays that Walter Benjamin wrote about Marseilles. The kind of ambivalence that Winkler discovers in contemporary Marseilles permeates these essays, too. As much as Marseilles is the locus of crisis in the contemporary aesthetic scene, it functions as such for Benjamin as well, which speaks to the status of Marseilles as continual crisis.

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The first essay, “Marseilles,” was published in 1929 in the Neue Schweitzer Rundshau, followed by “Hashish in Marseilles” in Frankfurter Zeitung in December 1932. Benjamin (1994, 352) describes the “Hashish” essay in a 1929 letter to Hugo Hofmannsthal as one of a number of “slight pieces” and “weak.” As he wrote about this essay in the same letter, “I had to do battle with this city as with no other. You could argue that it is harder to wrest a single sentence from it than it is to get a whole book out of Rome.” If the street is “the only valid field of experience,” as stated in the André Breton quotation that is inscribed at the beginning of “Marseilles,” it is clear that experiences derived from this perspective are not always fruitful when it comes to writing. This appears to be the case with respect to Marseilles, at least to judge by the attitude that pervades the essay. Benjamin (1986b, 131) begins the “Marseilles” essay by describing the city as “the yellow-studded maw of a seal” that “exhales a stink of oil, urine, and printer’s ink.” His opinion of Marseilles’s inhabitants seems equally poor: “the harbor people are a bacillus culture, the porters and whores products of decomposition with a resemblance to human beings.” These opening sentences make crystal clear Benjamin’s distaste for, if not outright animosity toward, the city and its inhabitants. Nor does his opinion seem to improve as he works his way from the harbour through to the landward edge of the city. The stink of the port finds its inland analogue in the “dust that here conglomerates out of sea salt, chalk, and mica” to be raised in the struggle between social order and landscape: “telegraph poles against Agaves, barbed wire against thorny palms” (136). “Marseilles” ends on a caustic note, where it seems that the city refuses to offer itself up to experience: Benjamin (1986b, 136) writes of the dust “whose bitterness persists … in the mouths of those who have pitted themselves against the city,” and we sense that the bitterness is also Benjamin’s own. Marseilles immediately stands out as the counterexample to the literary plenitude available in the capital, and the kind of struggle that he represents as a feature of the city repeats itself in the struggle to write about it. Thus Marseilles could be the test case for the theory of the city. Evidently, there is no anticipatory image etched in the material of this city, no “utopia which has left its traces in thousands of configurations of life” (Benjamin 1986d, 148), as it has in its other: Paris. If Paris is the dream, the daytime idyll that is conjured at the moment of mystical and alchemical transformation wrought by flânerie, Marseilles is obviously something altogether different. How to stroll, if everything stinks, and it’s hard to breathe? The city is stalwart in its resistance; it is an inhospitable ground for the imagination. This leaves Benjamin uneasy, or perhaps even

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angry, and he levies a harsh judgment upon Marseilles for its refusal to submit to the literary conventions with which he wishes to shape it. If it is cruel to him, he will in turn be cruel to it. We, in turn, are left puzzled by the essay as a whole since, analogous to the city, it also appears to offer only an ensemble of fragments assembled in no particular fashion and with no explicit thread that might unite each of the moments – except possibly the wretchedness inscribed within them. Perhaps the riposte would be that it is precisely the fragment as the logical outcome of Benjamin’s strategy of urban reconnaissance that makes it a characteristic of his writing and unites this essay with his other work. Nevertheless, even if this is the case, it does not account for Benjamin’s attitude, in sharp contrast to other writing on other cities. Peter Demetz (1986, xx), for instance, argues that “Marseilles” is “of an entirely different order” with respect to Benjamin’s other writing by virtue of its “highly personal importance.” Demetz does not, unfortunately, attempt to explain precisely why this might be so, although the lines that Benjamin writes in the Hofmannsthal letter (to which Demetz refers) hint that this is indeed the case. The problem that Marseilles represents for Benjamin, the struggle to make sense of it in his own terms, and the consequent negative caste that his description takes also warrant special attention in comparison to the capital cities – especially Paris – and the status that they have obtained in the reception of his oeuvre. Why does Benjamin attribute a special place to the city that seems least amenable to his disposition? Is the excess and abundance, the supplement required by the flâneur, missing here? Does the asceticism with which he characterizes the city interfere with the extraction of redemptive possibilities? We might, in the interest of finding possible answers to these questions, compare “Marseilles” with the accompanying essay “Hashish in Marseilles” (Benjamin 1986a), which appears to offer an altogether different portrait of the city. This essay appears to have undergone a certain number of revisions and appeared in at least two versions: as “Myslovice – Braunschweig – Marseilles,” in Uhu (a Berlin monthly) in November 1930 and in the version used here from 1932, although Demetz also notes an earlier version from 1928. Each of these, along with other fragments, represent memoranda of ongoing experiments that Benjamin conducted with hashish in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the essays apparently inspired by a reading of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (Demetz 1986, xx). As Demetz claims, “Benjamin wanted to sharpen his sensibilities to pierce the essence of the city” (xx), and we can understand, given the disposition displayed in the first Marseilles essay, why Benjamin might be prompted to use an aid to help discover this essence.

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While sharing the precise imagistic detail of its counterpart, the tone in “Hashish in Marseilles” is decidedly more celebratory. The first essay, with its density of detail, speaks to a kind of overwhelming oppression caused by the city – the pall of dust that chokes those who struggle with their relationship to a city that seems relentless in its determination to defeat its adversaries. In contrast, “Hashish in Marseilles” finds Benjamin (1986a, 138) working out an altogether different disposition toward this city, where struggle seems forgotten and a tone of reconciliation emerges: instead of bitterness, we anticipate “a certain benevolence, the expectation of being received kindly.” What had begun as a battle to find a way of writing that would withstand “the pressure of a thousand atmospheres under which this world of imagery writhes” (Benjamin 1986b, 134) turns, through the mediation of hashish, into an expression of love. The harshness of the city seems to dissolve along with intoxication, or is vanquished by it, allowing a completely different relation with the city to appear. Unlike the suffocating forces elaborated upon in the first “Marseilles,” a kind of expansiveness exerts itself in this essay, where “a wonderful, beatific humor dwells all the more fondly on the contingencies of the world of space and time” (Benjamin 1986a, 138). The vivid horror of an implacable situation that Benjamin had found so oppressive gives way to a paradoxical, yet apparently delightful, sensation of both distance and proximity: a release from the crushing effects of the tempo of everyday life in Marseilles, while at the same time the capacity – enabled by that release – to ponder in detail the “contingencies” heretofore unnoticed. In other words, through intoxication the conditions become optimized for reverie and, most assuredly, for flânerie as well: in fact, as Frisby (2001, 30) points out, in the notes to the Arcades project Benjamin (1999b) suggests that the flâneur is similar to the hashish eater. We can also detect much more clearly in the contrast between the two dispositions the feelings of unease that represent the norm for Benjamin’s experience. Consider, for instance: “I positively fixed my gaze on the faces that I had around me, which were, in part, of remarkable coarseness or ugliness” (Benjamin 1986a, 139). The way that “coarseness” operates in this essay as a symptom of tension with respect to Benjamin’s own sensibility is quite interesting, particularly in how we see it provoke at points the kind of dégoût hinted at here. If Buck-Morss (1986, 114) is right to claim that Benjamin “never denied his bourgeois class background,” it becomes manifest in these moments. This is made clearer as Benjamin continues by describing how he wouldn’t usually look at the other customers in the tavern where he sits: these are “Faces that I would normally have avoided for a two-fold reason: I should neither have

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wished to attract their gaze nor endured their brutality.” There is a remarkable squeamishness here, and all the more remarkable for its being “normal.” However, the conditions provided by the hashish permit – momentarily at least – an abandonment of the “norm.” Further, it is all of a piece in this inverted world that the ugliness he would normally not face is magically transmuted into its opposite: beauty. If the kind of terror that Benjamin experiences is front and centre in the “Marseilles” essay, here it reappears in his marvelling at how his aesthetic sensibilities are now capable of overcoming (in part) his revulsion – although they continue to provide evidence for it. The aesthetic, heretofore absent entirely from Marseilles (except perhaps negatively), emerges as counterpoint: “I now suddenly understand how, to a painter” writes Benjamin (1986a, 139), “ugliness could appear as the true reservoir of beauty, better than any treasure cask, a jagged mountain with all the inner gold of beauty gleaming from the wrinkles, glances, features.” In this manner, an entirely different relation appears toward both humans and things. Unlike the crush of the real in the first essay, ironic distance – presumably aided by the drug – allows for objectification and aesthetic contemplation. Becoming a painter apparently means objectifying, and the distancing implied in aesthetic disinterest – that “beatific humor” that enables contemplation of the “contingencies” – underwrites the power of conversion. The “reservoir” hints at a connection with Heidegger’s “standing reserve” of labour power and at a sort of instrumental action, here put to use in the production of beauty. Further, the reservoir of ugliness is singularly proletarian, which is yet again called to work for “l’homme moyen sensuel,” who has purchased the time for disinterested aesthetic contemplation. As Benjamin carefully notes of the tavern where he exercises his gaze, “no bourgeois sat there,” which might just account for his unease. Our unease, on the other hand, is provoked by this correlation between ugliness and class and by the fear that this engenders in Benjamin. Courtesy of the hashish, however, this anxiety is defused (diffused?) through the operation of converting ugliness into an aesthetic (in some ways similar to the modernist strategies of art making with which Benjamin was thoroughly familiar). The repose permitted under this condition provides for an attentiveness to details that, in isolation, could be abstracted as aesthetic, made the objects of Kantian “disinterested interest” that is the proper mode of aesthetic judgment. We can speculate as to whether the metaphors function to obscure this objectification – that is, the reduction to exchange value – and whether this entire “sudden” conversion obscures the symptoms of paranoia provoked by proximity to the working classes. As for tangible evidence of his revulsion: “There was a moment in the harbor tavern when a

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violent pressure in the diaphragm sought relief through humming” (142). Is this the Real pressing down upon him like a medieval witch sitting on his chest? The question that really begs to be asked, however, is about money. Why is the “gold of beauty” even more valuable than a treasure cask? Why are they even comparable? Money has a strange function in this essay that is difficult to understand. At the end, Benjamin (1986a, 145) writes: “when we love, our existence runs through nature’s fingers like golden coins that she cannot hold and lets fall to purchase new birth,” repeating both the image of gold and the problem of expenditure that haunts much of the essay. Despite the euphoria of release, there is still an anxiety concerning the cost, particularly that of spending on love and beauty, as though they somehow represent an excess that risks incurring a debt that cannot be paid or that is money simply thrown away, never to be recovered. If there is a crisis of indeterminacy here, brought on by the dope, it is perhaps in the threat to the self-confidence of what Arendt (1968, 25–6) described in the case of Benjamin’s German milieu as an attitude of entitlement, attached as it was to the abstemiousness of a certain class fraction. One final symptom to illustrate this tension: “I have forgotten on what grounds I permitted myself to mark the beat with my foot. This is against my education, and it did not happen without inner disputation” (144). Here we see that even the euphoria derived from the drug is not enough to release Benjamin from certain constraints. In the end, despite – or perhaps because of – his state of mind, Benjamin (1986a, 144) claimed that the people of Marseilles “were stuck at the level of dialect.” This he links to an image of alienation drawn from Karl Kraus: “The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back.” It might be appropriate to swap “city” for “word” and ask whether it was the people of Marseilles who were stuck or Benjamin himself; as he writes in the sentence following upon that about Kraus, “I find among my notes the surprised comment ‘How things withstand the gaze’” (144). It is curious that he should be surprised, given the contents of the first essay and his own bitter reaction to the recalcitrance of the city. The extent to which the reverie helps to erase difference is summed up in the desire to perform magic, to make Marseilles disappear so that Paris could be resurrected in its place: “I immersed myself in contemplation of the sidewalk before me, which, through a kind of unguent with which I covered it, could have been, precisely as these very stones, also the sidewalks of Paris. One often speaks of stones instead of bread. These stones were the bread of my imagination, which was suddenly seized by a ravenous hunger to taste what is the same in all places

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and countries” (Benjamin 1986a, 143). We could not be further from the bitterness that was the other Marseilles; we might in fact be in Paris – except that we need an unguent to make it so. Real difference, then, can be made to disappear only through an artifice. Perhaps the “other” Marseilles threatens to leak in, requiring the unguent as a prophylaxis. Surely, however, it is not “the same in all places.” If this were so, why the need for the smear of the unguent, if not to hide the specific place? Indeed, why take the hashish as the solution to the unnerving situation in which Benjamin finds himself?

amortization and loss In his recollection of this experience at the end of “Hashish in Marseilles,” Benjamin (1986a, 144–5) writes: “I should like to believe that hashish persuades nature to permit us – for less egoistic purposes – that squandering of our own existence that we know in love.” This is his way of explaining, after the fact, the experience of “amorous joy” arising from a contemplative state brought about through the expansion of time as an effect of the drug. In the transformation of time and space wrought by the hashish, it becomes possible to develop an erotic and sensual relationship to the city seemingly unavailable otherwise, as the preceding “Marseilles” essay appears to attest. It is through the suspension of everyday norms that a kind of aesthetic contemplation of the city begins to emerge. But it is also clear that this comment is retrospective, that it comes after and thus implicitly contrasts a “normal” state with the memory of another disposition. There is a kind of wistfulness in the conditional “I should like to believe” that indicates a certain yearning for this state and at the same time an ambivalence toward it. There is a distancing, depersonalizing effect that occurs in shifting the onus onto the hashish itself, where it “persuades nature to permit us” to express love, thus relieving us (and Benjamin in particular) of the responsibility for our feelings and, at the same time, suggesting that this is not what we might normally do without it. The permission thus granted by an external agent allows us to “squander” our existence in a way that appears, in retrospect, to be contrary to a more parsimonious attitude toward time characteristic of the intimations of finitude that loom over everyday experience. There is thus a curious morality at work in this comment, or perhaps a concern about the seeming immorality implied in the excess enabled by intoxication, in response to which Benjamin tries to distance himself by absolving himself of agency. Indeed, one version of this essay denies agency altogether by casting it as a recounting of someone else’s experience (Benjamin 1999a, 386).

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We have to ask, then, about the tension between these two essays, particularly in light of the tension exhibited within the “Hashish in Marseilles” essay itself. In so doing, we might find a way of thinking about the problematic and ambivalent relationship to the city that underwrites these personal reflections. Unlike the wonders of Paris (or the books waiting to be written about Rome), which provide ample opportunity for Benjamin to wax poetic – and theoretic – Marseilles offers an interesting counter-example, where the possibilities of discovering through the dream of the city the intimations of redemption do not seem so readily available. It is important that we have hashish in Marseilles, not Rome or Paris, and curious that it should be the vehicle to provide the conditions for a kind of love for the city nominally reserved for the capitals. The opportunities for the adoption of the disposition of the flâneur or flâneuse seem less available in the provinces, and such cities seem to evoke in Benjamin a sense of frustration at their resistance to the conventions of the cosmopolitan. The city becomes a curious repository for conflicting feelings: on the one hand, a kind of animosity born of the city’s resistance to making itself available to experience and, on the other, a vehicle for the expression of a kind of love, a city that opens itself up to the individual’s embrace. At the same time, however, the gift of love to and for the city is figured as a kind of excess, a “squandering” that is anomalous (and arguably sinful) with respect to normal behaviour. The confrontation with Marseilles is thus a symptomatic episode since it brings to the surface all of the ambivalence with which the city is often viewed sociologically: as a site of both liberation and alienation and of their underlying class conditions. The question that looms over the essays is the extent to which the liberal possibilities embedded in a particular attitude toward the city can be allowed full scope. Benjamin would obviously “like to believe” but apparently cannot commit himself entirely to the excess implied in giving full rein to emotion; this appears as a kind of betrayal of the finitude of one’s existence. Under normal circumstances, Benjamin seems to suggest, nature does not allow us to be so free with our feelings; the consciousness of time makes us take more care. The awareness of finitude (from which we are released by the hashish’s plea) makes us spend our existence more judiciously than we otherwise might. In his ambivalent relation to the experiences provoked by Marseilles, Benjamin raises a difficult problem: false reconciliation. The hashish reverie invokes the kind of utopian and redemptive possibilities that characterize the hopes that the capitals can invoke. At the same time, Benjamin’s ambivalence toward flâneurie indicates a suspicion that whatever possibilities might present themselves remain reliant on a debt yet to be paid. The moral tone inherent in the recollection of the

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artificial state of hashish reverie indicates an awareness that the experience of “amorous joy” was, although true for that moment, ultimately false since it required the drug to facilitate it. The hashish acted merely as a soporific from which one is ultimately returned to existing conditions. Despite his desire, Benjamin recognizes that the insights gained in those moments do not imply anything like a permanent situation. If the experience of joy appears, in Ernst Bloch’s (1986) term, as a sort of “anticipatory illumination,” it does so in the knowledge that it remains just that: anticipatory. Indeed, the struggle represented by the first essay stands as testament to the difficulties in overcoming the condition of alienation. Nevertheless, as anticipation, we might ourselves recognize the possibilities of enchantment made available through Benjamin’s experiences. It is not implausible to maintain that Benjamin presents us with an insight that might open upon a reconsideration of the opportunity for expression in the city.

alienation and reenchantment What we begin to sense is a kind of dynamic of a to-and-fro between states of consciousness, an oscillation that seems to form a dialectical relation to the city, characterized, on the one hand, by the naked confrontation with an unfeeling and remorseless environment and, on the other hand, by an experience of pure joy arising from the aesthetic contemplation of the beauty of that environment’s configuration. The city thus appears in a two-fold manner, or at least augurs the potential to appear before us in two very distinct ways. The city, in Weberian language, offers itself as the scene both of enchantment and of disenchantment. The experiences highlighted by Benjamin speak to the problem of alienation that the modern city represents: a problem insofar as its condition seems to allow little opportunity for the possibility of reenchantment, except on artificial, and temporary, terms. Ultimately, it appears that the modern city offers, as modern, a contradiction or paradox: the city provides the conditions of possibility for new kinds of experiences at the same time as it seems to forestall them. The emphasis on alienation is, to be sure, a modern impulse, and it is at its core a reaction to the city, where it seems that the city’s role as market entails a fragmentation of life. Under such conditions, the culture born of the city itself comes to be threatened to the extent that the economic conditions out of which it arises have the potential to overwhelm it. The relationship between art and everyday life becomes a distant one, and the question arises as to whether the “gulf between praxis and happiness,” as Adorno (1984, 17–18) once put it, can be bridged – or reconciled – through the recovery of the promesse du

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bonheur sequestered in works of art and, mutatis mutandis, in the city. The degree to which the aesthetic attitude remains sealed off from everyday praxis is made manifest in the attempts by Benjamin to induce it artificially as an antidote to the repressive character of the city. Any promise that the city may potentially possess with respect to the cultivation of an aesthetic disposition would appear to require substantial excavation if it is to be recovered. If beyond the scope of this essay, we nevertheless have to raise the question of how we might arrive at a juncture where a seemingly irreconcilable bifurcation emerges and where the reunification of aesthetic experience and everyday life takes on the character of a tragic impossibility. If the city offers a configuration within which cultural practices without historical precedent might emerge, how is it that the city seems simultaneously hospitable and inhospitable toward these new forms? There is something of a paradox here, where the production of works of art gains a relative autonomy within the structure of social and economic relations that emerge in the modern city, yet the aesthetic impulse is taken to be shorn of its affective power as a consequence of the effects of this structure (see Burger 1984). Thus the recognition of aesthetic experience as having an autonomous character also appears as the moment in which it no longer has any mediating function vis-à-vis social norms. In this scenario, art is both in the city and external to it. Through the struggle revealed in the Marseilles essays, we can perhaps see Benjamin at his most disenchanted. Weber (1958, 139) describes disenchantment as the moment when everyday life in the city is overburdened by mastery through calculation: “One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits … Technical means and calculations perform the service.” Under these conditions, Weber speaks of a world in which “sublime values” have retreated from daily life into the realm of mysticism, or what he calls the “brotherliness of direct and personal human relations” (155). Thus an aesthetic attitude, similar to the neo-Platonism of the Romantics, becomes the response to a life overburdened by means-ends rationality. The projection of a possible community united by values sequestered from everyday life presumes an authentic relation that is implicitly contrasted with an inauthentic one that prevails over the everyday. Disenchantment, then, appears to imply a kind of reactionary force that, under the pressure of a deracinated life in the city, seeks a kind of disengagement that would preserve or reproduce values (alternately Romantic or avant-garde in character) that now stand outside of normative practices. There is the question of whether this interpretation is too one-sided, as it presumes that the bifurcation between religious and “rational”

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worldviews is both total and negative in character. This contrasts with Simmel’s (1971) view, wherein alienation augurs the potential for both negative and positive outcomes. In the metropolis, the burden of the individual is to make a path shorn of the comforts that tradition might provide. However, at the same time, there is also a freedom produced through the disburdening from tradition that provides opportunities not previously available. There is thus a contradictory (or dialectical) character to disenchantment that is perhaps overlooked by Weber. In the case of Benjamin, however, it is questionable whether the experience he describes can be assimilated to the kind of disenchantment formulated by Weber. If Benjamin’s disenchantment arises from the loss of magic as a system of belief, it is all the more problematic in that it does not resolve itself within a counter-strategy that reasserts an authentic relation, even if only as an anticipation. Whatever features of the sublime may be preserved in the “utopia which has left its traces in thousands of configurations of life” (Benjamin 1986d, 148), these do not appear recoverable in the case of Marseilles. Even the supposed possibilities of demystification inherent in Verfremdung (alienation effect) as employed by his friend Brecht do not produce the epiphanies that the avant-garde shock should produce. The shock overwhelms rather than enlightens. Thus, even if disenchantment could be said to have its positive dimension, similar to the estrangement effects described by both Simmel and Brecht, and presumably inhering in the “explosive” effect of dialectical images of the city, Marseilles seems to stop short of offering itself as a site from which these redemptive or transformative possibilities might emerge. Marseilles proves to be the limit case; that is, it proves to be everything that the capital is not. It refuses to submit to writing and reverie, or perhaps only does so begrudgingly, or only in a negative manner. The kind of alienation in the encounter speaks to the way that the experience of the capital is annihilated by the proximity to the real, against which a retreat into the reassurance of the reproduction of class reflexes and codes becomes the strategy that both demonstrates symptomatically (for us), and works to relieve, the anxiety produced by the inimical situation in which Benjamin finds himself. The comparison thus proves instructive, at least insofar as it indicates that the conditions for being the stranger offered by the capital are not the same as those producing the estrangement encountered in its other. In the former, meaning emerges as the anamnestic pay-off, as it were (in both its Platonic and immunological senses), for the archeological discoveries that distance affords; in the latter, there is no subsurface layer that would make good on the fragments of the material

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surface and offer a way to reconstruct a subjective whole and reinstitute agency. There is no “behind” that any hermeneutical technologies might be employed to discover. For some, this would simply demonstrate the parochialism of the “second” city and point to the limits or lack of resources, aesthetic or otherwise, that mark the difference and distance between province and cosmopolitan centre. But that would be to deny the special problem that Marseilles posed for Benjamin. Marseilles becomes a kind of black hole, the “maw of a seal” that eats everything, even the words that might be used to describe it. This is the city of catastrophe, where the strange really is just that – not parochialism, then, but a defamiliarization that, unlike the familiar defamiliarization of the capital, has a real element of strangeness to it. If there is an experience of the sublime, it would be Kantian in form, in how it produces both awe and terror. If, along these lines, Marseilles represents the sublime, then the capital is perhaps representative of beauty – that is, in Kantian terms, measurable – since it can be assimilated by thought as a human product. The sublime, on the other hand, is that which cannot be grasped as a whole, hence the fear that it creates for us. How Marseilles appears to elude representation is what produces the anxiety that we can read symptomatically off of the surface of Benjamin’s texts.

th e s e c o n d - ti e r c i t y Bonner (2002, 4) argues that the examination of contemporary cities “that are not primary global centres” provides an opportunity to observe “conflicts about the meaning of the city” that seemingly do not manifest themselves within those centres to which he refers. The implication here, following from Sassen’s (1991) work on major cities, is that there is a distinction between kinds of cities that is observable and that has implications for research – particularly the suggestion that the focus on “primary global centres” has diverted attention from interesting problems occurring elsewhere. However, it will not do to confine any observations of these differences to contemporary conditions alone. We can ask perhaps equally interesting questions about the past and about the degree to which such distinctions arise only in the contemporary context, or whether historical evidence suggests otherwise. Even more important, particularly with respect to the historical dispositions toward place, is the question of how the differences between centre and margin are to be grasped. Hidden in Bonner’s claim is the assumption that we would intuitively know what those differences are. Invoking the difference, however,

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raises the question of the “second-tier” city within what Sassen (1991, 327) calls “urban hierarchies” that emerge both within regions and between regions and that, in the comparative framework, invite curiosity about why such a difference exists and on what grounds. The idea of the “first-tier’” insists, by implication, on the copresence of a “second” (and, presumably, “third”) tier against which it is measured and compared. Positing a set of relations of difference generates the problem of the threshold and thus also judgments of what, by comparison, surpasses – or falls below – the threshold. The major stumbling block here is a narrow conception of tiers based on the volume of financial transactions, as is specifically the case with Sassen. If these quantities do represent a significant measure of difference, we can nevertheless ask whether this single dimension is sufficient as an index of differentiation. Cities are surely “first” – or not – for a variety of reasons, not all of which are economic. Despite its derivation from Sassen, we can nevertheless follow through on Bonner’s claim, although by linking the notion of hierarchy to a different set of relations. The reading of Benjamin’s essays undertaken here seeks to make good on Bonner’s suggestion that conflicts over meaning arise most visibly outside of the centre, and it does so by showing how Marseilles represents a problem for a theory of the city generated at the core. It troubles the “imaginary” of Paris, of which Winkler wrote, by threatening its enjoyment. We might think about this problem, then, in the context of distinctions that emerge in a reading of Benjamin. For many, Paris and Berlin provide the paradigmatic cases through which the insights of Benjamin are organized into an appealing theory of disposition both in and toward the city. But these formulations are too one-sided, particularly when viewed through the optics of Benjamin’s writing on “second” cities. Models of orienting toward the city that are derived from dubious inferences arising from glosses on the Paris fragments are employed to validate contemporary forms of relations between self and city in the context of a global field now characterized in terms of fluidity and flows (e.g., Appadurai 1996). The figurations of contemporary forms of cosmopolitanism and global cultural tourism are just two examples of notions derived from this one-sided perspective, based on a romanticized notion of flâneurie that has done a potential disservice to Benjamin. Criticizing this tendency, Tom McDonough (2002, 103) accuses Hannah Arendt of being one of its chief instigators by “strongly misreading the Benjamin text before her [and] celebrating a comforting vision of public space as a site of leisure open to all.” This results, for McDonough, in a betrayal of the ambivalence expressed by Benjamin toward the experience and place of the flâneur. In erasing this ambivalence, the “capital” stands in for all metropolitan experience,

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without the necessary attention paid to the status of other cities that do not necessarily provide experiences in the same manner. It is not, however, clear why the problems brought out through the “other” cities about which Benjamin writes have not received their due, although as McDonough seems to imply, the emphasis on the romantic perhaps precludes an attentive reading of the city essays as a whole. As an entry point, we can speculate that it is perhaps the second-tier city that provides the limit case, a bit of the Real that generates the noise against which the spectacular character of the first makes its appearance. As Bonner suggests, attention to the “second-tier” city might permit us to observe phenomena otherwise obscured. If the modern is specified, as Benjamin would have it, in shock and its contingent effect, in the “explosive force of dialectical images” (BuckMorss 1986, 109), we might read this backwards, as it were; that is, not through the emancipatory potentials that the first-tier city, through its estrangement, offers to the already estranged, but in the shock effect of the real that its other furnishes – an effect that is, arguably, denied as such for the sake of preserving estrangement as a positive feature. As we have seen, such events are traumatic enough to produce humming and foottapping as the symptoms of displacement that, if not so much reveal, certainly stand out as points where noise appears as a threat. This initiates a sort of rhythm machine that tries to cover up the static, a condition that is less metaphoric than it may at first seem: as Buck-Morss writes, “It was Adorno who pointed to the station switching behavior of the radio listener as a kind of aural flanerie” (105). Baudelaire, according to Benjamin (1986d, 158), “succumbs to the infatuation of Wagner” by abstracting the work of art from its historical specificity. Benjamin in turn succumbs to an infatuation with the notion of emancipation by converting the city into a ruin avant la lettre that can be appropriated for use as a dream fragment relocated through retrospective reordering. It is not clear how this is any less an abstraction than that of which Baudelaire stands accused. As Benjamin rightly points out, the Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) “abstracts from the social existence of man” by exempting itself from history, particularly in regard to the effects of technology on the production of art. If Benjamin was on the brink of a tremendous insight in grasping the mediating effects of technology on the work of art, this discovery seems not to have been developed to its furthest extent. This is so to the degree that he reinscribes the auratic in the ruin of the present in order that it become the thesis of a dialectic for an imaginary future. This formulation is put to the test in the problem for writing that Marseille poses. The degree to which the operation of auratic reinscription in the city may at all be feasible is betrayed by the very reality of Benjamin’s own

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existence as “bourgeois,” which keeps reappearing in symptomatic form. The other cities, second cities, do not offer themselves up as the kind of dream ruins such as are invoked in his favourite surrealist paintings. The essays on these “other” cities remain descriptive (that is, as opposed to redemptive) and do so precisely because of how they refuse to become the objects of anamnesis. They have no emancipatory potential because they remain unrealizable as façades for something that they are not. “See Naples and die” marks the end point of the essay “Naples,” when it ought really to be the beginning (Benjamin 1986c). The mistake is taking Paris as the paradigm. Paris is the vision of the somnambulist; the Real awaits considerably further south in Marseilles.

a n x i e t y a n d e n j oy m e n t What these essays by Benjamin point us toward is the problem of contingency and the forms of investment in desire that operate to cover over contingency; thus they present themselves as symptoms. That is, the first Marseilles essay might be read as a symptom of anxiety arising from the absence of meaning with which Benjamin finds himself confronted, and the second is perhaps symptomatic of the attempt to cover over the anxiety that emerges in the first. The smear in particular stands out as the means by which the threat that Marseilles appears to represent for Benjamin’s enjoyment can be quelled. Both essays point uneasily to the absence of any stable essence and thus to the contingency that makes the making of meaning an ongoing work – one aimed at covering over the absence of sense at the centre. Marseilles threatens to expose this “nothing” through the difficulties that it presents to Benjamin, the bitter dust that it throws in his face, which blinds him and chokes him. It is therefore the loss of meaning that the “secondtier” city forces us to confront, as Marseilles most evidently does. The second city is always already there from the beginning, the “repressed traumatic kernel” that is there by necessity, as otherwise meaning would collapse. This trauma is the realization that there is only nothing, the Real, putting the theory of the city at risk since it is ineluctably contingent, as Marseilles threatens to reveal. In this complex operation of covering over this latent nothingness, the “thing” as Zizek (1993, 203) points out “is conceived as something inaccessible to the other and at the same time threatened by him.” However, this thing is something that has never existed in the first place, and thus exists only to the extent that imputing theft to the other conceals its non-existence. We see all of this displayed in the symptoms that arise from a reading of Benjamin’s essays. Marseilles acts as the

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kind of other that threatens to steal the enjoyment of Paris. Similarly, Keohane argues that the uniqueness of English Canada resides in its awareness of “lack,” a particular proximity to the real that can be detected in the anxiety over identity that seems to haunt English Canadian being (Keohane 1997). This is a useful observation insofar as it allows us to wed the crisis of Marseilles to the problem of comparison as it is reflected through the differences that appear to separate Toronto and Montreal. The logic here is that of the “theft of enjoyment” (Zizek 1993, 201–5), a charge levelled, for different reasons, in both directions, much in the same way as Marseilles is accused of theft by Benjamin. The seriousness, and repetition, of the exchange of charges belies their very fragility and uncertainty. That is, there is always a comparative system in play, which simultaneously both shores up identity and meaning as it threatens to undermine it, and we are faced with indeterminacy. The fantastic (if not phantasmic) character of this relation, of possession and theft, is best seen in the recovery of enjoyment through the medium of hashish as it occurs in Benjamin’s essay. Mediation, then, proves to be the key to the organization of this relation; the medium invokes the system through which the disposition toward the city emerges. The enjoyment recovered through a shift in communicative perspective allows for the discursive possibilities previously absent; that is, it allows Benjamin to (re)write the city in more familiar terms, although this may function simply to mask the problem. Describing the relationship between bourgeoisie and bohemia in the modern city, Blum (2003, 219) notes a tension or negotiation between sets of “normative” oppositions: art and commerce; freedom and administration; and so on. He proposes a relation necessary to an understanding of regulated existence within the city, while at the same time noting the ambiguity of this relation and hence its potent force. Against the potential ruin that any excess might imply, and in the face of its indeterminate possibility, the bourgeoisie defend themselves through a strategy of self-absorption: they “develop hyperbolic self-confidence as a demonstration of worth reflected in a strategy of methodic asceticism toward the meaning of actions(s) and life.” The bourgeoisie so described decline to partake of the very abundance that they themselves have created as a sign of their self-control. Implied here, of course, is the other, whether defined in class terms or otherwise, as the locus of excess against which such abstemiousness is measured. If Blum is here implicitly contrasting this move with its other – the flâneur – we might equally suggest that what is at stake here is the Real (in the Lacanian sense), which threatens constantly, through this very indeterminacy, to make a mockery of such a lifestyle choice. The city is both an invitation

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to transgression and the place wherein to police desire, both intrapsychically and materially. Benjamin clearly portrays this tension through the struggle to recover the scene of enchantment by writing over such indeterminacy. Even so, the rewriting is still haunted by the spectre of comparison that requires the salve to lubricate the friction of difference, if not erase it entirely, in the attempt to make everywhere the same. It is also the moment when the “hyperbolic self-confidence” is put to the test, as it recoils from the terror produced by the inability to represent the city in its own image. It is clear that Benjamin suffers insofar as his own selfconfidence is put at risk by the implacability of the situation that he encounters. For us, it suggests how the everyday encounter shatters the security of theory and opens upon the necessity of the specific instance insofar as it shatters our own complacency with respect to the culture of cities. That is, if the cost to Benjamin appeared to be the squandering of mortality itself, the stakes should be equally high for us.

references Adorno, Theodor. 1984. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. “Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” In Hannah Arendt, ed., Walter Benjamin: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 1– 55. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, Walter. 1986a. “Hashish in Marseilles.” In P. Demetz, ed., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 137–45. New York: Schocken Books. – 1986b. “Marseilles.” In P. Demetz, ed., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 131–6. New York: Schocken Books. – 1986c. “Naples.” In P. Demetz, ed., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 163–73. New York: Schocken Books. – 1986d. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” In P. Demetz, ed., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, 146–62. New York: Schocken Books. – 1994. “To Hugo Hofmannsthal, June 26, 1929.” In G. Scholem and T. Adorno, eds, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–140, 352–3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. – 1999a. “Myslovice – Braunschweig – Marseilles: The Story of a Hashish Trance.” In M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith, eds, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, 386–93. Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press.

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– 1999b. The Arcades Project. Trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope. Vol 1. Trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Blum, Alan. 2003. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bonner, Kieran. 2002. “Understanding Placemaking: Economics, Politics and Everyday Life in the Culture of Cities.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 11, no. 1: 1–16. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1986. “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39: 99–140. Burger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. M. Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Culture of Cities Project. http://www.yorku.ca/culture_of_cities/about/approach.htm. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Demetz, Peter. 1986. “Introduction.” In P. Demetz, ed., Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, vii-xliii. New York: Schocken Books. Farge, Arlette. 1995. “Ville derobée et subie, ville inventé xviiième siecle.” Journal des anthropologues 61–2: 89–95. Frisby, David. 2001. Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilloch, Graeme. 1996. Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City. Cambridge: Polity Press. Keohane, Kieran. 1997. Symptoms of Canada: An Essay on the Canadian Identity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lindner, Rolf. 1999. “The Imaginary of the City.” In The Contemporary Study of Culture, 289–94. Wien: Turia and Kant. McDonough, Tom. 2002. “The Crimes of the Flaneur.” October, no. 102: 101–22. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1971. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In D.N. Levine, ed., Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, 324–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sombart, Werner. 1967. Luxury and Capitalism. Trans. W.R. Dittmar. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stahl, Geoff. 2001. “Tracing Out an Anglo-Bohemia: Musicmaking and Myth in Montreal.” Public, nos 22–3: 99–121.

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Weber, Max. 1958. “Science as Vocation.” In H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 129–56. New York: Oxford University Press. Winkler, Daniel. 2002. “Marseilles: Cinematic Sites of Imaginary and Globalisation.” 16 pp. Unpublished. Marseilles. Zizek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, nc: Duke University Press. Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, ma: Blackwell.

PART TWO

Fragmented Cities

4 The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi Staging Polyphony in Montreal and Toronto MICHAEL DARROCH AND JEAN-FRANÇOIS MORISSETTE Interlingual creativity has long been a feature of Montreal’s cultural imagination. With vibrant immigrant communities in addition to a long and complicated relationship between French and English, Montreal is increasingly a site where polylingual creation has come into the limelight. In many cases, such works are inspired as much by Quebec’s often heated politics of language as by commonplace city encounters. The arts have responded significantly to the tensions evoked by the changing nature of language use in the multicultural metropolis of Montreal against, or despite, the backdrop of Quebec’s nationalistic politics. One such work, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi (1995), a play by Quebec playwright Larry Tremblay, is unique in how it deals with the interaction of French and English. In contrast to other creations that combine languages – the intercultural theatre of Robert Lepage; bilingual texts such as David Fennario’s play Balconville (1979) and the works of contemporary novelist Gail Scott; or the linguistically hybrid forms of poet A.M. Klein – The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi layers English words over French syntax: the play portrays a francophone man who has lost the ability to express himself in his mother tongue but relates his melancholy life story in a proficient, but hesitant, French-inflected English. In Dragonfly, Gaston Talbot, a francophone man in his fifties, born in the town of Chicoutimi, recounts how a dream reawakens his ability to speak after a traumatic childhood experience plunged him into silence for some forty years. However, when he finally regains his speech, it is in another language: English. Having decided to share his story, Gaston, whose

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motto is “to keep in touch,” cannot prevent himself from pretending and lying: he claims in the first line of his story that he “travels a lot,” that he is a worldly, successful man, only to revoke this affirmation shortly thereafter and admit that he has never left Chicoutimi in his life. Gaston seems to hide his identity behind the mask of a foreign language, only gradually revealing the circumstances that have led to this predicament. Alone on stage, as if in a psychoanalytical session where the public assumes the role of the attentive, but nonintrusive, therapist, Gaston recounts the dream that led him to recover his speech facility, a dream during which he ultimately transforms into a dragonfly and devours his mother, unveiling the event of his youth that provoked his muteness: the death – of which he is either the cause or merely the witness – of his friend Pierre GagnonConnally while the two boys played Cowboys and Indians on the bank of the Rivière aux Roches. The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi premiered at Montreal’s Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui in 1995 as a coproduction with the Festival de théâtre des Amériques and was remounted for an extended run in 1996. Produced by Larry Tremblay himself and starring prominent Quebec actor JeanLouis Millette, the play was performed for the primarily Frenchspeaking audience of the Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, founded in 1968 as an institution committed to producing new Québécois dramatic works in French. A 2002 production of the play directed by Kevin Orr and starring Dennis O’Connor was presented for the primarily Englishspeaking audience of Toronto’s Factory Studio Theatre. The Factory Theatre Lab, founded in 1970 in the heyday of Toronto’s alternative theatre movement, was the first of Toronto’s small theatres to work exclusively with Canadian content.1 This performance was coproduced by the Solar Stage theatre company and Odonata, a company formed by O’Connor and Orr to create and tour Dragonfly. Orr first came across Dragonfly while reading journalist Ray Conlogue’s book on Canadian and Quebec relations, Impossible Nation: The Longing for Homeland in Canada and Quebec (1996). Conlogue, who has worked as an arts critic for the Globe and Mail in both Toronto and Montreal, figures among the journalists to critique both productions of Dragonfly, a play that for him profoundly resonates with the failures of the dream for Canadian biculturalism. As we shall see, these two productions differed significantly in approach, revealing divergent perspectives on the prospect of the convergence of languages in city culture. Written without stage directions or punctuation, the play’s monologue form resembles a flowing narrative poem. Yet this monologue nevertheless sustains a dialogic structure between French and English, thus raising important questions about the relations between languages in Quebec and Canada, about the relationship between language and

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the performance of identity, and equally about the social implications of the intermingling of these dominant language cultures. Although these aspects have been interpreted extensively through their broad implications for Canadian and Québécois national identities, we argue in this paper that Dragonfly represents – from the very possibility of its creation to the social and cultural discourses elicited by its themes and, in particular, by performances in Montreal and Toronto – a particular state of interaction between French and English that is unique to the urban character of Montreal but also allows for reflection on the linguistic character of Toronto. Many plays written in Canada’s official languages move between these cities, either presented in translation or presented to an audience of the original language group (for example, English plays at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre or French plays at Toronto’s Théâtre français). Even parts of Balconville (1980), Fennario’s celebrated bilingual play portraying daily relations between anglophone and francophone neighbours in Montreal’s largely working-class district of Verdun/Pointe-St Charles, were translated to render the Québécois joual more accessible to English Canadians who struggle in French. Yet the text of Dragonfly is unique in not requiring translation or transition to move between audiences in Montreal and Toronto. Although the action of the play is not situated in either city, the uncommon characteristic of this play’s textual immutability allows for a succinct form of comparison of the interchange of languages in these urban sites. In this chapter, we undertake this comparison on several levels: first, we develop notions of intercultural translation as integral to the creative act underlying the play; second, we consider the play’s forms of theatrical expression and the social discourses that these evoke; and finally, we try to understand the relationship of language to the urban experience in these two cities by considering the play’s respective mises en scène in Montreal and Toronto as well as the critical reception that each production elicited. Our analysis thus explores not only the play itself as an expression of the convergence of languages, but also the possibility of translating dramatically this otherwise untranslatable text from one urban stage to the other in order to compare (and to question the comparability) of the linguistic experience in these two urban cultures. First, let us turn to the element of intercultural translation.

u n t r a n s l a t a b i l i t y, o r t r a n s l a t i n g without an original Dragonfly occupies a space between languages. Paul Lefebvre’s afterword, “To Keep in Touch” (1995, 65), is helpful in grasping the play’s aesthetic form:

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This play was written in English. Actually, it was written in French, but using English words. Must one have the name Larry Tremblay, a name that contains the two languages, in order to create such a text, as if Larry has found words for Tremblay’s silence? Does he have to have been born in the Saguenay region of Quebec? That might have speeded up the birth of such a text. But it seems that sooner or later, an equivalent text would have been written in an equivalent place, Athens maybe, or Düsseldorf, or who knows where else. And of course, to translate the text into Greek or German, one wouldn’t have to put it into Greek or German words. One would have to put the English words over the Greek or German language; the same would be true for the Lettish, the Bengali, or the Dutch language.

Lefebvre strikes a vital chord when he suggests that Dragonfly cannot be translated in a traditional sense. To rewrite a work in another language is an attempt to traverse cultural distance to another place, another community in space and time. His idea is in accordance with the first and strongest premise behind any concept of cultural translation – that is, with the inherent impossibility of translating, to another place and time, the totality of meaning that any one text may signal or suggest. Yet his extrapolation that a translation of this play would consist solely of putting the English words over another language is flawed. Such a translation is naturally conceivable, but its success would largely be based on the equivalency of context, on the equivalent weight and use of the English language with respect to the dominant tongue of this other place – an idea also raised by Lefebvre’s suggestion that “sooner or later an equivalent text would have been written in an equivalent place” – that is, another context in which English threatens to dominate the local idiom. Translation, however, can never fulfil a demand for equivalency; yet the act of translating can indeed serve to highlight the affinities and differences between places, peoples, and cultures. Lefebvre’s understanding of the play and his consideration of its translation are founded on a particular sense of power relations between the national languages in question. Ultimately, he fails to consider the obvious possibility of presenting this text to an English-speaking, especially Anglo-Canadian, audience, raising the question: how would one overlay this French play of English words onto an English syntax and sustain any remnants of meaning? In an analysis of Dragonfly’s linguistic characteristics, Robert Dion (2002, 126) refers to the play as an extreme case of hétérolinguisme, a term that he borrows from Rainier Grutman (1997): “Il ne s’agit donc pas, ici, de s’attacher à telle oeuvre ‘bilingue’ ou ‘multilingue’, mais à un exemple qui, dans les limites imposées par le marché québécois (différent, par exemple, du marché acadien, où les possibilités d’hybridation

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linguistique sont plus riches à cause du bilinguisme réel des auteurs et de la population), suggère la cohabitation des langues par divers moyens, la représentation ainsi créée produisant ce que Rainier Grutman appelle un hétérolinguisme … c’est-à-dire l’inscription de différences au sein de la représentation des idiomes écrits ou parlés, que ce soit à l’intérieur d’une narration ou d’une séquence dialogue.” Following this vein of thought, Dragonfly’s dialogic form is exemplary of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, which encompasses not only the processes by which large or even national language systems converge, but also the natural shifting between discursive strata within local contexts of language use. Dragonfly is thus a text where cultural translation played an integral role in the creative act itself. The dialogic nature of its aesthetic form renders this play a continual passage between French and English – translative action that occurs on one level in Quebec’s social and national discourses but perhaps more importantly in the lived experiences of Montreal streets where these languages converge. In contrast to Paul Lefebvre, who suggests that Tremblay’s origins in the predominantly francophone city of Chicoutimi in the Saguenay region speeded up the composition of this text, and to Robert Dion, who insists that Dragonfly is firmly anchored in the Québécois region of Chicoutimi,2 we believe that it is insufficient to reduce this text merely to Tremblay’s experience as a Chicoutimien or even a Québécois. Does this text not also stem from Tremblay’s subsequent experience in Montreal, his migration from a monolingual to a multilingual sphere? To our mind, contemplating the performance of Dragonfly for a Montreal audience bears greater significance than does a literary interpretation of the play’s statement about language use in regional Quebec. From this standpoint, if we are to follow Lefebvre’s discussion of “equivalent places,” Athens and Düsseldorf must give way to cities such as Brussels or Hong Kong. Dragonfly is by no means the first text created in Montreal that deals in part with this encounter of language cultures. Sherry Simon (2001, 321) has written about forms of cultural translation in Montreal and related practices in literature: “To live with the contamination of languages is to feel at home in those sometimes painful areas where translation and writing overlap. In the shadowing of one language by another, in the ghostly presence of one behind the other, there is a widening of the frame of reference. No one vocabulary will suffice, no one channel can access the multiple planes of expression. Just as visual and plastic arts today abandon the single frame, the written word expands its reach.” Simon (2001, 321) coins the term “translation without an original” to refer to texts that have been engendered by the traffic of language in

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urban sites. “Translation without an original” “stands for a range of writing practices that fall somewhere between writing and translation, practices that use the gap between languages as a space of creativity. Rather than acting exclusively as mediators, writers/translators create hybrid literary texts that are informed by a double culture. Their texts become a crossroads of sensibilities.” We might then posit that the theme of Dragonfly is no less than the irreconcilability of such cultural sensibilities in a particular time and place. The coexistence of English and French, most pronounced in the everyday of Montreal, but also a force in regional areas of Quebec such as Chicoutimi, has been thrust into a single character, Gaston Talbot, and this cultural clash, where French clearly exists only in the shadows of English, is irreconcilable in his memory: it is ripping him apart. Moreover, as mentioned above, the expression of this conflict is only available to readers or spectators in the form of Gaston’s dream, which he struggles to recount even as he constantly uses the mask of language to lie and interrupt the linearity of his tale. The expressive form of the play can thus be reduced neither to a version of cultural fusion nor merely to the incongruous sediments of two cultural realities. It is a theatrical dream, the fragile propping up of a desperate character whose predicament conceals and reveals broader social and historical discourses of Quebec and, to our mind, the particular theatrical and linguistic character of Montreal. If we posit that these forms of cultural translation are already embedded in the work’s underlying written act, drawing, as Simon says, on “the gap between languages as the space of creativity,” it must also necessarily be a constituent of the work’s theatrical (re-)creation in varying cultural contexts. Such an understanding of cultural translation must be broad enough to include performance, gestus, accent, décor, and it must also account for the collaborative aspect of theatre making. In this vein of thought, we may cite Antoine Vitez, for whom translation is analogous to stagecraft itself through the very impossibility of transposing all potential meanings. Translation, he argues, like a mise en scène, has the task of teasing out certain, selected meanings and interpreting these according to the time and place of their reproduction: “Très souvent, il faut dire aux acteurs de ne pas chercher à exprimer la totalité du sens ou la totalité de l’imitation d’un personnage supposé, mais de signifier simplement par quelques traits qu’il y a une différence entre le personnage et son modèle: signifier la forme plutôt que le contenu. On signale le décalage, et le décalage dégage l’effet. Effet d’étrangeté, ou d’estrangement (c’est le néologisme que j’ai inventé), comme le demande Brecht” (Copfermann and Vitez 1981, 57). The “décalage,” or gap, of which Vitez speaks forms the axle of our comparative analysis. His view that no translative practice or, by

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extension, performance, is capable of re-presenting the totality of meaning signalled by an original model implies that translating can serve as a gauge for measuring the distance between two contexts (in our case, from one city to another). In Vitez’s sense, the goal of translation is to hold the original at a distance and to emphasize this distance – an idea that he equates to the Brechtian notion of estrangement. Verfremdung, for Brecht, was an underlying method designed to oblige the spectator to see Otherness in the habitual or everyday. This, in itself, is an inherently comparative action of perceptual exchange, of seeing conditions and contradictions simultaneously (back and forth) as familiar and strange, same and other. How is Gaston’s personal estrangement, the loss of a mother tongue to a surrogate language that is forever influenced by the first, translated between the theatrical experience in Montreal and Toronto? With these questions in mind, we must also recognize that measuring cultural distance alone is insufficient as a means of comparison. Merely acknowledging, for example, that Montreal and Toronto are statistically comprised of varying language groups tells us little about linguistic encounters within them, how they differ or compare. As Jean-François Côté remarks in his contribution to this volume, one of the implications of comparing cities is that “you can compare a city not only to itself according to how it is portrayed in a certain chronotope, but also to others in reference both to a type and to the ‘ideal city’ that lies either behind or beyond, in terms of historical experience, the possibilities of cultural expression – since it is only through the projective comparison that cities finally exist in their own specificity as civilized units.” As Dragonfly embodies travelling between languages and the relationship of this movement to identity and place, we may explore its productions in Montreal and Toronto not only to compare how each city understands its own linguistic experience, but equally to emphasise the décalage between them. It is important to consider the extent to which estrangement lies at the core of Dragonfly. Jane Moss has proposed that Dragonfly enacts speech itself (Moss 1995, 251–67) and, we might add, its division (English words over a French syntax), which renders problematic the symbolic order guaranteed and structured by language. Equally problematic becomes the individual identity that is forged by this symbolic order. The form of expression represented by this play – its speech act or utterance in Bakhtin’s sense – is specific in its very strangeness, its “being other,” from the mother tongue of the protagonist Gaston. Consequently, the character becomes estranged from himself, or rather, he assumes the voice of Pierre Gagnon-Connally: Pierre comes to inhabit Gaston’s consciousness: “I close my eyes and Pierre appears”

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(15). The action in Dragonfly thus refers to the action of telling (a story) in the language of the other. In this sense, Gaston’s monologue is constructed as an internal dialogue, a dialogue in which each of his ruses, each lie, is undermined by the anticipation, or the presence – even within Gaston’s consciousness – of a reciprocal response: I told you that I travel a lot that’s not true … My childhood was a big success I told you that too it’s not true (18)

Gaston sees himself from outside, with the eyes of someone else. Moreover, almost all of the features that Gaston attributes to himself are, in fact, those of Pierre and vice versa: the role of the cowboy was played by Pierre, not Gaston; the naked boy who was laughing in the water was Gaston, not Pierre; the simple-minded person was not Pierre, but Gaston. In this way, Dragonfly enacts, on the one hand, the encounter of two languages within the consciousness of one individual, thus making him appear alienated and in conflict with himself; on the other hand, it stages an unconscious process, the dream, which permits the protagonist to access his own consciousness. The dream both enables him to escape the state of muteness and provides the structure through which he vents, or invents, this experience.3 Gaston initially seems reborn linguistically, becoming a new man by speaking in English, but we slowly realize that he is trapped, struggling between two linguistic personalities. At the end of the play, Gaston is left waiting, in a state of uncertainty and of incompleteness, his final act to sing J’attendrai (a French song made popular by Tino Rossi).4 Ultimately, no element of his life story is certain, particularly the ambiguous circumstances surrounding Pierre’s death (accident or murder?). Here we return to a core element of our enquiry: does this polylingual work imply the impossible union of languages, each estranged from the other in a state of incompleteness? Or can this fragile, imbalanced union of English and French be understood as a grotesque linguistic form – pure language in its essential state of change and becoming?5 The grotesque relation of self and other embodied in Gaston’s linguistic personas reflects an experience of awakening within another linguistic sphere and therefore begs us to question the relation of language to place. Beyond the evident signification of Quebec’s tenuous relationship within the Canadian federation as outlined in other analyses,6 the performance of Dragonfly in Montreal and Toronto brings to the fore the immediate experience of inhabiting the variable linguistic spaces of the

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cosmopolitan city. In this regard, several aspects are worthy of enquiry: first, the relation of language to place embedded in the action of the play; second, the implications of language and place for audiences in Montreal and Toronto; and third, the ways that the relation of language to place was staged differently in the Montreal and Toronto productions. As we will see, the two productions took divergent interpretations in portraying the site where Gaston delivers his monologue.

th e p l a c e o f l a n g u a g e , l a l a n g u e d u p u b l i c In Gaston’s story/dream, we are provided a variety of descriptions of Chicoutimi, his hometown. Contrary to representing a homogeneous, inner-Quebec environment, Chicoutimi is likened to a border or frontier, an intermediary zone with many divisions. These aspects of Gaston’s surroundings have forced him unwittingly into an unsettled state of linguistic border thinking. It is important to review the ways that Gaston attempts to relate his perception of this divisive environment in order to grasp the import of this story for the linguistic borderlines shared by its Montreal and Toronto audiences. Gaston first defines Chicoutimi as “an amerindian word / it means up to where the water is deep” (13), but soon alters it to “up to where the water is shallow (18) and “up to where it’s not profound” (18). This meaning of depth, he first claims, refers to the Saguenay river, “a big a beautiful a splendid river” (13); but the action of his traumatic experience takes place in the shallow waters of the Rivière aux Roches, itself a border zone between land and water, a “river full of stones / as if a huge volcano hat spit them” (13). Chicoutimi later means “up to where the ships can go” (23) and ultimately “where the city stops or starts” (26). Gaston initially describes Chicoutimi as “ugly / as every American town / and this ugliness is very interesting” (13), adding “I believe in the power of destiny / to be born in Chicoutimi is very meaningful” (18), only to counter, “there is nothing interesting to say about this area / we are not responsible of the place where we are born” (20). Moreover, Chicoutimi is referenced as a divided city, and Gaston’s childhood takes place on the borderline: the dream began on Sainte-Anne Street in Chicoutimi which is divided in two parts Chicoutimi and Chicoutimi-Nord the Saguenay separates them the Sainte-Anne bridge makes the link between them … the Sainte-Anne Street starts at this bridge

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and goes north to south dividing the town in east and west my parents rented a house on Sainte-Anne Street (19–20)

These contradictions and frontier zones signify the inner turmoil already inscribed in Gaston’s identity, which emerges in his conflictual postaphasic anglophone self. Only in the final stage of his dream, flying above the town as the dragonfly, does he gain a distanced, cohesive perspective of Chicoutimi – and only from this distance is he briefly content: “for the first time in his life / the sight of his native place / made him happy” (46). But this euphoria is deceptive, as moments thereafter the dragonfly is pulled inescapably to crash into the chaos of the Rivière aux Roches.7 In Dragonfly the space between city and language is vague: the allusions to city dividing lines and border zones seem intertwined with Gaston’s own linguistic divide. For a Montreal spectator, the relation between language and space is integral to the perception of difference between city districts and, indeed, to the public discourse used to describe and categorize the city’s spaces. The paradigm of the “two solitudes,” borrowed from Hugh McClellan’s canonical book of the same title, persists as the norm to split Montreal into anglophone West and francophone East, divided by the central Boulevard St Laurent, despite many forms of intermingling of both communities throughout the city’s history. Furthermore, the increasingly celebrated high rate of trilingualism among immigrant communities in Montreal lends a linguistic framework to any portrayal of a nonfrancophone or nonanglophone city space: beyond the vast array of experiences that one might enjoy, for instance, in the established communities of Chinatown, the Portuguese Quarter, or Little Italy (along the traditional immigrant corridor of Boulevard St Laurent) or in the diversity of newer areas of settlement such as the Côte-des-Neiges district, these spaces are also perceived as places where particular languages may be heard, spoken, and enjoyed. Gaston’s constant recharacterizations of the border zones in relation to Chicoutimi, and indeed, to the variable condition of his linguistic self, further relate the dialogicity, the state of constant flux and change that exists in such an environment of sustained and diversified linguistic contact. If we understand the urban experience to be partly characterized by theatricality – that is, by the performance of identity in the presence of strangers – Montreal’s particular linguistic configurations intensify the shifting relations between language, identity, and place. Which language, in Simon’s terms, exists in the shadows of the other? In the national discourse of Quebec, under the surveillance of such policies as Bill 101, English would seem to exist in the shadows of French. Montreal is

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indeed statistically more French-speaking than English-speaking, but English is nonetheless spoken by a large community, it is without doubt the dominant language in several municipalities, and further, it retains international status as a lingua franca. Thus in Montreal it is certainly no surprise to anglophones to find themselves in an environment where English is spoken hesitantly or not at all; conversely, a francophone might equally enter neighbourhood streets where French is no longer the main tongue. This experience frequently results in having to assess which language is appropriate in order to address an interlocutor in varying situations, a negotiation of language performance that dramatically animates many linguistic encounters. Moreover, many Montrealers who are comfortably bi- or trilingual live and celebrate the constant shifting between linguistic encounters, in both the public and the private spheres. Gaston’s narrative revolves around duality and frontier and functions in response to a fear of singularity and confinement. His desire and ultimate failure to escape thus contradict his very first claim to “travel a lot.” In this sense, Gaston attempts to break loose from the bounds of his language, first, by obliterating the oppression of English embodied in Pierre; second, by symbolically devouring his mother (tongue) and flying away. But as he is drawn back to crash into the Rivières aux Roches, we are led to wonder whether he can ever escape these binds. It is a reflection of the spatial and identitary confines that language imposes on a speaker: as a monolingual francophone, Gaston seems tethered to his location in regional Quebec, where his desire to express himself freely – to communicate essentially, to “keep in touch” – can never be fulfilled. Instead, his actions lead him first to silence and then to a corrupted form of language imposed upon him, a personal idiom in which his English vocabulary works clumsily over the unalterable constraints of the underlying French grammatical structure.8 For the Gaston whom we view on stage, to “travel a lot” and to “keep in touch” can thus be construed as a manifest desire for the facility, and no longer the fear, of shifting fluently between languages: I told you that I travel a lot I told you that just to make me more interesting that’s not true it’s common sense that people who travel are more interesting than people who stay all their life in the same little spot (18)

Once again, Montreal emerges as the focus of Dragonfly’s contemplation: a site where “travelling” between languages is a commonplace event. Exchanging languages and changing spaces are inherently

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related through the mutual aspect of motion. Trapped irrevocably within this movement, Gaston wants above all to avoid exclusion, “to be in not to be out” (12): It’s a question of fitting I just want to fit with the scenery the world is a bunch of problems everyone knows that if we share the same vision we can handle the world if we feel the same thing all together we create a magic moment (12, emphasis added)

He recognizes that speaking one language or another is an ordinary, everyday event, yet he remains threatened by the shift: however what I want to express is that the mere fact to dream in English which after all is something more or less ordinary even if as for me at that moment of my life I was a French speaking person was felt as a dramatic change (19, emphasis added)

Experiencing language in terms of fitting “with the scenery” and as a “dramatic change” relates the overt theatricality of speaking in the different districts of Montreal. Sites of linguistic contact relate to communal language – that is, the language of commerce, of street interaction, music in cafés, and even written signs. In Montreal, even if Bill 101 prohibits explicit commercial signage in English, written English persists in other social forms, such as bulletin board postings for lost cats and garage sales, menus, price tags and sales receipts, newspapers and fliers, and strikers’ signs. Indeed, Larry Tremblay has frequently attributed Dragonfly’s evolution to a moment spent contemplating a bilingual menu in Montreal’s famous Ben’s Deli. In a text about the play written in 2002, he recalls: “One day, in Montreal, having just let my mind wander in contemplation of a bilingual menu, French on the right, English on the left, I pulled out a little notebook and began to write. I jotted down the first lines of that play that kept running through my head, in which French was to be the main character. There, I had my first surprise: the words that I was jotting down were in English. I believed, then, that this was just a little game, a sort of warm-up before seriously beginning my writing work. But, the next day, when I opened up my notebook, I

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continued to write in English” (Tremblay 2002, 10–11). Such sites of contact refer less to forms of private language – language spoken in the home or even to oneself. It is between these forms that Dragonfly comes into play. Gaston’s interior discourse is infused with the exterior collision of languages. Although he performs his thoughts, his dream, his fears, for the community of the audience, his monologue is equally a performance – indeed, a confession – to himself. If Dragonfly can be seen both to emerge from and to convey the urban experience of Montreal, we must equally question how this experience can be represented in Toronto. Toronto is reputed to be Canada’s most multicultural city, having accepted a vast number of immigrants since the adoption of official Canadian multiculturalism in the early 1970s. Despite Toronto’s diversity, however, the multilingual experience remains largely behind the scenes, in the privacy of the home or community, or superficial, visible primarily in forms of print culture or commercial and street signage. Public discourse regarding multilingualism is often associated with the role of language education: the necessity of offering newcomers programs in English as a second language; the school requirements for French as a second language in compliance with national bilingual policy; and the sometimes contested space between teaching these “official languages” and the so-called “heritage languages” in Ontario law, which provides that schools offer free courses in any language for which there is demand by twenty-five students or more. For many immigrant communities, these “heritage classes” have been pivotal in maintaining the use of a mother tongue across generations (Kalinowski and Brown 2002, B01). Nevertheless, as English remains the dominant language of both trade and media, it also dominates the public expectation of the linguistic capital required to negotiate the city. Ultimately, the principal association of language use with city space in Toronto hinges on shared perceptions of settlement patterns among immigrant communities. The dense clustering of certain communities, such as Toronto’s impressive downtown Chinatown along Spadina Avenue, may indeed evoke a sense, or even fear, among noncommunity members of the possibility of straying into a space where communication breaks down, but the overwhelming belief that one can always return to or rely on English relegates such fears to the realm of urban legend. Although multiple languages are heard spoken throughout the city, for monolingual Torontonians, accented English may be just as important a signal of linguistic otherness. For the large number of Toronto residents who are able to function in a language apart from English, there are only a limited number of contexts in which the choice of language is uncertain.

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Considering this precarious state of linguistic interaction portrayed within Gaston’s psyche, the site where Gaston delivers his monologue is necessarily ambiguous: it is textually undefined, no more than the empty space of the stage. The choice of scenography used in each production reflects anticipated attitudes of the audiences in each city. In the Montreal production, Larry Tremblay used a sparse décor consisting primarily of a leather swivel chair and a makeup table with a mirror against the black background of the stage. For the scenography of the Toronto production, Kevin Orr used an equally sparse stage: a sixinch riser in the centre, onto which Gaston climbed, and merely a table with a glass of water, set up for Gaston to address his audience. In Montreal, Gaston entered the stage in full possession of his faculties and started speaking as though at a conference: “I travel a lot. I see a lot of things” (11). Nevertheless, this conference space soon transforms into a space of confidentiality and secrets: “I told you that I travel a lot / that’s not true” (18). And finally it becomes a space of confession: “I take his head with my hands and / crush it on the rocks / It was not Pierre who laughed” (55). Gaston slowly disintegrates in the course of the spectacle. In Toronto, Orr and actor O’Connor specifically envisioned Gaston as addressing an association of linguists. They reinforced the personal conflict within Gaston by having him stumble in, as though entering by accident or by error. Thus the character of Gaston, who is seemingly unaware of this environment, is already fragmented when he enters the theatre. In this ambiguous space, Gaston recounts his story as though in a constant state of rehearsal. To carry out this effect, O’Connor entered the auditorium through a side entrance at the audience level while the house lights were still on. The house lights were gradually dimmed over as much as ten minutes as he continued to speak. To avoid allowing the performance to descend into the realm of political statement, Orr’s initiative sought to relate to a Toronto audience the terrifying experience of losing (or fearing the loss of) a mother tongue.9 Before we review the critical tendencies of each performance, we need to consider the relation of the play to the audience. The interior dialogues, conscious or subconscious, that inhabit Gaston make him appear implicated in a real relationship with the other: when he speaks, he lies, he looks forward, he interrupts himself, and so forth. Gaston thinks of himself by integrating Otherness into his consciousness; he cannot assert his own identity in a fixed, monologic way, and in this sense, his identity remains open, incomplete (between birth and death), and dialogical. In the same way, the meaning of his tale remains incomplete, uncertain, and thus calls upon the presence of an audience or reader to construct the work’s significance. In the theatre, meanings attributed to a work ultimately derive from audiences’ experience of the

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event. In our example, it is important to consider the theatre as a lived experience that requires the presence of Otherness in the “here and now” – in the place of the theatre and in the space of the city – to realize its existence. On the one hand, participating in a theatrical work as a spectator refers to the act of “attending” a performance. Gadamer (1996, 142) reminds us that “to attend” means “to take part,” in the sense of full participation, requiring an attitude of detachment from oneself for the benefit of the work. On the other hand, “to attend” a theatrical performance stimulates, in principle, the audience’s pleasure. In order to fulfil this function, to have pleasure, spectators must necessarily suspend their preoccupations that animate their daily reality to become entirely available for the show. For Brecht, these ideas were related since theatrical pleasure derived foremost from the play’s ability to distance the spectator from the habitual or familiar, allowing for a new perspective of oneself. Distance with respect to oneself, the décalage of which Vitez speaks, allows spectators to recognize and understand that which is happening before them – that is, to learn to see from a different perspective what they knew already and to be capable of attributing a new meaning to this reality. We may thus enquire into the forms of recognition that Dragonfly evoked for audiences in Montreal and Toronto. Without attempting to reconstruct the audiences themselves, we turn here to discursive aspects of critical commentaries published in newspapers and journals for indications of the play’s reception in each city.

criticism in montreal and québécois ne wspapers Acclaimed by Montreal critics at the time of its creation, Dragonfly was enthusiastically received for its boldness and for the performance of the late Jean-Louis Millette. Robert Lévesque (1995, B8), writing for Le Devoir, considered Tremblay’s text “un exploit d’écriture et un morceau de bravoure,” in which Millette appeared “grandiose de souplesse et de dureté à la fois.” Lévesque summarized the story as a “ressassement angoissé d’un mythe de meurtre loin dans l’adolescence.” Elsewhere, in La Presse, Jean Beaunoyer (1995, A12) applauded Millitte’s performance and Tremblay’s boldness, claiming that, for Québécois, Dragonfly represents the exploration and the discovery “du traumatisme de l’autre langue.” Nevertheless, without overly insisting on the linguistic question, Beaunoyer interpreted Dragonfly as a “grand moment de theatre” in which “l’on peut tout puiser et tout interpreter,” everything from suspense to a psychoanalytic session. In the weekly newspaper Voir,

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Isabelle Mandalian (1995, 37), reiterating the praise for the author’s text and the actor’s performance, saw in this work “[u]ne quête d’identité qui passe par la confusion linguistique.” Nevertheless, while supporting her argument with the author’s own comments, she intimated the importance of the political and linguistic question by asserting that it serves only as a pretext for a “tragédie personelle.” Continuing the praise with respect to Tremblay and Millette, Pat Donnelly (1995, C4) of the daily Gazette wrote that “it is written with an intoxicating poetic power and grace.” During its second run in 1996, Marie Labrecque (1996, 36) of Voir claimed that Dragonfly treats the “aliénation d’un être devenu étranger à lui-même” and constitutes a transformation that “évoque le cauchemar des peuples minoritaires complexés par leur petitesse, face à la puissance d’autrui,” and, without hesitating, she continued, “et au premier chef, le nôtre.” Raymond Bernatchez (1997, D8) of La Presse, commenting on the run of 1997, essentially saw the problem of relations to others, of the interference of the other in the consciousness of the self. Finally, Paul Lefebvre, in his afterword, “To Keep in Touch” (1995), felt that the character of Gaston Talbot announces the fate of Quebec and even of the world of tomorrow – that is, that after a long period of aphasia, cultures will become uniform, and Quebec, like the rest of the world’s small nations, will awaken speaking in English.

criticism in toronto and ca n a d i a n nat i o n a l n e w s pa p e rs The criticism of the Toronto production was equally praiseworthy of Orr and O’Connor’s achievements, but a clear shift in focus emerges between the two productions. Ray Conlogue (2002, R5) of the Globe and Mail – and the author of Impossible Nation (1996), which partly inspired the Toronto production – took up remarks made by Orr by underlining that Dragonfly recalls the political forces that have forged Canada (“the play is about Canada itself”) and by emphasizing the linguistic tensions according to which Francophone Québécois absorb, without always wanting it, English-language culture while simultaneously feeling threatened by it. Conlogue (1995, D1) also critiqued the Montreal performance of 1995, writing in the Globe and Mail, one month after its release, that Dragonfly illustrated why the linguistic debate was going to be put on the agenda again in Quebec politics (something that, it seems to us, never occurred). Referring more to a discussion led by Paul Lefebvre after the performance than to the work itself, Conlogue suggested that Dragonfly dramatizes the interior conflict that tears apart every francophone Québécois: “Quebec’s artists, like other Quebeckers, are torn between their commitment to their

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language and the equally strong desire to participate in the party next door.” Robert Crew (2002, O4), writing about Orr in the Toronto Star, saw Dragonfly “like all of Tremblay’s plays” as being “about identity,” quoting the author’s description of Gaston as wearing the “linguistic mask of the other in order to talk to himself.” In his critique, Richard Ouzounian (2002, D13), also in the Toronto Star, described the play as taking “us on a strange linguistic roller coaster, because Gaston uses the inflections and sentence structure of his Francophone self but the vocabulary that wraps itself around it is largely the Queen’s English,” thus making the play “obviously … partially a political metaphor,” but not one that Tremblay pushes. For Robert Cushman (2002, B13) of the National Post, Dragonfly is a show about a man “caught between trance and consciousness, between childhood and maturity, and – most bizarrely – between English and French.” Claiming that Dragonfly takes account, on the representational plane, of the linguistic division that divides Quebec, he nevertheless concluded his critique by specifying that Larry Tremblay’s work is more convincing on the plane of selfinterrogation than on the political plane: “Tremblay’s piece works more potently in personal terms than in political.” A French-language weekly from Toronto, L’Express, ran several stories on the play, each focusing on the loss of language and identity as the central theme. The first, a preview entitled “Perdre sa langue, perdre son identité” (2001), goes on to recount the tragic circumstances surrounding Gaston. In the second, entitled “Deux crises d’identité” (as it also discusses the play Plan B by Michael Healy), Pierre Karch (2002, 10) describes the story of Dragonfly as “l’histoire de cet homme qui perd sa langue pour sauver sa peau, qui n’arrive à se comprendre qu’en se distançant de luimême, qui ne peut avouer le crime involontaire qu’il a commis qu’en se donnant une nouvelle identité.” Writing in Toronto’s popular alternative weekly Now Magazine, Jon Kaplan (2002) explains that “Gaston Talbot … has a language problem” and “finds English words rolling around in his mouth as awkwardly as burrs he can’t wait to expel. The tale that he tells with them is unconfortable, bloody and unsettling,” a play “constructed on a series of contrasts, among them French and English.” Kevin Connolly (2002) of the alternative weekly Eye Magazine remarks that “Dragonfly seems to hinge on that simultaneous sense of intimacy and awkwardness that goes with expressing oneself in a strange, even hostile, tongue,” and Kamal Al-Solaylee (2002), also in Eye Magazine, concludes that “Dragonfly proves that the dividing line is not what you lose in the translation but how to reconcile English and French theatrical sensibilities.” In another of Toronto’s alternative papers, The Mirror, Maria Tzavaras (2002, 10) summarizes the play’s theme as the loss of identity through language: “Imagine being mute for 40 years and after a strange dream, you awake able to speak, but in a

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language different than your own.” Finally, Christopher Hoile (2002) of the Canadian Association for Theatre Critics wrote for the internet journal Stage-Door that Dragonfly expresses Québécois alienation too schematically and that the majority of anglophone spectators would understand an anti-anglophone allegory. For Hoile, this work presents the English language as the language of the oppressor, while the French language appears to him as a language of nature (due to the name of the Rivière-aux-Roches) and of the music integrated into the text (Gaston Talbot sings Tout va très bien and J’attendrai). He ended his discussion by saying: “most people will not look charitably on such an unmitigated dose of self-loathing that blends two languages for divisive ends.”

behind the scenes in montreal, mise en scène à toronto David Whitely summarized the general points of the critiques of Dragonfly, namely that the work brings questions of identity, of language, and of sexuality into play, and into relation, with one another.10 This said, an essential distinction emerged from the critiques analyzed. For certain critics, the question of language serves as the pretext for the personal drama; other critics understood the reverse – that is, that the personal drama functions rather as an allegory expressing a linguistic, or even political, conflict. More precisely, the political and linguistic question preoccupied the Torontonian or Canadian national newspapers to the greatest extent, while for Montreal and Québécois newspapers, this question became secondary faced with a more personal interrogation, where the exploration of the meaning of individual identity, as well as the quality of the show, came to the forefront. How can this be explained? Can we attribute this divergence to a sense that, for Montrealers, the encounter of French and English is only perceived in terms of elements of a socio-cultural context – that is, as the background where the drama of the city is played out – whereas for a Toronto audience, the tensions between French and English are external to the lived experience of the city, witnessed rather as a political conflict on a national scale, something reported primarily by the media as an ideological concern? The difference in staging techniques between the two productions noted above is poignant in these respects. Where Tremblay and Millette’s performance emphasized Gaston in his tragedy, enticing spectators to compare the tale with their personal experience – the complex linguistic encounters that are constantly played out behind the scenes of Montreal’s everyday – Orr and O’Connor’s Toronto production focused to a greater degree on engendering the profound sense of

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loss that an English-speaking Toronto audience might otherwise not appreciate from its everyday experience.11 Each director expressed concern that the play might be ill-perceived. Would an English play in Montreal be appreciated at a theatre known for its mandate to produce French creations? Would a Toronto audience arrive with unfortunate misconceptions of the play’s political statement? Montreal theatregoers, habituated to the copresence of languages, might equally find themselves estranged from the tragic Gaston, for whom the contact of languages has had such troubling – indeed, debilitating – effects. Moreover, for a Toronto audience, the encounter between languages is by no means an unrecognizable event for a city that claims one of the largest immigrant populations in North America. However unaccustomed anglophone theatregoers in Toronto may be to the intensity of living in another language, the same cannot be said for the city’s numerous immigrant communities, many of which are situated near the Factory Theatre. Indeed, Kevin Orr has remarked that a noticeable nonanglophone population was in attendance, Toronto spectators who may frequently shift languages between the private and public spheres and who may quite rightly share Gaston’s anxieties about losing hold of a mother tongue faced with an overwhelming English majority. Indeed, immigrant communities seem to face a greater challenge maintaining a mother tongue in Toronto than in Montreal, where the immediacy of linguistic contact and conflict, and the candidness of linguistic politics, have rendered multilingualism a nearly necessary, accepted attribute of being a Montrealer. We may return to Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia to develop a better understanding of these phenomena. In his text “The Problem of Speech Genres” (1986, 60–102), Bakhtin distinguishes between two general speech genres: a primary (simple) genre that derives from spontaneous, daily, and “lived” exchange, and the secondary genre (complex) that covers different types of works that come within the scope of fields of activity such as science, art, law, politics, economics, and so forth. For Bakhtin, discourses of the primary genre constitute the seed that nourishes discourses of the secondary genre. Complex discourses, such as, for example, the discourse of dramatic poetics, draw utterances from discourses of everyday life and absorb them; these transform the utterances of the primary genre, which, in the frame of another text, express and signify something different. In this sense, a dramatic work seeks to move the public, to grasp the spectators in such a way that their daily preoccupations are, so to speak, suspended, leading them to see an experienced reality in another form. As we have seen, in a performance of Dragonfly, the spectator is subject to a discourse uttered by the protagonist in a language other than his mother tongue: the text addresses no single language group. In

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Montreal, this particular encounter between French and English refers, as we mentioned, to a recognizable daily event, for many perhaps even a banal occurrence. This encounter may not necessarily be experienced as a communal social tension but played out on an individual plane for francophones as much as for anglophones and allophones. The surprise experienced when one thinks occasionally in the language of others is a strange effect, an estrangement effect toward oneself. In short, the Montreal audience witnesses a familiar, lived reality but presented in a different, radical form, in part because it is imposed, or revealed, by Gaston’s unconscious, his dream, but above all because it falls within the scope of an aesthetic form guided by determinations other than those of daily life: by the desire to move, or disturb, the audience. Despite the diversity of Toronto’s many communities, the particular form of Montreal’s everyday bilingualism between French and English remains an external event. The experience of hearing many languages in Toronto is a quotidian one, but the experience of being bilingual in Toronto has not one dominant form, taking place in isolated community moments or in the shadows of inevitable linguistic assimilation. With regard to Dragonfly, in Bakhtin’s sense, we are dealing not with the intervention of a primary discourse (everyday nature) in a secondary discourse (theatre) but with the merging of one secondary discourse (the mediated and politicized conflict of French-English relations in Quebec) into another secondary discourse (theatre). These varied perspectives demonstrate that the form of cultural translation that drives the play’s dialogic action can itself be understood as an intricate process of comparison. Spectators are obliged to do more than set cultural spheres side by side; they are encouraged to shift between the two, constantly relocating and questioning their centre of perspective. The text may allow Montrealers and Torontonians alike to compare their diverse lived linguistic experiences with those of others in their own urban environment, but it may equally permit them to place themselves in the other urban experience altogether. The erstwhile fear of losing French through contact with English may no longer apply for many Montrealers, for whom bi- and trilingualism have become the norm. Conversely, for Torontonians, it is imaginable that ever-increasing contact among linguistic communities may indeed begin to draw this very fear into public discourse.

c o n c l u s i o n : stag i n g p o ly p h o n y in montreal and toronto The textual form of Larry Tremblay’s singular play The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi allowed it to be performed in both Montreal and Toronto without

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modification or translation, providing a unique platform for comparing linguistic experiences in these two cities. By developing a notion of cultural translation as a methodology of comparison, we have sought to demonstrate how this form of textual creativity is able to represent the specificity of Montreal’s linguistic diversity both within and without the city. Through a discussion of the relationship between language and place, elicited as much by the action of the narrative as by the act of performance, and through an analysis of journalistic criticism of the play’s production in each city, important tendencies in understanding the cultures of language use in Montreal and Toronto emerged. Although linguistic difference and exchange have come to characterize both being a Montrealer and speaking for the culture of this city, the everyday nature of these phenomena was viewed as the backdrop before which the tragic story of Gaston Talbot was played out. Conversely, language conflict and the threat of linguistic assimilation became the central feature of the Toronto production, gesturing to a different understanding of multilingualism in a city that, despite tremendous diversity, is dominated by one tongue.

notes 1 In addition, the original production was taken on tour, starring Jean-Louis Millette, to Rome in 1997 and to Vancouver’s Waterfront Theatre in 1999. A new production was presented at Rome’s Teatro Argot in 2002 starring Renato Campese and directed by Maurizio Panici, and again by the Cooperativa Argot at the Scuderie di Palazzo Farnese, Caprarola, Italy, during the 2003 Festival di Drammaturgia Contemporanea. 2 “The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi reste fermement ancré dans le sol québécois, la ville de Chicoutimi constituant un bastion francophone au cœur d’une région, le Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, majoritairement souverainiste-indépendantiste. En l’occurrence, ce n’est pas un Québécois qui se transporte sur le terrain de l’Autre anglo-saxon et qui est tenu d’adopter au moins partiellement sa langue, c’est l’anglais qui investit la parole du protagoniste, un anglais qui doit cependant compter avec la présence rémanente, souterraine, de la langue d’origine, le français, langue abolie, recouverte, cachée, mais en même temps indéracinable, persistante” (Dion 2002, 127). 3 For Mikhail Bakhtin (1984, 116–17), the literary use of dream (especially in Menippean satire) represents a character who no longer corresponds to or coincides with himself: “Dreams, daydreams, insanity destroy the epic and tragic wholeness of a person and his fate: the possibilities of another person and another life are revealed in him, he loses his finalized quality and ceases to mean only one thing; he ceases to coincide with himself … This destruction of the wholeness and finalized quality of a man is facilitated by the appearance, in

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the menippea, of a dialogic relationship to one’s own self (fraught with the possibility of split personality).” In the same work, Bakhtin further suggests that dream crises bring the rebirth, the renewal, of man: “the central (and one might say genre-shaping) theme of the crisis dream … is the theme of a man’s rebirth and renewal through a dream vision, permitting him to see ‘with his own eyes’ the possibility of an entirely different human life on earth” (152, original emphasis). Gaston first recounts a version of his tale in which Pierre appears naked, laughing in the water, but when he recounts the second version, we learn that Pierre is dead and that Gaston is the naked boy laughing in the river. Gaston’s rebirth is thus intimately linked to death: in a symbolic way in dream and in a traumatic way in the reality of the play. Moreover, Gaston’s use of English can stem only from the desire that he feels with regard to Pierre, but Pierre is dead and Gaston is able to revive him only by borrowing his features, by becoming Pierre, or more precisely, by permitting Pierre to speak through him. If, in his dream, Gaston says to his mother (who does not recognize him because he has Pierre’s face), “I’m the flesh of your flesh” (39), in his rebirth Gaston becomes Pierre’s flesh, the flesh of one in whose death he is implicated. As Jean-Cléo Godin notes (1996, 94), “C’est d’abord cette relation complexe et obscure entre le moi et le moi-étranger que dit ce texte anglais pensé en français.” A comment by Larry Tremblay (2002, 10–11) indicates that this new form of writing was such language in motion, in the act of becoming: “I was writing in a state of freedom I had never before felt. As if the play had already been written and all I had to do was copy it. Unconsciously I was no doubt telling myself: English isn’t my language, after all, I can do what I want, I don’t have to worry about my choice of words, their order, the rules of grammar, or syntax. I was no longer writing in fear of committing an error in French, since I wasn’t writing in French. But writing in English words as I did, was it really writing in English?” See, for example, the analyses by Ray Conlogue (1995, 2002), Robert Dion (2002), Paul Lefebvre (1995), and Robert Schwartzwald (2002). Robert Schwartzwald proposes the interesting hypothesis that Gaston “tient a une cartographie de navigation” as a narrative strategy. Following a study of cartographical techniques by Marie-Louise Pratt (1992), Schwartzwald claims that the choice of Chicoutimi is a reflection of eighteenth-century attempts to map the interior of the new world, not merely the trade routes along water boundaries such as the St Lawrence River and port cities such as Montreal, to which most exploration had previously been limited. The element of categorically ordering and classifying the world is represented in Gaston’s dream as he himself metamorphoses into the dragonfly, pinned down and exhibited as a specimen. Schwartzwald (2002, 459) remarks: “Sa redéfinition constante des frontières laisse deviner les multiples angoisses de Gaston à propos de l’autorité de Pierre en tant que sujet bilingue et de double nationalité, à propos des

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frontières entre lui et Pierre, et à propos de l’integrité de son proper moi qui s’érode, alors qu’il incorpore Pierre en parlant sa langue après l’avoir tué.” In this regard, Schwartzwald further recalls the fear of bilingualism as a form of cultural assimilation that has pervaded Quebec’s social discourse, such as in an interview with Gaston Miron in 1973 entitled “Décoloniser la langue”: “Le bilinguisme de Pierre rappele la ‘communication bicéphale canadian’ déplorée par Miron, dans laquelle ‘le mot horse se répand partout’. L’anglais que parle Gaston représente un langage hybride, qui possède le statut de français corrumpu déploré par Miron, mais de façon inversée. Miron se plaignait que la structure de l’anglais était en train de glisser dans le français Québécois et que les Québécois étaient maintenant encirclés par un français textuel qui ne pouvait être compris que comme une traduction littérale de l’anglais. Dans The Dragonfly, c’est la structure syntaxique du français qui corrompt l’anglais de Gaston, comme pour suggérer une structure profonde qui ne peut-être effacée – ou rêvée de l’être – par un nouveau lexique. Cette structure originelle est la trace qui rattache Gaston à son passé, donc aux événements traumatisants qui ont provoqué son aphasie” (Schwartzwald 2002, 463). Kevin Orr, interviewed by Michael Darroch, 10 September and 3 October 2003. David Whitely emphasizes that the show brings into play questions of identity, language, and sexuality and that comprehending the play depends upon who one is. Commenting on one of the performances in Montreal through reference to its critical reception, Whitely (1997, 34–8) believes that the force of Dragonfly resides more in the performance of Jean-Louis Millette than in the text by Larry Tremblay. Whitely (1997, 37) further notes, “in Montreal’s cultural context, a francophone author, a francophone director, a francophone performer, and a francophone theatre – not to mention francophone syntax – more than suffice to guarantee a classification as ‘francophone.’ That is undoubtedly the culture to which the play belongs. The program was in French only, and the night I attended the vast majority of spectators were francophone.”

references Primary Sources Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 1986. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” Trans. Vern W. McGee. In Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, eds, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 60–102. Austin, tx: University of Texas Press.

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Conlogue, Ray. 1996. Impossible Nation: The Longing for Homeland in Canada and Quebec. Stratford, on: Mercury Press. Copfermann, Émile, and Anatoine Vitez. 1981. De Chaillot à Chaillot. Paris: Hachette. Dion, Robert. 2002. The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi: Un cas extrême d’hétérolinguisme? In János Riesz and Véronique Porra, eds, Le Quebec et l’ailleurs: Aperçus culturels et littéraires, 125–37. Bremen: Palabres Éditions. Fennario, David. 1980. Balconville. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Gadamer, Hans Georg. 1996. Vérité et méthode. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Godin, Jean-Cléo. 1996. “Qu’est-ce qu’un Dragonfly?” Les cahiers de théâtre Jeu 78: 90–5. Grutman, Rainier. 1997. Des langues qui résonnent: L’Hétérolinguisme au XIXe siècle québécois. Montreal: Fides/cétuq. Kalinowski, Tess, and Louise Brown. 2002. “Language Programs ‘Not Frills’: Threatened Heritage Classes Hailed as Boon to Safe, Tolerant City.” Toronto Star, 5 September, B01. Lefebvre, Paul. 1995. “To Keep in Touch.” In Larry Tremblay, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, 56–65. Montreal: Éditions Les Herbes Rouges. Moss, Jane. 1995. “Larry Tremblay and the Drama of Language.” The American Review of Canadian Studies (Summer/Fall): 251–67. Pratt, Marie-Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Schwartzwald, Robert. 2002. “Chicoutimi, qui veut dire…? Cartographies de la sexuation dans The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi de Larry Tremblay.” In Louise Dupré, Jaap Lintvelt, and Janet M. Patterson, eds, Sexuation, Espace, Écriture: La littérature québécoise en transformation, 447–67. Montreal: Éditions Nota Bene. Simon, Sherry. 2001. “Hybrid Montreal: The Shadows of Language.” Sites, Journal of 20th Century French Studies 5, no. 2: 315–30. Tremblay, Larry. 1995. The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi. Montreal: Éditions Les Herbes Rouges. – 2002. “Where You’re At à Montreal.” The Works: Dramaturgy coast-tocoast-to-coast 36: 10–11.

Critiques Al-Solaylee, Kamal. 2002. “O’Connor Takes Off: The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi.” Eye Magazine, 24 January, http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_01.24.02/arts/ onstage.html. Beaumoyer, Jean. 1995. “Jean-Louis Millette: L’état de grâce pour Dragonfly et pour tout le reste.” La Presse, 20 May, A12. Bernatchez, Raymond. 1997. “The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi: Le public en redemande.” La Presse, 20 March, D8.

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Conlogue, Ray. 1995. “Spectator Drama and Nuance in the Language Debate.” Globe and Mail, 20 June, D1. – 2002. “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Globe and Mail, 9 January, R5. Connolly, Kevin. 2002. “At a Loss for Words: The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi.” Eye Magazine, 10 January, http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_01.10.02/arts/ dragonfly.html. Crew, Robert. 2002. “Chasing Dragonflies: Kevin Orr Wants to Make Directing Mark with Toronto Premiere.” Toronto Star, 5 January, O4. Cushman, Robert. 2002. “Telling Ghost Stories.” National Post, 14 January, B13. Donnelly, Pat. 1995. “Poetic Dragonfly Breaks New Ground: Play Defies Translation.” Gazette, 29 May, C4. Hoile, Christopher. 2002. “Maudit Anglais.” Stage-Door (January): http:// www.stage-door.org/reviews/misc2001j.htm#dragonfly. Kaplan, Jon. 2002. “O’Connor Awes.” Now Magazine, 17 January, http:// www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2002–01-17/stage_theatrereviews2.html. Karch, Pierre. 2002. “Plan B et The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi: Deux crises d’identité.” L’Express (Toronto), 15 January, 10. Labrecque, Marie. 1996. “The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi: Acteur fleuve.” Voir, 18 April, 36. Lévesque, Robert. 1995. “Jean-Louis Millette et Anne-Marie Cadieux: L’Acteur, l’actrice en scène.” Le Devoir, 29 May, B8. Mandalian, Isabelle. 1995. “The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi: Langue Seconde.” Voir, 25 May, 37. Ouzounian, Richard. 2002. “O’Connor Masters Dragonfly.” Toronto Star, 11 January, D13. “Perdre sa langue, perdre son identité.” 2001. L’Express (Toronto), 18 December, n.p. Tzavaras, Maria. 2002. “Speaking Part with a Twist: Loss of Language Tackled by Director of One-Man Show.” The Mirror (Toronto), 4 January, 10. Whitely, David. 1997. “Of Mothers and Dragonflies: Two Montreal Solo Performances.” Canadian Theatre Review 92: 34–8.

5 Imagine-Nation in the City Seriocomedy and Local Democracy GREG M. NIELSEN

introduction How citizens imagine multinational states from the point of view of cities is one of the most obvious but also most complex objects of study for the Culture of Cities Project. In order to demonstrate how the nation or nations provide one of the city’s many imaginary horizons and in turn how the city sets background convictions that provide multiple vantage points toward it, this chapter compares two case studies of how national identities and local politics are represented in Montreal and Toronto mass media. References to the two cities in public radio and television seriocomedies are compared to emotionally charged political disputes concerning pleas for and against recent legislated amalgamations or municipal “mergers” as reported in newspapers in recent years. Once the two case studies have been set side by side, I deduce a conclusion to the chapter that interprets the seriocomedies from the point of view of the newspaper debates and vice versa. Evidence from the comparison reveals tensions within each city that resist monologic definitions of citizenship and national identity. The difficulty of comparing the two cities is amplified by constructing them out of two case studies that draw on different media; thus, before outlining the chapter, I offer some preliminary explanation for the selection of examples and provide a gloss of key concepts that I borrow from Georg Simmel and Mikhail Bakhtin for the ensuing analysis. Newspapers are among the oldest urban media and are also considered to have played a major part in the production of the modern imaginary

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nation. Yet newspapers are often overlooked in urban studies, which tend to focus more on concrete spaces, policy issues of governance and regulation, leadership and resource mobilization, or the impact of new transmission technologies. Radio and television seriocomedies are more recent forms of cultural production than print media but are studied more within the history of mass communication and within national rather than urban contexts. On the other hand, seriocomedy on public radio and television is arguably a continuation of a very ancient tradition of the culture of urban laughter that accompanies the origins of cities and of democracy. Seriocomedies include a variety of poetic devices that converge or bring into collision the serious and the comic; ironically reverse social, linguistic, and bodily hierarchies; clash and fuse accents, different vernacular, and speech genres; and address aspects of the human condition that range from the darkest, most cynical, and acerbic, to the most light-hearted, mindless, and silly.1 On the other hand, newspapers perform many of these same operations without the poetic devices and in so doing provide other kinds of outlets for deliberation over disputes about the common good within democratic publics. Radio and television seriocomedies and newspapers are thus durable fields of urban cultural reproduction partly because of their capacity to adapt themselves to any city and partly because their basic ingredient, the critique of the traditional from the point of view of the contemporary (or vice versa), remains in tact as their own institutions continue to evolve. By studying seriocomedy and debates over local democracy in newspapers side by side in Toronto and Montreal, I hope my contribution will be found not only in the detail revealed for each case, but also in the ideas that come from juxtaposing various levels of their oppositions and similarities. The methodological difficulty of comparing comic and serious discourse is resolved in part by placing the seriocomedies and the institution of public broadcasting as well as the debates over the amalgamations in the two cities within the larger contexts of their respective societal cultures, which I call – for heuristic reasons – Englishspeaking Canada and French-speaking Quebec. It is argued further that each case study holds different degrees and different levels of an imaginary sense of the possible nation within each societal culture and in each city – or conversely of the “good city” without the nation – in a way that is mutually supportive. Instead of preparing separate chapters on seriocomedy and amalgamation, then, I proceed as though each discourse is an extension of the other. My broader claim is that the comparison of representations helps to demonstrate a limited but important sensibility within the culture of each city by outlining limits of what can be imagined or said in one medium, place, and time but cannot be imagined, said, or represented in another.

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Georg Simmel’s definition of objective and subjective culture differentiates between a representation as a “thing” and as a “unique subjective experience” in a way that explains an important step in the logic of inquiry that I am exploring here. It helps to understand this distinction if we remember that for him the emotional and volitional are as unique for each individual as are the will and even the happiness or sadness that might be experienced by each (Simmel 1968). Between the products of objective culture and “the fragmentary (subjective) life-contents of individuals … there exists the most diverse and fortuitous relationship.” Although for Simmel, the “tragedy of culture” is about the loss of subjective culture to the objective culture of all kinds of industry, the paradox is that the one cannot completely exhaust the other: “The labor of countless generations is embedded in language and custom, political constitutions and religious doctrines, literature and technology as objectified spirit from which everyone can take as much of it as they wish to or are able to, but no single individual is able to exhaust it all” (Simmel 1997, 40). On the other hand, if there is no finite number of experiences and wills for or toward these representations, how can the complex of unique experiences of them be understood? Giving Simmel’s distinction a very slight linguistic turn, I argue further that there is a finite number of forces that combine to structure representations in objective culture. Inspired and influenced in part by Simmel, Mikhail Bakhtin develops the concepts of answerability and dialogism as a means to get at the subjective or emotional-volitional exchange that occurs in objective culture itself. Answerability suggests a two-sided process in which a speaker anticipates a general or objective response to an idea or act as well as a unique subjective rejoinder. In other words, the social actor is answerable for a unique performance and toward a general ideal. Like answerability, dialogism also assumes a crossover between the objective and the subjective “when equally weighted, simple or complex utterances” (seriocomedy and newspaper articles in the case of our analysis below) address the same theme or sets of themes in a way that they cannot help but gravitate toward one another subjectively, “whether they confirm, mutually supplement, or (conversely) contradict one another” (Bakhtin 1984a, 189). As in all dualisms, one side cannot help but refer to the other for its own definition. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism helps to recall how this opposition needs to give way to a multiplicity of identifications that find unity out of difference, not the other way around. To sum up, the concepts of seriocomedy, subjective and objective cultures, answerability, and dialogism are employed across the chapter to get a sense of how the nation or nations are imagined in the cultures of urban laughter and how debates over local democracy in Toronto and

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Montreal unfold differently yet parallel one another in interesting ways. The first section of the chapter defines the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc) and La Société Radio-Canada (src) sociologically both as state-sponsored cultural organizations and as institutions that define the two cities as national capitals in the production of multinational identities. Discourse analyses of the radio and television programs are presented in the sections on “Toronto and the Absent Nation” and “Montreal and the Absent Region.” These sections draw samples from a reading of the long-running weekly cbc radio series Royal Canadian Air Farce (1972–96) and the celebrated year-end Radio-Canada television review Le BYE BYE (1968–98). Both series are selected because of their historical significance and as exemplary forms of the seriocomedy genre. Emphasis in the analysis is placed on the dialogism within the oppositions between authors and imagined publics. The sections on “Amalgamation Debates” and “Crossover Dialogism” follow the analysis of the seriocomedies from the two cities and provide a similar reading of letters to the editor and feature articles from newspapers concerning national and local democracy references to the amalgamation debates. After comparing representations of the two cities as well as their different ways of imagining themselves and each other, I conclude that understanding the different national dimensions with which each identifies reveals a pluralism that resists definition of a singular identity for the cultures of each city.

nati on al b roadc as ting an d the culture of urban laughter As key producers of objective culture in Canada and Quebec, the cbc (est. 1936) and Radio-Canada (est. 1938) have served as an important force in the democratization of each society and as the organization that has had a prominent role in reproducing the narratives of a variety of lifeworlds through its music, drama, entertainment, and news. This has been accomplished by absorbing a balance of historical conflicts and contradictions that entail (1) the opposition between systems of private and public capital, (2) the inherent geo-political contradiction between centre and peripheral regions, and (3) the sometimes opposite interests of cultures whose memberships are notoriously difficult to define sociologically (anglophone, francophone, First Nations, and a growing number of diasporas and transnational groups) (Nielsen 1995b). Bringing the complex demands of diversity together in a unified communications subsystem of the public sphere has been a long political process that has made Toronto and Montreal key centres in the production and legitimation of a multinational imaginary.

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Not surprisingly, then, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and La Société Radio-Canada are extremely interesting examples of how state sponsored cultural organizations deal discursively with the addressees of cultural identity and politics. In fact, nothing from the networks’ official discourse or from the federal mandate actually indicates that either seeks to produce a multi- or a binational project. Each network absorbs a reference to its “other” audience so that Radio-Canada is simply the French network of the cbc, as the cbc is the English network of Radio-Canada. The two corporations’ definitions of “Canada” and “Quebec” thus require a double-voiced discourse. On the one hand, the “dialogized” absorption of the one into the other demands an absence of region in that Radio-Canada’s majority Frenchspeaking Quebec audience does not easily imagine itself as just another Canadian province like the others. On the other hand, the cbc requires an absence of reference to an English-speaking nation in that its societal culture has not cultivated the capacity to imagine itself as one of two, three, or more nations. Although Radio-Canada provides services to the tiny number of French-speaking minorities across the federation, through its programs and its policies, almost exclusively produced or defined in Montreal, it addresses a distinctly French-speaking Quebec audience that has the historical capacity to imagine itself as a people without the rest of Canada. The cbc addresses a distinctly Englishspeaking Canadian audience, and although there has been much historical lip service paid to addressing regional drama, news, and multicultural programming, product has for the most part been directly or indirectly issued from Toronto and in the main has not represented the diversity of the emerging transnational city itself. The cbc Broadcast Centre provides production of an imaginary Canadian community mostly managed but not exclusively produced in Toronto’s downtown core. If the argument is correct that cities are centres for construction of national identities, then the Toronto headquarters is a striking historical and symbolic mark that defines the city as a national media capital. The cbc has in fact been drawing all kinds of creative talent from Canadian regions into Toronto since 1939, when the city first became the centre for radio drama production and where it has continued its role as gatekeeper and centre for development of creative formations in film and television (Nielsen 1994). From the outset, the cbc sought to bring together the best artistic talents from the various regional centres – Halifax, Vancouver, Winnipeg, (English-speaking) Montreal – to create production teams for the national network in Toronto. Between 1936 and 1961 the cbc produced more than 300 radio theatre series, including more than 8,000 individual plays, of which half are original productions. Around 70 original seriocomic radiotheatre

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plays were broadcast from Toronto between 1940 and 1952, of which 50 were written for the prestigious Sunday Evening Stage Series, directed by Andrew Allan. Allan, who began his career in Vancouver, produced over 450 shows out of Toronto during the first twelve years of the series. During the same period, more than 70 writers and over 150 actors and actresses were employed.2 By contrast, today, the cbc plays a decreasing role in the Canadian film and television industry, which produces over four billion dollars of revenue a year and employs more than 50,000 people. Given that the cbc and Radio-Canada have been centred in Toronto and Montreal, the question becomes what are some of the characteristics that have most exemplified the urban culture of laughter provided by the seriocomedy genre. The distinction between serious and popular radio comedy has its origins in ancient forms, as noted above. However, it should be pointed out that the carnival or rural influences on seriocomic laughter are heavily concentrated on grotesque elements and on reference to the lower bodily stratum. Urban comedy also begins in this corporal region (ancient Mennipean satire in particular), but the emergence of mass audiences and electronic media would initially at least become more focused on the “upper bodily stratum.” As one critic has remarked, “Vaudeville and music hall humor [also very urban forms] had been centered in the groin and heart. Radio humor is located above the neckline” (Clark 1997, 38). In the first decades, radio satire presented a reified version of seriocomic laughter in the sense that there remained words that could not be uttered, comic reversals that could not be achieved, and levels of laughter that could never be expressed. This atmosphere changed somewhat in the 1960s when conventions were expanded and became more permissive as a cultural shift began its transformation of the older order. By 1972 the main seriocomedy program for the cbc in Toronto became the weekly half-hour series called The Royal-Canadian Air Farce (Nielsen 1999). Roger Abott and Don Ferguson, two of the original members, were graduates of Montreal’s Loyola College and came out of the late-1960s stand-up scene in English-speaking Montreal – a background that would feed their political satires for thirty years to come. In its early years, the troop was influenced by a mix of commercially orientated light comedies and the nihilism of the very popular 1970 British comedy Monty Python’s Flying Circus – as well as the American counterculture fm underground radio satire comedy Firesign Theatre. Its style grew from a wide mixture of the short sketch, standup comedy, English music hall, and theatre of the absurd. Initially, Air Farce was received as an innovative marginal series that broadcast the studio radio performance of four comedians. In its fifth season it

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shifted toward a more vaudeville style and took its show on the road to live broadcasts on location. It continued to develop the old vaudevillian techniques and gradually developed into a lighter mainstream program. By 1996, its final season in radio, it remained one of the only live travelling radio comedy series in North America. Like the cbc in Toronto, Radio-Canada also came to take up a key symbolic national role in Montreal. As Germaine and Rose (2000) point out, a vision of Montreal as a media centre for French Quebec and the francophone world was conceived in the late 1950s by Jean Drapeau. He saw the development of a Cité des Ondes (City of the Airwaves) along with the new Place Des Arts and Les Complexes Desjardins as a way to shift the centre of commerce eastward and away from the traditional westward, English-leaning downtown core. The construction of the Radio-Canada Centre in Montreal was the first step in a futuristic vision that defined the city in terms of the new economies of telecommunications and more recently new media. This vision has evolved into a plan that would make Montreal a bonafide “wired city” (Cité Multimédia). In 1998 the Quebec government announced a massive subsidization for the construction of eight mega office towers in the western periphery of Old Montreal that within five years would create Canada’s, and one of North America’s, largest media cities. Quebec French-language urban laughter in a mass culture form also has its origins in radio during the 1930s (Pagé and Legris 1979). RadioCanada, headquartered in Montreal, has drawn talent from all over Quebec and to a lesser extent from French-speaking regions across Canada since its birth in 1938 when the two networks first uncoupled (Nielsen 1994). A standard theme across the history of Quebec radio and television seriocomedy has to do with language. Social satires draw from the deep tension between traditional and modern culture (Cyr 2004) through the ironic use of subdialects, local oral traditions, and regional accents. Language is stratified from top to bottom and is defined through a struggle between the peripheral forces of popular speech and the centralizing pull of literary correctness. Language stratification plays a key role in establishing the scale of satire that ranges from the serious to the light and that addresses audiences that are potentially both popular and scholarly. The variety, burlesque, and satirical magazines that developed the seriocomedy genre on Radio-Canada from the 1940s to the present are narratives that cover a broad range of this kind of linguistic diversity. Radio-Canada’s Carte Blanche, the infamously irreverent, weekly, Montreal-based radio review of the 1950s was perhaps the highest achievement of the stratification of voice in seriocomedy that satirized the coming modernization of Quebec society (Nielsen 1994, 1999). The Le BYE BYE series developed along similar lines out of another

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1950s radio show where the main cultural and political events of the year were treated to a seriocomic send-up. The two-hour year-end review began in 1968 at the moment that the Quiet Revolution in Quebec (a massive transference of power over civic welfare and education from the church to the provincial government) became a fait accompli. The series ended twenty years latter in the current context of Canadian constitutional malaise. In its first decade, Le BYE BYE was considered as much a political as a cultural success; however, by the end of its second decade, it came under heavy criticism for its poor production quality and lack of political punch – despite the popularity that it continued to enjoy in terms of ratings (Cusson 2004). So far I have been arguing that seriocomedies provide a culture of distinctly urban laughter that focuses on a stratification of languages and bodies, a critique of tradition from the point of view of the contemporary, and a mixture of language, accent, and dialect. In the next section, I continue to develop these formal characteristics through the analysis of various excerpts that directly refer to the imaginary nation in the city. I have also argued that it is important to keep in mind that each city has served as metropolis for two different societal cultures that have coexisted within one federal state. The national imaginary within each city is in part defined but not determined within organizations of cultural production like the cbc and the src. This statement may appear to be little more than a banal platitude given that national cultures have seemingly become less prominent under conditions of globalization and the emergence of transnational diasporas (Castles and Davidson 2000; Held and McGrew 2002). Without rejecting the thesis that defines the emergent city as transnational (and thus the relative absence of representations of significant newly arrived diaspora and immigrant minorities in programs produced by national organizations of public culture), I take another tack and propose an analysis of the dominant imaginary community of the nation as well as a reflection on its lingering and wideranging effects on the city. Again, I fully recognize the difficulty of theorizing any singular imaginary national culture in cities, given that many cities are deeply implicated in the creation of transnational borderless conditions (Friedmann 2002; Amin and Thrift 2002). Nonetheless, it remains an important step in reconstructing how the imaginary in each city has been instituted historically.

toron to and the absent nation Like prose and poetry, radio and television seriocomedy needs to be understood in terms of its place within the scale of possible comic expression that ranges from the serious to the light and whose reception often

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crosses the boundaries of the scholarly and the popular. Seriocomedy is a genre that pretends to expand the limits of what can be said or represented in a given imaginary structure at a given time through the use of irony, satire, and parody, but it is also a genre that can simply support popular prejudice. The structure for both Le BYE BYE and Air Farce are similar to that of other shows that stitch together four or five brief distinct skits in the form of fake reporting, talk or interview shows, dream or fantasy sequences, and any variety of satire on social or political situations. The genre is above all designed to reverse meanings and distance its author and listener from its subject through the use of irony or satire, which, along with parody, plays on words, and jokes, institutes the mode in which laughter, the main effect of seriocomedy, can be achieved. Seriocomedy provides countries around the world with relatively inexpensive entertainment in a voice and accent that expresses cultures of laughter in local communities and often in ways that confirm or transgress complex political and moral issues. A good example of the genre concerns how national representations of Toronto most often carry a negative image, reflecting how those from outside Toronto tend to perceive the city. Toronto is a city that Canadians love to hate. Does the negative national image of Toronto’s chauvinism have anything to do with how Toronto imagines itself? Can such an image ever be completely represented? Can the hundreds and even thousands of reference groups that might gaze on Toronto’s “scene” – perhaps hoping to get intersubjective answerability through a glimpse of their own lifestyle, accent, or image – all be included in any singular representation? Canada’s view of Toronto and Toronto’s view of its own diversity and cosmopolitan character can only ever be partially represented. Yet we can see how Toronto is seen from the outside as both celebrated and debased and as though the city itself constitutes a culturally coherent whole in the following set of 1984 Air Farce fragments. The first one is a spoof on a rhyme recited before meetings of the Toronto City Council, while the second features a comic character familiar to Canadian audiences in the 1980s and ’90s: December 9/84, Sketch B: Toronto the beautiful / Toronto the great / Where piles of dough just grow and grow / For those who renovate / Toronto the Beautiful / A place that’s full of freaks / Where most of the apartment blocks / Are owned by Arab Sheiks … sergent renfrew: When I got there the intersection was choked with traffic backed up for miles, and the people were insulting each other in seventeen languages. It was a perfectly normal Toronto afternoon.3

I will have occasion to discuss the latter example further in terms of interpreting the sense of chaos and loss of neighbourhood in the

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amalgamation debates, but first I want to consider another example of the seriocomic treatment of the relation of Toronto to Ontario and the rest of Canada and of the relation of Montreal to the Province of Quebec and the rest of North America. A slightly acerbic, rather than simply silly or ultralight, definition of the two cities in relation to the larger societal cultures can be seen in this 1980 Air Farce sketch: April 27/80, Sketch A: Canada is divided … Into ten wonderful provinces, loosely connected by fear. Quebec and Newfoundland do not seem Canadian: One has its own culture and a foreign language. The other is Quebec. Canada’s population is composed of three main groups: native Canadians, naturalized citizens, and illegal immigrants. In some parts of Canada, the natives speak English, while in other parts the foreigners speak English. Montreal … Montreal has often been compared to Paris, although not favorably. It enjoys a reputation as an “old world” city, but thanks to garbage strikes, municipal debt and criminal violence, it’s quickly becoming known as a North American city. Toronto is quite different. The inhabitants are dedicated churchgoers, which is why every Sunday night all the topless bars and gay steam baths close at ten o’clock. Winnipeg is interesting because … uh … pause

The above was broadcast not long before the 1981 Quebec referendum on sovereignty association in the days when English-speaking Canada was still pondering questions like what does Quebec want? Imagining identities that can be recognized in both peripheral regions and metropoles like Montreal and Toronto creates ambiguous emotional tensions between the two. Part of the effect of producing narrative from metropolitan centres is the folklorized image that is left on peripheral regions (“Winnipeg is interesting because … uh …”). At the same time, resentment from the regions fuels criticism against the cities of Toronto and Montreal, and this gets ironically absorbed in the bit. Similar kinds of stereotypical comedy that use reversed meanings to make fun of urban regions date back to the beginnings of radio. Although one does find examples that ironize the image of Montreal as a French North American city, there are no examples before the 1970s that would use the image of Toronto as a city in transition from its stayed protestant past to its new, “queer” future. Norms of sexual orienation were obviously as repressive in 1919 as they would be in 1950 (Marchessault 2001; Miller 2002). But in 1980 it works, and it works in part because media scenes in the city are more than fixed forms of reification. Tracking political satire on identities like “the Montrealer” and “the Torontonian” are ways of answering the questions: How does a collective identity get imagined in the first place and then how is it seen? How far can we go in criticizing symbolic identities or how much of

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any identity can be contained within a symbol? And finally, what are the limits of what can be imagined and represented in an important sector of public life in the city and the nation? In reverse image from the French seriocomedy Le BYE BYE, Air Farce has been satirizing the Montreal-French-Québécois scene from an English-speaking Toronto perspective for more than thirty years. On a world scale, we might say that Toronto sees itself as unique not only because of its actual existing cultural diversity, but for having achieved the transition toward a well-ordered multicultural city in record-breaking time. As this has been absorbed within Toronto’s “identity” over the last thirty years, it has also been enshrined within the Canadian constitution (McRoberts 1997). Jenny Burman (2001, 196) argues that “the objective mirage of ethnicity in Toronto is a collaborative production – top-down through popular representation, ethnic associations, and the exigencies of multicultural policy, but bottom-up through the sedimented habits and practices of everyday life, including ways of remembering other places.” Montreal is also a multicultural city but is linguistically divided and a metropolis for a large national minority (Kymlicka 1998). Canada’s gaze on the Montreal scene can easily be seen by cities as a shared way of imagining largely because, despite regional differences within Canada, each region (excluding most of Quebec and First Nations) has an ability to shape-shift, setting aside local differences to join in a consensus about a unified Canadian identity – especially if it is defined in its “multiculturalness” and its difference from the American melting pot. The negative gaze on Montreal is embedded in the ethical and political collision over the universality of individual rights defended by the Canadian Charter, in the arguments for collective rights in Quebec over language and access to schools and signage, and in a perceived rejection by Quebec of Canadian multicultural policy (Taylor 1994). The historical organization of national public institutions of radio and television also include the development of creative formations and cultural audiences. It is interesting to note that while francophone Quebec media audiences have been politically split over constitutional-type identity options for at least a generation (around 60 percent for some version of political independence and 40 percent for the status quo), in the main this has not been the case in English-speaking Montreal or the rest of Canada (Gagné and Langlois 2002). The division over political options within the francophone audience in part explains the relative absence of similar kinds of seriocomedies like Air Farce and This Hour Has Twenty-Two Minutes in mainstream Québécois media (Robinson 1998; Nielsen 2004; Cusson and Nielsen 2001; Saxon, Rocher, and Jackson 2004). To put it bluntly, much of

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English-speaking Montreal and most Canadian audiences outside Quebec are united concerning constitutional identity options for Quebec; thus political satire can count on a homogeneous audience response on a series of issues. Air Farce was among the first series to regularly show the serious negative political image that Montreal can have in “English-speaking” Canada and to render comic the city at the centre of the controversy. March 11/78, Sketch A: “Moving From Montreal.” edna (whispered aside): Nicky, I thought you were going to get an English company to move us. nicky (Whisper): There was only one left, and they were moving himself out. He even had to turn down Jean Chretien … pierre: Hokay. Federstoneyhowz we gonna move you, then. We thought you were maybe was one of those Anglaise rats leaving the sinking bateau. nicky/edna: Oh no!no! nicky: It’s simply that I have to go where my job takes me. And by co-incidence that happens to be Toronto. pierre/gaston: Oho! (frenzied mumble, milk and extend possibly. “Welcome to Rosedale – kiss my ass.” odd french word put down of toron to.) jake: (coming on) Hello!-Hello! Oh hello Nicky, Edna. In the midst of it I see. Finally getting out. gaston: (suspicious) Keep it up there Pierre (referring to a box of china) nicky: Oh hello Jake. (cautious) Well you know how it is. When the company goes, you’ve got to go. jake: Yes well you’re fortunate being on the board of Sun Life. gaston: Hokay Pierre! Let ’em go. sound: Horrendous crash of box of crockery being dashed to floor. edna: Oh no! – jake: I knew it was coming of course, Nicky the minute I heard you say, “I’ve had this province right up to here.” It was where you put your hand that was significant … I say, the old drawers of wood and hewers of water are restless tonight. No Nicky. I’d like to get out myself, but no matter how hard I try I can’t budge the company … Hydro Quebec are determined to stay and brazen it out. But we’ll miss you, and your little tricks. Slashing Rene Levesque’s tires. March 4/95, Sketch C: francophone: Oui, allo. I’m in favour of sovereignty. But it might hurt Quebec’s economy. sound – trap door creaks slightly open. francophone: But it would ultimately be good for all Quebeckers. sound – door closes. francophone: But it might cost us jobs. sound – creaks slightly open. francophone: But it would preserve our culture. sound – snaps closed. francophone: But we might become isolated and inbred. sound – creaks open. francophone: But we wouldn’t have federal government interference. sound – snaps closed. francophone: But we’d lose the benefit of federal social programs. sound – creaks open. francophone: But they could be replaced with our own social programs. sound – door snaps closed. francophone: But then again. sound – trap door sprung open. francophone: (reverb going off) Ahhhhhhhhh! chairman: That guy was getting on my nerves. Who’s next?

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These excerpts demonstrate a commonly held “English Canadian” normative horizon of the imaginary nation in the city. “English-speaking Canada” has not developed a capacity to imagine itself as a nation without Quebec. It understands its profound difference from Montreal yet cannot see Quebec as a nation on its own (“I’ve had this province right up to here”). As the Quebec question shifts from 1978 to 1995, the argument is no longer the exodus from an intolerant Montreal to a very wealthy Toronto (Rosedale) but the contemporary background debate over individual (“But we might become isolated and inbred”) and collective rights (“But it would ultimately be good for all”) that continues to divide Quebeckers and Canadians (Angus 1996). It is interesting to note that while the content of the representation shifts from the city to the national question, the normative horizon of expectation of the imaginary nation remains on the same even plane. Canadian radio and television seriocomedy provides examples of how two distinct societies look on one another’s cities from within their own media scenes. As they laugh at themselves and at each other in the imaginary between the city and the nation, English- and French-language audiences are not aware of what it is the other is laughing about.

amalgamation debates These are good seriocomic examples from which to step back and begin to interpret parallel references found in letters to the editor regarding serious political culture and how the cacophony of difference is interpreted concerning the opposition to legislated amalgamations in the two cities. Montreal is a city divided due to historical pulls and the tugs of forces that emerge from tensions between national majority and minority interests. While Toronto is not typically understood as a city at the historical centre of national politics, like Montreal, it is a city rich in cultural diversity and transnational diasporas and is also defined by its own internal social division. Although there is an important degree of similarity, most of the debates over amalgamation in Montreal (2001) and Toronto (1997) turned out to be over quite different issues. This indicates to us that legislated amalgamations in the two cities are not simply “signs” of the globalization bulldozer’s flattening of each city’s capacity to maintain distinct objective cultures or unique subjective identities. On the contrary, like the seriocomedy that we have just discussed, the debates themselves are taken as emotional-volitional orientations within the city that clash over deep differences and struggles regarding answerability and the meaning of neighbourhood, community, and the “common good.”

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Most striking about newspaper reporting on the Toronto amalgamation as compared to the Montreal case is the extent to which the national gaze on Toronto is absent. This is in a sense opposite from the seriocomedy that we have just reviewed. Mel Lastman, then the mayor of Toronto, posited an eleventh-hour and seemingly naive plea to separate Toronto into a city-state in the postamalgamation context. His plea was widely perceived as a publicity stunt for securing better funding from the province. Aside from this singular caricature of Toronto “separatism,” there is no internal fear in the amalgamation debates in Toronto of being overrun or destroyed by the “other” surrounding “nation,” as in the case of the Montreal seriocomedies and amalgamation debates presented in the final sections below. Throughout the period of the amalgamation debate in Toronto, however, there is a palatable sense of being overrun by the wrong political worldview. In the end, the debate is cast almost entirely between a neoliberal discourse on practicality and efficiency, combined with an almost cynical mistrust of government, versus a plea for self-determination, local identity, and direct forms of social democracy. Although several elements in the debates over amalgamation in Montreal and Toronto are similar, the difference in societal cultures as well as the circumstances and ideological parameters of the political parties responsible for the legislation are in fact quite different. In Toronto the tension is not over a multinational quarrel about answerability but over traditional perceptions of the left-leaning city politics that conflict with right-leaning provincial politics. The first indication of the Toronto amalgamation can be traced to the early trial balloons sent up through the press in the spring of 1996 – two years before the first echoes were heard in Montreal and shortly after the election of a Conservative government. The gap between rumour and legislation followed a pattern in Ontario similar to that seen later in Montreal. Unlike in Montreal, large Toronto daily newspapers were not as uniformly unanimous in their opposition to the legislated amalgamation, but they were unanimous in their criticism of the downloading of debt and services to the level of the municipality (Boudreau 2000; Sancton 2000). The City of Toronto Act, Bill 103, was passed in February 1997 and became law in January 1998. The bill consolidated the upper tier of Toronto’s municipal government, the Greater Toronto Region (gtr) (itself the product of an amalgamation introduced in the 1980s of thirteen municipalities into five consolidated regional structures: Peel, Halton, York, Durham, and Metro), as well as six municipalities in the central area of metro Toronto. Under Bill 103, forty-four councillors and one mayor were to be elected to the new city of 2.3 million people. The new city government took office 1 January 1998 (Sancton 2000).

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Opposition to the amalgamation in Toronto was more fragmented but no less emotional when it came to issues about local identity and democracy. Like in Montreal, the former six municipal suburban mayors were strong opponents of amalgamation. Michael Prue, mayor of East York, said at one point, “We won’t let them get away with it, East York is home to 102,000 people, many of them working to stop the megacity” (Toronto Star, 31 December 1996, final ed., A3).4 However, unlike Montreal, the former mayors came under intense criticism for protecting the interests of their own office and territory against the interests of all. The popular press looks at the municipal arena as a truth that needs to be exposed and as a set of interests that need to be seen before the good of the city can be achieved. In a letter to the editor, Daniel Dostanich from Etobicoke wrote: “My, how they whine when their jobs are on the line. Metro Council members, the six mayors and other municipal politicos, fearing job loss when Metro Toronto amalgamation comes to pass are crying that the process is undemocratic” (Toronto Star, 21 December 1996, final ed., E3). “Politicos” are obviously not actors who carry the good of the city in Mr Dostanich’s view. Editorials are especially critical of the inability of the mayors to cooperate as further proof of their redundancy, incompetence, and corruption: “Six separate snow removal departments are gearing up to clear roads across Metro … In addition, the Metro government is in charge of arterial roads and expressways. Trucks can clear up one Toronto Street, leaving a neighboring street in York, Scarborough, North York or Etobicoke unplowed because it is in another city” (Toronto Star, 26 December 1996, final ed., A46). Opposition is also strongly voiced in terms of a sense of democratic betrayal. David Miller, now mayor of Toronto, expressed his sense of disappointment in a letter to the Toronto Star, which took an editorial position against recognizing a referendum on the legislated amalgamation: “The provincial government, which promised to preserve local municipalities and not amalgamate them without their consent, is doing the exact opposite. That is apparently okay … I once thought we were living in a democracy. Apparently, we are not” (Toronto Star, 30 December 1996, final ed., A20). In another letter to the editor, Eric Colquhon wrote: “Would someone show me where the idea of Metro amalgamation was included in the manifesto for the Common Sense Revolution … It’s one thing to live with all the ideological madness … It’s quite another to have these little extras tossed in, without the chance to vote on them in an election” (Toronto Star, 21 December 1996, final ed., E3). On the one hand, it is important to keep in mind, the initial announcement of the merger fuelled a large-scale opposition movement

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that responded to the shock waves set off by the new government’s politics. Demonstrations, general strikes, popular referendums, legal challenges, and government opposition filibusters were launched. A largely middle-class citizens group, Citizens 4 Local Democracy (c4ld ), came together in this context and organized regular events to block the government plans. In the end, however, opposition would fail to translate itself into an alternative political movement that could mobilize the majority of citizens to elect a mayor and council that would share the political vision of c4ld in the 1997 municipal election or help to defeat the Conservatives in the 1999 election (Isin 2000). On the other hand, editorial positions in the main Toronto dailies remained divided. The Toronto Sun’s editorial opinion in particular favoured the merger and challenged opposition to consider the government’s mandate: Time to change gears for a moment, from the teachers’ strike to the megacity election. In many ways, of course, the two are similar. In 1995, when the Tories were elected, there was consensus among voters that: a) we had too many municipalities, too many bureaucrats and too many local politicians; and b) we had too many school boards, too many trustees and too many fat-cat school board honchos soaking up too many tax bucks on shrimp cocktails and junkets to Disney World. The Tories promised to end all that – and they did. There was the massive battle to rationalize government within Metro and now there is the huge offensive over education. On both counts, the government has immense communication problems. (Toronto Sun, 5 November 1997, final ed., 12)

While the Sun’s editorial approves of the government’s agenda, it questions its public relations work. Criticism of the government’s seriousness and even its resolve is dismissed in an early editorial comment from the Toronto Star: conquerors of the debt? Leaders of a change so drastic they call it the “Common Sense Revolution”? Inspirational role models for Bay St. and the captains of industry? Nuts. The suspicion is growing these guys couldn’t order lunch … Leach [then minister of municipal affairs] still hasn’t told us what the government’s going to do – if it’s going to do anything at all, except maybe keep sending out rumors and trial balloons. Meanwhile, the mayors are gearing up for a massive propaganda campaign designed to scare the daylights out of people. It’s going to be expensive and it’s going to be awful. It’s also going to be effective. People are going to be rattled by the scare stories their mayors throw at them because there is nothing coming from the other side. (Toronto Star, 8 November 1996, final ed., A8)

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Emotional-volitional reactions to the merger were frequently interwoven with widespread protest against the Conservative government’s massive cuts to the Ontario public sector, which were justified under the guise of fiscal responsibility and what the government called the “common sense revolution.” The above quote from the Star puts the government ideology into a seriocomic light by further questioning the mayoral opposition while at the same time lamenting a lack of serious information for a full public discussion. The common good of the city here is about transparency and deliberation. But of course, the whole debate about local democracy and legislated amalgamation has to be thought through in terms not only of what is the common good, but also of what is the “right” decision in terms of balancing complex urban problems of democratic communication, snow removal, the specialness of neighbourhoods, libraries, communities, and municipal management with all kinds of external pressures. The wider picture that I want to recall as I shift back to the seriocomedy example in the next section is that the cbc, Radio-Canada, and newspapers are organizations that provide different points of view on a singular continuum of objective culture that serves two “distinct” societies. Thus they are organizations that reproduce the narratives of national majority and minority cultures in each of the cities. They are both objective producers of culture and receptacles for subjective expressions of identity. In other words, important self-perceptions about identity and answerability inside each city are embedded in these narrative forms.

montreal and the absent region Citizens are emotionally and volitionally committed to their cities, and feelings and will are deeply implicated in answerability and a sense of belonging. An important issue to add when trying to reach understanding about the unique sense of belonging or wanting to belong is the issue of two-sided answerability. Identity is an individual and collective claim about oneself whereby citizens inform one another about what makes them distinctive. This is easily seen in a classic Radio-Canada television sketch on Montreal from Québécois seriocomedy history that starred the popular actor Olivier Guimont, who died only a few months after its broadcast. The text is from the Le BYE BYE New Year’s Eve show for 1970. The show was recorded less than two months after the end of the October Crisis, which had seen the imposition of Marshall Law (the War Measures Act) and hundreds of random arrests of intellectuals and artists without due process. The scene in

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Montreal was still tense at the time of the broadcast. The sketch that follows is both an attempt to make light of the situation and to offer a serious social commentary on the divisions between the English-speaking elite in Westmount (Montreal’s, and one of Canada’s, wealthiest municipalities) and the French-speaking working class, as represented in the neighbourhood of St Henri. A soldier originally from St Henri is assigned as a guard to a house party on New Year’s Eve where we see him on patrol walking back and forth in front of the house and up and down its stairs, which place it at the very top of the hill looking down on the city. The sketch is about the contact between the soldier and the bourgeois owner, Mr Thompson. The two first meet on the stairs as the owner opens the front door dressed in formal evening wear. He is also a little drunk and carrying a glass of whisky in one hand and a bottle in the other. There are sounds of an ostentatious festive celebration going on in English in the background: mr thompson: (Speaking in French with a thick English accent) Could I possibly interest you in a drink, mon ami? soldier: No, no. Thank you. I really couldn’t. Well perhaps just one small one. mr t.: No, no. To celebrate the New Year. soldier: Well (turns his walkie talky toward the ground). mr t.: (In English) That’s my boy! (Mr T. pours a drink and offers it to the soldier. As they talk they take turns drinking from the same glass while Mr T holds the bottle in his other arm. They both continue to walk back and forth as if on patrol). mr t.: (Back to French with a thick English accent) It’s so beautiful, the night before the next year, there is so much fun everywhere, eh soldier? soldier: Yes a lot of fun everywhere (a bit sarcastically). mr t.: Where are you from? soldier: I’m from St Henri, Mr Thompson. mr t.: I never been around there but heard a lot about it. soldier: Look we can see it from here. mr t.: Where, where is it? soldier: Look way down there where there is almost nothing, we can see it from here. mr t.: You are from St Henri and you are guarding Westmount. soldier: Yes. I joined the army so I could travel. mr t.: Ha. Ha. That’s very funny. Lets have another drink to the health of St Henri. soldier: (Speaking from the top of the steps now) Its true, from here it really is beautiful (he descends the stairs as if on patrol but slips and then barely recovers).

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mr t.: Me I like very much the whole province of Quebec. soldier: You are really right (slurring his words now). A little drink to your province Mr Thompson (he pours a drink for Mr T. and then descends the stairs again, now drinking straight from the bottle). Church bells ring. mr t.: What’s that? soldier: (Completely drunk) Happy New Year Mr Thompson. I wish your people a good year for 1971. mr t.: Me too, I hope it will be a good year for your people as well. They shake hands. Well, I am going to go inside (Mr T starts up the stairs but after slipping takes hold of the soldier. He finally says, as he holds on) Be careful boy. Because if you fall, I fall! Hilarious laughter, Music, Fade out … Snowfall.5

The sketch employs several elements of the seriocomedy genre. It especially plays on the reversal of hierarchy at both the physical and psychological levels through a set of politics that are simultaneously economic, linguistic, and ethnic. The municipality of Westmount sits at the top of the hill, whereas the neighbourhood of St Henri is situated at the bottom. Montrealers, like citizens of other linguistically divided cities, are used to living in one language at home and in another when they leave the house. The linguistic interference in the sketch (Mr Thompson’s thick accent and state of inebriation limit his ability to grasp sarcasm in vernacular French) allows the soldier to communicate directly with the audience, which is in the know regarding how ignorant bourgeois anglophones are of francophone neighbourhoods. The bourgeois becomes the idiot, the soldier the savant. But the final word is given to a recognition that the anglophone boss and the francophone soldier need each other because in the face of violence, if one political will lets go, the other is likely to do the same. The second French-language extract that I want to discuss is also drawn from Le BYE BYE and was broadcast on New Year’s Eve 1995, only two months after the narrow “no” vote prevailed in a second Quebec referendum for sovereignty and a new partnership with the rest of Canada. The sketch expresses the “scene” in French-speaking Montreal at the time. Once again, this is a time when the city is intensely divided, again between the linguistic groups and again over the city’s difference from the rest of Canada. The referendum vote was a period of high political drama, and the program that I site adds to it through the satirical and ironic representations that it provides for a highly politicized audience.

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Whereas the soldier sketch reverses the hierarchy between class and ethnicity within Quebec, this program, again authored in a francophone Montreal perspective, looks to define Quebec’s difference from the rest of Canada. The sketch is a parody of a political rally in Montreal that brought around 100,000 Canadians to demonstrate for the “no” side in the final days of the referendum campaign. It parodies a group of inebriated English Canadians who are flying to Montreal for the “no” rally to tell the Québécois that they love them and that they should not break up the country by voting “yes” in the upcoming referendum. Each of the actors in the sketch is a well-known local Quebec celebrity pretending to be an English-speaking Canadian. The sketch is entitled “We Love Quebec”: A rowdy and drunk partying group of Canadian anglophones aboard an Air Canada flight en route to Montreal to join the unity rally.] Serge Theriault: Canada, Canada […] when the Québécois see that us, the English, their superiors – we have come to Montreal from across the country to tell them that we love them – this is the best day of their lives you see. Ok! Lets offer a toast to us, the saviors of Quebec! André P. Gagnon: To love Quebec is like loving our women. It is easier when you are drunk. ha! ha! ha! Diane Lavallée: Hey! I brought a little piece of the Canadian Rockies to show why the Québécois should stay with us. It is just so beautiful! If the rock doesn’t convince them I am going to throw it in their face! S.T.: Look, look … it is really important that we come to your place before we burn the Quebec flags that we gave you last year! You Québécois don’t find that hilarious! ha! ha! ha! D.L.: If Quebec separates there’s a good side and a bad side. The good side is we will finally be rid of the God damn Frogs. The bad side is that the Québécois are all racists and all the ethnics are going to want to come and live with us. We are not racists, but dammit anyway, each one should live among his own ethnics! S.T.: Are you ready to go? Jugalup! Jugalug! Jugalug! Cause if we are going to fix the vote we better fix it right. Have another beer! A.P.G.: Eh, this referendum thing is a lot of fun! They should do this every year. I love Quebec! Dominique Michel (disguised as an airline attendant): Quiet Please, shush! Please! Would the group of Canadians travelling to Montreal for the No side please leave by the side exit … [the Canadians cheer as they stumble out of their seats toward the exit of the aircraft] Meanwhile everyone else please remain seated, and please attach your seatbelts, we will be landing in a few minutes. Byebye Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!6

This sketch shows how when Canadians came to Montreal, they came looking to be seen to be loving les Québécois, but they are satirized as

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being seen as wanting to be seen. Their intentions are ironically reversed. In the section on “Theatricality” from his essay on scenes, Alan Blum (2001) theorizes the tension between wanting to be seen, wanting to see, and wanting to see without being seen. Scenes are places people go to be seen and to see others who are there also. On the other hand, it is important in the “scene” not to be seen as someone who is actually watching or too eager to see and hence give away one’s own desire to be seen. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of exotopy, or the role that the excess of seeing plays in the authors creation of heroes in the scenes of novels, adds another dimension to this idea. Bakhtin (1990, 23) argues that an author always sees more of the hero than she can see of herself because the hero has a privileged position outside of her that allows us to see her in a way that she can never see herself: “As we gaze at each other two different worlds are reflected in the pupils of our eyes … in order to annihilate this difference completely it would be necessary to become one and the same person.” This “ever present excess” of seeing “is founded in the uniqueness and irreplaceability of one’s place in the world.” The tension here stems from a paradox of recognition in which outsidedness from the scene, one’s “irreplaceability” in the world, is a necessary condition in the desire to see but also in the desire to be seen as belonging. The 1995 sketches from Le BYE BYE and Air Farce demonstrate two very different normative horizons of expectation that demonstrate how outsidedness and alterity are understood. The horizons of expectation are the outer limits of an excess of seeing. Le BYE BYE’s ironic reversals, for example, assume a Québécois imaginary that is distinct from the rest of Canada, whether the Montreal audience favours a unified Canada or not. The Air Farce sketch on the pros and cons of sovereignty association assumes an undivided audience that shares a common view of Montreal and the imaginary Canadian federation. Whereas resentment in English-speaking Canada against Montreal is focused on Quebec nationalism, cultural difference, and the inability to act as a region or province no more distinct or unique than the others, resentment in French-speaking Quebec against Toronto has to do with its status as a centralized chauvinistic metropole.

c r o s s - ov e r d i a l o g i s m At first glance the issue of municipal amalgamation does not seem to have much to do with imagining the city from the point of view of the nation in the comic way that we have seen so far. Indeed, public debates over the reorganization of municipal administrative and political structures in both Montreal and Toronto seem to be more about issues of local identity, taxes, garbage pick-up, snow removal, and dozens of

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other practical services. Yet the passionate defence of the local often employs the same logic as do the national cultural industries when justifying their role in nurturing objective (collective) cultures. The municipal structure does have a constitutional reference and is implicated in a living set of cultural practices that often indirectly orientate themselves toward or against national identity. The fear of a loss of community and the sense of a battle between civil society and the provincial state certainly provoked acerbic oppositional attacks against official positions for the amalgamation in both cities. But it also disquieted some of the most personal kinds of objective cultural habits and subjective lifeworlds. Consider the following quotations in the period when debate was beginning in each city over the two amalgamations: From a resident in the Montreal suburb of Côte St Luc (now a demerged municipality): Every morning when the Côte St. Luc library opens at 10, Harry Greenberg, hikes from his apartment across the street to begin his daily ritual. Dressed in a tweed jacket and sweater vest, the 79-year-old sits down in a sunny corner of the library and digests a daily helping of books and magazines. “I spend six or seven hours here. I come in the morning, then I go home for lunch and come back,” said Greenberg, his owlish, bespectacled eyes rising from the inky pages of a newspaper. “I’m retired, so I come every day, except when I go away on vacation, which isn’t very often.” Greenberg can come every day because the doors of the Côte St. Luc Library are open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. But that could soon change. (Gazette, 8 December 2000, A3)

From resident activists in the former North York Suburb of Toronto: “All of the communities within Metro are distinct, just as provinces have distinct makeups and economies,” said [David] White whose association represents 750 households in the Bayview area between Hwy. 401 and York Mills Rd. Joan King, a North York resident of 30 years, is also active in a community group in the Weston Rd./Finch area and said she has trouble seeing how neighborhoods will be able to protect themselves in the face of a larger and more distant municipal government. “This caught us by surprise. It was a real shocker,” King said. “It’s scary to think that we might not be able to retain that specialness,” King said. “We have worked very hard for what we have,” she said. (Toronto Sun, 15 November 1996, final ed., Y4)

The “common good of the city” is not only about services, taxes, or governance, but also about how objective culture has been built over time. “The library caters to Côte St. Luc’s many senior citizens, who

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come to socialize, read, play chess – even get information about medications they are prescribed. If the library was open less or not at all … many would spend long, lonely days cloistered at home” (Gazette, 8 December 2000, A3). The library developed on its own and as a result prospered as the municipality itself prospered. Like Mr Greenberg, David White and Joan King are concerned about the “specialness” of their community and even evoke constitutional language (“distinct communities”) to express a feeling of combativeness. Arguments for amalgamation hold that redistribution of resources are necessary to provide equity across the whole of the cities of Montreal and Toronto, which raises the broader question of the answerability of the whole of the city to its parts and, beyond that, of the answerability of the city to its larger societal culture. Mr Greenberg from Côte St Luc and Mr White and Ms King from North York anticipate in fearful ways how the cities of Montreal or Metro Toronto are likely to disturb their respective lifeworlds and potentially create chaos. But it is overstating the case to say that they share Sergeant Renfrew’s comic view of the city that we saw in the Air Farce Skit on the unbearable disorder of traffic, insult, and linguistic interference. What remains very interesting about the sense of outsidedness and alterity that was raised at the end of the previous section of the seriocomedies is the question of conflict and antagonism between different ways of seeing and the implications for thinking about political culture in each city. How is it that North Yorkers and Metro Torontonians or Anglo-allo Quebeckers and old-stock Franco-Québécois are able to gaze into each other’s eyes without annihilating each other the way that they might do in seriocomedies? The tinge of violence hinted at here is prepolitical if we mean by the political the art of persuasion (Arendt 1958). The politics of two-sided answerability means that when each gazes into the eyes of the other, they orientate toward each other while remaining themselves. The political in this definition has to do with the art of the possible, not the administrative exercise of power, and with the art of persuasion, not the exercise of a legitimate means of violence. On the one hand, seriocomedy and its culture of laughter is close to the prepolitical in the sense that laughter is a kind of weapon; as Bakhtin notes, “its like a stick.” In the modern culture of laughter, the ethical question becomes not simply how does the decentred “I” encounter the other and remain itself, but in this ironic reversal, how does the “I” encounter the other and stretch the experience of solidarity with those with whom the “I” identifies as much as possible? If politics is about the art of the possible and about persuasion, then my question is how do opposite emotional-volitional orientations cross over and take on elements from one another without ceasing to be themselves (Nielsen 2002)?

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At the level of everyday political culture, this dimension of alterity suggests a degree of intimacy, whereas when we conceive of the “dialogism” on the more abstract level of institutions, intimacy disappears into a more formal organization. On a macro level, the relation between the cultural ethos of urban comedy and the political dimension of demos can be considered interrelated to the extent that their internal opposition divides political actors into various camps when public deliberations between distinct communities cannot be resolved (“AngloQuebeckers move away from Montreal,” as in the Air Farce skits; or soldiers guard affluent houses as in the Radio-Canada skit). For the city, intersections between political parties, municipal policies, neighbourhoods, communities, and minorities can be contemplated through the processes of gaining understanding of the common good between groups. At the same time, the tension generated between groups seeking answerability can also be thought through in terms of reference points for new ways of posing questions as well as developing new kinds of solutions to problems that in turn require new responses. Thus reducing explanation of Montreal and Toronto to their political and economic functions as metropoles for larger societal cultures means that one cannot make explicit the two-sided forms of answerability that are struggled over in the making of their objective cultures. Without an “outsidedness” or excess of seeing and a subjective sense of “irreplacability,” actors are deprived of the perspective and confidence needed to develop conceptual tools and shared meanings that are necessary for problem solving in the dimension of the larger political community. On the other hand, overly culturalist definitions of Montreal and Toronto as centres for the production of Quebec and Canadian imaginary communities risk reducing the adversarial dialogism inherent to each city that aids answerability between diverse and even incommensurable communities. Some of these identities may want to transcend the unification between Montreal and an imaginary independent cosmopolitain Quebec or between Toronto and an imaginary city-state status in the network of global cities, but they never seem to completely “exhaust” those who struggle to make these links. For the Montreal amalgamation, opposition includes both francophone and anglophone municipalities and is expressed in voices that are charged across an intense range of emotions that are not always measured against the background context of the nation. Unlike Toronto, suburban mayors in Montreal were not discredited in their bid to lead the most intense emotional reactions to Bill 170, which saw the restructuring of twenty-eight municipalities on the Island of Montreal into one municipal government and the formation of a new city of 1.8 million people and the creation of an urban region of 3 million. Like

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the official voice, these opposition voices are not monologic. They respond to and anticipate rejoinders from the provincial government. When official voices continue to respond without answering to a sense of local democracy, opposition voices become increasingly accented with anger. On the other hand, these mayors were located largely in the West Island, a predominantly federalist section of the city.7 These mayors were not the only authors of the incensed verbal attacks in the antimerger movement in Montreal, but they were often among the most vocal. They articulated a particularly acerbic anger toward Bill 170 before Christmas of 2000. The mayor of Baie d’Urfe said, “I don’t think you want to hear the rude words I have to describe how I’m feeling”; the mayor of Dorval said, “There are no words in the English language to describe my disgust for the way this bill and this law came to be” (Gazette, 21 December 2000, A6). Journalist Michel Vastel from Le Soleil points out that these suburban interlocutors are not angry at the principle of creating a greater Montreal. What drove residents toward a mass public protest was “the brutal autocratic nature of this reform from on high” (Gazette, 15 December 2000, B3). Dialogism, or the clash between utterances that can’t help but orientate themselves toward each other through emotional-volitional tones, is about a “live” exchange that goes on among embodied voices. The counterpoint between the legitimate differences of popular opposition toward and support for the amalgamation two years later in Montreal and five years later in Toronto is a good example of this kind of exchange. An immanent reading of the affirmation of each discourse means unravelling the tension with opponents over contradictory claims about the ultimate common good for the city. It is worth revisiting the following set of quotations from a previous analysis on the Montreal amalgamation that clearly demonstrates how two ways of imagining the nation in the city confront each other (Nielsen, Hsu, Jacob 2002). The quotations are from Anthony Housefeather, then head of Alliance Quebec (a federally funded English-rights lobby group in Quebec), and Louise Harel, former Parti Québécois (pq) minister of urban affairs, who was responsible for the original legislation on Montreal’s amalgamation. They concern reactions to the government’s decision to fuse the cities on the Island of Montreal into a new megacity. Mr Housefeather wrote: “When reading the Québec Governments Bill 170, I began feeling physically ill. Nervous flutters, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach – symptoms I recognized from the weeks prior to the 1995 Québec referendum. The feeling I had when I felt I might lose my country was one that I will never forget. Now I feel the Parti

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Québécois government wants to take away my town, my home, my community and my way of life. Worse still, the government says that it will not even recognize votes held on the issue. How democratic” (Gazette, 18 November 2000, B5). Minister Harel wrote: “These are not republics, nor nations we are talking about! If this criticism were ever to be argued abroad we would become a laughing stalk. It is absurd to compare the right of a people to self-determination with the right of cities to self-determination. Municipalities are an organizational form that needs to evolve … This no longer has anything to do with ultra-local territoriality” (Le Devoir, 20 May 2000, F3, my translation).8 We have already seen examples of the negative reception of Quebec’s societal culture as represented in the city of Montreal from the point of view of English-speaking Canadian seriocomedy. It is not hard to imagine what “country” Mr Housefeather is referring to when describing his deepest fears of loss and absence. The “Canadian” identity that he defends and how it is seen from outside Quebec is well represented in the 1978 Air Farce skit on “moving out of Quebec.” It is also the most embedded background identity for the majority of the West Island mayors. At the same time, thinking through Mr Housefeather’s claims about the loss of his home and neighbourhood from inside the Frenchspeaking Quebec milieu, as in Le BYE BYE sketches on the drunken Mr Thompson and the Canadians who came to Montreal to show their “love of Quebec,” reverses this imaginary reference to the political culture of the province. From this vantage point, another “country” (Quebec) already exists right in Mr Housefeather’s neighbourhood. This country has a strong sense of itself as a national minority within Canada and North America. The fear that comes from the absence of the other here is that if the national majority (Canada) were ever to recognize this second existence of a national minority (Quebec) in search of sovereignty, it would ultimately negate itself. On the other hand, reading Minister Harel’s statement from the point of view of the 1995 Air Farce sketch on arguments for and against Quebec independence reveals the slippery slope that Mr Housefeather and the West Island mayors have in mind. Minister Harel finds herself in an argument over sovereignty while the issue is about internal organization of urban governance. Here, the irreconcilable clash between the city and the multinational vision of its objective culture could not be made any clearer. The two-sided politics of answerability is clearest in the above quotations in that neither Mr Housefeather nor Minister Harel have any interest in internalizing each other’s ideal position, yet they each anticipate the subjective response of the other in striking ways. At one extreme, the

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example of Minister Harel’s sarcasm proposes an accusatory sideward glance that suburban mayors opposing the merger maintain isolationist and anticosmopolitan tendencies (an accusation commonly levelled against her own political party because of its longstanding policy on national independence or shared sovereignty with the rest of Canada). At the other extreme, the much hotter tones of fear and moral indignation, expressed in Housefeather’s rejoinder, argues for an absolutist individual autonomy and local democracy as the highest form of common good for the city. The impasse between the two discourses lies in the ultimate conclusion that the one will never “quite get” the meaning of the other.

conclusion Comparison of serious debates over legislated amalgamations and satirical caricatures that place the two cities within their societal cultures leads us finally to some surprising juxtapositions. Although the formal structures of debate over local democracy and the genre of seriocomedy are more or less the same in each city, both represent their cities in very original ways. Toronto and Montreal are cities that carry an ambiguous relation as metropoles to larger societal cultures, and the imaginary horizons of expectation within each city in part accommodate this ambiguity. The cultures of laughter in Montreal and Toronto differentiate two very unique normative horizons for imagining the nation in each city. Each laughs at the other in a time and place that cannot happen anywhere else or in any other moment. At the same time, neither is aware of what the other is laughing about. I have also argued that political statements on the amalgamation and samples from the seriocomedies share common horizons of expectation in several instances. Mr Housefeather’s attack against the pq government and the 1978 and 1995 Air Farce sketches about Quebec share the same profound disdain for the Québécois national project. Another, much lighter, example of shared horizons was seen in Sergeant Renfrew’s comic vision of urban sprawl and linguistic interference along with the lament over the imminent loss of “neighbourhood” expressed by Mr Greenberg and others. On the other hand, the Le BYE BYE sketches share Minister Harel’s vision of Quebec as a distinct nation, one that can never really quite be grasped by Canadians who see Quebec as a province or region no more different or distinct than any other. Imagining how Englishspeaking Canadians look for a glimpse of themselves in the objective scene of public broadcasting in Toronto needs to be situated in the context of an absent nation whose societal culture does not easily define itself without French-speaking Quebec. Imagining why Canadians came to be seen by French-speaking Québécois as wanting to be seen needs

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to be understood in the context of the larger societal culture of the absent region in the sense that the French-speaking Québécois in Montreal do not have a consensus in which they easily see themselves as identifying or belonging first and foremost to the Canadian federation. From the point of view of the absent region, the 1995 sketch on the “no” rally in Montreal is an interesting example of a sharply differentiated normative horizon between Montreal and Toronto as well as between the two societal cultures. Dialogism, or what I have called the politics of two-sided answerability, means that when one gazes into the eyes of the other, the one orientates toward the other whether the gaze is cast in confirmation or negation. The two case studies establish clearly defined limits between each and, at the same time, demonstrate mutual support. Examining the interpretation of popular criticisms of political competence, the mayoral opposition to the amalgamation, and pleas for local democracy found in the quotations from the Toronto and Montreal newspapers, all from the point of view of seriocomedy, one gets a larger sense of the extent to which popular culture holds any decision from the political class in contempt. As Bakhtin (1984b, 95) notes, “distrust of the serious tone and confidence in the truth of laughter has a spontaneous elemental character. Fear never lurks behind laughter and hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask.” The seriousness of politicians is “elementally distrusted, while trust is placed in popular laughter.” While Mr Greenberg and Ms White are worried about their neighbourhoods being disturbed by a new distant and inhumane municipal government, the 1970 soldier sketch from Le BYE BYE brings the “scenes” of terrorism and state violence directly into the view of mass media and turns them into a political truth about what happened to Montreal in the October Crisis. Preserving objective culture and social solidarity are ultimate goods in both scenarios. We get Toronto’s counterpoint on Montreal’s social solidarity in the 1978 Air Farce sketch on leaving Montreal: when the last moving company in Montreal itself had to move out, they were even forced to turn down Jean Chretien’s request for assistance (along with the other “Anglaise rats leaving the sinking bateau”). By 1996 the “common sense revolution” hit Toronto like a rock, and for many it had gone way too far (“these guys couldn’t order lunch”). In 2000 Minister Harel’s political option leaves Mr Housefeather nauseous and suburban mayors apoplectic. In 1995, after another very tense moment in Montreal’s political history, Le BYE BYE throws the drunken amorous anglophones off the plane, while Air Farce pulls the trap door on the Québécois contemplating voting “yes.” In the end, argues Bakhtin, “laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth; it cannot be transformed into seriousness without distorting the very con-

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tent of the truth which it unveils” (94). This chapter has attempted to engage in analysis of imagining the nation in the city and the emotional-volitional diversity involved in struggles across communities over answerability and over remembering the building of objective culture. This has meant in part interpreting subjective and objective cultures as “with one-another, for one-another, in one-another, against one-another, or through one-another” (Simmel 1949, 292). The comparison of Montreal and Toronto is thus not simply a matter for everyday opinion like “Toronto is less exciting than Montreal” or “Montreal feels more and more provincial compared to Toronto.” If the social imaginary is also objective – that is, if the imaginary is not taken as something that falsifies the real but as the structure of possibility and sometimes even irony within the real, then the research object is doubly problematic in as much as boundaries of what can be imagined and what cannot need to be clearly discerned (Lindner 2002). In pursuing this line, I have tried to describe some of the normative features of the nation in the city and to show how the background of the city sets the imaginary horizons for practical exchanges of meaning. My selection of the object of comparison assumes that the whole of each city can be seen in the part but also that the whole (with all its loopholes) carries a greater sense of possibility and thus is always more than the sum of its parts. Much of today’s most exciting research approaches the emergent city as a privileged site for the study of new economies and transnational ways of imagining “home” and “belonging” across large networks that transcend national boundaries. This literature holds that the nation’s ability to unify mass society into a single people has been in decline for some time. On the other hand, I have argued that even though the nation is a much weaker unifying force, the state continues to expand top-down cultural organizations like the cbc and Radio-Canada in the name of national unity. In this paradox, the city becomes a key site for the study of postnational culture. In this context, national identities become less relevant to urban life as nation-states increasingly share sovereignty with regional and global institutions. It thus becomes more important for the city to sustain itself as a theatre for the performance of both local belonging and cosmopolitan pluralism. City culture, then, is usually examined within literature on postnationalism in terms of its answerability not to local societal culture but to a global cosmopolitanism. Yet there is much need for research to address the local question of imagining the nation in the city given that the nation is likely to continue to linger within the “dialogism” of citizenship practice in this new context. The idea that the emergent city is one that includes multiple voices that intersect and overlap is a central aspect to research that sees the city as an intersubjective centre for the development of diversity. The living plurality of cultures and the stratification of

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languages, voices, accents, and emotional-volitional orientations in the speech genres of the city have traditionally challenged singular definitions of either national ethnos or ethos in the past and will continue to do so in the future. As an example of the above, I have argued that public broadcasting organizations continue to produce complex national narratives about distinct cultures from within the vantage point of metropolitan centres. This production seems likely to continue even if it is true that the nation is withdrawing further into the background of a postnational network of global cities. I have also argued that the background tension of the nation in the city can sometimes be seen to underlie overt disputes about local democracy and the governance of the city, even though they do not always refer directly to the nation. On a variety of levels, then, the argument from this chapter suggests that future research should take the nation as an important, but by no means exclusive, object of research in the study of the culture of cities. On the other hand, it should also see the city as perhaps the most important driving force of a new diversity in which a dialogism of citizenship practices is lived out within and well beyond the nation.

notes 1 It is interesting to note that as a Western art form, seriocomedy precedes the invention of radio and television by more than 2,000 years. Both Northrop Frye (1962) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1984a) situate the origins of the genre in Greek and Roman cities and trace its development across the carnival festivities of the Middle Ages to the birth of the modern urban novel, the parallel institutions of the English music hall, the French théatre de boulevard, burlesque, the Italian opera comédia, and vaudeville. Freud’s study of Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1916) remains an important reference for studying the social psychology of laughter. On the other hand, unlike Bakhtin, his study focuses on the joke as a “sub-species of the comic.” He classifies the multiple techniques of “joke-work” and situates them in the psycho-dynamics of repression and pleasure rather than in a broader history of the chronotope or genre. Nonetheless, his discussion of the similarity between “joke-work” and “dream-work” across the processes of “condensation, displacement, and indirect representation” helps to explain the internal imaginary structure of address and reception. Henri Bergson’s classic Le rire (1899) also sees laughter from the point of view of the comedic rather than as an expression of a more general culure. For an excellent review essay on the philosophy of laughter since Aristotle, see Emerson 2002. 2 Since 1960 cbc radio has produced over eighty satires in the form of one-hour

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radio plays and irregular series of mini-satires as well as dozens of short-lived comic sketch shows. An example of the latter would be the fifteen-minute weekly comedy series on the three-hour morning program over the last twenty years. See the Concordia Centre for Broadcasting Studies collection of 16,000 radio drama scripts. See also the online bibliographies at http://ccbs.concordia.ca/bbcarchives.htm. Selections from the Air Farce are drawn from the complete Royal Canadian Air Farce Archives in Toronto. Thanks to Air Farce Productions for permission to enter the archives and study the materials. Thanks also to research assistants Susan Adams, Shannon Braden, and Christine Laverance for collecting materials in the archives. Thanks to Mircea Mandachea for organizing the sample. The selection from the Toronto newspapers is taken from the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun. Using the key word search for amalgamation, 223 articles were selected in 1996 and 885 articles in 1997 from Canadian News Disc 2 for the Toronto Star. And 143 articles were selected in 1996 and 458 articles in 1997 from Canadian News Disc 3 for the Toronto Sun. After reading through the larger sample, a further sampling was done by selecting one article for each ten. For example, article 2 from articles 1–10; article 13 from 11–20; article 187 from 181–90, and so on. In this way, 22 articles were selected for a closer reading from the Toronto Star in 1996 and 88 articles from the Toronto Star in 1997. Fourteen articles were selected from the Toronto Sun for 1996 and 45 for 1997. From the remaining 169 articles, 20 were selected randomly, with preference being given to editorials and letters. “Le Soldat Sketch B,” 27–31, from BYE-BYE ’70, broadcast by Radio-Canada, 31 December, 11:00 P.M., Société Radio-Canada Archives, Montreal. Principle actors, Denis Drouin and Olivier Guimont. My translation, based on the script and on the improvisation and emphasis of the broadcast tape. Thanks to La Société Radio-Canada for access to the archives. Stephan Laporte, “We Love Quebec,” 1, from BYE-BYE ’95, broadcast by Radio-Canada, 31 December, 11:00 P.M., Société Radio-Canada Archives, Montreal. Assistant producer, Stephan Laporte. Producer, Jean-Jacques Sheitoyan. Principle actors, Dominique Michel, Andre Philipe Gagnon, and Serge Theriault. My translation, based on broadcast tape and script. Note that in the Montreal case, the focus of analysis is the merger debates, not the demerger debates that followed the 2001 legislation. For a discussion of the selection process from the Montreal newspapers, see Nielsen, Hsu, and Jacob 2002.

references Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Cambridge, Polity.

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Angus, Ian. 1996. A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984a. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson and Wayne Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. – 1984b. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana: Indiana University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1899. Le rire. Reprint, Paris: Presses de l’Université de France, 1940. Blum, Alan. 2001. “Scenes.” Public, nos 22–3: 7–36. Bonner, Kieran, 2002a. “Understanding Place Making: Economics, Politics and Everyday Life in the Culture of Cities.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 2, no. 1: 1–16. – ed. 2002b. Space Place and the Culture of Cities. Special issue of Canadian Journal of Urban Research 2, no. 1. Boudreau, Julie-Anne. 2000. The Mega City Saga: Democracy and Citizenship in This Global Age. Montreal: Blackrose Books. Burman, Jenny. 2001. “At the Scene of the Crossroads, ‘Somewhere in this Silvered City’: Diasporas Public Spheres in Toronto.” Public, nos 22–3: 195–208. Castles, Stephan, and Alistar Davidson. 2000. Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging. New York, Routledge. Clark, Andrew. 1997. Stand and Deliver: Inside Canadian Comedy. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. Cusson, Marie. 2004. “Du Soldat au Danse à Dix: Répresenation des rapports sociaux de pouvoir et du pluralisme urbain dans les Bye-Bye.” Frequency: Journal for the Study of Canadian Radio and Television 11–12: 227–51. – and Greg Nielsen. 2001. “La satire à la radio publique et à la radio privée au Québec.” Canadart II: Revista do Nucleo de Estudos Canadenses 8: 83–105. – and Greg Nielsen. 2004. “Canadian Radio Satire.” In Christopher H. Sterling and Michael C. Keith, eds, The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Radio, vol. 1, 285–9. New York: Fitzroy Dearborn. Cyr, Claudine. 2004. “Moi et l’autre: La mise en scène de l’identité.” Frequency: Journal for the Study of Canadian Radio and Television 11–12: 199–226. Emerson, Caryl. 2002. “Coming to Terms with Bakhtin’s Carnival: Ancient, Modern, sub Specie Aeternitais.” In R.B. Branham, ed., Bakhtin and the Classics, 5–26. Evanson: North Western University Press. Fink, Howard, and John D. Jackson. 1996. “Jack Bowdery/Jack Ammon: Pioneer Leftist Thirties B.C. Radio Dramatist.” Fréquence/Frequency, nos 1–2: 59–72. Freud, Sigmund. 1916. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Vol. 6 of

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Collected Works. Reprint, trans. Albert Dickson, ed. Angela Richards, London: Penguin Books, 1976. Friedmann, John. 2002. The Prospect of Cities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Frye, Northrop. 1962. “The Nature of Satire.” In Charles A. Allen and George D. Stephens, eds, Satire Theory and Practice, 15–30. Belmont, ca: Wadsworth. Gagné, Gilles, and Simon Langlois. 2002. Les raisons fortes: Nature et signification de l’appui à la souveraineté. Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Germaine, Annick, and Damaris Rose. 2000. Montréal: The Quest for Metropolis. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Held, David, and Anthony McGrew. 2002. Globalization/Anti-Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Isin, Engin. 2000. “Governing Cities without Government.” In Engin Isin, ed., Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, 148–68. London: Routledge. Kymlicka, Will. 1998. Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Lindner, Rolf. 2002. “The Imaginary of the City.” Address to the Culture of Cities Summer Institute, Montreal, 19–23 August. Marchessault, Janine. 2001. “Film Scenes: Paris, New York, Toronto.” Public, nos 22–3: 59–82. McRoberts, Kenneth. 1997. Misrecognizing Canada. New York: Oxford Press. Miller, Ian. 2002. H.M. Our Glory is Our Grief: Torontonians and the Great War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Nielsen, Greg Marc. 1991. “Les institutions imaginaires et le processus démocratique au Canada.” Société/Society 15, no. 2: 25–30. – 1994. Le Canada de Radio-Canada: Sociologie critique et dialogisme culturel. Toronto: Éditions du gref. – 1995a. “The cbc and Canadian Society.” Canadart II: Revista do Nucleo de Estudos Canadenses 2: 112–30. – 1995b. “L’impasse Canada-Québec et le sort de Radio-Canada: L’autonomie culturelle ou la mort!” Cahiers de recherches sociologiques, no. 25: 181– 212. – 1997. “Culture and the Politics of Being Québécois: Identity and Communication.” In Marcel Fournier et al., eds, Critical Issues in Quebec Society, 81– 94. New Jersey and Scarborough: Prentice Hall. – 1999. “Two Countries, One State, Two Social Imaginations: A Comparison of cbc and Radio-Canada Seriocomedy.” Journal of Radio Studies 6, no. 1: 160–58. – 2002. The Norms of Answerability: Social Theory between Bakhtin and Habermas. Preface by Caryl Emerson. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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– 2004. “The Third Phase in the Seriocomedy Project.” Frequency: Journal for the Study of Canadian Radio and Television 11–12: 174–81. – Yon Hsu, and Louis Jacob. 2002. “Public Culture and the Dialogics of Democracy: Reading the Montréal and Toronto Amalgamation Debates.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 2, no. 1: 111–40. Pagé, Pierre, with Renée Legris. 1979. Le comique et l’humour à la radio québécoise: Aperçu historique et textes choisi, 1930–1970. Vols 1–2. Montreal: Fides. Robinson, Gertrude. 1998. Constructing the Quebec Referendum: French and English Media Voices. Toronto: University of Toronto. Sancton, Andrew. 2000. Merger Mania: The Assault on Local Government. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Saxon, Tammy, Donavan Rocher, and John D. Jackson. 2004. “This Hour Has 22 Minutes: The Center Periphery Problematic and Gender Performance.” Frequency: Journal for the Study of Canadian Radio and Television 11–12: 182–98. Sevigny, Marcel. 2001. Trente ans de politique municipal: Plaidoyer pour une citoyenneté active. Montreal: Les Éditions Ecosociété. Simmel, Georg. 1949. “The Sociology of Sociability.” Trans. Everett Hughes. The American Journal of Sociology 55: 254–61. – 1968. Das Individuelle Gesetz. Ed. Von Michael Landmann. Frankfurt: am Main. – 1997. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone. London: Sage. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism, 29–73. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press.

6 Ethnicity, Social Organization, and Urban Space A Comparison of Italians in Toronto and Montreal1 NICHOLAS DEMARIA HARNEY It is above all the practical significance of men for one another that is determined by both similarities and differences among them. Similarity, as fact or tendency, is no less important than difference. In the most varied forms, both are the great principles of all external and internal development. In fact, the cultural history of mankind can be conceived as the history of the struggles and conciliatory attempts between the two. Georg Simmel, cited in Richard Fardon, “African Ethnogenesis,” 1987, 169

Georg Simmel’s comment about difference reminds us of the critical role performed by contrast and similarity, or comparison, in the way that people apprehend and act in the world. Scholarly writing about ethnicity has emphasized that these larger identity formations are constructed by an aspect of a social relationship, a process of differentiation or comparison between peoples. Such a view reveals the fluid, situational, and constructed quality of ethnic identities.2 Ethnic categories, such as Italian Canadian, serve to conjure up forms of representation, which have practical significance. In this context how does the same ethnic category manifest itself differently within the localized context of two cities? This chapter seeks to compare the experiences of Italian Canadians in Montreal and Toronto. There are numerous ways to examine ethnicity and ethnic group construction in cities, but here I will limit my attention to the similarities and differences between how Italian Canadians make and claim places in Toronto and Montreal. I am particularly interested in the intersection between the use of space

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and the social organization of Italians.3 Further, I will consider Italian Canadian ethnicity in Toronto and Montreal within the current scholarly interest in the production and use of space (Harney 2002, 2006; Appadurai 1996; Lefebvre 1991; Rotenberg and McDonough 1993). In addition, I want to link this exploration of the spatiality of ethnic processes with an inquiry into the variety of ways that ethnic groups are internally socially organized (Cornell 1996; Handelman 1977; Swanson 1971; Breton 1964). Through the use of some ethnographic examples, I outline three modes of inscription enacted by Italian Canadians in Toronto and Montreal both to spatialize culture and to create spatial boundaries (Low 2000). These modes of inscription reflect the variety of forms of collective enactment and representation of “group” life both internally to those who identify themselves as Italian Canadians and externally to other ethnic and racial minorities, transnational circuits, and local political-bureaucratic authorities. Moreover, through these examples I hope to examine the intersection between the uses of space and the aggregate dynamics of ethnic group life to further our understanding of the culture of the city in general and these two cities in particular. For example, at the level of the individual or the family in Toronto and Montreal, the most striking form of the repetitive practice of place making when we compare the urban neighbourhoods of Italians to other city neighbourhoods is the ritual evening walk, or passegiatta. This ritual predinner leisurely walk occurs throughout Italy in every major city, provincial town, and local village and has been recreated in “Little Italies” throughout the globe, such as St Clair Avenue West in Toronto and Ville St Léonard in Montreal. The ritual offers an opportunity for people to present themselves in public and also to assess the presentation of other members of the moral community through their assertion of a bella figura,4 an image of oneself that you wish others to socially consume. Of course, it can also act as a form of social control whereby the community monitors the behaviours and representations of its members to ensure that members of the group adhere to the prevailing views of the group. From this perspective, the passegiatta is a recognizable sign of daily practice that offers a glimpse at the semiotics of place and indicates to non-Italians the social character and claims to a particular space. Why compare Italians in Toronto and Montreal? These are the two dominant cities of Italian Canadian life. Over 50 per cent of all Italians in Canada live in either Toronto (34%) or Montreal (17.6%). Toronto’s demographic dominance coincides with an economic, political, and cultural hegemony that is in marked contrast to the pre-Second World War era, during which Montreal was the major Italian city of

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the country in terms of its “Little Italies,” cultural life, bourgeoisie, and position as a labour recruitment and organizing site for companies seeking workers to labour in Canada’s hinterland. Toronto’s displacement of Montreal as the centre of Italian Canadian life emerged as a result of the economic recentring of the country around the Golden Horseshoe of southern Ontario and the accompanying massive manufacturing and construction economic boom in postwar Ontario. Later, the disruptions and uncertainty of the nationalist movement within Quebec led to a small but significant aesthetic community of young writers and artists making their way to Toronto.5 Generally, however, it was the economy that drove Italians toward Toronto. Similar to most migrants to Canada, Italians considered English-speaking North America the best economic future for their children. The distinctions between Italian experiences in these two cities emerge most significantly at the level of collective and corporate group activity, a social field within which Italians in Montreal must engage with the history and present reality of the national question of “two solitudes” – English and French Canada. Locating the concern for place and space in the context of plural cities, I consider how Italian migrants and their descendants assert their presence in urban space and construct a sense of belonging through particular spaces to create places. The social, habitual, and ritual working over of space by Italians in Montreal and Toronto recalls de Certeau’s (1984) view that space must be used, embodied, and practised to provide meaning. The everyday use of space in a city does not occur in a terra nullius – uninhabited space, uncharted nothingness. Instead, the ritual and popular celebrations, the transformation of sidewalks, landscapes, and storefronts, and the placement of monuments and institutions are assertions of group presence in, familiarity with, and control over specific territorities. Embedded in these modes of place making is the presence of other projects by other groups. In this context, it is not simply the use of space that matters, but, as Appadurai’s (1996) focus on the production of locality suggests, the production of a neighbourhood is inherently an exercise of power over some sort of environment imagined or calibrated variously as unfamiliar, unruly, uncivilized, and inhabited by other people. The assertion of presence and power can become the aggressive and violent use of white-based power against minorities, as seen in the United States in celebrated cases in greater New York (DeSena 1990; Rieder 1985). In this chapter, I am less interested in those more violent forms of place making and claiming than in the more mundane and institutionalized forms of place making.6 It should also be noted that Italian immigrant use of space in Toronto and Montreal was and is practised not only within the confines of dominant

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English Canadian and French Canadian notions of how public space ought to be used and by whom, but also in the presence, and some might suggest at the expense of, other ethnic minorities. The assertion of ethnic identity in the process of place making by Italians in these cities manifests itself in a variety of ways and, I think, can help us to consider both the shifting boundaries of ethnicity and the “stuff inside” (Barth 1969; Wallman 1986). By joining an enquiry into place making with an understanding of the social organization of ethnic groups, we can develop a fuller understanding of ethnic collective practice in cityscapes. Swanson (1971) offered a classificatory view of group aggregates and collectivities with the intention of interpreting these forms as a means for determining the kinds of decisions and actions that could emerge from different aggregates of group structure. Exploring the organization of ethnic communities Breton (1964, 194) underscored the capacity of ethnic/immigrant communities through the notion of “institutional completeness” to provide for the needs of members through their own institutions. Breton’s work focused on social integration, but it also could be considered in relation to the location or spatialization of ethnic processes. The provision of death benefits by mutual-aid societies, the availability of culturally specific goods and services, heritage-language classes, or employment opportunities, for example, address to varying degrees the shared institutions, shared interests, and shared culture that Cornell (1996) has delineated as crucial for understanding the content of collective ethnic identity and the intensity of ethnic group attachments. Cornell seeks to have us consider not only the constraints imposed on the construction of ethnic identities, but also how the content of these identities mediate the circumstances that are encountered. The organizational capacity that Breton suggests and the variable “ties that bind” that Cornell describes are enacted through specific physical spaces, such as social clubs, community centres, neighbourhoods, and commercial buildings. Handelman’s (1977) otherwise insightful typology for interpreting the various degrees of ethnic organization by differentiating between the ethnic category, the ethnic network, the ethnic association, and the ethnic community neglects to consider the connection between territory and ethnicity in other than the most complex form in his typology: ethnic community.

th e i t a l i e s o f t o r o n t o a n d m o n t r e a l It is through these dimensions of identity construction, place making, and social organization that this work on people of Italian heritage living in Toronto and Montreal has taken shape. The history of Italian migration and settlement emerged both from the limited economic

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opportunities in the Italian peninsula and from the expansion of the Canadian railway and mining companies in the prewar period and the mass increase in manufacturing and construction in the postwar period. While Montreal was home to a more significant Italian settlement until the Second World War, Toronto eclipsed Montreal as the demographic and economic centre of Italianità in Canada by the 1960s with the massive arrival of migrants between 1951 and 1967. Both cities are ethnically heterogenous and are the recipients of most migrants coming to Canada over the last fifty years. In Canada people of Italian ancestry number over 1.2 million. With mass migration between 1951 and 1961, the Italian population increased threefold in Quebec to 108,552, with 94 per cent living in Montreal. Today, Montreal is home to almost 20 per cent of all Italians living in Canada. Toronto is an incredibly multiethnic and multiracial city, with nearly 50 per cent of its residents born elsewhere and significant immigrant populations from all corners of the globe. Italians living there are a predominantly postwar ethnic/ immigrant community. The 2001 census reports that 429,380 Italians live in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area, or 34 per cent of all Italians in Canada.7 This numerical presence contributes significantly to the experiences of everyday life in both cities, but the Italian presence is felt beyond the statistical realm in the ambience of neighbourhoods, consumable items, caffés, and stores, public culture, the cut and thrust of local, urban political life, labour unions, and urban development.8 What are the various ways that people construct communities and create meaningful worlds by inscribing urban space with their presence? The remainder of this chapter delineates a series of ways that space is moulded, shaped, and imbued with meaning by Italians in Toronto and Montreal.9 These are by no means exhaustive but, I think, suggest some useful directions for further research as we attempt to unravel the complexity of ethnicity in the city.

th r e e wa y s o f p l a c e m a k i n g There are a number of ways in which Italian Canadians use urban space to create meaning for themselves, assert their presence, and spatially subordinate or exclude other ethnic and racial minorities living in their neighbourhoods. Further, these ways of place making, or inscriptions, resonate with the different ways that Italian Canadians organize their collective expression, representation, and action. For the purposes of clarity, I delineate three discrete modes of these ways of marking and using space and related forms of social organization by Italian Canadians in city space; in actual everyday practice these modes intersect, are sometimes embodied together in the same actions, movements, dwellings and

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travels performed by Italian Canadians in their city life, and at times animate each other.10 These three could be distinguished as the individual, collective, and corporate inscriptions of space by Italians. Neighbourhood and Everyday Life An ethnic neighbourhood indicates a community materially situated in a socially constituted and reproducible space. The term neighbourhood implies both specific areas of concentrated Italian settlement, institutions, and commercial zones as well as social spaces. As Appadurai (1996, 204) argues, the term suggests “sociality, immediacy, and reproducibility without any necessary claims to scale, specific modes of connectivity, internal homogeneity, or sharp boundaries.” These dimensions fashion opportunities for a variety of ethnic aggregations to form and dissolve according to the contingencies and immediacies of needs, desires, and demands articulated through an ethnic form of identification. The construction of neighbourhoods, the habitual movement through space, and the representation of spaces as places for particular groups – the spatializing of cultures and peoples – take many forms in the daily process of living, working, dwelling, and celebrating. In this first mode of place making, we need to consider what at first glance might appear to be the most ordinary, mundane, prosaic activities of Italian Canadian urban life, but through these repetitive acts and rountinized behaviours, claims are formed and assertions and acknowledgments of Italian presence in particular neighbourhoods are made. At an organizational level, Italians here act in a way that Swanson (1971) might describe as a “social aggregate” enacting and embodying cultural practices that through the quotidian repetition of thousands of individual acts, create a representation of Italianness to themselves and the wider world. In a sense, the “ties that bind” (Cornell 1996) the social aggregate of Italians here derive from a shared sense of cultural practice. Of course, “shared forms” are riven with power differentials and inequalities, too, and enforce dominant modes of social organization and communal expectations about modes of behaviour based on age, gender, class, and so forth. If the evening walk, noted earlier, signifies the weighty routine of inhabiting certain streetscapes by Italians, what Del Giudice (1993) has termed the “ethnic personalization of space” has, by reworking material objects, land, and buildings, transformed and “fixed” identity in particular neighbourhoods and streets in the imagination of Italians and non-Italians alike. The individual process of embodying cultural practices in space is observable at the margins of the formal division between public and private space in the city: the front and backyards of

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the Italian family home, a garden full of leafy greens, tomatoes staked with broken hockey sticks, beans climbing stakes reaching for the sun, a separate entrance to a wine cellar or cantina, an outdoor oven, grafted fruit trees offering two or three varieties of peaches, and a grape arbour. Observed collectively, this shaping of land and architecture has a significant impact on the streetscapes and on the west-end neighbourhoods of Toronto. For many in the immigrant generation, the garden and the cantina provide a sense familiarity, security, and comfort. Nearly two-thirds of Italian immigration after the Second World War originated from south and central Italy, with its social memory of economic hardship. Seventy-seven per cent of Italians entering Canada between 1952 and 1971 indicated that they intended to work in manual labour upon arrival (Sturino 1999; Jansen 1988). Since many were of peasant background, their relationship to the land revolves around its ability to provide bounty. Nature must be domesticated and productive. Trees are cut down and backyards divided into garden plots, and what remains is covered in cement to extend the space for summertime social gatherings of extended kin and paesani (fellow villagers). The physical transformation of the landscape around Italian homes in neighbourhoods in Montreal and Toronto is only part of the story. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Italian immigrants altered, remade, or built features of their houses that are reminiscent of Italian architectural styles by incorporating arches, arcades, porticoes, terra cotta touches, tile, and marble. An indication of the value that Italian immigrants placed on the home is their extremely high levels of homeownership compared to other ethnic communities (Sturino 1985).11 These “archvillas” (Del Giudice 1993; Cameron 1988) are a testament to the centrality of the physical house in the construction of a sense of home and belonging for Italian immigrants. The arches, stucco, and other material used to recall an imagined, composite “Italian” architectural style or “archvilla” have also been interpreted as visible symbols through which Italians have challenged older AngloCanadian views about architectural style and thus have been a site for tension. One should also emphasize that this ethnic boundary marker also indicates to newer minorities the location and control of space by Italians in the city.12 Of course, in many instances, these personal and familial spaces in Toronto’s and Montreal’s Italian settlements eddy out along the side streets of main roads, which have concentrations of stores providing everyday Italian foodstuffs, bakeries, travel agents, barbers and salons, caffés, clothing goods, bomboniere (wedding gift) shops (Harney 1992), and myriad services offered in the Italian language. It is in these urban landscapes that the distinction between everyday forms of Italianità inscribed

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in space and a third mode of inscription that I discuss, monumentalism, becomes difficult to sustain without appreciating that both forms of place making may occur at the same time since these commercial activities encompass the activities of Italians in their quotidian routines and the commoditized forms of Italianness that are consumed more widely and objectified more consciously to cater to an expanding market of Italophiles. Yet the distinction may be suggested at the level of social organization in the sense that these commercial areas reinforce the loosely related connections of shared cultural tastes, practices, and expectations of Italians and their consumption needs. If there exists a business improvement association (bia), such as the Corso Italia BIA and the Little Italy bia, both in Toronto, the distinction may also reveal the active corporate interests of institutions and commercial establishments.13 Processions and Parades: The Collective Uses of Space The ritual, annual or biennial14 marking of an Italian ethnic presence performed in urban space in the form of religious processions, soccer celebrations, and chin Radio-sponsored festivals colonizes and recedes from public space within the calendar cycles of the faithful, both secular and sacred, in a repetitive, habitual circularity that implies an eternalness but also significantly a reassertion of this ethnic presence on streets and in public spaces anew each time. This second mode of inscription connects urban space with a dimension of ethnic attachment that manifests itself around particular cultural events. It addresses the ritual, collective, periodic colonizing of urban public space by Italians. With these perambulatory events, streets and neighbourhoods are demarcated as Italian. The calendar of religious feasts is central to the social life and expression of community solidarities among Italians in Toronto and Montreal during the spring and summer. In the last decade, roughly sixty different celebrations occurred annually. Although run by Italian immigrant lay organizations, these feasts and processions are loosely regulated by the Italian Pastoral Commission of the Archdiocese of Toronto, which attempts to incorporate them bureaucratically into a parish and to assure the appropriate religious content (see Harney 1998, 143–56). Parish saints’ days or Madonna feasts celebrated with processions of statues followed by evening picnics, carnivals, and entertainment provide a mapping of the locally specific sense of belonging and identification for Italian migrants from hometowns in Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata, Abruzzo, or Sicily within the pan-Italian settlement in Toronto. Through each of these processions, Italians assert their presence and control over parts of the city.15 These processions, through city

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streets and in public parks, are also part of the production and maintenance of neighbourhood. They offer “a territorial unit of meaning” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1983, 203, cited in Sciorra 1999) for Italians and others in the multiethnic neighbourhoods in which they occur. These processions and feasts, which are highly organized affairs sponsored by a lay organization with letters of patent, a constitution, and often a place for social gatherings, have approval from the city’s police and fire departments and the blessing (actually and metaphorically) of the Catholic Church. Even with this kind of organizational complexity, we might describe these events less as a thing than as a happening in the sense that although the rituals of the Catholic mass, the procession, and celebratory feasts are structured, the collective participation of Italians is of a more fluid and spontaneous character. In conjunction with the ethnic corporate activities are the more informal meetings of friends and family, these being occasions for people to return to the neighbourhood that they lived in as children, to visit grandparents, family, and friends who have not moved out, and to reinscribe the streets and sidewalks with their presence. Established as an annual event since 1963, the Good Friday procession in the heart of the older post-Second World War Italian settlement on College Street, originating from St Francis Church on Grace Street, has become a public media event covered by both the Italian- and Englishlanguage press. As the single most important procession in the Catholic religious cycle, it receives considerable attention. Italian immigrants from the United States and across Canada make the pilgrimage to Toronto for the procession. Today, the importance of the procession indicates some of the changes in Toronto since the immediate postwar period when the Irish Catholic hierarchy spurned southern Italian ritualized forms of Catholicism. The procession is now an expected and institutionalized Catholic ritual in the city and has become codified in popular-culture discourse as an Italian Canadian Catholic profession of faith despite the significant participation of other Catholics and their lay organizations, most notably Portuguese. Proceeding solemnly in line with those performers enacting Christ’s trials are local politicians, notables in Italian community organizations, and sometimes the Italian consul. Recently, for those who cannot make the pilgrimage, the national cable Italian/ Spanish-language station tln has offered live coverage with commentary as the procession winds its ways along College Street. This sombre procession, which commemorates the crucifixion of Christ, draws an estimated 30,000 people, most of whom are Italian Canadians. In the days leading up to the procession, many of my informants are busy organizing the social aspects of this religious affair by planning at which caffé/bar to meet cousins or friends with whom to catch up and drink espresso.

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The second example of the collective colonization of space by Italians from time to time in the urban landscape occurs during the cycle of international soccer tournaments. The transformation of spaces into places requires a conscious moment and a foundational event that becomes relatively routine. Just such an event occurred in 1982 for people of Italian heritage living in Toronto when Italy won the World Cup of soccer. It is estimated that as many as 250,000 Italians in Toronto spontaneously filled the main thoroughfare of the neighbourhood along St Clair Avenue between Dufferin Street and Landsdowne Avenue, or Corso Italia, to celebrate. Since 1982, to mark any Italian national team victory in the World or European Cup of soccer, young and old Italian Canadians, energized by the social memory of the collective experience on the streets of Corso Italia and filled with nostalgia for the original event of 1982, cruise their cars and walk the streets around the same area, with the tricolour flags of Italy waving, horns honking, and vendors selling Italian team t-shirts, buttons, and banners. In fact, this spatialized placement of Italian identity and community has so colonized the collective cognitive maps of the city’s populace and engrained itself in the public imaginative geography of Toronto that other ethnic communities, such as Portuguese supporting the perennially strong Brazilian team or Argentinean supporters, have come to the area to celebrate or to taunt Italian Canadian fans after Italian national team losses. Even as this mostly peaceful ethnic rivalry occurs, you also see young Caribbean, Vietnamese, and South Asians waving the Italian flag and joining in the festivities. These soccer gatherings have a pedigree, if slightly different, in Toronto that predates the transformative event of 1982. In the 1960s and ’70s, Italian Canadians, mostly male, would gather on College Street in front of Italian caffés/bars to listen to the Italian league soccer games on the radio and pass the time in camaraderie. In many instances, this form of public culture, which combined the immigrants’ need to find a familiar gathering place and the recreation of the public space of an Italian town’s piazza, created conflict with conservative, Anglo-Canadian notions of the appropriate use of public space. Numerous stories persist in the memories of older immigrants of Toronto policemen telling a group of Italians “to move along” as they stood on the sidewalk listening to the Italian soccer games on radios or chatting after Sunday morning mass. Finally, here I place the chin International Picnic. It is this localistic manifestation of collective cultural expression that in a comparison between Montreal and Toronto Italians would seem to be particularly entangled in the politics of multiculturalism and Canadian nationalism in English-speaking Canada. The assertive and unabashed equation of the chin Picnic’s multiculturalism of the street and marketplace and the

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legitimacy of Italian identity within a multicultural Canada leaves very little room for nuanced consideration of the history of Canadian confederation, the French-English debate, and the by now, at least in Toronto, archaic discussions of some kind of Anglo-Canada. For Italians in Montreal what would such an event be? Part of the difficulty here is the ambiguous and contradictory quality of Montreal’s Italians as they relate to Quebec society. Whereas only one-third of the total Italianheritage population in Toronto claims mixed (multiple) origin, fully half of Montreal’s does, which indicates a significant degree of intermarriage but also reflects a longer settlement period and the tradition of prewar Italians, more numerous in Montreal, to Gallicize. Similarities in language and religion add to the potential for integration in Quebec, if not Quebecois, life. Yet these sociological features mask a greater complexity. An Italian migrant in the postwar period, like most migrants, was concerned with mobility, and the language of mobility in North America was and is English. In the debates and social unrest regarding language instruction for immigrant children in Quebec in the 1960s and ’70s, Italians came down forcefully for the teaching of English to their children (Linteau 1989). Even with the history of this language conflict, over 80 per cent of Italians in Quebec speak French, and many are trilingual (Sturino 1999, 812). As an event that is sponsored by a commercial radio station, the chin Picnic, assertively multicultural, is also the site for ethnic-identity expression, which has the effect of reducing public culture’s impression of Italianness to sex, spaghetti, and song. It might well fit under monumentalism, my third mode of inscription, yet the annual colonizing of the Canadian National Exhibition grounds by this Italian iconic event on the July 1 weekend, in part to celebrate Canada Day, also shares with the previous two examples a degree of organizational style that I would emphasize. Despite its core agent, Johnny Lombardi’s chin Radio, the picnic is more collective than corporate in that Italian participants are not tightly bound to an institution but to the shared cultural practice of the event, the opportunity to claim and to be acknowledged in public space. That the ritual symbolism of Canada Day celebrations on the public lands of Canada’s oldest exhibition is tied with an Italianbased event serves to reinforce the legitimacy of Italian presence in Canada. The chin International Picnic, can be interpreted from a number of perspectives. It is a working-class festival, an ethnic group’s claim to place and presence in the city, an explicit enactment of multiculturalist ideology, a personalistic sales pitch for an ethnic entrepreneur, a transnational event that juxtaposes various diasporan networks, a ritualized event that expresses simultaneously cultural difference and convergence. Despite all these interpretations, the chin

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Picnic is at base a commercial affair. In the 1960s the traditional advertisers’ ratings measurement for radio stations in Canada, bbm, measured audience numbers only for French- and English-language radio stations. With no industry numbers to attract advertising dollars, chin needed to stage events and concerts to prove that there were listeners. This audience needed to be identified and nurtured. As one programming official at chin recently suggested, somewhat dismissively, “what the Italian community needed was educating and cultivating [that is, modernization and social improvement]” (Del Giudice 1992, 78). Out of this need emerged the chin Picnic. Nonetheless, the chin Picnic is more than the sum of its founder’s desire to make money. For one thing, it is also a site for working-class pleasure. Traditionally, summers in Toronto are marked by the absence of many in the elite, middle, and professional classes who retire to the lake country north of the city, often to avoid the sweltering humidity of July and August weekends. The chin Picnic offers poorer, workingclass immigrants the chance to spend the long summer weekend in the park with their families. It serves in much the same way as a festa in an Italian town’s piazza might to bring people together. Second-generation Italians with whom I spoke about the chin Picnic consistently thought of it as three things: a place to celebrate things Italian, to relax with family, and to find dates. There is no cost for admission. Food stalls serve North American fast food and beer as well as more global and ethnically distinctive foods, such as pizza, roti, empanadas, and pirogi. For several days and nights, tens of thousands of visitors gather at the Canadian National Exhibition lands near the lakefront to eat, to dance, and to listen to music and performers in their own languages.16 For Italians, just as for the many other people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds, the Picnic is an affordable, familiar, pleasurable way to spend the long weekend. Thousands of people, reportedly close to a quarter million, visit over the four-day event from almost every ethnic and racial background. While the event started out as a primarily Italian picnic and although even today it appears that Italians make up one of the largest segments of the crowd, the multilingual nature of the radio programming quickly stretched the audience beyond Italians. Lombardi and other hosts never tire of telling you their vision of Canada. “We celebrate our differences, we don’t fight about them,” is an often-heard phrase. Today’s participants include Portuguese, Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Trinidadians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Filipinos, Latin Americans, and many more attending the musical groups on tour from their homelands or the pan-ethnic female chin bikini contest and in the last dozen years the male bikini [sic] contest. Still, one sees Italian men and women strolling and greeting

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old friends, families spread out on the grass with blankets and food baskets, teenagers in small groups flirting. As one young Italian Canadian summed it up, “All of our parents are from Italy. So this is like a tradition, a social gathering for them” (Toronto Star, 3 July 1995). There is also a spaghetti eating contest, a chocolate tartufo (Italian ice cream) eating contest, a baby crawling contest, an ever busy band shell stage, a folk dance competition, bargain shopping, a beer tent, fast food, international food products, wrestling, cycling, and soccer competitions – and, of course, the chin Bikini contest. Performers from places as far a field as Hong Kong, Pakistan, Macedonia, Trinidad, and Italy entertain from the band shell. Singers, dancers, musicians “Direct from Trinidad” or “exciting entertainment from Hong Kong” have been added to the tradition of bringing Italian singers across the Atlantic from the annual Italian music festival in San Remo. The chin Picnic is clearly on the circuit for performers profiting from the transnational cultural marketplace of ethnoscapes (Appadurai 1990). Part of the excitement connected with the chin Picnic, certainly part of its allure, or even danger, is the possibility of encounters with strangers, products, and experiences. The festive atmosphere of the picnic creates the unusual opportunity to appreciate, taste, view, listen to, and participate in specific cultural traditions and practices from around the world. By bringing together both the exotic and the familiar, the picnic serves as an arbiter of change in that it expands the participants’ view of the world. Stallybrass and White’s (1986, 36–7) observation about fairs for the popular classes in England could be applied to the chin Picnic: “Part of the transgressive excitement of the fair for the subordinate classes was not its ‘otherness’ to official discourse, but rather the disruption of provincial habits and local tradition by the introduction of a certain cosmopolitanism, arousing desires and excitements for exotic and strange commodities.” By arousing desires and exciting interests in diverse cultures and commodities, chin cultivates its market. It offers an annual, visible assertion of Italianness over public land, and it locates Italians collectively at the vanguard of immigrant integration into a Canadian multicultural nation. In this sense, the picnic is a pedagogical tool that other ethnic and immigrant groups may use to interpret ways of asserting the limits and parameters of difference and belonging in Canada.17

monumentalism The third intersection of space and ethnic social organization directly asserts the putative permanence of Italians in Canada through the foundation of Italian material places, monuments, and institutions. This third

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category I have termed monumentalism not only to suggest the actual production of monuments representing a particular view of Italian presence in Canada, but also to draw on the conceptual implications of the term. In an insightful analysis of the intersection of place, time, identity, and histories in a Cretan town under the influence of external bureaucratic and aesthetic agendas to preserve a “suitable past,” Herzfeld makes the distinction between social and monumental time. Social time is constructed through the experiences of everyday life and thus is openended and unpredictable even if there are efforts to shape, mould, and cajole it. Monumental time, however, is “reductive and generic. It encounters events as realizations of some supreme destiny, and it reduces social experience to collective predictability. Its main focus is the past constituted by categories and stereotypes. In its extreme forms, it is the time frame of the nation-state” (Herzfeld 1991, 10). This dualism does not neatly operate as such since the discursive practices and actions of Italians and others often transgress the clean categories of scholars. Nevertheless, I am interested here in the idea of monumental time since it indicates a connection between place, permanence, ethnic organization, and identity that animates particular practices of place making by Italians. By using this idea, I emphasize the structuring of collective communal unity, solidarity, and shared history in these two cities. Under the category of monumentalism, I distinguish three forms in the urban landscape. First, there are actual monuments built to commemorate an imagined, heroic, official Italian experience in the histories of either one or all of the following: the Canadian nation, the Italian nation, or the many Italian diasporas.18 Even here, despite the homogenizing intentions and effects of constructing an official communal history, there are different understandings and therefore icons for this linear, carefully selected past. These monuments are most often located in areas of Italian commercial and residential settlement.19 Second, there are ethnic community-based institutions offering social and cultural services, which not only meet the practical needs of Italians – for instance, language instruction, access to public services and cultural activities – but also locate putative Italianness on the actual and imaginative multicultural map of the urban landscape in the rhetoric of bureaucrats, politicians, community spokespeople, the media, and members of other ethnic and immigrant communities. Third, in both Toronto and Montreal there are commercial spaces or streetscapes that concentrate specific Italian small businesses, which serve to essentialize and commodify Italianness for consumption. These commercial spaces are embedded in monumental time in the sense that the marketing and presentation of these products, services, and physical representations evoke an imaginary, stereotypical, timeless identity formation that is

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available to the Italophile and the curious for consumption. Difference, inequality, conflict, change, and ambiguity are all either excoriated or erased for the purposes of commercial activity and a refracted and simplistic multicultural ideal. The forms may vary, but the “monuments” produced represent not only selective interests and histories, but also necessarily corporate group interests within the ethnic collectivity. Monumentalism involves a convergence of interests, cultural expectations, and institutional forms within an ethnic collectivity and thus also requires a concerted corporate effort to achieve the construction of these sites. The icons or images of actual monuments constructed in Montreal and Toronto over the last century by Italian Canadian organizations follow four often entwined themes: an enduring tie to Italy;20 the public commemoration of the heroic nature of the humble migrant’s journey; the need to assert the enduring presence of Italians in Canada since its “discovery”; and the selection of the appropriate icons to enhance the reputation and status of Italians.21 In effect, these monuments are messages about the worth of Italians to the host Anglo-Canadian and Québécois-French establishments, but the location and meaning of these monuments are also interpreted by newer or less powerful minority groups in the contest for quasi-indigeneity (or at least, “founding status”) with respect to the Canadian “nation” and hence higher status in a multicultural Canada. For example, in a search for respectable heroes for the historical narrative of Italians in Canada, Italian leadership in both Toronto and Montreal have recovered John Cabot as Giovanni Caboto – the first “discoverer” of Canada. With the proper slant, his “journey of discovery” serves to symbolize the extraordinary migrant journeys undertaken by humble Italian migrants over the last century to North America. As early as 1935, caught up in a combination of enthusiasm for Fascist assertions of Italy’s greatness and a desire to claim a place in Canada, the Quebec branch of the Order of the Sons of Italy in Montreal erected a statue to Giovanni Caboto and hoped to pronounce him the true discoverer of Canada, rather than Jacques Cartier, to the consternation of French Canadian nationalists. In the end, the plaque read less controversially “The Italians of Canada to Giovanni Caboto” (Principe 1999). To indicate the enduring use of suitable heroes and the practice of monumentalism, but also to emphasize a different intersection of ethnic corporate group interests, I note that more than sixty years later in Toronto’s northern suburb, Caboto’s image adorned a new monument situated at the newly opened gates of the Veneto Centre. The monument to Caboto at the Veneto Centre situates the explorer in the pantheon of subethnic or ethnoregional heroes from the Veneto, rather than casting him as a pan-Italian one,

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and speaks both to the strength of the more localized identities of migrants from Italy who are tied to their regional heritages and networks and to the recent politicization of regional governments in Italy.22 Even without the nationalist foreign-policy swagger and assertiveness of Italy’s 1930s Fascist government and its energetic activities within “Italian colonies” and desire for control over Italian immigrants, the play of nationalist sentiment and desire for status in a variety of hierarchies more recently manifested itself in 1992 among a group of Montreal’s Italians in the suburban LaSalle district of Montreal. Here, I must note a difference with Toronto’s Italian corporate institutions. By 1992 all of the major Italian organizations were reluctant to celebrate Columbus as the “discoverer” of the Americas. They had read and absorbed the reassessment of his legacy. In fact, Columbus Centre, so named in the 1970s in the heyday of multicultural politics in Ontario, chose to commemorate the quincentenary with a low-key intercultural communicative act by hosting First Nations leaders and arranging for an Ojibway sweet grass ceremony. In Montreal, given the tension surrounding continual constitutional uncertainty over the French-English issue and the tenuous position that some allophones felt they held in the future of Quebec, one might speculate that the use of Columbus was a critical symbol that affirmed belonging to the land. One might add that it also reflected a tendency within the politics of Quebec to disregard issues related to Aboriginal or First Nations peoples, a critique often levelled at the Quebec nationalist cause. Although Italians comprise under 10 per cent of the population in LaSalle, careful politicking and intensive lobbying by Italian Canadian local councillors and Italian community-based associations and club leadership convinced the municipal government to back the naming of a park in honour of Christophe Colomb (Christopher Columbus) there.23 As one city councillor and member of the park committee put it, “I think it is time to acknowledge the existence of the Italians here in LaSalle” (Aramaki 1994, 124). The land for the park had previously been bought by the city, and the French Canadian mayor supported the proposal by an Italian city councillor to mount a statue of the explorer and have the park named in honour of Columbus. A committee was struck that was composed of members who were presidents of Italian community-based associations, including both pan-Italian groups such as the cnic (National Congress of Italian Canadians) and paesani-based Sicilian and Campanian clubs. The committee successfully raised funds from Italians in the area, starting with gifts of $225 from over one hundred local or paesani-linked Italian businesspeople. Following a celebratory mass at the local Catholic Italian parish, Madre dei Cristiani, the day’s

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commemorative event was blessed by an Italian-heritage bishop, and then the mayor of LaSalle and representatives of the local and national Italian associations involved in the park officially opened it on 11 October 1992. The park committee members carefully considered the specific design for the plaque on the statue to be certain that it reflected their feelings of belonging, localness, and identity. They dismissed a logo proposed by a prominent councillor because it recalled the logo of the pan-Italian cultural-service centre, the Casa d’Italia, which also housed the cnic. Known simply as the Casa, this organization serves all Italians but is more closely tied with the elite and with those Italians who live in Montreal’s northern suburbs, such as Jean-Talon, St Leonard, St Michel, and Rivière des Prairies. According to Aramaki’s (1994) analysis, a tension existed between these Italians and those in LaSalle who considered themselves more down to earth, generous, and relaxed and who reflected a pride in their working-class origins. The committee chose symbols that reflected the locally specific intersection of place, identity, and status in Canada: an old mill that was LaSalle’s city symbol, the tricolore of the Italian flag, and the number 500 to indicate the years since Columbus’s arrival. Monumentalism produces a selective and illustrious representation of the past. If the monuments described above manifest what Fortier (1998, 41) effectively describes as the hunt for an “ethnic patriarchal pioneer” to claim longevity and hence legitimacy in Canada, there are still other images and icons available for monuments that sustain alternative common narratives for the putative collective Italian Canadian experience. Four years ago in the Toronto neighbourhood of St Clair West – also the site of the Italian business district of Corso Italia, known for its espresso bars, bakeries, gelaterias, soccer celebrations, and stores selling Italian goods – the Italian-Canadian Immigrant Monument was unveiled in front of Joseph J. Piccininni Community Centre. The naming of the community centre after a long-serving alderman suggests a significant degree of corporate group organization, yet the monument’s recent emplacement is significant in terms of ethnic organizational initiative, design, the spatial production of locality (Appadurai 1996, 180), and the claiming of ethnic territorial space in a polyethnic neighbourhood. Far from the everyday, individual, aggregated actions of Italians mentioned earlier, who assert an ethnic territorial claim to the space by the sheer routinized, habitual practice of use, this monument project exhibits a significant degree of organizational capacity and complexity. This ethnic corporate group behaviour linked several different networks of interests, institutional resources, and shared cultural assumptions (see Cornell 1996) to accomplish the project. Aside from assistance from

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local city councillors and members of the provincial parliament (of Italian heritage) at the institutional level, the local Corso Italia bia and Italian social clubs and associations joined to advocate for this project and to organize its various elements. Later, the organizers contacted the University of Toronto’s Italian Department to commission a commemorative booklet and establish a scholarship.24 To recognize participation in and assistance with the monument project, donors/sponsors are listed at the back, and each sponsor was encouraged to write a brief (auto)biography or history of their club, organization, family, or family member in whose name the gift was donated. At the base of the statue are placed plaques dedicated to individual and group sponsors. This is both an effective way to acknowledge sponsors, while assuring them that their money has been well used, and a way to apply moral pressure on communal members to participate. The realist bronze statue depicts an immigrant family in what would appear to be the likely dress of Italian immigrants in the 1950s – husband, wife, two young children, one a newborn held by the mother, and a suitcase kept closed with a sturdy belt. The melancholy expressions on the faces of the individuals, we are told in the accompanying booklet, “is appropriate for those who have just departed from their ancestral home” (Principe 1999, 11). Later, in the same booklet, the reader is asked rhetorically about the Italian immigrant family in a comment by the coordinator of the monument project: “How did they manage, in spite of all the obstacles they encountered, and without any of the social support programs that exist today, to build such dignified, upright and noble lives? Lives in which family would assume a place of supreme importance, where work became almost a sacrament, and where their community became the place where they expressed their gratitude to providence for all of their lives’ blessings and accomplishments … And in the process, they built a nation … imagine” (Capone 1999, 84, original emphasis). The trinity of family, community, and nation echoes the masculinist discourse of many nationalist writers and neatly structures and reduces the narrative of Italian immigrant experiences to the Italian immigrant experience – one encapsulated by and read through these forms of social organization. The ambiguities, contradictions, and diversity within the ethnic group’s history are erased. Therefore, monuments can be seen as pedagogical tools or narratives with which to instruct an audience about the past, present, and future. A retrospective falsification of the Italian immigration process occurs in the representation of the nuclear family arriving in Canada (with the one tattered suitcase) since ample historical evidence reveals that the dominant mode of arranging migration saw men migrate through chain migration first – exercising

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connections to cousins, relatives, and friends – then earn cash and settle before sending for the rest of the family. Further, the image of the nurturing mother, no doubt accurate in many ways, neglects alternative narratives about women and restricts their agency to nurturing. This imagery obscures the everyday realities and necessities of migration. It ignores the significant way that migration to Canada necessitated that many women work outside the home, thus forcing some changes in gender roles and expectations (Iacovetta 1992). A reading of this monument, I think, must also consider its significance in the spatial production of locality and the current politics circulating around claims to ethnic territorial assertion. The area of St Clair West in Toronto has had a significant Italian ambience since the 1960s. The neighbourhood is perhaps most vivid in the public imagination as the site for the great outpouring of enthusiasm for Italy’s 1982 World Cup victory and the subsequent reimagining and reenacting of that event each time there is a World or European Cup championship. The Italian population in the area by 1961 was nearly 30,000. Since then Italians have achieved economic and residential mobility, moved farther north and west, and bought larger plots in suburban neighbourhoods, such as Downsview, and beyond the city borders in Woodbridge. Today, the City of Toronto Ward 17 encompasses the western part of St Clair Avenue, known as Corso Italia. The ward’s boundaries form an irregular shape, restricting its width across Rogers Road in the north as it reaches north to Eglinton Avenue, south to Dupont Avenue, east to Ossington Avenue, and west to Weston Road. By the 2001 census Italians were the second largest ethnic group in the ward at 24.8 per cent of the population, after Portuguese at 30.8 per cent, while roughly another 25 per cent was composed of eight different groups ranging from 2 to 4 per cent.25 Ironically then, just as the population of Italians has become more suburbanized and the composition of the neighbourhood around Corso Italia has begun to include significant numbers of Portuguese, Latin Americans, Chinese, Jamaicans, Vietnamese, and others, portions of the Italian ethnic collectivity have asserted and consolidated its presence and claim over the public space of the streetscape and public grounds in front of the community centre.26 Moreover, the use of a family as a symbol and the comments in the booklet noted above must be not only read as an affirmative image about Italian kinship relations and gender roles, since as noted above it erases a more complex reality, but also read within the context of the anti-immigrant rhetoric and politics circulating in Canada in the 1990s. A temporal difference in arrival is overlaid with a value judgment on the fitness, worth, and quality of the new migrants – in this discourse, new migrants do not work hard, abuse government support,

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lack strong family commitments, and advocate for rights without understanding obligations. In this sense, the semiotics of the monument can be read as a structuring narrative for a valorized Italian immigrant experience, as a critique of the current migrants entering Canada, and as a means through which Italians produce the ambience of the neighbourhood as ethnically marked. The third type of monumentalism that I distinguish is the ethnic community and social-service centre or institution. From my reading of the Italian Canadian ethnographic data, the variability of this organizational form suggests that these sites frequently blend the dimensions of ethnic-identity content proposed by Cornell (1996). That is, these institutional sites are places where shared interests are articulated, where the capacity exists to achieve specific desired outcomes and to solve problems, and where the moral imperatives of ethnically perceived cultural understandings and interpretations are expressed. Clearly, however, no centre is hegemonic to this extent, nor does one encapsulate all of these dimensions to the fullest degree; however, as sites for the combination of dimensions, these centres exhibit a concentrated merging of those ideal types.27 These sites spatialize culture and produce, structure, and shape locality. They act as generative nodes for communal practice and for the expression of Italianness in the city (Harney 1998, 2002). But why include this organizational form under the context of monumentalism? After all, these institutions are more than bronze, stone, or wood ethnic markers of social memory (and forgetting) on a pedestal in a park, in front of a civic building, or on a sidewalk in the urban landscape. Some, such as Toronto’s Columbus Centre, which is animated by pan-Italian identity formation, offer practical cultural and social-service institutions that receive funding from the United Way, federal and provincial ministries, and municipalities to offer government-sponsored programs. Villa Charities, the corporate nonprofit body that administers Columbus Centre, is the embodiment of Breton’s (1964) “institutional completeness.” It combines two homes for seniors that offer subsidized apartments, an aged care facility, a restaurant, a café, a fitness club, an art gallery, and meeting rooms used by Italian Canadians and others for cultural, language, and social-service programs. Further, for the local, national, and international media, for politicians, and for visiting dignitaries from Italy, it is the official site of Italianness in the city. Canadian politicians who wish to reach the Italian “community” arrange press conferences and public events there. Elsewhere, I have called it the Piazza of Corporate Unity because of its official unifying role within the competing interests of the community and its quasi-diplomatic role with other ethnic communities and the larger society (Harney 1998). Other institutions, such as the Veneto Centre, the Fame Friulan, and the more

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recently built Casa Abruzzo, with state funding from Ontario, Italian regions, and community-based fundraising, have constructed centres that offer a lesser, but still significant, range of activities and services but that coalesce around (sub)ethnic, corporate group identity based on regions of emigration from Italy. Aramaki (1994) also notes a persistence of regional identity formations and associations in Montreal. Ontario governments have funded building projects sponsored by specific ethnic groups in the area of seniors’ housing and seniors’ care since the 1970s. The recent devolvement of power, and with it tax revenues, to the regions in Italy has spurred an ethnicization process among emigrants from those Italian regions (Harney 2002). I situate these centres within the monumentalism framework for two reasons. First, pan-Italian or Italian regional identity formations, once they have been co-opted, animated, and ordered both by the patriarchal forces of hegemony within the ethnic collectivity itself and by the disciplinary activities of modern bureaucratic states, become emptied of the everyday contradictions, peculiarities, and uncertainties of social life. Particular “authenticities” become valorized and sustained by the largesse of the state, the public social imaginary of Italianness, and the ethnic collectivity organized here for corporate group action. In turn, ways of being Italian become increasingly restricted by the imperatives and ideologies of the dominant institutions. I will return to this issue shortly with an example from Montreal. In its simplest and most mundane form, however, the monumentalism is reinforced by the architecture and design features of the buildings, which exhibit selective forms of Italianate design – columns, marble, and courtyards ornamented with grape arbours or some feature reminiscent of a building or structure from a hometown in Italy (Harney 2002). Inevitably, aloft next to the Canadian flag is the Italian one, hoisted as if to mark the ethnic attachment of the territory as an outpost of Italianness. These structural forms, icons, and images offer shorthand categories and stereotypes to conjure an imagined Italianness for the urban traveller. Second, the recognition of these institutions by different states through funding legitimates specific identity formations, which are structured, disciplined, and regulated by their dependence on the financial and bureaucratic resources and ideological agendas of the states. Italian Canadian centres are located not only within the discursive territory of multiculturalism in Canadian nationalism, but also within the different diasporic projects originating in Italy, undergirded by migrant nostalgia and transnational kin networks but fostered by the political and nationalist currents in Rome or the capitals of the newly assertive regions. Let me turn briefly to an example from Montreal to indicate the power of this monumentalist regime. Inspired by the feminist movement

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in North America in the 1970s, a number of Italian-born women raised in Montreal made an unusual break with the masculinist practices and organizational tendencies of the Italian immigrant settlement and ethnic collective representation when they founded the Centro-Donne (Women’s Centre) in 1978.28 The organizers identified two problems facing Italian immigrant women that mainstream social-service agencies and Italian community-based ones did not address: the exploitation of these women as low-cost workers in the labour market and what they identified as traditional patriarchal forms of Italian culture and family structure that subordinated, exploited, and isolated these women despite the new double labour demands of migration (at work and at home) and changing social norms in Quebec society. Few Italian immigrant women would have worked outside the home before migrating to Canada. In contrast, it is estimated that 41 per cent were in Montreal in the 1960s (Painchaud and Poulin 1981, 426). To address these issues, CentroDonne became a nonprofit recreational drop-in centre that offered refuge from these various pressures. As a service centre, it provided free legal advice from a volunteer lawyer, professional psychological assistance, and social workers to help with family issues such as drug abuse, domestic violence, and so forth. It also distributed a newsletter that explicitly critiqued Italian culture as the source of Italian immigrant women’s problems and argued that the centre’s mission was “emancipation of Italian immigrant women.” It offered a place for the production of alternative and counter-hegemonic ideas and practices of what Italianness could be and how Italian ethnic attachments might be organized. As the reader might imagine, these agendas faced both subtle and stern opposition in the ensuing decade from the more traditional masculinist ethnic corporate organizations such as the Casa d’Italia and the local Italian-language press, which characterized this agenda in unabashedly antifeminist rhetoric and as anti-Italian since it attacked the “Italian family.” Further, it also encountered resistance among working-class Italian women who expressed more interest in sustaining and working within the networks of Italian family structures than in challenging them. In addition, faced with both persistent funding issues and the need to expand beyond a distinctive feminist base to broaden its reach, Centro-Donne invited participants who were not ideologically in agreement with its feminist mission. By 1987 Centro-Donne had undergone a transformation in the composition of its board members, workers, and volunteers as well as in its ideological stance. Several women from the established ethnic, corporate organization Casa d’Italia now worked there. As it was no longer a place for the “emancipation” of Italian immigrant women, one new board member argued that “Centro-Donne should be more ‘family’ oriented, as a family centre, and should even change its name. Instead of

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Centro-Donne, it should be something like Centro Famiglia … because family is the most important thing for Italians” (quoted in Aramaki 1994, 79–80). The monumentalization of Centro-Donne transformed this site of alternative ethnic organization into an acceptable representation of Italianness and “appropriate” intra-ethnic discourse that negated not just the complexity, contradictions, and alternative interpretations of Italian family life and culture, but also the real changes in gender roles and expectations and the pressures on family structures stimulated by the exigencies of migration, settlement, and adjustment in a new society. It reanimated stereotypes and categories regarding the organization and meaning of the Italian family, thereby also reducing the Italian family and culture to a timeless, immutable entity. In Toronto no such women’s organization existed to counter the masculinist discourse of Italian leadership and institutions and to offer women a social space for expression and organization. Haltingly and less programmatically, a small cohort of female aspiring academics and intellectuals in the 1990s, known as Voce Alternative, challenged the misogynistic aspects of the chin Picnic in the press (see Harney 1998, 164–6), but the group’s actions were oriented less toward engaging with social policy and social work and more toward internal group self-help, professional development, and networking. The only other prominent women’s organization in Toronto was the earlier Italian Canadian Women’s Alliance of the 1970s, which effectively was a networking group for middle-class and professional women entering politics and the broad public sector. This contrast in gender politics with Toronto may reflect the politicization of Quebec culture following the Quiet Revolution and the hyperpolitical discourse of the 1970s that not only created a swirl of localized Montreal and Quebec reconsiderations of hierarchy and the status of social groups in Canada, but also included the influence of American and European social movements for equal rights for women and civil rights for African Americans. Also in contrast with Toronto in this example, we see the persistent relevance of the Casa d’Italia in Montreal as a locus for Italian community external and internal representation. The fascist regime under Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s sought to politicize culture and formed the Case d’Italie in Italian “colonies” overseas, including Toronto and Montreal. All-purpose community centres, home to both consular services and local recreational and associational clubs, these became the focal point of Italian community life. During the Second World War, with Italy as an enemy, Canadian officials seized them. In the postwar period in Toronto and Montreal, some prewar Italian community members organized and successfully retrieved the Case d’Italie from the Canadian government. At present the former Casa in

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Toronto, located today in what is one of Toronto’s Chinatowns, is the Italian Consulate, a place avoided by most Italian immigrants unless absolutely necessary for bureaucratic reasons. By the 1970s the locus of the community was much further north in institutions built by and for Italian Canadians, and the consular presence is presently marginal and functional rather than central. While certainly the Italian settlements now stretch throughout Montreal and not all Italians engage with the activities of the Casa (Aramaki 1994), the continued significance of the site, I think, speaks to the older foundations of the Italian settlement in Montreal compared to Toronto, but it may also symbolize the contradictory and uneasy nature of Italian group identity in Quebec. Although highly integrated, opportunity for collective selfexpression is still partially located in a site that evokes significant Italian national symbolism and perhaps may be seen as a reflection of the group’s need for a highly symbolic site of nationalist or ethnic group identity that is able to compete in the discursive and material field of French-English Canadian nationalisms. The final example of monumentalism with which I wish to end briefly speaks to the commoditization of Italian culture. The use of Italian diacritical markers, images familiar from popular culture, signage in Italian red, white, and green, street lights in the shape of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula all create an urban spectacle for consumption by Italophiles. The branding of Italy, which seems to make all things Italian chic, converges with the agendas of the city government’s economic-development planners and local Italian Canadian Business Associations to transform ethnic spaces into quaint, stereotypical tourist destinations. These ethnic neighbourhoods are officially named on street signs as “Little Italy” or “Corso Italia,” and zoning changes are made to allow bars and restaurants to remain open later and to increase public parking spaces not just for the tourist from afar but also for the weekend tourist from the suburbs. The commodification and selling of diversity has become an important feature of the symbolic economy. Zukin (1998, 1991) has written extensively on the creation of aestheticized spaces and the increasing relevance of places of consumption. In the case of “Little Italy” along a stretch of Toronto’s College Street, we see the street’s rapid transformation from an ordinary but vibrant, multiethnic urban neighbourhood with local shops, caffés, and restaurants catering mostly to people living nearby, many of whom were Italian and Portuguese, into a site of urban chic and gentrification lauded by real estate agents and media writers. At its centre sits the chin International Building, which houses chin Radio, the sponsor of the picnic. Johnny Lombardi was instrumental in having the City of Toronto install the red, white, and green “Little Italy” street signs that

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officially designate the district. Just a few years ago he was honoured with the creation of “Johnny Lombardi Way,” the stretch of College Street in front of the chin building. An often-heard description of Lombardi portrays him as the “unofficial mayor of Little Italy.” College Street’s Little Italy is now a destination point not just for Italians from the suburbs returning to visit family, enjoy the dense social networks of life on the street as compared to their sleepy suburban streets, or attend the Good Friday Procession, but also for other suburban travellers who seek the pleasures of the new Italian chic. Of course, Italianness here becomes reduced to categories and stereotypes about particular foods, forms of entertainment, and the imagined qualities of intimate urban living in an “ethnic neighbourhood.” Interestingly, this reduction to stereotype for commodification and the desire for an intimate connection to “authentic” Italianness cannot escape – and perhaps it is an element necessary to conjuring up the artificial danger of these urban places of consumption – the oldest stereotype of them all: the mafia. In Pico Iyer’s recent book The Global Soul (2000), on a visit to Toronto, Iyer heads to College Street’s Little Italy and an iconic restaurant/ bar there, owned by one of the first Italian Canadian entrepreneurs to sense the potential for the reimagination of the neighbourhood as a place for consumption and to redesign its image: Bar Italia. Chatting with a multiethnic group of patrons at Bar Italia, one instructs Iyer in his view of the way that Toronto has become imagined as a cosmopolitan space. He credits Italians for initiating the openness to diversity in Toronto but cannot resist the pull of popular imagery when distorting the Italian immigrant history. Commenting on Bar Italia, he quips, “This place used to be pool tables and faded wallpaper and gangsters; now it’s all international” (170). When I began research into Italian community formation in 1991, College Street was much less a destination point in the urban tourist geography. As one might expect, the local population of Italians is divided by the change from a neighbourhood in which they lived to one where they are quaint props for an urban chic: some feel alienated by the new presence of hip clothing stores and eateries instead of green grocers and the stores that serve their everyday needs. Others are capitalizing on the economic boom that the marketing of Italian culture creates. The monumentalist practices of the Little Italy bia, the tendencies of civic boosters, city hall, and tourist officials, and media imagery work to restrict the imaginary of this Italianness to the stereotypical dolce vita and to the quaintness of authentic urban Italian life. Places that still cater to the migrant generation, a cohort mostly retired or retiring whose members seek social life at unreconstructed or gentrified bars, such as Bar Azzurri next to the chin building and the

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social club Le Tre Caravelle, are given wide berth by the new day trippers, yet they are necessary for the public imagination in conjuring up categories of Italianness; these places for old men to play cards evoke “shady” activity and the danger of the city.

final remarks Following Agnew and Duncan (1989), place has three features: a geographical location in space, a specific space recognized by people, such as a restaurant, café, or home, and finally the varied meanings that people associate with a place. Each of the three modes of inscription that I have discussed in this paper exhibit these features, but I have tried to indicate that for a fuller understanding of the connection between place and ethnic attachment, we need to consider the forms of ethnic group organization that obtain and the specific ways that immigrant and ethnic groups cultivate space to express, shape, and structure their sense of belonging in an urban setting whose culture refracts the politics of competing nationalisms in Canada. Assessing the implications of space is not a new concern among scholars working in urban North America, especially as the task relates to investigations into the forms, practices, and integrative functions (or dysfunctions) of urban immigrant and ethnic enclaves. Little Italies, Chinatowns, Greektowns, Little Indias, and Barrios conjure up images of food, fashion, goods, multilingual signs, vices, exotica, and adventures among the imaginative possibilities, and “geographies,”29 of urban life in a multicultural city. This imagery, of course, with degrees of self-awareness and critical attention, is pervasive in literature, film, and popular culture, in the departments of city planners seeking to boost local economies, and in the classrooms and offices of academics searching for sites for research. As Hannerz notes (1980, 5), anthropologists tended to choose “ethnic enclaves” because they were easily identifiable and putatively self-contained. Of course, it was not just anthropology that was intrigued by “urban villagers.” In the field of anthropology, research has focused on how space is socially and culturally constructed and transformed into place (Auge 1995; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Rodman 1992; Lefebvre 1991). This concern with space and place has emerged in part with the “discovery” of transmigrants, transnational practices, and diasporic imaginings (Glick-Shiller et al. 1992; Clifford 1997; Ong 1999; Louie 2000). Intrigued by the movement (flow) of people, goods, capital, and ideas and how the deterritorializing processes of globalization necessitate reterritorializing ones, anthropologists have explored the way that migrants and refugees reconstitute a sense of belonging and identity and reconfigure social organization in

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and across new spaces both discursively and corporeally (see Levin 2002). But it is the localistic manifestations of these transnational connections that provide us with the ethnographic material of social inquiry and challenge our naturalized assumptions about identity, place, and the culture of cities. It would be folly to suggest that a reading of ethnicity in the city should be located only in these modes of spatio-temporal localizing. Yet for migrants and their descendants in North America, a claim to belonging located in a sense of territoriality is central. Italians settled in both Toronto and Montreal exhibit striking similarities in their use and claims to space. These modes of inscription, while similar in form, reveal upon more careful scrutiny a practical significance located in the specific contested discursive arenas of multiculturalism and Quebec nationalism. The material, spatial mapping of the sedimentation of routinized individual behaviours on particular streetscapes, the spatial symbolism of ritual collective expressions of identity in public spaces, and the production of monumentalized subjectivities by building institutions or statues of various kinds to establish a sense of permanence for the ethnic corporate identity (even if there is a transnational dimension) all offer a useful perspective from which to engage the variability of ethnic attachments in the urban landscape and how these forms of organization can be materially expressed. This form of investigation does not discount the critical role of social relations across space and the effects of channels of communication and exchange located in transnational practices, nor does it undervalue alternative modes of investigating how ethnic attachments are articulated, manufactured, and interpreted within the life of the city; instead, this form of investigation opens up a limitless terrain to investigate the layers of meaning associated with shared public space, the varieties of social networks enacted through urban forms, and ways of expressing belonging in urban space. It makes us aware of different ways of expressing ethnicity and the spatio-temporal degrees of ethnic attachment in the topography of the city. It also should force us to consider the ethnicization of urban public space and the multiple and competing uses of space in the city.

notes 1 Research for this paper was partly funded through a seed grant from the Canadian Ethnic Studies Program of the Secretary of State, Multiculturalism Directorate, and was supported by the Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian Canadian Studies, York University. I would like to thank both for their assistance. 2 In the past decade or so, this academic consensus has received added support from the burgeoning literature that encourages an understanding of ethnic-group

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formation beyond the structures of particular states, nations, and often their cities and within the framework of continued transnational connections and the concept of diaspora. This transnational focus helps to disrupt ideas and naturalized assumptions about processes of integration, identity, and belonging in nationalist discourses and the identity formations that these entail. See the journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies for representative articles. In this chapter, I use the terms “people of Italian heritage,” “Italian Canadians,” and “Italians” interchangeably. I know that this will not satisfy some readers, but informants themselves use the terms interchangeably. Most often the term “Italian” (or “Italians”) was used as an inclusive and broad category to encompass both Italian migrants and the multiple generations of people of Italian heritage subsequently born in Canada, who, incidentally, outnumber the migrant generation by nearly four to one. When I use the phrase “Italian migrants,” of course, I am referring specifically to those who migrated from Italy. It can be loosely translated as “to present a fine figure” or “to give a good impression.” See Nardini 1999 for a detailed discussion of the term. Pitkin 1993 has a fine discussion of public space and the passegiatta in Italy. Significant among this aesthetic community are Antonio D’Alfonso, the editor and publisher of Guernica Editions and its extensive catalogue of titles, both fiction and nonfiction, related to Italian migration and ethnicity in North America, who moved his publishing activities to Toronto from Montreal in the 1980s. Another example is the actor Tony Nardi, whose film and stage career has been well regarded by English, French, and Italian audiences. Nardi travels between these cities and New York, too. It is worth noting that, as of yet, the sort of high-profile encounters between “white ethnic” youth and African American youth in the United States has yet to occur in Canada. There are many ways that we might speculate about this – ideas of whiteness, different forms of multiculturalism, the differential legacy of slavery and the American dilemma, the temporal differences in migration, economic opportunity structures – yet it deserves serious substantive investigation. See each city in the Ethnocultural Portrait of Canada section of the topic-based tabulations module at http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/ Standard/Index.cfm. For more extensive reading on the history and contemporary world of Italians in Toronto and Montreal, see Harney 1998, Boissevain 1976, Iacovetta 1992, Linteau 1989, and Sturino 1999. The Toronto component of this article relies on field research from 1992–96 and 1998–2001. The Montreal component relies less on fieldwork and mostly on secondary sources. In the selection of these three ways, or modes, of inscription, I have chosen what is most apparent to me from my research on Italians in Canada. There may well be others to consider in different field sites. Also I do not intend to

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suggest that other ways of apprehending space and its relationship to ethnicity and economy are not worth exploring. In fact, this article, although inspired by recent work in anthropology, was also sparked by a reading of the fine article by Yancey, Ericksen, and Juliani (1976) on emergent ethnicity and the structural ways that ethnicity is effected by urban/suburban space and economic/occupational transformations. In Canada in 1971, within just twenty years of the beginning of mass migration, which peaked between 1952 and 1967, fully 77 per cent of Italian immigrants owned their own home, only slightly fewer than Poles, the top group. From a social geographer’s perspective and hence with an interest in the architectural forms and uses of the shops on the streetscape, Buzzelli (2001) discusses the transition of Corso Italia on St Clair Street from a Little Britain to a Little Italy in the postwar period. Scant attention is paid, however, to the implications of the non-Italian presence that new migration into the area has created and to its social significance for the use of space. Recently, the Italian government and the International Association of Italian Restaurants (Ardi) have suggested providing a “D.O.C.” certification to those restaurants around the world that closely adhere to Italian culinary traditions. “D.O.C.” stands for Denominazione d’Origine Controllata and is used to authenticate a trademark in, for instance, wines. I use the term “biennial” here since the European and World Cup of soccer are scheduled in alternate four-year cycles that offer a major tournament for fans every two years in June; thus, at a minimum, European soccer fans in Toronto engage in quite publicly demonstrated spells of celebration and commiseration biennially. For a fine article focused on Brooklyn that argues the same point that I wish to make here on how religious processions mark territory for Italians, see Sciorra 1999. The chin Picnic took place for more than a decade on Toronto’s Centre Island. It required a ferry to reach the celebrations. Since 1980 it has been celebrated on the fair grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition (cne). This new location offers an excellent band shell, open spaces, and exhibition buildings within which to sell merchandise from local businesses and products imported from overseas. Johnny Lombardi died in 2002. It remains to be seen how his children who have worked at chin transform or maintain the chin International Picnic. It is instructive to compare the other major festival in Toronto’s summer, Caribana, organized around Caribbean celebrations of Carnival but displaced until the summer months. It has also been disciplined and regulated by multicultural rhetoric. Caribana is a Caribbean festival bound up in the politics of race in Canada. It offers a form of cultural expression that implicitly and sometimes explicitly engages the problems of race in the city. The chin Picnic also brings Caribbean performers direct from Jamaica or Trinidad. In the age of cross marketing, the Caribbean Cultural Committee, the organization that oversees Caribana, is one of the sponsors of the Caribbean festival portion within the

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chin Picnic. However, at the picnic Caribbean performers are part of the mosaic, the celebration of diversity, an objectified culture to be sampled or tried out. The politics of protest and race in Toronto are secondary to the commerce and ideology of marketplace multiculturalism (see Harney n.d.). I use the plural of diaspora here for two reasons. First, while the discursive styles of those producing diaspora projects strive for homogeneity and singularity in much the same way as we see in nationalist discourse, there are always competing projects, elisions, and counter-hegemonic visions. Second, the existence of many Italies has been commented upon since at least Gramsci’s views on differences between northern and southern Italy. To write in the singular about Italian transnational connections would be to erase the history of paesicentred (hometown-centred) migration, regional identity formations, the complexities of Italian popular culture, Italian labour internationalism, rural-urban splits, and so on. For example, the bronze monument to the fallen Italian worker (i caduti sul lavoro) in Toronto’s heavily Italian northwest suburb of Woodbridge asserts a labour internationalism in its realistic depiction of two Italian workers, one trying to save the unconscious other. Sponsored by local labour unions, Italian patronati (charitable institutions), and Italian Canadian social clubs with strong labour traditions, the monument evokes the heroic struggles of the migrant worker, emplaced in this Italian Canadian suburb yet in memory of Italian workers around the world who have lost their lives. This monument locates the struggles of Italian workers in Canada in a global diaspora of humble workers forced abroad in order to make a living. In a significant, refreshing, and unusual awareness of reflexivity in a community-based booklet, Principe (1999) has written an intriguing article tracing the building of these types of monuments in Canada by Italians. Principe links the choice of statue design at various times in Italian Canadian history to the imperial ambitions of Fascist Italy and its iconography and to the need for Italians to establish their place within Canadian nationalist history. The booklet in which the article appears was produced as a companion volume to commemorate the erection of a monument to the Italian immigrant family in Toronto’s west end near Corso Italia that was sponsored by a bia and community members. Unfortunately, although perhaps understandably, Principe’s analysis does not extend to some of the interesting assumptions built into that statue’s design and location, which I discuss later. For the reader interested in a more detailed discussion of the many statues, see Principe’s article. Baldassar (2002) looks at the significance of monuments in Italy to emigrants. In an insightful article Robert Harney (1989, 41) recalls this “Mayflowerism” in the United States and suggests that this scopritorismo (obsession with discovery) in Canada has led to the “hunt for Italianità of warriors, priests and explorers of Italian descent serving New France.” There is an elision that ties the putative glories of these explorers to the ordinary peasant and that serves for some as a way to combat the bigotry faced by Italian migrants to North America. See Harney 1998 and 2002.

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23 Michiko Aramaki’s (1994) PhD dissertation offers an informative analysis of the link between politics, social networks, and ethnicity using Italians in Montreal as her ethnographic case. I have drawn from her analysis of the process of creating Parc Christophe Colomb. Columbus Day has been a national holiday in the United States since 1892 and, although not a holiday, has been celebrated in Canada since then, too, and has been occasionally used by Italian Canadians in the same manner as Caboto to claim longevity in the land and “rights” as “cofounding” members of the nation with the British and French. 24 The booklet contains an introduction, Principe’s (1999) article on the history of Italian monuments in Canada, short pieces outlining the history of migration from nine key regions that sent migrants to Canada, and two other pieces on Italo-Slovenians and refugees from Giulio-Dalmatia (Croatia). Regrettably, there is no section on Basilicata. 25 The groups were as follows: Jamaicans (4.1%), Vietnamese (3.5%), Canadian (3.4%), Chinese (3.4%), English (3.1%), Greek (2.6%), Spanish (2.5%), East Indian (1.9%), and self-identifying as Multiple Origins (fully 16.9%). Of course, the bureaucratic/political boundaries of the city ward construct an arbitrary limiting geography. The social geography of Italians living in adjacent wards or elsewhere also frequent Corso Italia. Former residents often return to continue work, shop, visit family and friends, or enjoy the ambience. 26 An indication of the cognitive-temporal maps of Italian Canadians is that when I discussed this monument with several key informants who work in Italian Canadian social and community services, they remarked that there are no Italians down on St Clair Avenue anymore. They have all moved north. While they are inaccurate statistically, such an attitude does suggest different subjective views about the location of Italianness in the urban landscape. 27 I should add that I am fully aware of the extensive literature on the important role of kinship (or perceived kinship, such as town, provincial, or regional identity-based attachments and networks) as an organizing institution for Italians and Italian migrants (see e.g., Sturino 1990; Boissevain 1970). Nevertheless, there is ample evidence of considerable numbers of more “formal” institutions established that not only draw on pan-Italian attachments, but also elaborate regional-based identities (see Harney 2002, 1998). Further, we cannot discount some of the very important local/Italian town–based clubs as sites for problem solving, expressive culture, and interest-based actions. For an argument that posits kinship as an organizational style and hence a reason for why Italians in Montreal were ill-prepared to respond to the rise in Quebec nationalism during the 1960s French-language educational crisis, see Rosenberg and Jedwab (1992). 28 This account is derived from Aramaki (1994, ch. 3). 29 Edward Said (1978, 55) notes that the imagination “helps the mind intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close and what is far away.”

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and Greek Communities of Montreal.” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 29, no. 3: 266–87. Rotenberg, Robert, and Gary McDonough, eds. 1993. The Cultural Meaning of Urban Spaces. Westport, ct: Bergin and Garvey. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House. Sassen, Saskia. 1996. “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims.” Public Culture 8: 205–23. Schwartz, Jonathon M. 1991. “Urban Pastoral and American Social Science: The Italian Presence.” American Studies in Scandinavia 23: 15–28. Sciorra, Joseph P. 1999. “‘We Go Where the Italians Live’: Religious Processions as Ethnic and Territorial Markers in a Multi-Ethnic Brooklyn Neighborhood.” In Robert Orsi, ed., Gods of the City, 310–40. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen. Sturino, Franc. 1985. “The Social Mobility of Italian Canadians: ‘Outside’ and ‘Inside’ Concepts of Mobility.” Polyphony 7, no. 2: 123–7. – 1990. Forging the Chain: Italian Migration to North America, 1880–1930. Toronto: mhso. – 1999. “Italians.” In Paul Robert Magocsi, ed., Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples, 787–832. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Swanson, Guy E. 1971. “An Organizational Analysis of Collectivities.” American Sociological Review 36, no. 4: 607–24. Texeira, Carlos, and Robert Murdi. 1997. “The Role of Real Estate Agents in the Residential Relocation Process: A Case Study of Portuguese Homebuyers in Suburban Toronto.” Urban Geography 18, no. 6: 497–520. Wallman, Sandra. 1986. “Ethnicity and the Boundary Process in Context.” In N. John Rex and David Mason, eds, Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations, 226–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werbner, Pnina. 2001. “Metaphors of Spatiality and Networks in the Plural City: A Critique of the Ethnic Enclave Economy Debate.” Sociology 35, no. 3: 671–93. Yancey, William L., Eugene P. Ericksen, and Richard N. Juliani. 1976. “Emergent Ethnicity: A Review and Reformulation.” American Sociological Review 41, no. 3: 391–403. Zukin, Sharon. 1991. Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley: University of California Press. – 1998. “Urban Lifestyles: Diversity and Standardization in Spaces of Consumption.” Urban Studies 35, nos 5–6: 825–39.

7 At Home on the Street Public Art in Montreal and Toronto JOHANNE SLOAN

In 2003 the City of Toronto repackaged various works of art that had been installed over the previous twelve years into an orchestrated “Art Walk” through what is described on websites and in brochures as “Toronto’s Outdoor Art Gallery.” Across town, a “public art corridor” is proposed for Meadowvale Road, and as justification for this, the city’s Art Committee for Public Places notes that this particular part of Scarborough “lacks geographic identity,” while announcing confidently that “such a public art corridor would accent and impact the tourism to the area” and that “the impact over time would generate economic and commercial value to the community” (City of Toronto). In both Montreal and Toronto, artworks are indeed conspicuous in streets, plazas, and parks, while instances of “public art” feature prominently in tourist brochures and on municipal websites. The development of what is known as public art has resulted in an altered appearance for many cities across North America and Europe, and it could be said that some public manifestation of modern-looking art is now considered a vital component of the up-to-date, world-class city. Authors such as Sharon Zukin (1995) and Stephen Ward (1998), in their discussions of postindustrial cities, have pointed out that urban planners and administrators are eager to have the cachet of the artworld on their side as they brand and sell their cities as attractive places in which to live and work, to visit and do business, within the present-day global economy. If publicly situated art is expected to enhance the urban environment, does this mean that it must contribute to a city’s commercial viability or that it should compensate for a possible lack of identity? This kind of civic

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boosterism often informs the public art discourse, but on many other occasions the role of art within the life of the city has been approached more critically. A rather different understanding of what public art can be is implicit in Ken Lum’s billboard-sized photo-mural There is no place like home (2000), which occupied a downtown street in Montreal during the fall of 2001 as a public art component of the Mois de la Photo, a city-wide photography festival. This artwork consists of eight documentary-style portraits of people of different ethnicities, alternating with brightly coloured boxes of text expressing contradictory sentiments about the notion of home. The photo-mural addresses its audience using a globally recognizable rhetoric of catchy designs, pithy phrases, and an array of multicultural faces, while the artwork ultimately becomes meaningful in relation to local histories of immigration and xenophobia and to local modes of feeling estranged or fitting it. The mural’s texts underwrite this shift back and forth between individual voices and the social collectivity, between the global movement of peoples and the circumstances of local residence. When one man seems to rant, “Why don’t you go home?” and a woman seems to confess, “I’m never made to feel at home here,” home might be an emotionally and politically charged concept across the globe, but here becomes the street corners, subway platforms, waiting rooms, and workplaces of Montreal – the constellation of public places where inhabitants of this city might encounter each other. Before its appearance in Montreal, There is no place like home had been shown first in Vienna and then in other European cities, including Berlin, Paris, and Warsaw. It has also hung opposite the parliament buildings in Ottawa and might well touch down in Toronto as well. It was not a work created specifically for Montreal, but here, as in its other host cities, the work succeeded by pointing to a tension between the notion of home as a refuge or safe haven and the public space of the city as a site of social interaction or conflict.1 Writing in 1961, Jane Jacobs commented that the “art form of the city” consists precisely in the way that order and safety between strangers are maintained: “the bedrock attitude of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers. He must not feel automatically threatened by them” (30). But Lum’s work insists that the entry into a heterogeneous public space necessarily involves “risk,” very much in the sense that Alan Blum (2003, 268) has described: “The lure of the street is connected to this risk, this seduction: that it always endangers the sanctity of domesticity and productivity by making problematic its subject’s return.” It is significant that Lum’s work was exhibited as part of the Mois de la Photo, which is itself part of Montreal’s renowned sequence of

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festivals, those clusters of cultural activity that cumulatively aim to draw tourists to the city and, more symbolically, to confirm the city’s identity within national and international spheres as a centre for art and culture. In the festival context, every jazz concert, stand-up routine, and visibly displayed artwork is supposed to contribute to this burnished image of Montreal. Lum’s artwork was only a temporary addition to the urban landscape, but in any case, it was not likely to appear on the City of Montreal’s website, or on any other city’s official website, for that matter, because There is no place like home urges us to recognize the urban environment as a fraught, dystopian social space, which not every individual has the cultural confidence to claim as his or her own and where not all voices will be heard. There are kinds of public art, in other words, that do not provide reassuring signifiers of community and place and that cannot be easily appropriated as emblems of a city’s commercial vitality and cosmopolitan pedigree. At the present time, Montrealers and Torontonians going about their daily business in their respective cites will encounter a motley assortment of permanently installed abstract sculptures and architectural embellishment, as well as more temporary forms of billboard art, site-specific installations, or works presented as critical “interventions” in the urban environment. If all of these qualify as public art, it is not enough to divide the field between artworks that are official and those that are oppositional. The Culture of Cities Project is interested in deciphering the cultural uniqueness of every city, so it is key to compare how the public art debate has varied from city to city and to ask whether the public art requirements of every city are truly different. This chapter examines first how the category of alternative or oppositional public art has been constituted and then how this was interpreted during the 1980s in projects by two artists’ groups: Public Access in Toronto and Fleming and Lapointe in Montreal. By tracing practices and debates back to this decade, we return to a moment when the identities of the two cities seemed highly distinct, as Montreal’s economic slump, material disintegration, and inexpensive lifestyle could be dramatically compared to Toronto’s visible prosperity, expansion, and gentrification. I want to argue, however, that the differing models of public art that arise out of this comparison can be considered paradigms for the study of contemporary public art in a range of different contexts and cities.

th e “ p e r c e n t - f o r- a r t ” c i t y s c a p e More permanent forms of contemporary public art are often a result of the “percent-for-art” ordinances that were introduced in many Canadian and American cities, big and small, following Philadelphia’s lead

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as the first North American city to introduce its One Percent for Fine Arts Program in 1959. Usually, these programs ensure that approximately one percent of the cost of new architectural projects is given over to some form of art, with the emphasis put on the harmonious integration of art and architecture. In a way, it’s as though these officially sanctioned public art programs still – anachronistically or naively – carried forth the visionary plans of modernism, whereby assertively new forms of art, architecture, and urban design would be harbingers of a new social order. The most easily recognized instances of public art in most cities are those permanently situated sculptures (often abstract or semifigurative) to be found just outside of government and privatesector buildings. Art historian Thierry de Duve (1993, 25) has remarked that “the ‘biomorphic’ or ‘Minimal’ monsters decorating the esplanades in front of huge office buildings … look more like giant logos than works of art.” While these artworks ostensibly occupy a public, collectively inhabited urban space, they can easily be regarded as a form of corporate advertising, therefore, even when the individual artists involved had no apparent intention to propagandize for the government or to celebrate the triumph of global capitalism. This paradigm has often been criticized within international public art debates precisely because the artwork often appears as an addendum to the projects developed by architects and urban planners. Tom Finkelpearl (2000, 21), who was director of New York City’s Percent for Art Program during the early 1990s, has remarked on the compensatory burden placed on public art in the United States in recent years, subsequent to critiques mounted against the modernist cityscape: “Just as architects were demonized as destroyers of the city, artists were unrealistically asked to salvage it. At some basic level, there was a hope that art could revive an old idea of the city.” If architecture couldn’t deliver on its promise that a glittering new skyline would improve the quality of urban life, in other words, then perhaps this particular utopian vision of the modern city had to be tempered. The reintroduction of anecdotal street-level activity, small storefronts, and pedestrian traffic is meant to humanize an otherwise austere modern cityscape, which is where public art can also be asked to play a role by reactivating some lost quality of urban life, something supposedly antithetical to the modern ethos. The artwork introduced into the urban environment can be regarded as the hand-wrought outcome of individual labour and the product of a single human imagination. The artwork might even be considered a symbolic equivalent to that curiously phrased “art form of the city” referred to by Jacobs, whereby the antisocial impulses of the city’s inhabitants are held in abeyance.

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The Toronto megacity has its percent-for-art program, which, postamalgamation, replaces the more uneven commitment to public art of the previously discrete municipalities – and as mentioned, the public good of public art is trumpeted on city websites and through other forms of public relations. The situation in Montreal is somewhat different in that the city falls under the jurisdiction of a province-wide ordinance, administered by the Ministère de la Culture et des Communications. Under the auspices of this program, between the introductory year of 1981 and 2000, over 2,500 works of art have been commissioned for government buildings and sites across Quebec (Gouvernement du Québec 2000, 3).2 Quebec’s program emphasizes that its purview is anything but Montreal-centric because the dissemination of art and culture is considered to be a national (i.e., Québécois) mandate. In fact, a minority of these thousands of artworks are to be found in Montreal mainly because very little new construction was undertaken within the city limits throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.3 It is important to remember, with regard to these percent-for-art programs, that the work of art that is “integrated” into a new architectural construct will be considered part of the public domain regardless of whether it is located inside or outside of a building. Also, in Montreal as in Toronto, the public art produced under the official percent-for-art programs includes a great deal of stained glass, tapestries, furnishings, and various kinds of interior or exterior applied decoration, as well as more conventional sculptures and wall-works. Given the proliferation of official percent-for-art ordinances over the past few decades, it is evident that a kind of mimicry has occurred, as one city after another apparently succumbs to the notion that public art will add that je ne sais quoi of cultural capital to the city’s identity. How often is it the case, however, that works of permanent public art created under the auspices of such programs are truly unique to a city? It can be argued that Melvin Charney’s 1986 sculpture garden at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, created under the auspices of Quebec’s official public art program, is successful in this regard. Built on a promontory overlooking the southwestern part of the city, Charney’s botanical arrangements and miniature architectural structures allude to the material and economic transformation of Montreal over time. At the same time, the garden seems to problematize the sense of visual mastery that accompanies such a lofty position above the workaday city. A recent guide to Quebec’s percent-for-art program, however, is mostly illustrated with artworks that do not directly engage with the social or historical complexity of the city. Pierre Granche, for instance, has been the recipient of many commissions over the years, and it is

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difficult to discern anything unique to Montreal, or to Quebec, about his abstract, whimsical sculptures. A glance at the officially sanctioned public art of other North American cities suggests that Granche’s sculptures would just as easily fit in Cincinatti or Saskatoon. It does seem as though a generic and universally acceptable type of permanent public art has taken hold, which is neither informed by nor sheds light on the distinctive features of the city in question. Presumably in order to avoid offending some members of the public, it is often the case that the public art sponsored by municipalities avoids potentially disturbing questions of identity, collective experience, or historical memory. The problem with this compromise is that such public art succeeds by blending in with its environment, by not standing out, which can so easily mean that it becomes quasi-invisible, barely noticed by the inhabitants of the city.

historical consciousness: berlin and dublin The remarkable flourishing of public art over the last thirty years or so has involved a tremendous variety of materials, art forms, strategies, debates, institutions, communities, and sites in dozens of cities. Before returning to case studies in Montreal and Toronto, it is therefore of interest to see how the question of public art has been regarded in Berlin and Dublin, the two European cities included in the Culture of Cities Project. In Berlin, a number of public art projects in recent years have powerfully addressed questions of history and memory, often by transforming preexisting monuments and buildings. Both Christo’s Wrapped Reichstag (1971–95), a temporary silvery-white sheath for the entire building, and Hans Haacke’s Der Bevolkerung (1999), a permanently installed “garden” space dedicated to the entire, diverse population of Germany, targeted the Reichstag, perhaps the city’s most iconic public building.4 It should be noted that both Christo’s and Haacke’s projects were allowed to proceed only after much opposition, some of it from the parliamentarians who occupy the building. Christo had actually tried to get this project under way at various moments during the 1970s and ’80s, but whatever significance might have been attached to this work if it had been realized in previous decades, its appearance in the 1990s seemed to speak directly to the unification of Germany and especially to the newly unified, post-Wall city of Berlin. The gestures of covering and then uncovering this building became, for many observers, a “symbol of the rebirth of democracy” (Weiss 1994) or “a ritual cleansing”5 (Galloway 1995). Writing about artists who struggle with issues of memory and historical representation in Germany, James Young

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(1992, 271) has described the “counter-monument” as a possible alternative: “One of the contemporary results of Germany’s memorial conundrum is the rise of its ‘counter-monuments’: brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being.” Christo’s temporary installation did trigger a massive outdoor party for Berliners, but the ongoing debate about the politics of commemoration, occurring at civic and national levels, ensures that such works of art will be taken seriously as interventions in a publicly staged form of cultural exchange. This is not to say that all public art in Berlin engages with architecture and memory in such a critical and reflexive way. DaimlerChrysler’s rebuilt Potsdamerplatz is a spectacular arrangement of glass towers on a site that had once been the bustling heart of the city before becoming a no-man’s-land during the period of the Wall. A sequence of interior and exterior plazas, punctuated by large sculptural works of art, is explicitly presented as a new kind of public space for Berlin on the company’s website: “All the artists involved have developed their own strategies for addressing the current relationship between art and urban space … They use art as a way of talking to people, making an almost Utopian attempt to turn reality into art” (DaimlerChrysler). These allusions to the people, the public, and utopia do indeed echo the sophisticated discourse that has developed around public art, but it is important to note that DaimlerChrylser treated the Postdamerplatz site as a tabula rasa. None of the artworks owned and installed by DaimlerChrysler (by Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Robert Rauschenberg, among other world-famous, non-German artists), whatever aesthetic qualities they possess, evoke the fraught historical circumstances of the city. Here, the creation of a new public space is linked to the construction of emphatically new architecture, and as this newness seems to necessitate a drastic break with the past, this particular instance of public art facilitates a kind of historical amnesia. The recent debate about public art in Dublin involves questions of history, memory, and contemporaneity in somewhat different terms. It is the city’s belated formulation of a modern identity that seems to be at stake for defenders of the Monument of Light (more colloquially known as the “Millennium Spire,” the “Spike,” or “The Stiletto in the Ghetto”), a needle-like structure erected in January 2003 on O’Connell Street. This 120-metre high work, designed by Ian Ritchie Architects of London, is certainly the most high-profile work of contemporary public art in the city. Originally meant to appear in time for the millennium celebrations, it was finally installed only after a legal challenge to the winning entry and much acrimonious conversation in newspaper columns and editorial pages about the aesthetic value of the work and its

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meaning to the city’s inhabitants. It is not without significance that this public art project occupies the erstwhile place of Nelson’s Pillar, an 1808 monument to British military power that was blown up by Republicans in 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The Monument of Light site came accompanied with quite a sensational former history, in other words, but this was in no way acknowledged or commemorated by the new artwork; instead, as was the case with Berlin’s new Postdamerplatz, a casual but deliberate erasure of the site’s past is set in motion through a public art initiative. Dublin Corporation (the municipal government) and other proselytizers for the city’s new Europeanized identity clearly want art and culture in the new millennium to be affirmative and forward-looking. This position was articulated in the official defence of the winning entry: “The jury felt this brave and uncompromising beacon reflects a confident Ireland in Europe and reaffirms the status of O’Connell Street as Ireland’s principal urban thoroughfare, creating a new focus for its surrounding streets and buildings” (O’Connor). This new monument is certainly a far cry from its predecessor or other extant monuments in the city, most of which are figurative, allude to historic episodes, and/or commemorate individuals who fought for Ireland’s independence. The Spire lacks any kind of political, historical, or folkloric connotation because this “brave and uncompromising beacon” is meant to connote Dublin’s embrace of all things modern, international, and technological; it is as though Dublin’s past were incommensurate with its future. If Monument of Light is a rather overdetermined artwork insofar as it attempts to connote futurity, it can be argued that the city’s constellation of newly opened or renovated museums, galleries, and cultural centres succeed more forcefully in positioning “art” as a sign that Dublin is now a thriving, world-class city, while suggesting that art, urban space, and historical consciousness can profitably intersect.6

public art: up against the city’s monumentality It is worth mentioning at this point that Montreal still has its own, intact Nelson’s Column in the now-quaint Place Jacques Cartier, although, foreshadowing the fate of Dublin’s pillar to Nelson, this monument was itself almost bombed out of existence in 1893 by local opponents to British imperialism. In the summer of 2002, meantime, as part of a temporary art event entitled Mémoire Vive, this aborted plot was commemorated by the artist Mathieu Beauséjour.7 The artwork/intervention in question consisted of a bronzed bundle of dynamite sticks introduced at the base of the existing monument. This new public

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artwork, entitled Horatio Nelson: 1758–2002, was symbiotically joined to the traditional monument, making the front page of newspapers when some nervous tourists alerted the police about the dangerous explosives apparently left lying about (Davenport 2002).8 Writing about Montreal’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century monuments at the time of their conception, Alan Gordon (2001, 17) comments that, “above all, public memory is a contest that pits competing pasts against one another in a struggle to define the present.” We might ask, following this notion of “competing pasts,” what this monument, square, or neighbourhood might signify at the present time. The socalled Vieux Montréal is ostensibly the city’s most historic neighbourhood, but it is often difficult to see beyond the area’s reframing of “oldness” as a touristic category and a real estate opportunity. Beauséjour’s fake dynamite does suggest that a range of memories are potentially embedded in the materiality of these old streets (and perhaps that some kind of mnemonic detonation is necessary.) The Mémoire Vive exhibition as a whole – organized by a small artist-run centre, Galerie Dare-Dare, in collaboration with Montreal’s history museum, Le Centre d’histoire de Montreal – set out to conjoin serious historical investigation with what the organizer of the project, Raphaelle de Groot (2002, n.p.), described as “personal rereadings of the history of the city.” What this example shares with the above-mentioned case studies in Berlin and Dublin is an awareness of how particular buildings or sites within the city become both ideological and imaginative nodal points. The subjectivized transformation of objects and spaces can challenge the dominant story or image of a city. In opposition to the traditional monument and its present-day governmental or corporate counterpart, then, there exists a branch of public art consisting of ephemeral objects, images, events, and gestures that for a limited period of time come to occupy the site of a commercial billboard, a sidewalk, or an unused building. Ephemerality is woven into such alternative ways of responding to architecture, the built environment, and the life of the city. If the permanently installed work of public art inevitably echoes the solidity of the built environment, with its connotations of vested authority and ideological fixity, the ephemeral work of art can perhaps provide something that would be structurally equivalent to the city’s dematerialized movement and imaginative energy. We cannot assume that every permanent, officially sanctioned artwork embodies a reactionary ideology or that it is complicit with the commodified spaces of capitalism, just as it would be wrong to champion every temporary installation in the city as a radical, emancipatory opening up of genuine public space. Nonetheless, the field of public art is informed by a productive tension between permanence and impermanence,

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between monumentality and ephemeral traces, between the material weight of history and the fleeting signifiers of everyday urban experience – even while these questions must be addressed in relation to the specificity of each city. If public art can critically intervene in the historical consciousness of a city, the 1976 case of Corridart has served as a model and a cautionary tale for Canadian artists. An outdoor art exhibition that was meant to take place along Sherbrooke Street when Montreal was hosting the Olympic Games, Corridart was dramatically dismantled by city officials on direct orders from the mayor on the eve of its opening. The twenty-one participating artists would use Sherbrooke Street not merely as a neutral or picturesque backdrop for their art; rather, in the words of the organizer, Melvin Charney (1977, 545), the point was to create “an exhibition of the street itself,” with artworks “inserted into the interstices of the street.” It can be said that Corridart set out to aestheticize the cityscape, but this exhibition was not in any conventional sense a beautification project, nor did its image of Montreal correspond to the glowing and future-oriented one cultivated by Mayor Drapeau’s administration. The route eastward along Sherbrooke Street, from the city’s downtown core to the new Olympic Stadium, was measured by moments of strange construction and dilapidation. Charney’s Les maisons de la rue Sherbrooke, for instance, consisted of the ersatz facade of a greystone installed on a block where similar buildings had been torn down. If real estate speculation and civic mismanagement had led to the demolition of many historic buildings, all in the name of a new and improved future city on the cusp of becoming, the Corridart artists called attention, as well, to the obliteration of the city’s collective memories. To borrow Robert Smithson’s (1967, 72) terminology, the cityscape was now punctuated with “monumental vacancies.” If certain statuary and buildings have been designated “historic” and deemed collectively significant, it is possible that the city is full of less obvious “monuments” and that we can learn to regard a range of ordinary material objects and urban spaces as repositories of historical experience. Under certain circumstances, works of art can uproot sedimented ways of inhabiting the city and activate memory in unexpected ways.

interrupted programming: p u b l i c ac c e s s i n to ro n to Some artists specializing in public art have built their careers around competitions for permanent public commissions, but these isolated cases don’t by any means tell the whole story of how art has been introduced

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into the space of the city. Many more contemporary artists negotiate a range of media and exhibition sites that occasionally fall under the rubric of public art. Indeed, it would be difficult to find practising artists who have not, at some point in their careers, exhibited outside of the museum or gallery, in streets, squares, and alleys, or staged a temporary installation in an office building, shopping mall, vacated factory, or other such site. Contemporary art practices over the past few decades have repeatedly sought to challenge the institutionalization and commodification of art by inserting artworks into motley everyday scenarios. The art historian Rosalind Krauss (1979) has written of contemporary art’s “expanded field” of operations, whereby the nomadic object of modern art has been supplanted by a more complex negotiation between art objects and the surrounding environment. The artist can thus turn his or her back on the art gallery; once situated “outside,” the artwork will accrue meaning in relation to a heterogeneous environment of visual signage, movement, and social interaction. Yet the artist who operates in the city at large is also presented with a formidable challenge. Hans Haacke (2001, 340), an artist whose entire career has been concerned with the political and public parameters of art, regretfully concluded about a recent multicity poster project that his work probably got lost amid the urban kaleidoscope of images and messages because many people just block out the overstimulation of street signage. Displaying a work of art beyond the reach of the museum or gallery does not, therefore, ensure a quantitatively greater or more coherent public response. Ken Lum, for his part, is determined to win the public’s attention on the street, playing by the rules of spectacular urban advertising, where messages come encoded in visually fashionable compositions and where size matters a great deal. Since his photo-mural has in certain locations dwarfed adjacent commercial billboards, it does stand a better chance of being noticed by the city’s ever-distracted walkers and drivers, flâneurs and working people. In Toronto the conviction that public art should be an interruption of urban experience and an intervention into a social world was integral to the activities of the collaborative group Public Access since its formation in 1985. The very make-up and organization of Public Access are relevant in this respect because the original eight members (Mark Lewis, Monika Kin Gagnon, Janine Marchessault, Christine Davis, Marc Glassman, Rosemary Heather, Andrew Payne, Thomas Taylor) included not only artists but also writers and academics, all of whom set out to develop a theoretically rigorous basis for understanding the intersection of public art and public space.9 Public Access exhibition projects such as Some Uncertain Signs (1986), The Lunatic of One Idea (1988), Posters Mean Business (1991–92), and Contested

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Spaces (1994) involved the temporary takeover of billboards, electronic screens, or other forms of technologized urban signage that usually transmit commercial endorsements of some kind. If these were not the first public art endeavours in Toronto,10 the importance of Public Access lies in the breadth of their activities: alongside exhibition projects, they wrote and published critical texts about the public art debate, organized unusual outreach programs, such as a lecture series held in a Queen Street bar, $1.99 Discourse (1987), while the journal Public, which first appeared in 1988, was an important long-term outcome of this collaboration. Some Uncertain Signs came about when Public Access managed to negotiate access to an electronic signboard on Yonge Street. Twenty-two works by both local and internationally known artists appeared over a period of a few months, interspersed amid the regular stream of advertisements. A two-fold agenda was already evident in Public Access’s first project: on the one hand, a preexisting sign or mediatized surface was used to make contact with the expanded audience that exists beyond the doors of the art gallery, and on the other hand, there was a volition to scramble the signs, logos, images, and texts that contribute to the city’s semiotic identity. The pixelated sign used for Some Uncertain Signs could accommodate simple images, but most artists’ contributions consisted of selected words or phrases. The American artist Mary Kelly created a sequence of phrases suggestive of a fraught amorous encounter; Toronto-based artist Lynne Fernie was responsible for the catch phrases “Lesbians Fly Air Canada” and “Private Desires/Public Sins,” the first of which was ultimately modified to avoid litigation; and Montreal-based artist Charles Gagnon supplied a parade of verbs, “provide, conquer, condone, propagate, constrain,” and so on, that suggested the rhetorical forms of address that we encounter daily as we tune in to the public world of media and entertainment. These and other artworks emphasized the discrepancy between private, subjective experience and the common ground provided by commercialized popular culture. If the late-twentieth-century city was becoming a virtual space where mediatized images and texts continuously stream around us, over us, and through us, these artists acknowledged this contemporary urban experience and worked with it. It wasn’t that the artworks looked entirely different from what was normally on screen or that the artists were intent on completely blocking the usual flow of information. Rather, Some Uncertain Signs proposed a new aesthetics of interruption in that the artworks took the form of unexpected twists of language, apparent lapses in communication, or strange technological glitches. This strategy was extended with Public Access’s next project, The Lunatic of One Idea, which occupied a thirty-six-monitor video wall at a suburban Toronto mall. Here, the

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spectacular advertising program that was unceasingly “on” during the mall’s opening hours would give way, on an hourly basis, to original video works by sixteen artists. The plugged-in mode of this kind of public art is key in that the artists working with electronic screens (or even those inserting their works onto ordinary billboards) are fully aware that Nike ads or cnn news bulletins will precede and follow their artwork. The artworks inserted into these sites can only provide a temporary alternative to the usual repertoire of ideas and images flashing across screens around the globe. Some of the artists who contributed to Public Access projects produced messages with a decidedly political edge, but others opted instead to introduce unintelligibility or semiotic confusion into the unceasing stream of text or images. Mark Lewis’s contribution to Some Uncertain Signs, for instance, consisted of some ideologically suggestive sequences of words, such as “history” and “distort,” but these were intermingled with nonsense vowel sequences that might be understood as inarticulate cries. While it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of artworks even under more controlled circumstances, it is exaggeratedly so in the case of artworks such as these. Does the art get absorbed and lost within a maelstrom of mixed-up information, and are artists fooling themselves into believing that their interruptions make a difference? Or is it the case that highly attuned and media-savvy viewerpedestrians register all kinds of subtle shifts in the urban environment? Perhaps even such minor disturbances in the media flow can make viewers self-aware of their status as consumers of images and information. The implication here is that public art can at least momentarily redirect some habitual mode of perception or behaviour, perhaps creating an imaginative or even utopian opening, and this fundamental notion is still at the heart of many contemporary public artworks. If on one level their intention was to “discover new places and zones for art” (Public Access), the Public Access collective also announced themselves to be engaged in a more theoretically complex and paradoxical project involving the interrogation of public space. A manifesto of sorts, coauthored by Lewis, Marchessault, and Payne and published in Parachute magazine in 1987, emphasized “the difficulties inherent in producing any work of art in a commodified culture and specifically the difficulties inherent in producing so-called ‘public art’ when the spaces afforded to such production are privately owned and regulated” (24). This understanding of public space drew on an interdisciplinary (and international) discussion by authors such as Jurgen Habermas, Claude Lefort, and Thomas Crow. The bigger issue of public space presented artists with a quagmire of problems and difficulties, but Public Access announced that their intention was “never to resolve those difficulties

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but to stage them as process, a process of contradiction” (24). This is key: art would be introduced into the space of the city not to appease or reconcile but as a polemical and provocative gesture. Moreover, Toronto was conceived of as economically, technologically, and ideologically akin to other cities.

m i c ro e n v i ro n m e n t s w i t h g l o ba l s pa n Rosalyn Deutsche, one of the most important scholars of the public art debate, began publishing on these questions in the mid-1980s, just when Public Access emerged, and there are indeed significant points of convergence in their respective texts from this period. Focusing primarily on New York City, Deutsche has pointed out that profoundly undemocratic principles underlie the lived space of the (American) city in that ordinary sidewalks and parks are not really allowed to function as venues for discussion and social interaction. Deutsche noted that art was often introduced into the city at the very moment when an erstwhile “bad” neighbourhood needed to be transformed – that is, purged of its poor and homeless populations. A genuine public art, in Deutsche’s (1996, 288) terms, must be linked to the desire for genuine public space: “Since any site has the potential to be transformed into a public, or for that matter, a private space, public art can be viewed as an instrument that either helps produce a public space or questions a dominated space that has been officially ordained as public.” A key point of Deutsche’s argument, one shared by Public Access, is that public space currently exists only in a degraded and imperfect form. In her formulation, art can help to reverse this situation: art can become “an instrument” to be willfully deployed against instances of “dominated space” within the city. And if Public Access stressed the value of staging “a process of contradiction,” Deutsche has argued that the controversies and debates raised by controversial public art are valuable in themselves because these are some of the rare occasions when collectively held notions of democracy and public space can be challenged and reassessed. It is curious that this politicized view is a kind of mirror image of the official public art programs in that both positions evince a certain faith that public art can be an instrument for change within the urban environment. The City of Toronto hopes that a Scarborough “art corridor” will lead in the long term to more commercial activity, while in the terms laid out by Deutsche and Public Access, public art should be the catalyst for the transformation of this same commercialized and commodified milieu into a socially just public space. The imbrication of the local and the global was at the heart of Public Access projects such as Some Uncertain Signs and The Lunatic of One

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Idea. The electronic sign on Yonge Street or the bank of video monitors in the neighbourhood mall cannot be regarded as merely local phenomena because they are the means by which the delocalized concerns of multinational capital are introduced into the everyday urban environment. The artist who takes over one of these screens is creating a sitespecific work for Toronto, in a way, but he or she is also interacting with a globally disseminated, commercial network of images, signs, and texts. These Public Access projects approached Toronto as one incarnation of a globalized, “internetworked” metropolitan experience. Saskia Sassen (2001, 15) has recently written that, “much of what we might still experience as the ‘local’ … is actually something I would rather think of as a ‘microenvironment with global span,’ insofar as it is deeply internetworked.” That Public Access invited British and American artists such as Victor Burgin and Jenny Holzer to participate in Toronto public art projects is thus significant. Not only local residents would be mandated to speak to and for the city because practitioners of this new, oppositional, urban art form were also understood to be participants in a larger, globally relevant urban culture, suggesting as well that the artwork produced for Yonge Street or for a Mississauga mall would be equally intelligible in New York, London, or Montreal.

th e p o e t i c s o f e m p t y s p a c e : f l e m i n g a n d lapointe in montreal If the varied practices of public art have spread rapidly throughout North American and European cities, so too have the distinctive concepts and terminology used to encompass and explain the new developments on the street. Neither Public Access’s activities nor the critical language that its members deployed in Toronto during the 1980s were entirely unique, in other words. Yet the Montreal art scene during this period differed significantly from that of Toronto. If artists in both cities were increasingly eager to operate outside of institutional parameters through the creation of temporary artworks that in some way critically engaged with the social space of the city, the results were often dissimilar. To begin with, Public Access’s fascination with a mediatized cityscape didn’t resonate in the same way for Montrealers during the 1980s. In comparison with the activities of Public Access in Toronto, I want to bring forward the case of Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe, Montreal artists who inhabited derelict buildings within the city, slowly transforming these “found” material fragments and architectural spaces. Public Access has never had a permanent exhibition space or institutional affiliation, and its members developed an independent, adhoc way of working within the urban environment. Likewise, the series

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of projects undertaken by Fleming and Lapointe were independently organized and deliberately fleeting, and a heightened temporal consciousness was indeed central to their aesthetic conceptualization of the city. The Montreal duo’s emphasis on memory, materiality, and ruination, however, points to the troubled identity of Montreal at this time. Toronto and Montreal were then at markedly dissimilar moments in their life cycles as Canada’s premier cities. During the 1980s and into the 1990s, Toronto was growing at a tremendous rate, partly because it had taken over from Montreal the role of corporate headquarters of Canada. Public Access’s very insistence that what defined their particular urban experience went far beyond local concerns should be considered a response to the global-business consciousness that was becoming central to Toronto’s identity. Intervening directly in the space of the city meant something rather different to Montreal artists during the 1980s because, while Toronto’s affluence and global connectedness was becoming visible to the naked eye, Montrealers were faced with the counter-spectacle of the city’s economic decline, characterized by the striking absence of any new construction, and a line-up of boarded-up shops on the city’s main commercial streets. Yet this entropic cityscape also provided artists with plentiful and inexpensive spaces for living, working, and exhibiting, and as this coincided with the proliferation of artist-run centres and other venues such as the city-run Maisons de la Culture, the art scene was thriving.11 A certain romantic notion of Montreal as the anti-Toronto can be dated to this decade: if Montreal had higher unemployment and a lower level of commercial activity, its charming decrepitude could be interpreted as a sign of resistance to Toronto’s corporate mentality. As Geoff Stahl (2001) has commented, the “myth” of Montreal as a kind of bohemian paradise is linked to its lack of prosperity during these years. This context is therefore important when considering the Fleming and Lapointe projects of the 1980s: Projet Building/Caserne number 14 (1982–83) took over an old firehall in Plateau Mont Royal, Musée des Sciences (1983–84) was installed in an erstwhile post office in Little Burgundy, while La Donna Deliquenta (1987) saw the artists move into what had once been a vaudeville and movie theatre in St Henri. The buildings that Fleming and Lapointe chose to work with (or against) had once offered important amenities to the community, but their era of usefulness – when they’d contributed to the everyday life of the city, to the public good – was ostensibly over. Still, the artists took temporary possession of the “abandoned” fire station, post office, and theatre and created what might be called a kind of posthumous public art. This can be regarded as a kind of inversion of percent-for-art programs, which generally are activated when there is growth and prosperity in the city. At such times, the combination of

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new buildings and new art seems to announce the future identity of the city. The lack of new building in Montreal during this period meant that Quebec’s provincially administered public art program was flourishing everywhere else across the province except in its largest city. In any case, Fleming and Lapointe turned their attention to postindustrial neighbourhoods that had not seen thrillingly new architectural projects for some time and that, indeed, seemed to have no secure handle on futurity. If their percent-for-art brethren were caught up in a modernist dream of the new, these artists intervened at moments of architectural decrepitude and social oblivion, so the artworks’ temporal orientation was toward the past rather than the future. The grand-looking building that became Fleming and Lapointe’s Le Musée des Sciences was originally a post office in Little Burgundy, a working-class neighbourhood close to downtown. This kind of architecture, with its temple-like columns and other neoclassical elements, stands in for a worldwide network of such buildings that embody European notions of civilization and progress, and these indeed have particular resonance in countries like Canada as traces of the colonial project. The artists were able to inhabit and re-present this bulding to the community as a kind of alternative museum, a place where the artists would “propose alternative ideas about the order of things” (Fleming, Lapointe, and Johnstone 1997, 27).12 La Donna Deliquenta took over what had once been a vaudeville theatre, a venue for boxing matches, and then a cinema, although in the years immediately prior to the artists’ residency there, a plumber had been using it to store old bathtubs and toilets. Fleming and Lapointe transformed the entire interior of this building, using discoloured patches on walls as the basis for paintings and drawings and then deploying lighting effects, flickering projections, and the play of shadows to evoke a vanished world of illusions. Unlike many other works that fall under the public art rubric, La Donna Deliquenta was conceived for this site only and could not be recreated elsewhere; this was a site-specific work par excellence.

site specificity The art world continues to debate how and when a work of art is genuinely “site-specific.” Many of the artworks that were featured in the Public Access projects were created for specific screens within the city, but as discussed above, the aesthetic strategy of choice was often to mimic the nonlocal rhetoric of the corporate image-world. This point is significant because “site specificity” has often been considered an essential aspect of public art projects. This concept evolved in reaction to the high-modernist, autonomous art object, which is shown to most

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advantage in the distraction-free “white cube” of the modern art gallery. In site-specific sculptures, installations, or interventions, we are not meant to consider the artwork as something discrete or transcendent, nor is the site to be considered merely as the neutral background against which we view the work of art. Instead, the artwork and its emplacement are supposed to be semantically entwined and mutually constitutive. Nor is it enough to acknowledge that the work of art is imbued with some aspect of the site because so too should we understand that the space of the city is potentially transformed through the introduction of works of art. As Miwon Kwon (2002) says, “the space of art was no longer perceived as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, but a real place” (38, original emphasis). Eventually, as the German art historian Walter Grasskamp (2001, 520) remarks, with some regret, questions of site came to thoroughly dominate the public art discourse, making sitespecific the “magic words” associated with public art because of an implied promise that the social isolation of the art object would be uncannily overcome. Thus the sense that site-specific are “magic words” can be linked (rather paradoxically) to this possibility of finding a “real place” for art. For Fleming and Lapointe, site specificity was not a process to be taken lightly as merely the latest art-world gimmick. The artists committed themselves to spending months inside a chosen building, becoming phenomenologically attuned to the site, and learning about the history of the building and who might have inhabited it over the years. Only with such an immersion did the artists undertake an aesthetic dialogue with the site. Certainly the purpose was not to restore these buildings, or to make them look new again; if the buildings were timeworn, the artwork would be in sync with the processes of material disintegration. As the artists have remarked, “It is difficult to discern, in our projects, which elements were found in/with the building, and which we brought into or brought out in the site itself” (Fleming, Lapointe, and Johnstone 1997, 21). Whereas the firehall and post office of the previous two projects had served the public in a more prosaic sense, La Donna Deliquenta was qualitatively different because the public service offered to the inhabitants of St Henri by the Corona Theatre had been the opportunity to be swept up in a world of theatrical and cinematic illusions. Fleming and Lapointe set out to evoke these realms of fantasy and escapism, which had once proved so tantalizing to neighbourhood audiences. The visitor entered the theatre and wandered through the dimly lit areas, from stage to lobby to stairwells to balconies, the whole while moving through visual, sculptural, and aural effects that powerfully evoked other times and other places. Fleming and Lapointe’s reinvented Corona Theatre could thus become a “memory theatre” (22).

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This didn’t necessarily mean that specific historic events or figures would be commemorated or that the past would be restaged in some kind of realistic way but that the entire installation seemed to mimic the fallible processes of remembering and forgetting. We might say, on the one hand, that Fleming and Lapointe were offering a valuable service to the local community with their idiosyncratic public art by opening the doors of these closed-down buildings and allowing the public to imagine new uses for these supposedly abandoned sites. But in another sense, the artists were making space for their own private experiences and desires. The artists have described their entry into these buildings as “empowering acts.” In Fleming’s words, “One’s very own movement through a built environment, whether it is a discrete construction or an entire city, undercuts the rigid order that architecture’s divisions have been invented to impose” (Fleming, Lapointe, and Johnstone 1997, 27). This suggests that individuals have the potential to “undercut” and rearrange the spatial and perceptual order of the city, and such gestures are indeed all the more striking when undertaken by women. With La Donna Deliquenta, the reconfigured Corona Theatre was to become a new public space by offering a kind of refuge – for artists, lesbians, the local unemployed, flâneur wannabes, and various other “delinquent” types who make up the ordinary city. Following in the artists’ footsteps, visitors would enter these empty, abandoned buildings, where they might become aware of submerged memories and images, they might succeed in forging an imaginative bond with the past, and they might momentarily cohere into a distinctive public constituency or community. As Alan Blum (2003, 29) has remarked, “The ‘we’ of the city is then not a thing but an object of desire that comes to view and recedes in conflicts at a variety of points in everyday life.” If a fully realized public space does not spring into existence with public art, Fleming and Lapointe’s artworks showed how it might nevertheless come into view as an elusive object of desire.

th e p r e s e n t - da y s t a k e s The differences between Public Access’s projects in Toronto and those of Fleming and Lapointe in Montreal are significant, and I want to suggest that these differences remain telling in relation to the present-day discourse about public art. Some similarities should first be noted: both collaborative groups were interested in creating critical public art that engaged with the social, everyday urban environment; both conceived of the artwork as a temporary intervention in the cityscape, valuing this impermanency; as well, both produced critical writings, which should be considered an essential part of their complex aesthetic proj-

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ects. Public Access, however, was primarily interested in how the city had become a commercialized, globalized, and virtual space. Under these circumstances, artists would have to master the rhetoric of urban visual culture and its ever-new visual technologies as an initial step toward opening up more genuine public space within the city. Fleming and Lapointe were more interested in reanimating neglected public buildings and locating mnemonic triggers in the everyday neglected materiality of the city and thus in providing the provisional basis for a collective urban identity. And if both Public Access’s and Fleming and Lapointe’s projects addressed the intersection of private interests and public concerns, for the Montreal-based artists it was their own personal lives on the line. The identities of the two cities have of course not remained fixed in the intervening years, but contemporary artists continue to confront cities plugged into global networks of flowing capital as well as cities that are backsliding economically, seemingly out of reach of the high-tech tentacles of globalization. The models of public art that emerged in Montreal and Toronto in the 1980s thus provide very useful paradigms for the study of contemporary public art in a global context. It is important to point out that public art has become increasingly institutionalized in Montreal, Toronto, and pretty much every other North American and European city, and this is true not only of “official” public art. The potentially radical gesture of temporarily inserting art into the lived space of the city has gradually been normalized, and many cities across Europe and North America now have well-established organizations that specialize in sponsoring temporary artworks, installations, or dematerialized gestures in the city at large. At the present time, for instance, New York City and London each have two such long-running, independent organizations that stage temporary art events: Creative Time and Public Art Fund in New York and Art Angel and Public Art Development Trust in London. The projects developed under the auspices of these groups might be of a limited duration, but it should be pointed out that some “ephemeral gestures” have been extravagant and extremely expensive to mount over the years and that their realization often depends on extensive corporate funding. In Montreal, skol, Galerie Dare-Dare, Galerie Optica, and Quartier Ephemère are only a few of the the organizations and art galleries to have sponsored temporary projects and interventions in the city and about the city, while in Toronto such a list would include Art Metropole, Fado, the Symbiosis Collective, and the Off/site Collective, besides Public Access, which has continued to organize occasional events over the years. There is an extensive institutional and discursive framework, in other words, that can now accommodate even the most

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fleeting of artistic projects, meaning that it is no longer so obvious which artworks are “outside” in any meaningful sense of the word. Many artists leave the gallery behind and position an artwork on the street or in an abandoned building, but the goal of epistemological or ideological outsideness remains more elusive. In Montreal the entropic sensibility (embodied in the work of Martha Fleming and Lynne Lapointe) that temporarily redirects public attention to old, half-forgotten, residual fragments of the city has gained tremendous momentum in the intervening years. Alongside a standardization of official public art programs, then, there is a widespread interest at the present time in discovering and aestheticizing the interstitial spaces of the city as a whole. Galerie Dare-Dare, Galerie Optica, and Quartier Ephemère have all sponsored more than one exhibition that sends the art viewer out into the city. Also, 48 Hours/48 Rooms (1999), a two-day exhibition held in a recently vacated rooming house, and Hôpital (2001), held in an erstwhile hospital, both involved sitespecific installations by dozens of local artists organized by an ad-hoc collective.13 The 48 Hours exhibition is worth singling out because it points to the changing stakes of public art in Montreal: the rooming house on St Denis Street that was temporarily taken over by forty-eight artists (each installation occupying a small erstwhile living space) was shortly thereafter gutted and turned into a condo. Many of the artworks created for 48 Hours referred with eloquence and pathos to the previous inhabitants of this building and to their recent displacement. There was something disturbing, nonetheless, about how visitors to the temporary exhibition were positioned as witnesses to a seemingly inevitable process of gentrification. Quartier Ephemère is also caught up in this relatively new situation; in the mid-1990s this group began staging unusual site-specific projects in the Old Port area, such as a sound installation in an unused grain elevator and multimedia installations in old foundries and factories, while they are now semipermanently set up in the one-time Darling Foundry. This neighbourhood, recently renamed the Cité Multimédia by the City of Montreal, lay gritty and ignored for many years but is now rapidly changing as new high-tech tenants move in, renovate the old, picturesque, industrial buildings, and erect new glass boxes alongside the older architecture. Quartier Ephemère’s “entrepreneurial” projects and aesthetic values have been welcome in the neighbourhood up to date perhaps because they seem to cast a creative glow on the Cité’s entire gamut of commercial and professional activities. It won’t be long, however, before this neighbourhood is devoid of “abandoned” buildings for artists to explore. For the first time, Montreal’s urban development invites comparison with the model described by Sharon Zukin, whereby artists moving

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through the city looking for cheap rents and creating a local scene become the avant-garde of gentrification (Zukin 1987). If Montreal artists want to remain poets of urban interstices, the terms of this aesthetic project will therefore have to be renegotiated. Toronto now provides its residents with every possible public art permutation, including a steady accumulation of percent-for-art objects, a variety of temporary art forms that encompass the beer-companysponsored Moose in the City silhouettes let loose upon the city in recent years, and projects that conceive of themselves as more subversive gestures within the urban environment. The catalogue for Accidental Audience: Urban Interventions by Artists (1999) champions its “urban interventions” for being “odd,” “puzzling,” and defamiliarizing, as opposed to the kind of public art that is oppressive because of its permanence and official status (see Pruesse 1999, 7–12). Here, the objective is not necessarily to foster a proto-political realm of democratic interaction but, more modestly, to awaken urban dwellers from their usual semiconscious state. But it is curious, too, that a more politically engaged kind of rhetoric has at times found its way into government-run, percent-for-art public art programs. The Spadina lrt Public Art Program (which selected a series of artworks to accompany the street’s rebuilding when new streetcars were introduced), for instance, was seemingly an attempt to reconcile a socially responsive, oppositional model of public art with a more traditional, monumental approach. Like Corridart twenty years before, the Spadina artworks point to the distinctive character and history of the street, and like Ken Lum’s photomural There is no place like home, we are made aware that the city is a zone of encounter for people of diverse races and ethnic groups. And we could even say that, as with Public Access, the emphasis is on signage and voice as articulations of identity and place. The Spadina lrt organizers confidently announced that the project would “create a vibrant new streetscape by giving form to Spadina’s communities, past and present, with their different voices and histories.”14 They rejected the notion, however, that this could possibly come about by allowing artists to unilaterally impose their idiosyncratic visions on an unsuspecting public. Instead, they set in motion an elaborate process of deliberation and discussion between city officials, urban planners, designers, and various community groups to determine what kind of artwork would be suitable. But when the Toronto Star reported that “residents … were anxious to celebrate what one termed the ‘renewal of the grand avenue’” (Keung 1997), it became evident that only this up-beat emphasis would prevail, with a reiteration of terms such as “renewal,” “newness,” and “celebration.” The lengthy consultation process (notwithstanding the emphasis on discussion and cultural diversity) was evidently meant to

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forestall the controversy and more unpredictable public debate that have arisen in various cases of public art across North America – including, of course, Corridart. It is tacitly assumed in this instance that the “different voices and histories” activated by the public art will eventually settle into an unthreatening background murmur. The increasing visibility of public art on a worldwide basis can be regarded as yet another symptom of globalization, but the local modalities of this global phenomenon continue to proliferate. Both Montreal and Toronto have at various moments been the sites of public art configurations that bespeak their distinctive cultural identities, and there is no reason to doubt that new urban art forms will continue to flourish in these and other cities. Further, the value of public art is linked to our very difficulty in identifying it, defining its mandate, and predicting its effects. The longer that this ambiguous status can be maintained – that is, the longer, in Public Access’s words, that public art remains a “process of contradiction” – the greater are the chances that it will maintain its cultural vitality.

notes 1 In Vienna, Lum’s photo-mural There is no place like home was initially blocked by public officials linked to the right-wing Freedom Party, but the group Museum in Progress stepped in to sponsor the project. In Montreal the exhibition of the photo-mural coincided with 11 September 2001 and its aftermath – a new era of anxiety about who belongs on the streets of Western cities and who doesn’t. 2 For the lower-cost projects, the selection committee chooses from among a previously established pool of regional artists, while only the high-cost projects are open to artists Quebec-wide, which often means Montreal-based artists. 3 This administrative difference between Montreal and Toronto is not anomalous in the North American context, where there are instances of municipalities, states, provinces, or federal entities taking on the responsibility for public art under various circumstances. 4 Haacke’s work introduced an element of temporality to the permanence of the project by encouraging Germany’s parliamentarians to replenish the garden on a yearly basis with earth brought from their constituencies. 5 A rather more sceptical commentator asserted that the Wrapped Reichstag “serves as wallpaper over the cracks in German unity” (Dawson 1995, 12). 6 The Irish Museum of Modern Art, which is housed in a seventeenth-century building, and the Chester Beatty Library, which deservedly won the European Museum of the Year Award in 2002, conjoin the historic to the contemporary through innovative spatial design, forms of display, and artworks.

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7 Mathieu Beauséjour also works under the appellation Internationale Virologie Numismatique. 8 A few weeks later, Le Devoir (25 July 2002) reported that the bronzed dynamite had been stolen. 9 Information about Public Access was obtained from documents in their archives and from conversations in 2003 and 2004 with Janine Marchessault, one of the founding members. 10 Notably, the artist-run centres Mercer Union and A Space sponsored public art projects in Toronto during the late 1970s and early 1980s. 11 Since 1982 twelve Maisons de la Culture have opened in different Montreal neighbourhoods, and their presence in the city has been directly linked to the creation of public space: “Depuis 20 ans déjà, le réseau des maisons de la culture s’avère un outil important d’harmonisation sociale et un creuset d’expertise de point en matière de connaissance de publics distinctifs” (http://www2.ville. montreal.qc.ca/maisons). 12 Fleming, Lapointe, and Johnstone’s Studiolo: The Collaborative Work of Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe (1997) puts forward the artists’ ideas about such issues as public art and site specificity while also re-creating the imaginative universe of their major projects from the 1980s. 13 48 Hours/48 Rooms and Hôpital were projects coordinated by Ingrid Bachman and other artists. 14 “The Toronto Transit Commission’s Spadina lrt Public Art Competition awarded eight public art commissions for Spadina Avenue complementing the transit line. The art program was sponsored by the ttc with funding from the Province of Ontario and The City of Toronto” (City of Toronto, http:// www.city.toronto.on.ca/culture/spadina_lrt.htm).

references Blum, Alan. 2003. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press. Charney, Melvin. 1977. “Corridart: Art as Urban Activism in Canada.” Architectural Design 47, no. 7/8: 545–7. City of Toronto. http://www.city.toronto.on.ca/culture/artwalk.htm. DaimlerChrysler. http://www.collection.daimlerchrysler.com. Davenport, Jane. 2002. “Nelson Bomb Plot Foiled – Again.” Montreal Gazette, 6 July. Dawson, Layla. 1995. “Wrapping the Reichstag.” Architectural Review 198, no. 1181 (July): 11–12. de Duve, Thierry. 1993. “Ex Situ.” Art & Design, 8, no. 5/6 (May/June): 25–30. de Groot, Raphaelle. 2002. “Une aventure multidimensionnelle.” In Mémoire Vive, n.p. Pamphlet. Montreal: Dare-Dare, Centre de diffusion d’art multidisciplinaire de Montréal.

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Deutsche, Rosalyn. 1996. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, ma, and London: mit Press. Finkelpearl, Tom. 2000. Dialogues in Public Art. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Fleming, Martha, Lyne Lapointe, and Lesley Johnstone. 1997. Studiolo: The Collaborative Work of Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe. Montreal and Windsor: Artextes Editions and the Art Gallery of Windsor. Galloway, David. 1995. “Packaging the Past: Wrapped Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.” Art in America 83 (November): 86–9. Gordon, Alan. 2001. Making Public Pasts: The Contested Terrain of Montreal’s Public Memories, 1891–1930. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press. Gouvernement du Québec. 2000. La politique d’intégration des arts à l’architecture et à l’environnment des bâtiments et des sites gouvernementaux et publics: Guide d’application. Quebec: Gouvernement du Québec. Grasskamp, Walter. 2001. “Art in the City: An Italian-German Tale.” In Florian Matzner, ed., Public Art (Kunst im offentilichen Raum), 516–25. Munich: Hatje Cantz. Haacke, Hans. 2001. “Public Sights.” In Florian Matzner, ed., Public Art (Kunst im offentilichen Raum), 337–41. Munich: Hatje Cantz. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Keung, Nicholas. 1997. “Streetcar Named Spadina a Hit.” Toronto Star, 28 July. Krauss, Rosalind. 1979. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” In D. Preziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, 281–98. Reprint, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. “Sitings of Public Art: Integration Versus Intervention.” In One Place after Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity, 56–99. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Lewis, Mark, Janine Marchessault, and Andrew Payne, for Public Access. 1987. “Public Imaginary.” Parachute, no. 48 (September-November): 21–5. O’Connor, Joan. Website of the Architectural Association of Ireland. http:// www.irish-architecture.com. Pruesse, Kym. 1999. “Thoughts on Intervention.” In K. Pruesse, ed., Accidental Audience: Urban Interventions by Artists, 6–12. Toronto: Off/site Collective. Public Access. http://www.yorku.ca/public/beingontime/public_access.htm. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. “The City: Between Topographic Representation and Spatialized Power Projects.” Art Journal 60, no. 2 (Summer): 12–20. Stahl, Geoff. 2001. “Tracing out an Anglo-Bohemia: Musicmaking and Myth in Montréal.” Public, nos 22–3: 99–121. Smithson, Robert. 1967. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey.” In J. Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, 68–74. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

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Spadina Avenue lrt Public Art Program. http://www.city.toronto.on.ca/ culture/spadina_lrt.htm. Ward, Stephen V. 1998. Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850–2000. London and New York: Routledge. Weiss, Konrad. 1994. Speech presented by the Alliance/Green Party member, 211th Session of German Parliament, Bonn, 25 February 1994. http:// www.bln.de/k.weiss/te_wrapp.htm. Young, James E. 1992. “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.” Critical Inquiry, no. 18 (Winter): 267–96. Zukin, Sharon. 1987. “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core.” Annual Review of Sociology, no. 13: 129–47. – 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, ma: Blackwell.

8 Divergent Diversities Pluralizing Toronto and Montreal JENNY BURMAN A city is not a place of origins. It is a place of transmigrations and transmogrifications. Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants. Origins are rehabilitated and rebuilt here … A city is a place where the old migrants transmogrify into citizens with disappeared origins who look at new migrants as if at strangers, forgetting their own flights. And the new migrants remain immigrants until they too can disappear their origins. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 2001, 62–3 Numbers don’t lie. Close scrutiny of the latest statistics reveals just how quickly a new society is rising from the ashes. Like it or not, the pace of change is relentless as our national identity evolves, along with our homes, families, beliefs, and way of life. The New Canada is upon us. “The Altered State,” Globe and Mail, 7 June 2003

Leading up to Canada Day 2003, the Globe and Mail ran a twelve-part series entitled “The New Canada,” which consisted of polls, profiles, stories, and journalists’ analyses of the recently released 2001 Census results. The stated aim was “to draw a social map of this new country” by creating a portrait of the ethnoculturally diverse generation now aged twenty to twenty-nine, whose members are poised to move into positions of influence and to reconstitute the Canadian mainstream. While any popular reevaluation of the calcified definition of a national mainstream as bicultural seems a positive development, in actuality the mainstream (as numerical majority and ideological category) is changing very differently according to locale. Decisive demographic upsets started and continue to be based in the cities,1 which are as importantly linked to cities and nations outside Canadian borders as they are to

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Canada.2 The Globe’s revision of the national mainstream preserves the capacity for such a category to reify the whole: this new mainstream is more diverse in composition, but it is still represented as a singular and unified entity. This keeps at bay what might be interpreted as a threatening fragmentation, incommensurability, or dissensus, such as a growing divide between urban and rural or small centres – which, according to Hiebert’s research (2000), does exist. What is striking in “The New Canada,” despite the series’ justifiable emphasis on the pace and drama of urbanization, as well as on the concentration of immigrants in urban areas, is the continuing centrality of the figure of Canada. The nation lives on as phoenix, capacious and tolerant vessel, and united front.3 The reinforcement of a new “we” reasserts the nation at the moment of some of its sites’ most dramatic multiplicity and greatest number of extranational connections. It reasserts the category of the mainstream when it is the most imperative to examine it critically; as Spivak (1999) notes, the mainstream has always run dirty. Residents’ transnational links and multiple geographical identifications call for a redefinition of national space, a breaking down of “Canada” rather than the fabrication of a new-and-improved mainstream. The Globe’s construction of a recombinant nation is accomplished through, for example, the formulation of leading poll questions: if pollsters ask about the nation exclusively (e.g., “What makes you most proud of being a Canadian?”), they elicit responses that appear to consent to the terms centralizing the nation. Polls of this kind make a contradictory double move: they present dissenting positions, and they stitch these positions together by framing results as representative of a clearly identified membership group. Meanwhile, surely what is changing about Canada – given the new generation’s split affiliations and external orientations,4 and given the general proliferation of transnational diasporic public spheres – invites us to shift the emphasis away from a definable national character and to analyze, instead, the idiosyncrasies of Canadian locales. Otherwise, the longstanding filibuster about national identity will obscure the extent to which “the new Canada” is unfolding in distinct and complex fashions in different urban environments.5 Perhaps we needn’t talk unceasingly about Canadianness – we might in fact call an arbitrary end to the futile and anachronistic search for a definable we. Let me say anecdotally that having spent three years talking to undergraduate students at York University about issues of belonging and identity (mostly “diverse” second-generation Canadians – I led tutorials in Caribbean studies and taught a course in urban culture, 1999–2001), I found it hard to relate to the twenty-somethings whom the Globe interviewed. The students with whom I discussed these matters most often expressed allegiances

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split between the City of Toronto, cities in the eastern United States (and/or the radio “space” of Buffalo, New York), and their parents’ place of origin; further, they claimed indifference or at best ambivalence toward “Canada.” These mostly Caribbean-descended students are a no-more-representative group than the Globe’s, but their assertions are a stumbling block for this version of a brave new Canada. Important here is not the rejection of the nation per se but the reassembly of points of belonging, which practically speaking engages with immediate and imagined locales in different ways than those associated with Canada-focused identifications (also both immediate and imagined). The 2001 Census shows a population that is, remarkably, 79 per cent urbanized; the vast majority of newcomers settle in the four biggest cities. Internally, however, people are still moving away from the big cities, as Hiebert noted in 2000 – he hesitated to characterize this as “white flight” but deliberately let the suggestion linger. Popular or journalistic analysis does not follow this up with a methodological shift: “The New Canada” reconstitutes a federation of diverse young Canadians while avoiding the radical unevenness of scenes of pluralism across the nation. Proceeding mimetically – that is, developing new questions to guide social analysis that take their cue from new social patterns – necessitates an inquiry into urban and transnational affiliations.6 Below, I elaborate what is hopefully a productive concept in this context, that of the diasporic city, through which I aim to explore urban Canadian manifestations of diasporic consciousness. I recognize that it is important to keep in our purview how the nation and the province affect urban scenes, acting variably as legislative constrictors and enablers, but large Canadian cities are also experiencing what Saskia Sassen (1998, xxvi) calls “the denationalization of urban space.” Two popular cultural figures whose experiences are exemplary of this trend are Clement Virgo, who has discussed presenting his film Rude in Cannes and not recognizing himself in the descriptive “Canadian filmmaker,” having identified more strongly with Toronto,7 and the rapper YLook, who has described overlapping transnational affiliations that he grew up with in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood, including one with American urban culture.8 The tension that arises in the “New Canada” media event between the Census’s news of a dramatically urbanized population and the Globe’s disinterest in following this up with a shift in analytical terms away from “Canada” opens up the question guiding this chapter: how can we usefully compare scenes of difference in urban Canada in a way that deepens the understanding of idiosyncratic manifestations of cultural difference? These manifestations, or spatial translations of intersecting

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histories and cultural influences, emerge in dialogue with multiple contexts: other cities, the province, the nation, and transnational circuits. Toronto and Montreal are good places to start a comparison for reasons that I elaborate below. I use them here to suggest which contingencies might make what kind of difference. In what follows, I begin with general comments about comparison, then proceed to discuss the conceptual and practical differences between multicultural and diasporic models of urban diversity, drawing examples from popular music and fiction. In the second half of the chapter, I discuss two films set in these cities, Rude (1995) and L’Ange de Goudron/Tar Angel (2001), to illustrate some of the distinctions between sites of plurality: their specific conflicts, obstacles, and openings. I propose that describing Toronto as a diasporic city and Montreal as a multicultural city might get us closer to their divergent diversities. A diasporic city, in brief for the moment, is one in which the circulation of peoples, cultural influences, and objects has transformed the site to the extent that any idea of a shared history of place is displaced by overlapping call-and-responses reaching outside national borders. These links – emotional, financial, historical – to other places have a profound impact on the usages of the city and on the practices in which residents engage that move toward translating the city into a place of betweenness. Toronto, after its demographic upheaval of the last thirty years, is incomparable to the “Toronto the good” stereotype of the 1960s: we see now a definitive rupture of the place-origin equation. As Dionne Brand (2001, 62) puts it in the passage cited earlier: “A city is … a place of transmigrations and transmogrifications.” I hypothesize that despite Toronto’s pro-multiculturalism rhetoric, Montreal is the more multicultural of the two cities. Four of the most obvious distinguishing factors between the two models are: provincial policy, a critical mass of twentieth-century immigrants and high proportion of second- and third-generation Canadians, the conditions propelling emigration/immigration, and ongoing connections to places of origin (I return to these later in the chapter). Multiculturalism’s central trope is that of a mosaic (Day 2000), whose separate tiles leave little room for hybridization. In popular discourses concerning diversity in Montreal, all non-Franco and non-Anglo residents are grouped together as the city’s cultural communities (previously known as allophones). Given the history of Quebec’s opposition to official multiculturalism – an assimilationist approach has been preferred, lately called cultural convergence – it may seem paradoxical to call Montreal the more multicultural city. But when strong bicultural divisions between official language groups dominate the historiography of a site, “others” are shunted into a narrow third space, which parallels the third space occupied by “multiculturals” at the federal-policy level.

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One materialization of this paradox is Blvd St Laurent, or The Main, which is both the old thoroughfare bisecting the city into French and English territories and the (old also, by now) so-called ethnic corridor that has been a central vein for the immigrant population since the turn of the last century. The organization L’Autre Montréal (The Other Montreal), an “urban research and discovery group” aiming to uncover working-class and other nonhegemonic histories in the city, operates bus tours to educate residents and visitors about what they call Montreal’s multicultural quilt. Beginning with once Irish Griffintown, the tour passes through ethnicized neighbourhoods like the Jewish section of the Main and Little Italy, stops further north to watch multihued children play in a schoolyard (young talismans of Quebec’s “cultural convergence” politics), and finishes with the most recent arrivals, Lebanese and Haitian residents. It proceeds chronologically, moving neatly through space as though through time in the same order as that in which ethnocultural groups settled. The tour’s organizing logic is rooted in discourses of Canadian multiculturalism, in which the upward mobility of usually poor immigrants is part of the success story of the nation, and in this case, of the city, and adds to the latter’s character through figurative and literal colour or flavour. The unstated opposite seems to be “le même Montréal,” the same Montreal, made up of the two groups who represented biculturalism: white francophone and anglophone Christians, unmarked ethnically – that is, Canadian Canadians, a category that Mackey (1999) shows to be operational among “mainstream” Canadians.9

p r ac t i c e s o f c o m pa r i s o n Sophie: I live in a city in Canada. In Montréal. Andrei: Montréal? S: It’s a city in the country of Canada. A: Yes, yes, there’s a company there; they make very good puzzles, jigsaws. S: Really? A: I have three of them. I had. No piece is the same. Each one is different, not just different parts of the picture but different shapes for each piece … Very difficult. Richard Sanger, “Not Spain,” 1998, 281

Alan Blum (2002) writes that comparing cities is one way of telling a story and that “the collective engagement with comparison” – the ways that residents compare their own cities to others – should be analyzed as a social practice in comparative urban research (see also Blum 2003). In terms of ethnocultural diversity, Toronto and Montreal are not usually the pair popularly compared. The two locales with the

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greatest proportion of foreign-born (both immigrant and nonpermanent) residents are Vancouver (33.9%) and Toronto (37.6%) (2001 Census). Montreal’s correlate percentage is roughly half Toronto’s, at 18 per cent. In every other kind of discussion of cultural vitality, however, the Toronto-Montreal comparison is very much alive in central Canada. The Montreal-based comedy troupe the Vestibules perform a comical send-up of the anachronistic stereotypes that run through the popular comparison in their “I don’t want to go to Toronto”; a hysterical narrator reels off the reasons why he is afraid – joyless children in suits carrying black balloons, a diet of donuts and edible oil products, jungles of elevator and concrete – in an exaggerated summation of caricatures of Toronto. Canadian hiphop aficionados also make frequent comparisons between the two cities. The conversations in the alternative press in Toronto revolve around the hiphop scene’s vibrancy and fast ascent and in Montreal around the question of why it is so hard to sustain and how to resolve this problem (it is notably rare for Montreal to be deemed lacking in cultural vitality in any domain). In her article “Urban Music: Outside the City Limits,” Emily Mills (2003) interviews several urban hiphop artists, asking specifically about how their hometown scene compares to Toronto’s: Carl Henry says “the scene here is not as developed as it is in Toronto. Toronto has a network set up, the majors are there, and the system is being perfected. Montréal is just getting started!” Technical Sense members talk about bilingualism in Montreal, citing a Haitian influence rather than Toronto’s Jamaicanized sound. Hiphop culture is one of the frontiers of cultural hybridization in Canadian cities. It is unmistakably crosscut with American urban culture, but one of its most remarkable aspects is the importance of place (e.g., Kardinal Offishal’s “BaKardi Slang,” to which Technical Sense responded with a song about Montreal, “Grand Marnier,” and also Shades of Culture’s “The Island I’m From”); a key part of representation here is “representing” the city you’re from. On an official level, both cities define and market themselves as cosmopolitan, and uniquely so. On the first page of the City of Montreal’s “Statement for a Cultural Policy” (2003), the report states: “Montréal is unique: a French-speaking North American city with an active Englishspeaking community living alongside people from all over the world. Not only is Montréal bicultural and cosmopolitan, it is also Québec’s centre of cultural activity where most of Québec’s distinctive culture is shaped and produced.” Toronto places its diversity front and centre with the City Hall motto “Diversity is our strength”; city mayors regularly boast about Toronto’s status as the most diverse city in the world, with

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the greatest number of languages spoken and countries of origin. Following the next section, I relate this chapter’s conceptualization of urban cultural difference more directly to ideas of cosmopolitanism. One provocative entry point into an exploration of Toronto’s and Montreal’s divergent scenes of pluralism might be phrased as a question: how relevant or irrelevant to urban narratives is the relationship between “centre” and “margin” (conventionally, between white and nonwhite, bicultural and ethnocultural)? I understand the divergence between multicultural and diasporic locales in terms of either the reproduction of a multicultural model or the opposition/indifference to such. This model is inclined toward the division and description of discrete cultures. “Culture” here, as has been noted often in critiques of multiculturalism, is treated as a definable entity that is often collapsible with national origin: the same City of Montreal report writes, “To promote and develop [dialogue between cultures], the City must create a true cultural pluralism that brings together people of clearly defined identities, but capable of transcending in thought and action their culture of origin and accept that of others.”10 The report’s way of portraying the mix of discrete cultures is usually to turn two pure quantities into two pure halves.11 This model of encounter is analogous to theories of religious syncretism, which describe the reconciliation and synthesis of different beliefs. A very different concept is that of transculturation, influential in the Caribbean and originating in the work of Cuban poet and essayist Fernando Ortíz. In this process, interaction is inseparable from transformation: each party is transformed by its encounter with the other to the extent that they are ultimately mutually constitutive. Caribbean theories of creolization and transculturation are useful imports here, set in productive tension with pre- and post-Confederation ways of creating and managing the “problem” of diversity bureaucratically in what is now Canada (Day 1999). A diasporized site, a diasporic city, presumes a hybridized population that is constituted relationally, having been transformed and still transforming. One must be cautious about generalizations regarding multiculturalism. If theories of multiculturalism from different contexts are crossreferenced – that is, if the official Canadian rhetoric concerning its cultural policy is read in tandem with other unofficial deployments of the multicultural, the concept expands significantly. In his introduction to the essay collection Un/settled Multiculturalisms, Barnor Hesse (2000) addresses “multicultural transruptions” in Britain in a way that is very provocative for the Canadian context. First, he discusses the discrepancy in order to set up a move from discrepancy to transruption. Racism is an unresolved discrepancy: “By this I am referring to historical

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antagonisms and social inequalities which underline cultural differences that are represented as marginal or insignificant in dominant discourses … it is the exposure of the discrepant that opens up the nation to different challenges, interrogations and representations.” Transruptions are “interrogative phonemena … [that] refuse to be repressed … [Multicultural transruption] comprises any series of contestatory cultural and theoretical interventions which, in their impact as cultural differences, unsettle social norms and threaten to dismantle hegemonic concepts and practices” (16–7, original emphasis). Discrepancies and the transruptions that they engender make up a process akin to what Blum (2002) calls ethical collisions, whose eruption leads to collective attempts to solve problems. In the same volume, Stuart Hall (2000, 209) helpfully distinguishes between the adjectival “multicultural” and the substantive term “multiculturalism,” which describes policies designed to govern diverse populations. In the contemporary Canadian context, however, I am interested in what a shift away from the language and frame of multiculturalism might accomplish. If urban cultural research took up the provocation that changing cities offered, research questions might be reformulated in relation to how radical plurality manifests itself in a given site. In some cases, such as in Toronto, I am interested in the possibilities of a diasporic framework, whereas I suspect that a multiculturalist approach would engender research such as ethnographies of particular hyphenated “cultural communities,” such as Italian Canadians in Toronto and Haitian Canadians in Montreal. With the concept of the diasporic city, I mean to address a change in how urban spaces are appropriated, renewed, and effectively theorized by residents with dynamic, ongoing attachments to extranational sites and transnational collectivities. The diasporic city’s dynamism may hinge on the material dimension of a critical mass of “others” that upsets the balance between mainstream residents and newcomers. At such a point, decisions emanating from the virtually unicultural preserve of City Hall spark debates and galvanize groups to try to correct the problem of underrepresentation: in Toronto, New Voices for a New City, an umbrella group of ethnocultural community organizations, challenged the homogenous voice of the anti-amalgamation movement and placed a spectrum of new issues on the table; in Montreal Haitian Québécois community members came out in the thousands in 2001 to elect a council – cepahm, which when pronounced in Creole means “It’s up to you” – for the purpose of lobbying the city. This connects to a broader point about the mainstream’s changing hold on culture: centres proliferate and unsettle (if not necessarily unseat) the once hegemonic core. It is worth asking about the degree to which cities create hospitability for

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diasporic circulation. This includes the surface circuitry of the city as a visible crossroads site, but also measurable social mobility for diasporic groups, defined as participation in city politics and representation among the culturati and mass media commentators. The conceptual shift from the multicultural to the diasporic, I believe, mimics the changes in Toronto over the last thirty years.12 It is less applicable to the Montreal context, which is changing less quickly because of proportionate immigrant population differences, in addition to a provincial integration project revolving around linguistic assimilation. In ten to fifteen years, it will be an entirely different story, as the aforementioned City of Montreal report anticipates. YLook’s song and music video “Relate to me” is a good example of locally grounded, diasporically oriented cultural production that is organic to the diasporic city. YLook is a Muslim, South Asian-descended hiphop artist who grew up in Toronto’s Jane and Finch neighbourhood with a group of influential peers who are also in hiphop (including many Caribbean Torontonians, like Kardinal Offishal, whose hit single “BaKardi Slang” was about the Caribbeanization of slang in Toronto). The video for “Relate to me” is set in various downtown neighbourhoods, quintessential metropolitan crossroads areas with old and new graffiti, piles of tropical produce spilling out of shops with hand-painted signs, and residents who might represent a cross-section from any contemporary global city (but they don’t: the video pegs them as Torontonians). YLook is shown walking the streets with his crew or addressing the camera alone, wearing an Arab black-and-white checked scarf. Shadows pass over the images and characters, and text flashes up to distract the eye: both techniques have the effect of disrupting any voyeuristic gaze at the video’s socially marginalized subjects. “Relate to me,” in its lyrics and visual translation, shows at once an engagement with Toronto’s specific landscape – aesthetically, but also sociologically through a critique of racialized poverty zones – and an appropriation of its orientation away from the nation and toward the transnational space of the diasporic. (Using a similar vector between urban and global “sites,” Montreal’s Shades of Culture rap about the municipality Notre-Dame de Grâce, or ndg, and the Caribbean: “From boroughs internal to international circles / This army’s colonel keeping it heated like thermal.”) Kardinal and YLook’s articulations of a second-generation diasporic consciousness are global and intensely local, spliced with concerns grounded in Toronto. I am especially interested in taking up the diasporic in instances of overlap, intersection, and allegiance formation.13 In the first volume of Austin Clarke’s 1970s Toronto Trilogy, there is a richly layered scene involving Kensington Market: Sammy Burrmann (now the Jewish employer of a Caribbean domestic worker, telling this story to his therapist)

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used to steal apples from a Jewish merchant with his multiethnic boy “gang.” One day, the merchant caught a black kid named Jeffrey, whom Sammy let take the blame even though he himself had taken the apple. Jeffrey was arrested, and Sammy was racked by guilt, causing him to vomit up the apples that night. Notably, only after the incident did the boy gang splinter into uni-ethnic groups. This is a compelling literary evocation of emotional/psychic entanglement: a case of “having already been changed by the encounter with.” The physiological impact of Sammy’s sick-guilty feeling followed him through his adult years as embodied guilt that conditioned his once easy, now awkward interactions with black Toronto residents.

cosmopolitan: diasporic Cosmopolitanism reappeared on the cultural criticism radar in the 1990s.14 Lest anyone forget that it is an important historical concept, its Stoic and Kantian lineage is often invoked (in this way, it is subject to the same type of historical defence as diaspora, which is traceable to the Book of Deuteronomy). Pollock and colleagues (2000, 578) attribute its renewed relevance to the urgency mandated by the current constellation of nationalism, globalization, and multiculturalism. Theirs is an anti-elitist recuperation of the term: “Refugees, peoples of the diaspora, and migrants and exiles represent the spirit of the cosmopolitical community” (582). In a now familiar but effective move to pluralize the “ism” in question so that a single definition cannot overtake the understanding of a complicated set of concepts, they speak of cosmopolitanisms. Similarly, Vertovec and Cohen (2003) write of different “windows on cosmopolitanism”: Vertovec has listed at least six connotations of the term, which include practical habits, attitudes, political projects geared toward transnational institutions and local cultural identities, worldviews, and social conditions. Jacques Derrida (1997), in his essay on cosmopolitanism and cities of refuge, and Pollock and colleagues (2000) highlight the openness to the future that is key to the ethics of cosmopolitanism, which is also concerned with flux and ways of being in common. As the latter put it, “Cosmopolitanism, in its wide and wavering nets, catches something of our need to ground our sense of mutuality in conditions of mutability, and to learn to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and cultural transition” (580, original emphasis). In this sense, as for Derrida, cosmopolitanism is an ethical orientation to the world rather than a new state of being. They make clear that this orientation did not originate during the current incarnation of globalization; rather, it predates colonization.15

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What is the relationship between notions of a cosmopolitan and a diasporized site? The concept of diasporization leads analysis more precisely into an examination of how living links to multiple elsewheres charge the city landscape with vitality and sediment it with extranational histories (that forget and remember, renew and destroy), affecting the character of its flux in very different ways from site to site. Cosmopolitanism and diasporization – the noun “diaspora” aims to describe a closed group, so I stick to the adjectival “diasporic” and the processual “diasporization” – are complementary concepts in that both look simultaneously toward the past and future with open-ended visions of community. I favour the latter for its capacity to highlight a continuous mobility, rather than presuming a prior one, and for its emotive depth and weight, deriving from a historical association with the trials of violent displacement and the necessities of creative emplacement. Diasporas are scattered and sown, as the roots of the Greek diaspeirein tell us.

celluloid cityscapes Two films help to illustrate the distinction between the diasporic and multicultural paradigms with which I have been working: Rude (1995), directed by Clement Virgo, and L’Ange de Goudron/Tar Angel (2001) directed by Denis Chouinard. Both are complex, compelling portrayals of Canadian urban landscapes; each betrays a different set of underlying premises, indexed by its aural/visual combinatory method and ethos concerning the relationship between the local and the “foreign.” Rude employs a montage and layering of elements, while L’Ange regularly mobilizes juxtaposition. The stories that make up Rude unfold in and around Regent Park, a “housing project” in inner-city Toronto, over an Easter weekend. The buildings are concrete highrises, and the recreational spaces are basketball courts and green patches backed by stretches of painted murals (one depicting Jesus’ crucifixion). The character Rude, played by Sharon Lewis, is the dj of a pirate radio station, “stealing Babylon’s airwaves” in order to broadcast stories and erotic-poetic-mythical visions. “There are ten million Nubian tales in the projects on this Ojibway sacred ground,” she incants toward the beginning in a low, thrilling, Caribbean-lyrical voice, “If you have a tale to tell in this season of death and resurrection and rebirth, I’ll lend you my ears.” The film tells of an ex-dealer, recently out of prison, who reunites with his lover and child and struggles to start over; a closeted gay boxer whose friends are homophobic gay-bashers; a woman living the aftermath of a breakup and

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an abortion, kept company by the ghost of herself as a child. Most of the characters are second- and third-generation Canadians, many with Caribbean ties, and there are few interactions represented with “mainstream” Canadians: in Toronto, this is the main, or at least one of its incarnations. The film is not interested in recognition from or relationships with a hegemonic centre.16 The three main stories weave in and out of each other, interspersed with voices from the dj’s call-in and shots of the shadowed murals. Magical realist elements mix with realist narratives. The dj Rude tells of a lion prowling the project (we see it from time to time, seeming to both stalk and protect): “Boys and girls, the lion is loose tonight. If you have seen his majesty, give the mothership a call: you know the number.” (Someone does call her, yelling “only fucked-up Jamaicans would come up with that shit! There is no lion in the goddamn projects, ok?”) Rude’s status as a character is ambiguous: the film gives us room to interpret her as other than a human figure (she is seen only in fragmentary glimpses of mouth, eyes, silhouette; most important is her voice). She might be fantastical, tweaking a kind of collective “Nubian” subconscious by airing troubling issues: homophobia (she says to one caller, “haven’t you heard, you got fags, lesbians, dykes, queers”), sexism, so-called black-on-black violence, white predators (the dealer to small-time dealers is a white man called Yankee). Rude also offers a commentary on representation itself, as in one of the film’s most interesting sequences – through the visuals, we visit each of the stories, but the soundtrack is the dj’s voice: Don’t recognize my voice, can’t see my face? a case of dysfunctional illusion fusion of silence plus noise confusion sweet and sour delusion … Self-righteous primal desire to see to flee to bind to find the blind scent of identity. Reality reality two-dimension sensuality To touch you is not to know you

Finally, important to point out about Rude’s Toronto is that it is an already transformed place; these are Torontonian stories inextricably tied to their environment.

l’ a n g e d e g o u d r o n Chouinard’s film tells the story of the Kasmis, an Algerian family living in Montreal, in the process of applying for citizenship. The older of

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two children is nineteen-year-old Hafid, who spends much of the film hiding from the police and his family because of his involvement with local activists in a radical direct-action group called Crisco (Comrades in Crisis). Crisco, led by a hardened, aging white francophone, is involved in right-to-rent, homeless rights, and anti-deportation movements; Hafid joins in the most dangerous of their activities, which ends in tragedy. What I want to underscore here is the centrality of the nation and national belonging in L’Ange de Goudron. Here are several examples: the father Ahmed is a new hockey fan and sings “O Canada” as he tries on his citizenship ceremony suit for the umpteenth time; the act that sends Hafid into hiding is erasing the hard drives at the federal immigration offices; the parents have awkward meetings with an officious immigration officer; Hafid says to his girlfriend and fellow activist Huguette, “just watch me” (to which she responds, “If you start talking like Trudeau I’ll have the cops on your ass”); the family’s citizenship ceremony shows a room full of new Canadians singing the national anthem; the father says to Hafid’s memory in the film’s final scene, “your bones in this soil seals our belonging to this country.” L’Ange’s portrayal of an Algerian family as a microcosm in the city has little to do with Montreal as an already transformed place, in the way that Virgo’s film treats Toronto. Montreal is a comparatively stable site that encounters non-Montreal influences. That is why juxtaposition is a logical leitmotif here: what is Algerian/Arab (non-Canadian, non-Québécois) rubs up against a place that we already know, a nonArabized or nonhybridized site (Montreal, Quebec, and Canada at various points). Hafid is the exception, the example of becoming multiple, but he plays a role familiar to readers of literature from the Caribbean or American South: that of the tragic hybrid. The film opens with a strong juxtaposition, taking the viewer from a long prayer scene in a mosque to a wintry soccer game where Arabic-speaking men chase the ball amid two feet of snow. Ahmed sings a verse of “O Canada” in Arabic. Later, the conservative Ahmed is dumbfounded as he walks around a chaotic Montreal cegep campus looking for news of Hafid (this is a generational as well as a “culture clash”). There are several beautiful on-the-road sequences combining Quebec rural scenery with Arabic music. What makes these juxtapositions effective is that they activate the tension animating multiculturalism since its official implementation in Canada, a tension between assimilation and cultural retention. In the story of the Kasmi family, this is a central thematic, manifested in the relationship between Ahmed and the rest of the family (e.g., his wife Naima, whose work aspirations he resists), in language (French sprinkled with Arabic is spoken at home), and in the aforementioned scenes.17

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i d i o - sy n c r e t i s m Cultural difference is mobilized, portrayed or performed, and “managed” differently from city to city in a collaborative, if asymmetrical, construction – meaning that subject positions are created from the bottom and the top, but not evenly, in a vernacular model of heterogeneity. Several factors influence the development of an idiosyncratic cultural pluralism. As Blum might put it, collective actions move to address problems that precede the expression of diversity: (1) Provincial cultural policy, including adherence or opposition to federal multiculturalism policy. In Quebec, language politics have dominated cultural policy and structured immigration policy since the 1970s (Germain and Rose 2000; Levine 1990). Bill 101, introduced by the Parti Québécois in 1977, was a linguistic assimilationist program as far as immigrants were concerned. Its “francization” project has meant mandatory French schooling for children of immigrants, which has surely resulted in the greatest degree of trilingualism in Canada.18 B.K. Ray’s studies in the 1990s showed Montreal to have a higher degree of ethnic and immigrant segregation than Toronto (cited in Hiebert 2000, 30), suggesting that the reverberations of bicultural conflict have been an obstacle to the hybridization and cross-fertilization characterizing the diasporic city. Language politics have presented obstacles to translinguistic ethnocultural associations until recently: Black Youth in Action – the children of immigrants and/or unilinguals are much less likely to be unilingual – and efforts to form a bilingual Black Caucus are examples of cross-community formations emerging out of particular urban issues rather than out of common national origin. (2) Length of residence: How many generations of a particular community inhabit the locale? Many of the changes that I discuss here under the rubric of the diasporic city are due to the cultural work, everyday practices, and multiple affiliations or loyalties of second- and thirdgeneration residents. The hybridization of places and subject positions is a cumulative creative process born of accidental encounters, deliberately cultivated habits of multiplicity, conscious and unconscious desires and practices. It is not that there existed a time when Canadian locales were pure in population, but the longer that residents have negotiated copresence, the more legible have been the effects on the cultural and physical landscapes. For instance, the extent to which past newcomers orient their commercial endeavours toward the “mainstream” changes over time as a critical mass of international residents move in (the provision of certain goods and services to newcomers becomes lucrative).

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(3) Stratification of immigrant groups: What is the proportion in a given locale of different categories of non-Canadian-born residents – that is, refugees and economic- and family-class migrants? Toronto is the destination for the greatest percentage of refugees, and Vancouver is favoured by economic-class migrants, which intensifies at each end a preexisting polarization of rich and poor. The conditions of immigration play a significant role in the economic integration and socioeconomic possibilities of new residents. One of the facts scarcely mentioned in the Globe’s rosecoloured “New Canada” portrait is the enduring connection between poverty and ethnocultural background (Kazempiur and Halli 2000). This is partly a product of obstacles to social mobility facing certain groups: those who arrive without investment resources and must rely entirely on the new locale, and/or those who are on the wrong end of a longstanding racialized stratification system in Canada (one that has slotted AfroCaribbean arrivants, for example, as labourers and domestics). (4) Residents’ relationships to former dwelling places: What were the circumstances of departure (i.e., exile or voluntary departure), and what are the possibilities for ongoing links through Internet access, telecommunications, and air travel? Consider the differences between the Haiti-toMontreal, the Jamaica-to-Toronto, and the Hong Kong-to-Vancouver links. In the first case, the status of exile or refugee may invite nostalgia, a sense of irrevocable loss that engenders a melancholic relationship to the new and old dwelling places. In the second, to a greater degree than the first because of relative political stability in postcolonial Jamaica, there has been an ever-increasing degree of circular transmigration due to factors such as cheaper air travel and the need to spread one’s family’s labour across two or more national economies in order to get by. The final example of Hong Kong-to-Vancouver has involved for the most part a group of unusually economically privileged transmigrants who invested in Canada in the 1990s before Hong Kong was returned to China. Hong Kong Chinese residents in and around Vancouver faced a backlash – Hiebert (2000, 32) mentions conflicts over Chinese “monster houses” – fuelled by their economic success.

concluding remarks: engagements in flux I have been interested here in thinking comparatively about the copresence, in different Canadian urban public spheres, of entangled “cultural communities.” If community is understood as what Jean-Luc Nancy (1996) calls the bringing into relation – if it consists of spatially and temporally contingent practices, not of blood and origin – then one way to approach it is to look at the changing articulation of cultural difference over time in a specific locale. For example, what was the

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process that led to Toronto’s now-defunct Desh Pardesh, a festival that refused the equation of culture with national origin by instead showcasing the “culture” of the South Asian diaspora? We might get a passing hold on “cultural community” at the moment of its affiliates’ engagement with the city. The character of this engagement changes over the course of the diasporization process, and thus so, too, does the very definition of culture. Engagements change even more radically over the course of generations, and so, too, must our concepts of cultural difference in Canada. I maintain that situating the dynamic scenes of difference in the particular time-spaces of urban contexts – staging scenes of interaction, relation, and dialogue between new and old residents and between all the many heres and theres – will show how complicated is the collaborative production of community and otherness. The variegating bricolage of influences continuously renews the city as a site in flux – precarious and unstable, subject to disputing claims and usages. Here, we are dealing with both visible or discernible manifestations of transnational connections and invisible links that contribute to the charges running the circuitry (interpersonal and private; imaginative and creative/inspirational). Both become part of public culture and of the locale’s sedimented desire,19 which then enter into dynamic dialectical tension with those aspects and usages of the city more directly connected to the nation. The distinction that I have suggested here between Toronto as a diasporized site and Montreal as a multicultural site (keeping in mind Mackey’s insistence that multiculturalism is inevitably entwined with biculturalism) is not a rigid one that prevents each from having characteristics of the other, nor is it likely to be one that lasts forever. The news that Montreal now outranks Vancouver as Canada’s second-choice immigrant destination, which was reported as I began this chapter,20 is a timely reminder that researching locales-in-flux forces an interpretive open-endedness to match that of cityscapes themselves.

notes 1 In the late 1990s, Toronto’s population tilted to more than 50 per cent nonEuropean descended, a fact that attracted much media attention at the time. 2 See Castells’s (1997) discussion of nodes and hubs in the post-1970s global economy. 3 Ken Wiwa’s two contributions describing idiosyncratic Toronto crossroads sites are notable exceptions. In one article, he describes Bloor St, West, now home to several Korean and Ethiopian Canadian businesses, and in the other he discusses a collaboratively run fusion restaurant (although fusion cuisine as a metaphor for cultural transformation never satisfies the appetite).

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4 I refer to those affiliations expressed not only by second- or third-generation immigrant-descended Canadians, but also by their peers descended from socalled Charter groups. Urban youth cultures, whose influence reaches the suburbs and small towns, are important means of cultural hybridization: the “Native hiphop” scene in Western Canada is a good example, as is the case of white, Anglo Montreal rappers like Eye 2 Eye, of how cultural influences traverse and cross-cut one another. 5 There are a few old flies in the “New Canada” salve. For example, one feature story on mixed marriages cites the percentage of “Canadians” who would not object to their close relatives marrying “a black person” (in this formulation, it is impossible for a Canadian to be black). 6 In the context of this chapter, the running joke about the Globe as “Toronto’s national newspaper” is actually full of possibility! 7 I refer to Virgo’s work later in this chapter as exemplary of a diasporic urban sensibility, but it is worth noting that Rinaldo Walcott, in his introduction to the anthology Rude: Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (2000), places Rude the film squarely in black Canada. 8 Both Virgo and YLook spoke at the “Diasporic City” symposium that I organized in June 2002 at the Culture of Cities Centre, Toronto. Their work is described in greater detail below. 9 In The House of Difference (1999), Mackey argues that the rhetoric of multiculturalism created a space for the construction of a “mainstream” subject position based implicitly on the previous exclusionary biculturalist model. 10 One proviso about confusing origin with community is the difference between groups of Haitian Montrealers, who emigrated during at least two distinct periods separating them by class and generation (Labelle and Midy 1999). 11 In this vein, one of the “New Canada” stories describes the marriage of a Roman Catholic Philipina Canadian and a Sikh Canadian: the couple had to marry twice, once in each “tradition,” ostensibly to keep the respective families happy. 12 This is not to deny that multiculturalism, as policy and ideology infuencing everyday life, continues to assert itself in Toronto through, for example, cultural funding, primary-school curriculum, and media stereotypes regarding the putative value systems of other cultures. 13 Paul Gilroy’s (1993, 2001) and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2001) works on connections between African and Jewish diasporas are notable here. 14 Vertovec and Cohen (2003) give a good overview of the literature in the introduction to their edited anthology. 15 Maria Rosa Menocal (2002) makes an important historical intervention in her study of the multiplicity and culture of mutual acceptance characterizing medieval Spain, in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted relatively peacefully. 16 This is where I depart from Rinaldo Walcott’s (1997) and Erin Manning’s (2003) uses of the film to talk about the political space of Canada. I agree with Walcott’s discussion of the many foreclosures of black Canadianness but not, on the

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whole, with his reading of Rude. I find some of Manning’s comments about Rude, the way that she reads it alongside Eldorado, to be provocative but find the proposition that “Clement Virgo’s Rude takes us on a journey through black Canada” (67) unsustainable. After the two references in the film’s opening riff, downtown Toronto overtakes Canada as a setting – quite deliberately, I think. The poet Nadine Ltaif expresses irreconcilable juxtaposition through the double vision of here and there: “(je) regarde Montréal. / Et je vois double: l’Est et l’Ouest. / Je prends ma tête entre mes mains je crois voir Beyrouth … / une guerre entre mes deux coeurs” (cited in Harel 1992). “Two decades after the first cohort of children of Bill 101 started primary school, riders of the most multiethnic bus and metro lines … will commonly hear teenagers conversing with each other in two or three languages. One will speak French, the other English; or, they will pepper a sentence in one language with words or phrases from one or two other languages … such linguistic patterns – which are reinforced by a surge in marriages across linguistic lines revealed by the 1996 census – could be an authentic sign of the emergence of a hybrid cosmopolitan identity” (Germain and Rose 2000, 247). There have been numerous efforts to map or conceptualize the role of desire in the city. Vidler (1992, 222) describes the situationists’ approach: “The situationist conception of the city as a site of nomadic movement and behavioural disorientation is perhaps best seen in the psychogeographic maps produced by Debord in 1957, which reconstructed metropolitan space as a system of zones linked by arrows or vectors of desire.” cbc Radio, week of 3 August 2003.

references Blum, Alan. 2002. Midterm report. Culture of Cities Project, Research Centre at York University, Toronto. – 2003. The Imaginative Structure of the City. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Brand, Dionne. 2001. A Map to the Door of No Return. Toronto: Doubleday. Castells, Manuel. 1997. The Rise of the Network Society. Vol. 1, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Malden, ma: Blackwell. Clarke, Austin. 1967. The Toronto Trilogy. Vol. 1, The Meeting Point. Reprint, Toronto: Vintage, 1998. Day, Richard J.F. 2000. Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge. Germain, Annick, and Damaris Rose. 2000. Montréal: The Quest for a Metropolis. Toronto: John Wiley and Sons. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Reprint, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1999.

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– 2001. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Hall, Stuart. 2000. “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question.” In Barnor Hesse, ed., Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, 209–40. London: Zed Books. Harel, Simon. 1992. “La parole orpheline de l’écrivain migrant.” In Pierre Nepveu and Gilles Marcotte, eds, Montréal imaginaire: Ville et littérature, 373–418. Montreal: Fides. Hesse, Barnor, ed. 2000. Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. London: Zed Books. Hiebert, Daniel. 2000. “Immigration and the Changing Canadian City.” Canadian Geographer 44, no. 1: 25–43. Kazempiur, A., and S. Halli. 2000. The New Poverty in Canada: Ethnic Groups and Ghetto Neighbourhoods. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing. Labelle, M., and F. Midy. 1999. “Re-reading Citizenship and the Transnational Practices of Immigrants.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 25, no. 2: 213–32. Levine, Marc V. 1990. The Reconquest of Montréal: Language Policy and Social Change in a Bilingual City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mackey, Eva. 1999. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. London: Routledge. Manning, Erin. 2003. Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home, and Identity in Canada. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Menocal, Maria Rosa. 2002. The Ornament of the World. Boston: Little, Brown. Mills, Emily. 2003. “Urban Music: Outside the City Limits.” May. http:// www.thecyberkrib.com. Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. 2001. Diasporic Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews. London: Routledge. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1996. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pollock, S., et al. 2000. “Cosmopolitanisms.” Public Culture 12, no. 3: 577– 89. Durham: Duke University Press. Sanger, Richard. 1998. “Not Spain.” In John Knechtel, ed., Open City, 276– 301. Toronto: Alphabet City. Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: New Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Vertovec, S., and R. Cohen, eds. 2003. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press. Walcott, Rinaldo. 1997. Black Like Who? Toronto: Insomniac Press. – ed. 2000. Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Toronto: Insomniac Press.

9 Reflexive Theorizing while Travelling through Montreal and Toronto The Global Cities Discourse, New Urbanism, and the Travel Essays of Jan Morris KIERAN BONNER Certainly walking about and traveling substitute for exits, for going away and coming back, which were formerly made available by a body of legends that places nowadays lack … Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different … There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits, hidden there in silence, spirits one can invoke or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 1984, 106–8

De Certeau, in his now famous essay “Walking in the City” (1984, 92– 3), proposes that spatial practices like walking both escape and resist the fiction of knowledge of the city developed through the “scopic drive” (“the lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more”) of the “space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer.” The totalizing tendency of this same “scopic drive” – “the desire to see the city,” as de Certeau himself saw it from what was then the World Trade Centre – has also been seen as contributing to a loss of a sense of place that is increasingly being noted by theorists like Auge (1995) and Casey (1997), planners like Jamieson, Cosijn, and Friesen (2000), and of course, in the “global cities discourse,” by people like Sassen (1991) and Friedmann (1986). This chapter seeks to recover both the problematic of the place that is the city and the problematic involved in understanding place: it will do so through engaging the arguments of the above positions as well as the writings of a well-known travel writer, Jan Morris,

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particularly in relation to her descriptions of Montreal and Toronto. The issue that the chapter develops is whether there are some theoretic and methodological stances that enable one to recognize the particularity of places like Montreal and Toronto, thus making available “a body of legends that places nowadays lack” (de Certeau 1984, 107) in, for example, the global cities discourse. That is, can we tease out a theory and methodology that enables us to see whether the places named as Montreal and Toronto display a particularity collected by their names – and this despite the diversity within each city, the similarities across each city, and the clearly recognizable globalizing tendencies occurring in both? What does it mean to ask about the name of a city, and what is the theorist’s responsibility in this asking? What is involved in developing an oriented relation to one’s name, whether Montreal, or Toronto, or Theorist? Can we tease out an orientation, through a critical analysis of the discourse on the city, that enables researchers to develop recognizable stories about the particular places called Montreal and Toronto and about the researcher who seeks to develop such stories?

th e o r y a n d t h e c i t y i n j a n m o r r i s The City is different. It is an artifact so varied, so profound, so baffling, so significant, so far and away the most fascinating thing ever created by man.” Jan Morris, “Big City Types: Making Sense of the Metropolis,” 1985b, 60

Jan Morris, a prolific writer about places, does not often generalize about that which has taken up much of her attention: cities. In “Big City Types” (1985b, 62), published in Encounter, she says that the “City,” which she satirically capitalizes and talks about in the singular, “is not really amenable to critics and theorists, even the most stimulating, for there is something indomitably organic to its very existence.” This is an ironic statement given not only the proliferation of theories and approaches to the contemporary city, but also her very own dedication to writing about great cities. She wrote about the particularity of cities as James Morris and continues to do so as Jan Morris. According to her own account, she has visited and written about the great cities of the world. “I drew an imaginary, figurative line between two cities, Budapest and Bucharest,” she says in a Paris Review interview (1997, 163). “All cities above that line qualify as what seem to me ‘great cities’ … so I resolved that before I died I would visit and write about all the cities above the Bucharest line … In the end I did.” Clearly, therefore, she cannot mean that cities are not amenable to description and characterization through writing. Already, even with this protest by Morris, we have a recognizable characterization of the city that

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rings true – that more than most made things, the city is varied, profound, baffling, and significant and is so to the extreme. This is not the kind of claim that one makes of another kind of living situation (e.g., small town) or of many other made objects (e.g., commodities). One way of reading what she says about theorizing the city is that the two are incompatible: theory and the city are like east and west; they can never meet. Certainly, when she says that the “City disregards its theorists; as they say in that supreme example of the genre, Cairo, the little dogs bark, but the caravan moves on” (1985b, 60, original emphasis), one could easily come to this conclusion. The city grows, develops, changes, and moves on in ways that are both baffling and significant, while theorists and critics bark noisily but, in the end, impotently. Yet to fully understand her claim, we need to know what version of theory she draws on. Perhaps she is saying that the city is so “indomitably organic” or so “bafflingly significant” that any theory proposing to capture or, in de Certeau’s terms, “see the city” will fail, that it will, of necessity, betray the city’s varied profundity,1 that the panoptical desire of theory is itself deconstructed by the baffling whole that is the city. However, this is just one – if dominant – version of theorizing. If we were to take another version of theory, one, for example, that asks us to develop an experiential relation to what we make – even if it is “an artifact, so varied, so profound, so baffling, so significant” – then the tension between theory and the city is not so much insurmountable as it is a strong problem (Blum and McHugh 1984; Bonner 1998). In this case, “the imaginative structure of the city makes reference … to the collective anxiety aroused by the question of the power and mutual and reciprocal relevance of place to life and the impossible need to calculate answers to such questioning” (Blum 2003, 12). Taking such an approach to theory, I suggest, will allow us to take into account both Morris’s passion for writing about cities and the irony in her claim that “the City … disregards its theorists,” a claim that she immediately appears to contradict by formulating (theorizing) it as “indomitably organic.” If we hear this as saying that the city has a life of its own that continually evades the “scopic drive,” then the city’s resistance to being seen from a godlike position (“a viewpoint”) is a fundamental limitation only for a “methodologically controlled investigation of an object by a subject” (Linge 1976, xx). Such a relation sees mastery of the object as the objective of theory: a more hermeneutic relation to research aims to be guided by the object to be understood (Bonner 1997, 71–104; Palmer 1969) and accepts the gap created by the fact that “there is always more than words can say” (Blum 2003, 39). As Plato demonstrated, knowledge of the whole (or city) “eludes us but we know the parts: we possess partial knowledge of the parts” (Strauss 1959, 39–40).

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Gadamer’s (1975, 276) notion of the “fusion of horizons” points to the kind of understanding “that is itself changed by historical change” and that is thus engaged rather than defeated by what lives and changes (i.e., the indomitably organic, the bafflingly significant). In this case, we have a notion of theory that recognizes that it, too, lives and changes. The hermeneutics of Gadamer (1975) and the dialectical analysis of Blum (2003), McHugh and colleagues (1974), and Blum and McHugh (1984) draw on a notion of theorizing that embraces, nay is inspired by, the gap between knowledge of the whole and the whole itself. In this case, that both the city itself and knowledge production (of the city) are influenced by history, culture, and community requires that the theorist embrace the reflexive method – that is, explicitly comprehend how a theory comprehends the city (Bonner 2001). From the point of view of theory’s desire for finality, for a complete account, for mastery, such a reflexive approach may seem quixotic at best or impotent and disappointing at worst – “the little dogs bark, but the caravan moves on,” as Morris says. Perhaps, from this point of view, one may as well write travel essays and novels, be a travel writer rather than theorize that which is “not really amenable to critics and theorists” – and thus simulate moving on with the caravan (i.e., travel writing) rather than barking like a little dog (i.e., theorizing). On the other hand, the approach practically and reflexively affirmed in this chapter rests on the idea that the commitment to theorizing the culture or emplacement of the city is to take the risk of appearing like a barking dog, or a Socratic gadfly (as per Plato’s The Apology). Through an application of the reflexive method, therefore, this chapter aims to tease out what is involved in understanding the particularity of places named as Montreal and Toronto.

place and the global cities discourse In order to enter the discourse on the relation between theory and the city, let us examine one of the prominent contemporary theorists of the city, Saskia Sassen. In her essay “The Global City: Strategic Site/New Frontier” (2000, 49), in a section entitled “Recovering Place,” she asks: “Why does it matter to recover place in analyses of the global economy, particularly place as constituted in global cities?” In answer, she says that global cities “are centers for the servicing and financing of international trade, investment and head-quarter operations” (55), what she calls elsewhere the command and control functions of global corporations (Sassen 1991). “Firms in all industries, from mining to wholesale, buy more accounting, legal, advertising, financial and economic forecasting services today than they did twenty years ago … Urban regions – core cities, suburbs, edge cities – are … often the best production sites

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for such specialized services.” She concludes: “when it comes to the production of services for the leading globalized sectors, the advantages of location in cities are particularly strong” (Sassen 2000, 55). At the other end of the globalization scale, she says, are “the most astounding mix of people from all over the world” (Sassen 2000, 48), the “others,” as she later refers to them. As she shows, there is an “interesting correspondence between great concentrations of corporate power and large concentrations of ‘others’ … A focus on cities allows us to capture, further, not only the upper but also the lower circuits of globalization” (52). It is necessary for urban researchers to recover place, therefore, because it “allows us to recover the concrete, localized processes through which globalization exists and to argue that a great deal of multiculturalism in global cities is as much a part of globalization as is international finance” (49). The study of the city (which, for Sassen, ranges from core cities, to suburbs, to edge cities), therefore, helps to teach the theorist that globalization is not just about the movement of capital by global corporations, but also about the movement of people who are often in contest with such economic developments. Sassen’s analysis of the effects of these two groups on the city is quite specific. Both are users of the city who make different claims on it and, accordingly, shape it in different ways. “For international businesspeople: it is a city whose space consists of airports, top-level business districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, a sort of urban glamour zone” (Sassen 2000, 57). She is less specific about the claims of Third World immigrants, women, and African Americans (these being the “others”), but she states that their claims concern “re-introducing the household and community as an important economic space” with public services, affordable housing, and informal networks and that, in general, they seek their right to be recognized as legitimate rather than marginal users of the city (53). “The new politics of identity and the new cultural politics have brought many of these devalorized and marginal sectors into representation, into the forefront of urban life” (58). She argues that the city needs to be a central focus of the study of globalization, as “both actors, increasingly transnational and in contestation, find in the city the strategic terrain for their operations” (59). Sassen’s analysis of the global city is interesting in terms of the features of the contemporary city that she is able to collect, and there is clearly a logic of comparison that allows her to put cities in relation to each other. Her logic allows her to locate three cities, New York, London, and Tokyo (Sassen 1991), within a set of “global processes” that, “in her view, underlie parallel changes in their economic base, spatial organization, and social structure in the 1980s, despite their different histories, cultures and politics” (Smith 2000, 55). For example, both

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Toronto and Montreal could be fruitfully researched and compared in terms of the ways that these global processes are taking shape in these different cities (see Belanger 2002 for such an analysis of the Molson Forum in Montreal). Comparison in this case is observable and, using social science methods, demonstrable. Doing comparison is not happenstance; it is based not on merely happening to find similarity or contrast but on the idea that “the structure of the city is to be explained by the pursuit of profit … modified by the actions of the State” (Stuart Hall, cited in Maciones and Parillo 2001, 250). However, what implications does this approach have for the recovery of place? What is the meaning of place when Sassen calls for its recovery in the analysis of globalization and the city? Let’s recover the notion of place embedded in her analysis. Both groups, she says, “make claims on the city.” For the corporate user, the city is a “strategic production site” where “finance and specialized services can earn super-profits” (Sassen 2000, 52). In practice, this means a focus “on the urban glamour zone.” For Third World immigrants, women, and perhaps in Canada’s case, First Nations, the city is a site for survival that, in practice, involves examining the spaces where such others are active – for example, “institutions for public and private assistance and the immigrant/ethnic community” (54). Whether for the corporate users or for the “others,” place connotes a site of opportunity: in the case of the travelling corporate user, place is for glamour and “superprofits”; in the case of the devalorized, it is for economic survival, legitimacy rights, and voice. The place of the global city is, in essence, the place of opportunity. Opportunity is clearly one meaning of the city and is an important way of looking at Montreal and Toronto. As New World cities, the hope of opportunity is constitutive of their history and development (Maciones and Parillo 2001); globalization represents a new turn in this narrative. Transnational organizations and transnational peoples, according to transnational theorists, are transforming these and other global cities. Jan Morris (1963, 252) noted this feature of Montreal in the 1950s: “The melting-pot function of Montreal,” she said, “makes for pace, commercial push, acquisitive gusto … a very paragon of capitalist zest. The whole place is exuberantly on the make – far more vividly, it seems to me than its sister cities across the frontier. Here you can see in a man’s eye’s the glow and gleam of ‘making good.’” Whereas in the 1950s the story of opportunity for the most part concentrated on European immigrants, now the story of Montreal and Toronto would highlight the opportunity for the “others” and the international businessperson as well as the contest between these in the pursuit of opportunity, which had the appearance of a zero-sum game. Toronto and

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Montreal, as world-class places, would show the same patterns of geographies of centrality and marginality that are evident in New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Sydney, and so on (Sassen 2000, 51) – although, of course, the localization of these geographies would be distinctive, and they would be characterized as second-tier cities, or “core secondary world cities,” as Friedmann says (1986), in relation to the shape and intensity of these global processes. In terms of our guiding question concerning the meaning of places named as Montreal and Toronto, we can see that the global cities discourse responds by saying that these names mean opportunity. From the perspective of this discourse, the travel writing of a Jan Morris would serve as a lively example of the processes highlighted by Friedmann and Sassen. This is typically the place that such writing, like poetry and novels, occupies in the scholarly discourse on the city. If Morris eschews criticism and theory of the city, critics and theorists of the city treat her work as anecdotal, which in scholarly discourse, in turn, is seen as serving a mere illustrative purpose – that is, “to ‘butter up’ or ‘make more digestible’ a difficult or boring text” (Van Manen 1990, 116). Ironically, as the global cities discourse would see it, Morris is the lively travelling companion as the caravan of global capitalism moves on. It is as though each voice – the viewpoint/solar eye and the anecdote – lived in two different neighbourhoods in the city, unwilling or unable to engage each other in dialogue because of their (ironically shared?) version of theorizing. In a discourse on the city that takes the voice of a viewpoint, experiential encounters like Morris’s appear to be particular, contingent, and indeterminate. However, from Morris’s point of view, the “City” itself is indeterminate (“varied, baffling, profound”) and the attempt to render that as determinate is foolhardy, self-deceptive, and powerless. Ironically, in eschewing each other, both share a similar notion of theorizing the city. Theory is universalizing, and the particularity of the city qua city is not amenable to such universalizing. In both cases, it seems, the city is nothing but a sign (Blum 2003). With the aid of this global cities discourse, we recognize that the identity, or culture, of the city is not something that is incorrigible and sovereign. Rather, the name responds to large powerful economic forces that shape its activities and organization. This new political economy discourse shows that the city is receptive to the transformative character of capitalism that, as Marx (1965, 38) first identified, led to the subjection of the “country to the rule of the town.” The vital nature of the city is revealed in how it absorbs the influence of external forces – in this case, forces that threaten to make any one city like all others. The vulnerability of the city is that in inviting “both actors, increasingly transnational

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and in contestation,” to see the city as “the strategic terrain for their operations” (59), the city subjects itself to the opportunism of its residents. In the tension between the city as durable (inviting us to preserve and conserve a world handed down from our own living past) and the city as the exciting location for the celebration of human productivity, the global cities discourse shows that the very growth and development of the city might also be a Faustian bargain, one that threatens to empty its name of signification. Yet perhaps what is also baffling about the indomitably vital nature of the city is the particular way that any one city absorbs these forces, an absorption that promises to reshape it rather than to merely empty its name of signification. When place is reduced to a site of opportunity, is it really a place in the full sense of what this term connotes? Clearly, this view of the city does not address place either in Auge’s (1995, 77) sense or in de Certeau’s (1984, 108) sense of the term as that “haunted by different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not.” Perhaps the logic of certain kinds of comparisons prevents the theorist from recognizing the particularity of the emplacement of the city? Is, as this school argues (Smith 2000, 46–69), the culture (i.e., particularity) of places like Montreal and Toronto becoming marginal or irrelevant? Does globalization contribute to a levelling of cities? Are the variety, profundity, confusion, and significance that, for Morris, comprise the essence of the city disappearing? Is this what is meant by a loss of place? If, as is suggested above, the place of the city is problematic for theorizing the city, perhaps this will not be such an issue as cities more and more lose their architectural and social distinctiveness. We will be able to compare and generalize cities as they approach uniformity. Belanger (2002, 73) raises this issue when she says (citing David Harvey) that “similar developments across North American cities pushes [sic] them into what Sharon Zukin (1991) has called the development of a generic North American model, or a homogenized model, where every city has its Planet Hollywood, its Imax cinema, its Paramount complex, and its new multi-purpose mega-entertainment complex, among other things.” That such developments are taking place is obvious to a visitor or a resident of both Montreal and Toronto; whether this will lead to a homogenizing model is another issue. Michael Peter Smith (2000, 71), for example, critiques Sassen’s and Friedmann’s approach precisely on these grounds. “The urban future following from the contested process of ‘place-making’” he says, “is far less predictable but far more interesting than the grand narrative of global capital steam-rolling and swallowing local political elites and pushing powerless people around that inevitably seems to follow from the global cities model.” That is, we may well be back to the issue of the relation of theory and the city:

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the lack of a sense of place in the particular places of Toronto and Montreal may well have more to do with the unexamined notion of power that is privileged by a theory seeking to “capture” its object (“scopic drive”) than it does with “capital steam-rolling.” What notion of power is Sassen’s approach grounded in? To answer this, let us return to the reflexive method. Reflexivity is not a methodological feature either of Sassen’s approach or of the global discourse scholarship generally. She takes the world of globalization into account but is not particularly anxious about taking into account how she takes the world into account. Yet, when the reflexive approach is applied to Sassen’s discourse, we see a relation to the city emerging that interestingly parallels that of the travelling corporate user and the “others.” For Sassen (2000, 49), the city is a place that allows the theorist to “recover the concrete, localized processes through which globalization exists.” That is, the city provides a position that allows the theorist to see better a concretization of the workings of the global economy and the contestation that is increasingly a feature of the workings of globalization. As a result, the city is also an opportunity for the theorist to see better the workings of globalization, providing the opportunity for clear analytic observation and analysis. The subjects of Sassen’s analysis and Sassen as theorist mirror each other. The city is not “different” in Morris’s sense but merely a strategic terrain for actors whose interest (or opportunity) mirrors that of the one who would theorize the city. In an interestingly solipsistic way, when Sassen argues for the importance of recovering place in the analysis of the city, she finds actors who are grounded in the same orientation and attracted by the same interest as shown by her orientation to theory, pointing to the danger of solipsism embedded in all theorizing (Bonner 1994). In this sense, when theorizing is treated opportunistically, attracted by the possibility of enhancing the scopic view, it is not an accident that sensitivity to the particularity (or otherness) of the object is not a prominent feature of its ken. It is precisely this concern about which reflexive inquiry is anxious.

th e “ n e w u r b a n i s t ” r e s p o n s e t o t h e l o s s of place The problem of a loss of a sense of place is also a topic in urban planning discourse. According to Jamieson and colleagues in Canadian Cities in Transition (2000, 478), it is one of the issues of contemporary urban design: “As people walk less within their neighbourhoods, they talk less with their neighbours … Identification with the place-based community in which they live is thereby diminished.” They go on to say that

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“combined with this is the visual similarity between and within urban districts. A Toronto subdivision looks much like one in Calgary or Vancouver [or Montreal]; downtown high-rises across the county reflect a similarity of design; and strip malls are the same everywhere. This loss of distinction has important aesthetic implications but also erodes the community attachment and pride essential to quality of life” (464). As formulated by these experts in planning, this loss of a sense of place has two elements: one has to do with a decline in face-to-face interaction in one’s neighbourhood, and the other has to do with the visual similarity of urban districts; one is social and the other is aesthetic; one has to do with the neighbourhood and the other with the planning and design of the city, which, of course, include the neighbourhood. This characterization already tells us something about these planners’ assumptions about a city’s having a sense of place. While the “scopic drive,” the “lust to be a viewpoint,” still pervades their discourse, place for them means more than a site of opportunity. As they describe it, having a sense of place comes from sharing a community with people who live in proximity with us (as against, for example, a community of those who work in proximity with us). Everyday life, rather than work, is the privileged site of “place-making.” Walking and talking, it seems, generate and preserve a sense of place, and here the experts connect with de Certeau, at least in conclusion if not in method and theory. Another element comes from taking pride in the distinctiveness of the design and plan of the environment. In this case, form is privileged over function. Yet, as we know, we live in an economic and political system that privileges work over life and function over form. In this light, when Jamieson and colleagues compare the design of downtown high-rises, subdivisions, and strip-malls in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver, they find a visual similarity and a sense of placelessness. The philosopher Edward Casey makes the same point about contemporary cities in his book The Fate of Place (1997, xiii), pointing to why people like Jamieson and his colleagues make place an issue. “Perhaps most crucially,” he says, “the encroachment of an indifferent sameness of place on a global scale – to the point where you cannot be sure which city you are in given the architectural and commercial uniformity of many cities – make the human subject long for a diversity of places, that is, difference-of-place that has been lost in a worldwide monoculture based on Western economic and political paradigms.” He goes on to formulate the loss of a sense of place as “not just a matter of nostalgia.” Rather, “an active desire for the particularity of place – for what is truly ‘local’ and ‘regional’ – is aroused by such increasingly common experiences. Place brings with it the very elements sheared off on the planiformity of site: identity, character, nuance and history.”

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According to Casey, the loss of a sense of place by virtue of architectural and commercial uniformity engenders an “active desire for the particularity of place.” But we note that his concept of place emphasizes not only local interaction and visual distinctiveness, but also “identity, character, nuance and history.” Jamieson and colleagues (2000, 467) address a place-making activity in contemporary design, which has emerged as a response to the loss of a sense of place in the contemporary city. The “new urbanist design philosophy,” they say, “seeks to remedy many of the most profound shortcomings of the typical postwar planning model by focusing on sense of place and community, by returning to traditional forms of urban design … Central to the new urbanist” vision, they go on to say, “is the desire to reinvest residential neighborhoods with a sense of place.” Toronto has its story with regard to this experiment with “neotraditionalism”: Cornell, a neighbourhood on the northern edge of the Greater Toronto Area (i.e., the northwest edge of Markham). Under the headline “Rating the Experiment,” the Toronto Star (2 June 2001) recently described this urban experiment: “Cornell heralded the arrival of the new urbanism in Ontario and its master plan was created by one of the movement’s pioneers, Andres Duany of Atlanta” (the designers of a similar development, McKenzie Towne, in southeast Calgary). “Old-fashioned neighbourliness,” said the Toronto Star (2 June 2001), “would be encouraged by pushing garages to the rear of lots and putting front verandas on homes. Parks and stores would be within a five-minute walk so people could leave the car at home. A cross-section of housing types, from starter to move-ups to retirees, would allow people to stay within the same neighborhood even as their housing needs changed.” “‘People are incredible,’ says Rene Torrington, a mother of two young children and who moved there 2 years ago, ‘and I don’t think we could have moved into a nicer area. We look out for each others children, the community likes to do things and if something’s going on, it’s fully attended.’” While there have been some problems in these new urbanist developments – for example, “Architect Duany’s previous new urbanism projects had been in the southern US where snow is not a factor and the first heavy snow in Cornell created problems” (Toronto Star, 2 June 2001) – Jamieson and colleagues (2000, 472) state that “the significance of the neo-traditional movement lies in the fact that it proposes an alternative to the typical, soulless, suburban development of the post-World War II period, and in this it stands virtually alone.” Ironically, the new urbanist initiative is also an international rather than local movement but one now attempting to redress the problems of placelessness created by, among others, the international influence of

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modernist architecture and planning. The humour and irony that pervade this discourse (i.e., neotraditionalism, an international movement that seeks to privilege locality) is reflexively noted here. One of the noteworthy elements in this new development, in general and in the Cornell case in particular, is the explicit embrace not just of the idea of a neighbourhood in the city, but also of the small town as the model of community. Larry Law, president of Law Development Group, which championed Cornell, says: “It was a brand new concept for Canada, but we tried to go back to the turn of the century to create a community with a small town feeling” (Toronto Star, 2 June 2001). The very name of the Calgary development, McKenzie Towne, also suggests that the small town is the model for providing a sense of place and community – as though the city, by its very being, were incapable of developing a sense of place and community. In the descriptions of both Cornell and McKenzie Towne, infusing these Toronto and Calgary communities with a sense of place is built on the idea of making these neighbourhoods “as self-sufficient as possible with regard to daily needs … McKenzie Towne will ideally contain a well-balanced combination of work, shopping, and living opportunities” (Jamieson et al. 2000, 470) This would achieve one of the prime aims of cutting down on the use of the car, thus making trips to the city incidental if not irrelevant. As with the global cities discourse, reflexivity is not a methodological feature of this planning discourse. While it explicitly rejects the typical soulless suburban planning, it does not take into account its own relation to the discourse on the city. Thus it develops a practice of place making focused on a return to the local to the point of the exclusion of city. Does the modern, even global, city make a sense of place problematic such that neighbourhoods have to be insulated from it? Is the story of the “soulless suburbs” a story of a living space hollowed out of spirit because of its dependency on the city for work, recreation, and associations made at commuting destinations. If this is true of Cornell, does it tell us something about the places named as Montreal or Toronto? Would we want to say that Montreal or Toronto are great cities because they have neighbourhoods that engender a sense of place by becoming as self-sufficient as possible from the city? Presumably, such developments, if successful, will provide a sense of visual distinctiveness and pride of place not available in the “soulless suburbs.” That is, we can live in a Greater Toronto or Montreal Area neighbourhood and resist engaging the (corrupting danger of the?) city by becoming selfsufficient. In what way does this new urbanist vision speak to the seduction of variety, profundity, confusion, and significance that, for Morris, are the mark of the city or to the “identity, character, nuance

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and history” that, for Casey, are the mark of place? Does the ground of this discourse, the “lust to be a viewpoint,” subvert its own apparent interest in developing a sense of urban place? Charles Long’s trade book, Life after the City (1989, 11–12), takes issue with people who describe city neighbourhoods as having a rural small-town sense to them. “Take Toronto,” he says, “Its denizens call it the most livable city in North America. And it is very nice; much safer than Detroit, prettier than Pittsburgh, easier for commuters than New York, Torontonians have a right to be a little bit smug, which is why I was feeling uneasy as the only out-of–towner at a recent summer barbecue in the comfortable suburbs of that city.” At the barbecue, “everyone raved about what a wonderful place” the suburban setting was. “Again and again” he says, “we remarked on these charms and inevitably summed them up by saying, ‘It’s almost like living in the country.’” “Think about it,” he goes on to say, “The luckiest people, in the most livable city, save their highest praise for a house whose greatest virtue is pretending not to be in the city.” He asks, why settle for “pretend” rural living when globalization itself makes it possible to choose to live outside of the city and thus to avoid all the time-wasting commuting and getting around? “It’s not that cities have become unlivable, although some have,” he says, “It’s just that cities are becoming unnecessary” (Long 1989, 15). While Toronto’s reputation as the most livable city suffered in the late 1990s, here we have the other side of the global city argument. If the mark of the place of the city for Sassen (2000) is opportunity, and the contestation over opportunity, then globalizing developments – technology, video-conferencing, e-mail, highways, suvs, and so on – could make the city unnecessary. The city is necessary as a terrain of opportunity, but, of course, if, through technological developments, the rural can also present opportunity, the city then becomes unnecessary. Is this the fate of the city as a place in the globalized age – that those who have choice will realize that the city as a place is unnecessary (and escape to the cottage)? And what is the theorist’s responsibility in trying to recover the city as a place and the place of the city? The problem of the loss of a sense of place has now become more problematic. Is the best claim that can be made of a city neighbourhood that it is a “pretend” small town or that it is “almost like” living in the country? Faceto-face interaction and visual distinctiveness are important for a sense of place in the city, but are they sufficient? What of the variety, profundity, confusion, and significance that, for Morris, are the mark of the city as city. If Montreal and Toronto were to develop more and more new urbanist neighbourhoods, would we know more about the urbane character of these places? Perhaps this is where questions of “identity,

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character, nuance and history” need to be part of the theorizing? And perhaps in developing the theoretic discourse in this direction, we will find an understanding that resists the bifurcation of theory and the city that Morris asserts and also find a way to address Morris’s stories of Montreal and Toronto as more than mere decorations for factualempirical or factual-historical scholarship.

privileging the concept of place i n th e o r i z i n g Place is problematic for theorizing not only because of dominant Western economic and political paradigms, but also because of our way of conceptualizing and experiencing place. In The Fate of Place (1997), Casey shows how the idea of place has been marginalized in Western thought. The “rich tradition of place-talk,” he says, “has been bypassed or forgotten for the most part, mainly because place has been subordinated to other terms taken as putative absolutes: notably Space and Time … Beginning with Philoponus,” he says, “in the sixth century A.D., and reaching an apogee in 14th century theology and above all in 17th century physics, place has been assimilated to space … As a result, place came to be a mere modification of space (in Locke’s terms) – a modification that aptly can be called ‘site,’ that is, leveled down, monotonous space for building and other human enterprises” (x). In the nineteenth century, place was “reduced to locations between which physical bodies move” (x), subjecting it to a concept of time conceived chronometrically and universally. “The triumph of space over place,” he says, “is the triumph of space in its endlessness, its coordinated and dimensional spread-outness, over the intensive magnitude and qualitative multiplicity of concrete places” (201). The problem of the loss of a sense of place, noted as a contemporary planning concern and as an outcome of globalization, has now been deepened. It is tied to the conceptual subordination of the idea of place to “putative absolutes” like “Space and Time,” the latter conceived universally and chronometrically. This conception of place as a “mere modification of space … a modification that aptly can be called ‘site,’” has led to places being considered building sites, an orientation that not only makes “identity, character, nuance and history” incidental, but also regards them as features that need to be eliminated or transformed into irrelevancy. Yet, if place brings with it the elements of “identity, character, nuance and history,” what approach would help us to recognize and conceptualize this? Casey (1997) suggests the following: “The most effective way to appreciate the importance of place again is not to approach it as a total phenomenon, to compare its virtues en bloc to those

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of space in a single systematic treatment. Such a totalizing treatment would lead to nothing but vacant generalities. What is needed is a new and quite particular way into place, a means of reconnecting with it in its very idiosyncrasy … The best return to place is through … [the] body” (202–3, original emphasis). To recover the placed character of a place, Casey, like de Certeau, recommends an embodied relation (like travel and walking) to place rather than an iteration of virtues in a totalizing and systematic treatment. The particularity of place – in this case, the city, its “identity, character, nuance and history” – more readily appears through a theoretic orientation that privileges bodily experience. One reflexive tradition of inquiry, hermeneutic phenomenology, has, among other traditions (e.g., feminist theory), drawn attention to the body not just as an object to be known or as the subject of the gaze, but also as a way of experiencing and knowing the world (Van Manen 1990). Unlike the scopic eye, which creates the illusion of seeing from nowhere, the embodied point of view shows its place and is therefore in a position to reconnect with place “in its very idiosyncrasy.” It has been said that “the traveler is an embodied subject” and that the travel writer articulates the “different experiences … inscribed at some level on the body of the traveler” (Cronin 2000, 134). This suggestion brings us back to one travel writer: Jan Morris. Perhaps, through the embodied inscriptions of Morris, we can get some sense of the idiosyncrasy of places like Montreal and Toronto. This requires having a different theoretic relation to such material. Her descriptions, like any anecdote, are to be valued not for “their factual-empirical or factual historical reasons” but are “rather like a poetic narrative which describes a universal truth … The paradoxical thing about anecdotal narrative is that it tells something particular while really addressing the … universal. The anecdote shares a fundamental epistemological or methodological feature with phenomenological human science which also operates in the tension between particularity and universality” (Van Manen 1990, 119–20, original emphasis).

m o r r i s ’ s sto r i e s o f p l ac e s ca l l e d m o n t r e a l and toronto As stated, Jan Morris writes travel literature about cities, among other places. She has crossed over many borders, not only between places, moving her home from England to North Wales, but also between genders – about which she wrote in two books (1974, 1989). She wrote about the particularity of cities as James Morris and continues to do so as Jan Morris.2 Montreal and Toronto, as well as Dublin and Berlin,

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are on this list, and she has written at least once on each of these cities. She has written two essays about Montreal, one while she was James Morris and the other – and the Toronto essay – as Jan. Her gender is not a topic in either of these articles, possibly because her self-characterization is that James, although masculine, was only superficially so: “inside, Jan insists, she was always a woman” (Phillips 2001, 15).3 Morris (1997, 181) describes her method as follows: “What I do is go to the place for a week and think about nothing but that place.” While she is in the city, she follows two precepts: “the first I draw from E.M. Forster’s advice that in order to see the city of Alexandria best one ought to wander around aimlessly. The other, she says rather enigmatically, she takes from the psalms … ‘grin like a dog and run about the city’” (162). She resists the “idea that travel writing has got to be factual” (153) and uses “anecdotes and stories in certain places to punctuate the narrative” (169). She describes her essays as reflections of a traveller, not as guides for the tourist. She searches for images, vignettes, and analogies and uses metaphors to capture the spirit of a place, pointing to the universal-particular intertwining described above. (However, for reflexive inquiry, unlike for Morris, the universal is something to be formulated and developed.) Her talent at capturing the character, personality, or spirit of a city has led to invitations by local magazines to write about their cities. Her essays on Montreal and Toronto were written for the Canadian magazine Saturday Night. In this case, natives, residents, and newspaper editors of the city invite a writer of travel literature to describe for them the character of their own city, perhaps to produce, as de Certeau (1984, 107) would have it, “the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity.” That is, a writer is invited by an agency (e.g., Saturday Night) that speaks for and to the city to speak to its citizens about their city. In the Toronto Star (14 October 1988), the prominent journalist Ken Adachi describes Morris’s approach as follows: “She catches places, as it were, off guard and captures their essence in a superbly fluent prose style – sometime to the dismay of its inhabitants, as Torontonians will remember from her rather acerbic 1984 portrait in Saturday Night magazine.” Capturing the essence of a place by catching it off guard suggests that she has the talent to see the city when it is just being itself, when it is not oriented to managing impressions (e.g., receiving an Olympic committee). As one who lived in Toronto for over ten years and has sojourned in Montreal often, her description of each city provides a striking chord for my own conversational relation to these worlds. Her characterizations of both Montreal and Toronto are therefore read (as they must be) against the horizon of my own experience.

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Morris (1990) deals with each city as she meets it. In the process, she notes features of Toronto and Montreal that cohere with what the theorists (Sassen and Casey above) state. Boulevard St Laurent in Montreal, the street that, “for generations, separated the French from the English in this city of two empires” has now become cosmopolitan in a way that has “made the street more or less identical with others.” “For where in the Western world,” she asks, “is there not a Lebanese restaurant, a Ukrainian baker, a Turkish confectioner cheek by jowl with a Korean greengrocer?” “For better or worse,” she goes on to say, “Montreal has become a complete modern city; the Big Bang syndrome, which is leveling cultures, transcending loyalties throughout the Western world, has even affected this profoundly ideological place” (45). Thus, as argued by Sassen and others, globalization or global monoculture has affected Montreal in the same manner as it has other world cities. Similarly, Morris (1990, 85) notes of Toronto that “multiculturism … turned out to be the key word, so to speak, to contemporary Toronto. As ooh-la-la is to Paris, and ciao to Rome, and nyet to Moscow, and hey you’re looking great to Manhattan, so multiculturalism is to Toronto.” In Toronto, she “was invited to try the Malaysian vermicelli at Rasa Sayang, the seafood pierogi at the Ukranian village or something Vietnamese in Yorkville” (86). Again, from the factual-empirical perspective of the global cities discourse, her descriptions here of Montreal and Toronto would seem merely to provide a colourful example of the levelling effects of globalization. Yet, despite this convergence of global and consumer cosmopolitanism in today’s global cities, she still recognizes significant differences in the culture and feel of Toronto and Montreal. Her descriptions are attentive to the difference in character and identity of the two cities. Montreal is recognized for its spontaneous charm and the passion of its inhabitants; even the anglophones, she says, are “not as shy as most other Canadians. They smile more easily, and perhaps cry more easily too. They are less numb than their counterparts in Toronto or Vancouver: in short, not to put too fine a point upon it, they are more like the French” (Morris 1990, 48). Here we see that in opting to “grin like a dog and run about the city” (Morris 1997, 162), she tests the smile factor of the local culture, giving us a nuance to highlight a local idiosyncrasy. While she says that “Montreal is already the most interesting city in Canada and … is rivaled in the United States … only by New York, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles” (Morris 1990, 54), Toronto is the capital of the unabsolute” (92). It is, she says, “a city of “undertones and surmises rather than certainties and swank” (90), among “the most highly disciplined and tightly organized cities of the western

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world,” (84), and, as a “haven of opportunity, it is unassertive” (85). While Montreal is the city of the “irresolvable cause” – and, she says showing herself, “there is nothing more fascinating than an irresolvable cause” (54) – the promise of Toronto is “promise of a more diffuse, tentative not to say bewildering kind” (85). Drawing on her smile test, she says, “It takes time … for the Toronto face, having passed through the several stages of suspicion, nervous apprehension, and anxiety to please, to light up in a simple smile” (97). She calls this the “oppression of reticence” and speculates about the cause of this flattening of the spirit (the flatness of the landscape, the numbing climate, the vastness of the lake). “Could it be the permanent compromise of Toronto, neither quite this or altogether that, capitalist but compassionate, American but royalist, multicultural but traditional?” (98). Thus, despite the convergence of both cities in terms of multiculturalism and consumer cosmopolitanism, and even though both have become, in their different ways, complete modern cities, Morris also sees them as profoundly different in culture, in street life, and in civic attitude. Even the immigrants, although they may in each city share the same structural features (minority status, economic insecurity, discrimination), express a difference of tone and emphasis when they complain about the dominant group. Whereas Torontonian immigrants complain that “the people is cold here,” that “people just mind their own business and make the dollars,” “the neighbours don’t smile and say hullo, how’s things,” “nobody talks, know what I mean” (Morris 1990, 98), the Montreal immigrants grumble readily to strangers about the French Canadians: “very jealous people,” “very puffed up” (53–4). That is, the dominant culture in Toronto is felt by immigrants to be cold, undemonstrative, and self-interested, while in Montreal it is felt to be vain, self-important, and possessive. Morris’s writing and travel make comparison possible, although she is ambivalent about the focus on comparison.4 She uses the method of comparison and contrast to tease out the particularity of each city. “Toronto,” she says, “is not like London, England, obsessed with its own history. It is not an act of faith like Moscow or Manhattan. It has none of Rio’s exuberant sense of young identity. It is neither brassily capitalist nor rigidly public sector … It is what it is, and the people in its streets, walking with that steady, tireless, infantry-like pace that is particular to this city, seem on the whole resigned, without either bitterness or exhilaration, to being just what they are” (Morris 1990, 89). Her “peripatetic existence,” she acknowledges, gives her “a precociously wide range of comparisons” (Morris 1963, 13). In this earlier Montreal essay, the ethnic diversity of Montreal in the 1950s is compared with that of Chicago in the 1920s, and its beat cafes, espresso

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bars, and highbrow bookshops are compared to those of San Francisco (252). On the other hand, when invited to see the comparison between Old Montreal and Bordeaux, she replies: “in fact French Montreal … reminds me of nowhere but itself” (Morris 1990, 40). She does not travel to cities in order to compare but seeks, through the methods of absorption, walking, and smiling, to get to the heart of each city that she encounters. For the reflexive theorist, Morris’s essays provide particular embodied descriptions of the experience of Montreal and Toronto. Thus they have the status that literature serves in researching lived experience (Van Manen 1990, 70–1). They evoke the quality of “vividness in detailing unique and particular aspects” of the life of these cities (70). Her anecdotes, stories, and pointed observations become a way to ascribe a personality or style to a place. Through Morris’s method, the strange particularity of a place becomes recognizable, sometimes uncomfortably so. Susan Kastener, a reporter for the Toronto Star (25 November 1990), said, in a Toronto-like fashion, of the characterization of Toronto: “All this we knew; had flinched, and bravely borne.” This self-confessed flinching and bravely bearing is, ironically, not unlike the “walking with that steady, tireless, infantry-like pace that is particular to” Toronto. Morris’s anecdotes and images of the city generate an “aha” response, particularly on the part of residents who often see her bringing their experiences into language. But what do these characterizations mean? In an interesting way, both cities have an in-between status in Morris’s writing, Montreal being the irresolvable cause and Toronto the permanent compromise. Yet for Morris, Montrealers live in one of North America’s most interesting cities, while Toronto wins second prize “in the Lottario of life.” The fact that Toronto is Toronto, and thus maintains and shows continuity in its transformation from Toronto the Good to Toronto the Multicultural, does not make Toronto a brilliant city. “It seems to me” Morris says elsewhere, “in time and in emotion, a city in limbo. Clean, neat and ordered, yes, but without brilliance” (Toronto Star, 14 October 1988). What standard can we uncover from her discourse that enables her to be so decisive in evaluating cities? We get an indication from her description of Montreal as the city of the irresolvable cause – “and there is nothing more fascinating than an irresolvable cause” (Morris 1990, 54). A place that is passionate about the struggle with its own identity and character is one to which she feels closer: “I like to live in interesting times. I like to be in a country going through some sort of torment. I feel closer to places like that” (Toronto Star 25 November 1990, D1). So passion and torment (rather than order, cleanliness, and neatness) are here standards

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for judging greatness, awarding prizes, and pronouncing on the spirits of the city. Morris, in her encounter with each of these cities, recognizes both the convergence of a consumer cosmopolitanism (as a consequence of the levelling effects of globalization) and the particularity of culture that emerges in its contest with this cosmopolitanism? So Morris (1990, 93) says that despite its cosmopolitanism, and in a way that is almost surprising to her, “Toronto is Toronto and perhaps that is enough.” For Morris (1997, 154), both cities have a sense of place – although, for her, a place is best understood in relation to its history, not just to its topography. Montreal, the city caught in the tension of the irresolvable cause, and Toronto, the city engaging in a permanent compromise between its past and future, constitute identities that demonstrate the power of “identity, character, nuance and history” (Casey 1997, xiii), although this power is subject to change.5 In this sense, the understanding that reflectively embraces the “fusion of horizons” (Gadamer 1975, 276) mirrors the constantly changing but still recognizable sense of place in cities like Montreal and Toronto. This concept, “fusion of horizons,” provides us with a way of understanding the kind of theoretic approach that helps us to see how Toronto and Montreal engage the changes that globalization entails, with the history and character that each city brings to the encounter. The idea of the “fusion of horizons” requires that we be open to recognizing changes in the city that are brought about, for instance, by immigrants or international financiers and also that we be open to continuities of identity and character, both of which are features of the indomitably vital character of the city, as a way of displaying the radical openness of reflexive theorizing. A horizon is always indeterminate: the “fusion of horizons,” which is a fusion of understanding, is always a determination within indeterminancy (339–41). Similarly, the horizons named by Montreal and Toronto are determinations within indeterminancy. The civility of Toronto’s permanent compromise and the passion of Montreal’s torment enable both cities to be recognizable as particular places, a recognition made possible by a kind of travel, which “(like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different” (de Certeau 1984, 107).

r e f l e x i v i t y, th e o r y, a n d the culture of the city For reflexive lived-experience research, Morris’s stories serve as a good counterpoint to the global cities discourse. Whereas the latter shows how the culture and identity of a city are weak, subject to powerful

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forces of globalization, Morris provides images of Toronto and Montreal that “lead us to recognize how any category [city] always answers to our normal and typical capacity to imagine the life (an experience) which it must name” (Blum 2003, 34). In this way, such literature can be seen to serve something more than the illustrative and decorative function that it typically serves in empirical research. Morris does this by rejecting a formal theorizing of the city, even claiming a kind of snide superiority to this formality, which she regards as a kind of futile practice. Yet, like the theorists whom she dismisses, she is one voice (in a diversity of voices), whose claim is best understood as a response of the city to the question of its own identity. There is something paradoxical about her holding fast to the very recognizable characters of Toronto and Montreal, while theorizing that the city qua city is baffling and indomitably organic. Montreal reminds her of nowhere but itself, and “Toronto is Toronto,” yet “the City is not really amenable to critics and theorists” (Morris 1985, 62). Her narrow view of theory (or, to put it more strongly, her lack of oriented reflexivity) leads her to a position where she is unable to recognize that she participates in the same enterprise that she sees herself as eschewing, an enterprise that seeks to recover a resolution to the forever irresolute question “what does the name (of the city) mean?” Her contradictory voice is to present a resolute response to the irresoluteness of the enterprise. To use her own metaphor, she does not see that the barking dogs are part of the caravan: the theorist is one of many voices in the discourse on the meaning of the name of the city.6 Whereas, for Sassen, the city is vulnerable to powerful economic and social forces, Morris provides popularly compelling images of the power of the culture of the particular city. Both are voices that respond to the question of the modern city’s relation to its own name. As voices in the discourse on the identity of the city, they show that the idiosyncrasies of the places called Montreal and Toronto are neither secure and incorrigible nor empty and nonexistent. Rather, the culture of the city emerges in the very contest over its name, a contest that the theorist reconstructs as a narrative about identity. Theory, in this sense, does not merely answer the question “what is Montreal?” or “what is Toronto?” but seeks a dialogue with those voices that would respond to such questions. The issue, therefore, is not whether the passion of Montreal’s irresolvable cause or the civility of Toronto’s permanent compromise wins first prize, as Morris would have it, or whether idiosyncrasies are impotent with regard to the powerful economic forces shaping the culture of these cities, as the globalization thesis would have it. Rather, passion and civility are a collective’s way of responding to the fundamental problem of the importance of developing a relation to one’s name.

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Passion, as Nielsen and colleagues (2002, 133–4) show in the amalgamation debate in Montreal, can lead to “suspicion, fear, anger, moral condemnation and revenge” as well as to a failure to reach “mutual understanding.” While such torment may be attractive to Morris’s romantic tendency, it privileges an understanding of a sense of right (or a cause) that is not subject to influence and dialogue. Civility without passion can lead to passionless agreements (and this may be Toronto’s weakness), while passion without civility can lead to passionate disagreements. In neither case is there a development that is transformative of collective self-understanding. As responses to the irresolvable problem of having a strong relation to one’s name, both cities repeat rather than renew themselves. This is the danger that each city reminds us of in responding to the importance of developing a relation to its name. “Theorizing makes problematic the question of the voice of the city through its desire to recreate this object as the terrain of many voices” (Blum 2003, 47), which themselves are oriented to responding to the fundamental and irresolvable issue of the need to develop a strong relation to a name. Reflexively, theorists aim to work out and to live up to their own names as they engage in dialogue with the re-created discourse of the voices of the city that respond to the issue of a strong relation to a name. To conclude with Gadamer (1975, 341), “to reach an understanding … is not merely a matter of total self-expression and the successful assertion of one’s own point of view, but a transformation into communion, in which we do not remain what we were.”

notes 1 In this regard, Morris’s view would cohere with that of urbanists like Jane Jacobs (with whom she expresses some sympathy) and de Certeau, although perhaps she would be more sanguine about the dangers of the “scopic drive” and the possibilities of inverting the “Panopticon.” 2 See Phillips 2001, 7–9, for an overview of Morris’s corpus of writings and its reception in the popular press. 3 This has brought much criticism from some feminists (Raymond 1979; West 1974) as essentializing gender. Phillips (2001, 17), drawing on Judith Butler’s argument, says that Morris exposed gender as a performance, which in turn denaturalizes and destabilizes it: “James appears as an ultimate drag artiste: she is wearing not only the clothes but also the body of a man, and like all good drag performers, she has rather overdone it, in a manner that exposes the performativity of gender. Morris’s portrayal of Jan’s womanhood is ostensibly more sincere, though as Morris’s critics have pointed out, it was equally caricatured in its portrayal of gender, and equally unconvincing.”

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4 Morris (1963, 13) has an ambivilence about comparing cities: “‘Comparison,’ George Santayana once observed, ‘is the expedient of those who cannot reach the heart of things compared.’” 5 For example, “Anglo society in Montreal may, recently, have lost some of its pomp,” but “it is not without its vigour” (Morris 1990, 49). 6 For another view of the contradictions in Morris’s writings, see Phillips 2001. He addresses a version of this paradox in one of the few pieces of scholarship to take up the writings of Morris. From the perspective of postcolonial writing and criticism, Morris’s texts, he says, “are internally contradictory and limited in their critical sensitivities … For example,” he goes on to say, “Morris condemns multiculturalism, admitting ‘I am not very multicultural,’ but she seems to forget that in much of the country the alternative is probably Anglo-Canadian or French Canadian cultural supremacy. Morris appears to contradict herself by regretting the inevitable assimilation of an Eastern European woman whom she sees arriving at Toronto airport. Regretting both assimilation and its only real alternative, Morris regrets the existence of (re)settlement society … [which] evades the complexity of colonialism and its legacies” (18, original emphasis). Phillips formulates this as ambivalence, “attraction to and repulsion from the imperial centre.” “Morris” he says, “lives and writes in the shadow of empire, as she does in the shadow of imperial masculinity.” He goes on to say that “this kind of in between space is at most a preliminary site of resistance” (19). Instead, he says, “it is important to consider what to do with ambivalence? How to go forward with it politically?” (20). He answers this by arguing for a “politically engaged reading – opportunities to turn ambivalent space to critical ends” (20), which means “disrupting imperial binaries: colonizer/ colonized, master/servant, white/black, civilized/savage, advanced/primitive, and so on” (6). For Phillips, ambivalence is strong when it disrupts imperial binaries but weak when it is itself ambivalent about such binaries. Thus Morris is ambivalent about the binary between Anglo or French Canadian identity and multicultulturalism, and such ambivilence suggests to Phillips that she shows “an attraction to and repulsion from the imperial centre, which [Homi] Bhabha diagnoses as the ambivalence of the imperial/colonial subject” (19). That the culture of cities thesis embedded in my chapter resists Philips’s interpretation – both of Morris and of the idea and practice of ambivalence – should be apparent. Reflexively, one could ask whether such a “politically engaged reading” does not unintentionally have the consequence of colonizing the practice of ambivilence?

references Adachi, Ken. 1988. “Jan Morris Girdles the Globe with Wit and Sensibility.” Toronto Star, 14 October.

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