Thoughts on Mark Kingwell's Concrete Reveries

In case you haven't noticed, except for a couple of quick hits on the invaluable Parabasis, I've largely lost interest in the "does-theater-have-a-future" debate. It would be more salient, in my opinion, to ask if theater has a present. But, to the extent that the art form is going to keep developing, it will probably be by following the lead of art-forms that are not generally characterized as theater, per se: popular music, performance art, comedy, neo-Vaudevillians like Tyler Perry, theater as social work, big festival events like Burning Man, and so on. These events, unlike much of what currently gets produced in theaters large and small, often take advantage of the liveness of theater, the fact that it exists in four dimensions, the fact that it is finite and local, executed by live humans for other live humans, with minimal (or at least peripheral) technological mediation. For decades now (or at least since the American Right won this relatively insignificant battle in the culture wars), the institutional wing of the art form has been mired in the 19th century, a time in which certain conventions ("realism," the "fourth wall") mainly existed because their superior technological antecedents hadn't been invented yet.

One of the key aspects of the future of the art (again, assuming there is one), is space: not the grand black void outside the atmosphere, but design in three dimensions, in architecture and psychogeography. I've always been a huge fan of the O'Neill Playwrights' Conference's "dream design" meetings, in which playwrights and designers get to discuss the play, and I've always wanted to develop a piece with a designer. I also had a great time writing text for the site-specific We Give Up, which incidentally used quite a bit of Concrete Reveries as inspiration. In the Pataphysics Lab I took with him, Mac Wellman recommended we all read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, not incidentally also referred to by audio auteur Gregory Whitehead and by philosopher-of-architecture Mark Kingwell, in his book Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City. Kingwell is a contributing editor to Harper's, where he regularly writes about architecture and city planning (and where I first read earlier iterations of a few of this book's chapters).

This book is a vital read to anyone concerned about space, about architecture, and what it does do us. I've long been obsessed with the idea of the Baudelarian flanêur who wanders around the city looking for inspiration, Henry David Thoreau's treatise on walking, and Walter Benjamin's Marxist/kabbalistic vision of the city as a living being with a language that can be read. I've been obsessed with the wanderlust and psychogeography of the Beat writers, the paranoid soulessness of the late-capitalist landscape as described by J.G. Ballard, the spectacular aspects of the modern city as described by the Situationists. Kingwell covers all of these, as well as the 20th/21st century starchitect system in which celebrity architects, stoned on Ayn Rand, build epic buildings and skylines that are largely indifferent to the people living in and around them. One of my favorite sections of the book is a travelogue from Shanghai, appropriately titled, "The City of Tomorrow":

"Ask anyone here and he or she will tell you: Shanghai is the future. But that is not so. Shanghai is not the future; it is every future, a palimpsest of urban visions, a history of what is to come. Visiting Shanghai is a journey to the very near future by way of the very near past, a fact that contributes to a strange form of urban vertigo. You may never have been here before, but you are always already here... To call the city science-fictional is correct but too general. Yes, there are geodesic domes and massive cantilevers and huge expanses of neon and glass. But the landscape offers a full spectrum of sci-fi echoes and allusions. There are Buck Rogers ray-gun finials on the China Life building in Pudong. Portholed Jetsons-style flying saucers hovering atop the Lan Shang Building and the JJ Oriental Tower in Pudong. The knifing faceted slash of Tomorrow Tower is like Darth Vader's headquarters designed by Japanese toy freaks... Down at street lever, it is impossible to view the city in anything other than cinematic terms: the Blade Runner globalization jumble, with some Terminator 2 overtones, of rickshaws and noodle stands washed in rain-softened neon or the Technicolor sunsets of pollution-- all dwarfed by slabs of steel and glass stretching eight or nine hundred feet into the night sky above...

Pudong skyline at night

"The press of humanity here is multidimensional, omniolfactory, inescapable and loud. Like its citizens, Shanghai's sights, smells, and sounds crowd in form every direction, thick walls of sensory noise that snap out signals as fast as your learning-curve brain can take them: an English sign in purple neon, the mingled scents of frying pork dumplings and rotting watermelon rind, the unmistakable hrnfft... hrnfft of a businessman in gangster-cut suit and broken-down leatherette loafers voiding his nostrils onto the sidewalk, thumb pressed to either side in turn. Dirty water and fish guts spill into the street from sidewalk stalls that cluster under spaceship high-rises and five-star hotel ballrooms, all washed in KFC and McDonald's neon, Prada and Gucci signage, everywhere in the inevitable green of that globally ubiquitous coffee chain. A tiny man with the weathered face of an ancient god under a Nike toque huddles in a corner selling seven mismatched batteries and a bundle of wilted scallions."

Kingwell's description makes the reader both want to go to Shanghai immediately and to avoid the place like the plague.

While the first half of the book consists largely of philosophical travelogues to Shanghai and New York City, the second half consists of a series of literary and philosophical meditations on space and the city. One of my favorites, from Chapter 6, "The Thought of Limits":

"There is an inside, so there is an outside, and even if the outside means danger or risk or the unknowable, we long to explore it, to spill out. (Samuel Beckett: "The whisky bears a grudge against the decanter.")"

Organized space, in other words, is a metaphor for our restlessness, for our paradoxical need to contain and define our world and simultaneously to rebel against that containment and definition (NB my insistence above that the future of theater is not theater).

Another favorite, on mapping, from Chapter 7, "The Limits of Thought":

"...[A]ccuracy can... begin to control the determination of human ends rather than serve existing ones. The idea of accuracy becomes self-fertilizing and perverse. We might put the point of this way: abstract space is what happens when a logic of representation takes on a life of its own, rather than serving the projects of life. This is, to be sure, reducible at the margins to absurdity, as in the Jorge Luis Borges tale of the country so bent on accurate mapping that it commissioned a 1:1 map that, when completed, lay over the ground like a carpet. All maps, even highly accurate ones, remain fantasies of representation, and the concepts of accuracy and precision themselves subject to important limits.

"Even today, when mobile communications have more and more rendered the idea of location irrelevant, the first question most people ask of a cell-phone interlocutor is, Where are you? It doesn't matter, and yet it matters-- even as talking on the phone in the first place, that disembodied act, seems to give people a sense of their own solidity, their existence confirmed."

And on security, from Chapter 8, "The Imaginary City":

"Lately, in the form of security crackdowns of mounting desperation or violence, [the] failure [of urban projects of control and sanitation] is revealed in vivid colors. For example: In the wake of the Paris banilieue riots of 2004, Parisians began a fearful dialogue about the way the streets and districts themselves might be configured to minimize internal violence-- a direct reprise of the hausmannization project analyzed by Walter Benjamin. A century earlier, Baron Hausmann had insisted on the creation of wide boulevards inhospitable to guerilla harassment but well suited to cavalry charges: the lovely Paris we all now know. But the new version of the security project is shot through with contradictions unknown to Hausmann, not least the looming prospect of what Paul Virilio call the panic city, the city structured and premised on fear of the other. A city of portals and barriers, vertical slums and vertical gated communities, security systems and patrols. A city where we witness, in Virilio's words, the twilight of place, because there is nowhere that is not already surveilled and secured."

The book is laden with gems such as these, and should take its place beside The Poetics of Space, Benjamin's Illuminations, Peter Brook's The Empty Space, and Richard Foreman's Unbalancing Acts for anyone who wants to consider live theater as a spatial, architectural art.