Preface to a book in draft, People at Work In Industrial Los Angeles or The City as a Composed Synergetic Syzygy
People at Work In
Industrial Los Angeles or The City as a Composed Synergetic Syzygy
Contents
Preface
I.
On Syzygy Street, The City in Mind
Analogy
is Destiny
Thinking
and Analogy Thinking for a Living
Reading
the Inscrutable; Writing to Go On in Life; Describing, …
Existential
Doubts
Out
of Brooklyn
II.
Composing the City
Seeing
and Hearing
Diego
Rivera’s Detroit
Projects:
Around Subway Stations, Neighborhoods as
Transit-Oriented Development
Non-Fashion
on the Streets of New York City
Rephotographing
Marville’s Paris of 1870
Placing
Sound
Words
and Pictures
Talking-About
to Make Sense
The
Art of Describing
Epilog
Appendix: Imaging Technology as
Philosophy
III. A Composed Syzygy
The
City as an Analogy
Thinking
About Cities
The
City in Gravity, An Analogy
The
City as Nature (as in Natural Science)
IV A
City of Immigrant Angels: People at Work in Industrial Los Angeles
200
photographs
Epitome
Notes
*****************************************************
Preface:
This book is ostensibly and in
page-count photographs of people at work in industrial Los Angeles, California.
Yet, it begins with about sixty-fivethousand words and perhaps twety-five thousand
more on photographic technology and even some poetry—all about how I think or
figure out what I am doing. I have come to believe, the latter motivate the
former. Of course, you are welcome to
start with Chapter Three, or the preface to the photographs, or the photograph
themselves. I cannot, and hence those sixty-tfive housand words.
I am a professor
of city planning. I think for a living, trying to make sense of what is right
in front of me. As a complement and a
compliment, about twenty years ago I started to systematically photograph the
city, my cities, Los Angeles and New York. At first, 800+ storefromt houses of
worship—for Los Angeles is the Jerusalem of Pentecostalism. More recently, the
neighborhoods around Subway stations in my natal city, New York City, often at
the ends of the lines.
I
am thinking about how cities are represented, visually and aurally, and how to
make those pictures and sound clips richly meaningful. How to talk about or
write about what I see or hear is a challenge, at least for me. I have
experimented by writing poems about paintings. In the appendix to the second
chapter, I treat photographic technology as philosophic.
What
is striking is how pervasively a city is analogized to something else,
sometimes something rather abstract and mathematical, sometimes a tree or a
beehive. The city seems to welcome a wide range of analogies, it is so
difficult to get one’s arms around it.
As
for the title: a syzygy is an analogy
of analogies, synergetic refers to
the surprising consequences and meanings of such syzygies, and composition is the fact that the diverse
aspects of a city hold together, for the city is an identity in a manifold
presentation of profiles.
The lesson here is that thinking is
fruitful, but the fruit it bears are more about ourselves than the city itself,
its remaining autonomous, escaping our arms. Yet, what we can get hold of is
for us a revelation of our culture and knowledge.
I.
On Syzygy Street: The City in Mind
Good. Give me one example. That was for me: I
can't understand anything unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific
example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I'm kind of
slow and I don't understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these
"dumb" questions. Is a cathode
plus or minus? Is an ion this way, or that way?
But
later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he'll say
something and I'll say, “Wait a minute! There's an error! That can't be right!
The
guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the
mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the
beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?”
He
thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that's not what I'm doing. I
have the specific physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know
from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation
says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump
up and say, "Wait! There's a mistake.” [i]
(R. P. Feynman)
I think for a living, figuring out the world so that it
makes sense for me: analogy and analytic description are my modes.
Whatever is in my air—ideas, notions, reading,…--may condense into a project. I
work busily on condensation, but I must be patient for the appearance of the
condensate and its orderliness.
By having a variety of perspectives or
analogies onto a situation, whether it be social or economic or cultural, in
effect something like a computer aided tomogram (a CAT scan), I get a better
sense of that situation, and I am more likely to feel I really understand it.
Yet, there will be blind spots or aspects I cannot get hold of, nonetheless.
I’ve always been trying to figure out
(some of) the world.
Or, put differently, albeit saying much the same:
It seems that I think in terms of
analogy, and analogies of analogies (what is called a “syzygy”). The idea is to
try to get at what is really going on, behind all the rigamarole, by seeing
what is going on from various perspectives, an “identity in a manifold
presentation of profiles.” I want to figure out the world I encounter, make
sense of it, albeit imperfectly, in terms of what I already understand.
None of this is abstract. Always, a small
number of ideas or models or notions are in mind and employed. They are diverse
but for me they are at hand, given my training and earlier work.
Surely, this book is about how one person thinks and
understands the world. In part, there was that remark from my ninth grade
English teacher, Mr. Webb, who told me that I think in analogies. Who knew? In
part, I am the guy who is a perpetual outsider, and wants to be let in, and so
I pay close attention in a seminar or in reading a paper, trying to figure out
as soon as possible, What’s Up? I have little patience, as such, and I like to
try to figure out what is going on, then and there. And I am willing to ask a
speaker, Do I understand what you are doing, by saying…?
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