CITY writers look at David Simon’s hit TV series The Wire – it’s depiction of urban crisis, and the roles photography, fiction and academia have to play in tackling it.
See also from this feature:
• Socio-spatial imagination and jargons of authenticity: The Wire and Baltimore – the city America left behind, Simon Parker
• The Wire: Things pictures don’t tell us. In search of Baltimore, Elvin Wyly
• The ivorine tower in the city: Engaging urban studies after The Wire, Rowland Atkinson and David Beer
‘At best, our metropolises are the ultimate aspiration of community, the repository for every myth and hope of people clinging to the side of the pyramid that is capitalism. At worst, our cities – or those places in our cities where most of us fear to tread – are vessels for the darkest contradictions and most brutal competitions that underlie the way we actually live together, or fail to live together.’ (David Simon, Creator of The Wire, [1. Simon, D., Prologue to Alvarez, R., The Wire: Truth be Told. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009. p. 4.])
The formulation is stark. Perhaps too stark? Is there room in it for the everyday realities and/or comforts of those living outside ‘those places in our cities where most of us fear to tread’, room in it for glimpses, feelings of a sense of community that is more than aspirational, a basis for real hope? Is there room in it for similar glimpses and feelings, though more obviously threatened by a sense of ‘clinging to the side of a pyramid’, of those living within the feared places? More room can and should be made but the starkness of the formulation is a necessary challenge to our understanding and to consequent action.
A special issue of CITY (Issue 14.5, October 2010) tested out the adequacy of this formulation and of our responses to it through an examination of a major exploration of life in one of the feared places, an area in the US city of Baltimore as explored by the author of the above epigraph, David Simon, and his associates in their massive TV series (available on DVD), The Wire. The challenge, Simon claims, is to develop an adequate understanding of ‘The City’, no less. It is a challenge, to:
‘how we in the West live at the millennium, an urbanized species compacted together, sharing a common love, awe, and fear of what we have rendered not only in Baltimore or St. Louis or Chicago, but in Manchester or Amsterdam or Mexico City as well’ (Simon, 2009)
…and to our understanding not only in the West, but extending, via Mexico City from the global North to the South.([2. In the same issue, Roy Scranton raised the question of what is involved in transferring the approach adopted in The Wire to US armed intervention in Iraq; ‘Going outside The Wire: Generation Kill and the failure of detail’ see article >>])
Whether in the North or South it involves uncovering ‘the darkest contradictions and most brutal competitions that underlie the way we actually live together, or fail to live together.’ In our ridiculously misnamed ‘knowledge economy/society’, are our ‘informational’ institutions, the media and the universities, up to the task? And is that knowledge connected to action? (See Rowland Atkinson and David Beer on the place of academia >>) Is this a dimension for which there is also little room (the struggle for personal change is there but is the struggle for socio-political change really as totally compromised as enacted there?) in The Wire and, indeed, in the university?
‘The city America left behind…’
In a fine but not uncritical appreciation of The Wire the writer Lorrie Moore ([3. Moore, L. ‘In the life of “The Wire”’, New York Review of Books, 14 October 2010.]) notes some of the many comparative characterisations of the series – with references to Greek tragedy and epic, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Melville, and to its possible status as a historical document – that David Simon has provided. These cannot be dismissed as hype but they do need to be weighed carefully. More to our purpose here are some of the formulations of the central concern(s) of the series put forward by Simon and in our feature. The one adopted above is that it is about ‘The City’ in all its promise and horror. Two more are the ones that guest editor, Simon Parker, adopts for our feature in Issue 14.5 – “The city America left behind’: Baltimore, The Wire and the socio-spatial imagination” – see end for full list of contents – (‘the city America left behind one of David Simon’s own formulations) and, in its subtitle, Simon Parker’s own, the reference to ‘the socio-spatial imagination’ (initially a reference to Wright Mills’s great and still challenging classic, The Sociological Imagination, but then extended when Geography was allowed into the analytic equation). A fourth is the one he adopts for his introduction to the feature, “Welcome to the urban desert of the real”.
Of these formulations, the weakest (though a useful starting point) is ‘The city America left behind’. The only city left behind? The whole city or part of it? The dumping agency is ‘America’? Who s/he?
The choice of analytic focus, ‘the socio-spatial imagination’, is strongly suggestive. A laudable choice but might Wright Mills have been critical of the style, sociology, and related analytic concerns to be found in this feature? Would the down-to-earth Mills have been satisfied with the appeal to fans, actual or to be, as an appropriate audience or with the somewhat arcane reference to ‘propaedeutic’ with which Parker begins and ends his introductory survey ([4. Simon Parker concludes his introduction by saying “We should therefore regard The Wire not as a closed text or a homily on how to make bad cities better, but as a propadeutic – an introductory lesson that explains how to develop a more holistic, structurally informed and closely observed critical urban studies”; CITY 14.5 page 495.])? There is much talk of the danger of spoilers in discussions of The Wire but surely the ultimate spoilers would be to trivialise or over-academicise our approach? Does symbolic change from the ivory tower to an ivorine one, suggested by Atkinson and Beer, mark a significant re-orientation in both the conceptualisation of sociology and urban studies and of the social function of the tower itself? Why the disciplinary parochialism – that having recommended films such as City of God, Elite Squad and When the Levees Broke that might extend the sociological imagination – shows no awareness, despite references to CITY, that they and related concerns have already received, and continue to receive, transdisciplinary attention here? ([5. Diken, B., ‘City of God’, City, 9 (3), pages 307 – 320, and Ruggiero, V. ‘City of God’, City, 10(3), 2006, pages 363 – 364; Catterall, B., ‘Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (12) Are the levees breaking? Apocalyptics versus Panglossians’ City, 12 (1), pages 132 – 143, 2008; Catterall, B. ‘Is it all coming together? Thoughts on urban studies and the present crisis: (15) Elite squads: Brazil, Prague, Gaza and beyond’, City, 13 (1), pages 159 – 171, 2009. See also from Issue 14.5 Daryl Martin’s ‘A poetic urbanism.’])
Why is it only a geographer, Elvin Wyly, who takes up the seminal study (which also gives a good deal of attention to photographic representation) of Baltimore by David Harvey ([6. See Harvey, D. (2000) Spaces of Hope for his “powerful and accessible visual account of Baltimore, blending numerical data, city photographs and narrative explanation in a tradition of unapologetic description” citing Elvin Wyly (2010) “Things pictures don’t tell us” CITY 14.5 page 504. See elsewhere here for an excerpt from Wyly’s article >> ])? Is geography that marginal for sociologists?
…Or ‘the urban desert of the real’?
Of the four formulations of what The Wire is about, we are left with the first and the last. The last, ‘Welcome to the urban desert of the real’, takes us back to – and forwards from – 9/11 and to Baudrillard, The Matrix and Zizek. This is territory that we shall revisit in 2011. Meanwhile, there is a particularly apposite passage in Slavoj Zizek’s immediate (four days after the event) characterisation of 9/11:
‘If there is any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the “centre of financial capitalism,” but, rather, the notion of financial speculations disconnected from the sphere of material production. The shattering impact of the bombings can only be accounted for against the background of the borderline which today separates the digitalised First World from the Third World “desert of the Real.”'([6. Zizek, S. ‘Welcome to the desert of the real’ (09/15/2001) Reconstructions. Available from: http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions/interpretations/desertreal.html (accessed 1/10/2010) This was the first of several versions that finally led to the book Welcome to the desert of the real (2002).])
What Zizek largely missed is the near-at-hand materiality of that desert. He conveys the so-to-speak immateriality of the existence of the more affluent, referring to sources such as Philip K. Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint (1959) and Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show (1998):
‘The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show.'([7. Ibid])’
If Zizek’s characterisation of the significance of 9/11 does not take in the full materiality of those not living in an idyllic, consumerist paradise, it does return us to our first formulation, ‘The City’. It returns us to our metropolises as ‘the ultimate aspiration of community, the repository for every myth and hope of people clinging to the side of the pyramid that is capitalism’, a phenomenon extending across the global North to the South. But is there no hope that these metropolises can be transformed?
Returning to The Wire, the dimension of social action is severely attenuated, in fact to the point of exclusion. And yet, as Wyly notes, following Dreier and Atlas,
‘many people are working to save the cities, through a variety of community, labor and environmental justice organizations. People are working in Baltimore, and in many other cities around the world in the growing Right to the City movement.’
Wyly outlines a pedagogy in which critical visual theory is linked to critical planning (in particular mentioning Peter Marcuse’s 3 steps – expose, propose, practice). It is, he continues, ‘hard to see these people … in the small sample of snapshots’ he offers here. Some indication of their presence does arise, though, from another snapshot from his archive that he has made available for our cover and frontispiece. At the bottom of the Stop Foreclosures poster is, in effect, a link to that presence:
www.StopForeclosuresandEvictions.org
Following that link, two organizations are evident, both politicized and for some, controversial: the Bailout the People Movement and the International Action Center. Under an entry for the Baltimore IAC, one paragraph in particular stands out:
Our city, Baltimore is suffering. Joblessness, foreclosures, evictions, utility shut offs and service cuts are making life unbearable. The good thing is that organizing has begun to turn this around; organizing that can give those who are voiceless and invisible a voice and face.
Bob Catterall, Chief Editor of City
Editorial to City, Vol. 14 Issue 5; see contents list below
Contents list for Issue 14.3
Editorial
Bob Catterall, Pages 487 – 490
‘The city America left behind’: Baltimore, The Wire and the socio-spatial imagination, Part 1.
Introduction: Welcome to the urban desert of the real Simon Parker, Pages 491 – 496
Things pictures don’t tell us: In search of Baltimore Elvin Wyly, Pages 497 – 528
The ivorine tower in the city: Engaging urban studies after The Wire
Rowland Atkinson; David Beer, Pages 529 – 544
From soft eyes to street lives: The Wire and jargons of authenticity
Simon Parker, Pages 545 – 557
Going outside The Wire: Generation Kill and the failure of detail
Roy Scranton, Pages 558 – 565
Forum
Two world urban forums. What happened in Rio? Where does it lead? A discussion
Adrian Atkinson; Barbara Lipietz; Marcelo Lopes de Souza; Shipra Narang Suri Pages 566 – 585
Debates and Commentary
A poetic urbanism: Recreating places, remade to measure, but from the inside out
Daryl Martin Pages 586 – 591
