potlatch

the multiple spaces of Manhattan

Manhattan ought to be one of the simplest places to navigate. Its grid, together with its vaguely oblong shape, give it a rational, calculable feel to newcomers, in which the rules are first learned and then applied. The formula is not quite as sophisticated as Washington DCs, in which building numbers on the avenues correspond to the nearest cross-street (so 1254 Avenue K will be near 12th Street), but it is good enough.

Then the rationalism begins to slowly unravel in a curious way, that leaves one with a feeling of something mischievous and disorientating, but without ever quite descending into the pure a-rationalism of a historically contingent lay-out such as London's. It begins with the more renowned pieces of rule-breaking, such as the West Village, where streets illegally cross each other, rather than avenues (as in this map). But it advances as one begins to realise that there is not just one rationalism at work, but several and they are at play with each other.

Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space identifies three ways in which space is produced. There are 'spatial practices', namely the routines through which we act to produce spaces in a certain way (e.g. commuting). Then there are 'representations of space', such as maps of one sort or another or photographs. Then there are 'representational spaces', the spaces we deliberately create to carry meaning such as parks. I imagine Lefebvre has been endlessly used to assess Manhattan, and apologies if I'm going over old ground. But the 'representations of space' that exist in Manhattan are particularly unusual.

It strikes me that modern representations of space generally involve a reasonably neat split between euclidean geometric maps and user-centric maps. So in London, we have overground spatial practices supported by the 'accurate' representation to the left and underground spatial practices supported by the famous, 'inaccurate' representation below it. (One might be tempted to say that these two images are both 'of' roughly the same part of London, but, in a faintly Wittgensteinian sense, it would be unclear exactly what one meant by that.) Streets are represented in euclidean terms, that is, in terms of where they 'actually' are, the direction they 'actually' point in, and with a large variety of other representations alongside them, to allow for the user to determine their own uses of the city. It's not inconceivable that an international consultancy, say, may produce a 'business map' of London, in which space was re-represented in non-euclidean, purely use-oriented terms for a businessman who had specific needs and no interest in the city. But by and large, euclidean geometry is what is used to represent the various potential objects and uses of the overground city. The tube map, on the other hand, is entirely different, with the only euclidean limitation being that lines cannot be represented as being headed in a direction more than 45 degrees from their 'actual' direction.

Now take Manhattan. Here the two are blended into one another, the implication being that the city is so neatly rationally organised that there is no need to split a user-oriented map of the subway from a euclidean map of the streets. After all, isn't the whole city planned around ease of use? And this is where the multiple, playful and mischievous rationalisms start to pull apart from one another. Thanks partly to the woefully bad signage on the New York subway, there is little clear distinction between what is going on underground and overground. 'Second Avenue' station has an exit on 'First Avenue' avenue, and both are indicated in an identical font on the station platform itself. Without a clear split (as in London) between what Manuel Castells calls 'the space of flows' (such as a subway) and 'the space of places' (such as a physical street), the subway user experiences a disorientating middle ground in which space is neither user-friendly nor quite euclidean either.

What makes this all the more extraordinary is that the same is true overground in Manhattan as well! The vast majority of euclidean spatial representations of Manhattan are, in orthodox geographical terms, entirely false. The recognisable map of streets and subways above shows Avenues running, as common parlance has it, 'North/South' and the streets running 'East/West'. But if you look at the genuinely euclidean representation of this same space on the left, you'll see that the angle of the streets is so far out from this division, that things could almost be spoken of the other way around. 'North' is actually 'North-East', and 'East' is actually 'South-East'.

The representations of space are therefore rationalist, without comitting to being 'true'. As yet another act of collective solipsism and surrealism, Manhattan creates its own space that sits outside of the distinction between euclidean-geometric space (orthodox maps) and user-centric space (such as the London tube map). Had Manhattan been a great naval power rather than London, the 'North pole' would presumably sit somewhere in Germany, a projection of a grid that is simultaneously rational and yet arbitrary.

Finally, as three forms of rationalist-surrealist space sit inter-mingled with one another (the flows underground, the grid overground, orthodox geography), the obliviousness to any clear distinction between the three is played out in the failure to construct different symbolic codes for each one. For instance, should one be on the platform of 4th Street subway station (some of which is on 4th street), notions of 'north' and 'south' multiply, but never quite distinguish themselves from each other in terms of signs, linguistic or otherwise. It is all enfuriating and mesmerising.

the public sphere as confessional

As we near year-end, it seems appropriate to do some 2007 thematisation. Was this finally the year when we learned to love someone or other? Will it go down as the year when such and such went mainstream? Yes, I'm sure it was and it will. But allow me to make a small contribution to the feast.

Here are two stories that made big headlines this year - not Maddy-sized headlines, but big nevertheless. Firstly, there was the controversy over whether the Queen had stormed into a photo shoot or out of one, which eventually led to the resignation of the BBC1 Controller. As a consequence of this, the boss of the BBC offered an amnesty to documentary producers to come forward and confess their sins (I quite like the image of them doing this as group therapy. Imagine lots of men in wacky glasses sitting in a circle, taking it in turns to disclose their terrible guilt - "My name is Joe Bloggs, and during the filming of our hit how-clean-is-your-dog-kennel-makeover phone-in contest, I secretly used an Alsatian to play some of the scenes that had in fact involved a labrador!!! I'm sooo sorry!!!!"; cue sobs).

The point here was not - I hope - that anyone reveres the Queen sufficiently to view her irritation as cause for panic. The point was that people inside the TV industry knew that it was riddled with this sort of thing, as a direct consequence of the viewers' demand for programming that fuses 'factual' and 'entertainment' (along with the obvious contradictions involved with trying to sell tv shows to viewers as participatory activities). Stories started to surface not through investigation, but through confession.

Secondly, there was the scandal over the lost data, containing details of 25m child benefit claimants. Clearly the consequences here are potentially more severe, but in other respects it was a similar kind of story. It took a major increase in scale to bring it to the attention of the media, but I truly wonder if many civil servants were all that surprised. Despite the very minimal interest that senior e-government experts have in privacy arguments, those who have a technical responsibility to handle this data must surely have been worried for some time. Without some per se commitment to defend the integrity of individual identities, and not merely an instrumental or evidence-led one, it is surely inevitable that eventually incentives to do so will collapse.

So a confessional is required. And low and behold, Ruth Kelly (who must be quite practiced at it) confesses to the  loss of 3m records from the DVLA last May. It would stand to reason that more similar stories will emerge over the next couple of weeks, leading to the announcement of a cross-cutting independent review of the government's entire information architecture, which will conclude several months later with a headline recommendation that we need another re-branding of  the e-Government Unit.

I suspect that this could become a model for public policy debate: public sector technocrats cut corners but hide this behind the language of being 'flexible' and 'innovative'; public sector technocrats start to get a little nervous; big cock-up occurs and public throw up hands in horror; various other public sector technocrats emerge sheepishly out of the bushes to reveal their shared sins; review takes place, before the process starts all over again.

Why is this happening? Two reasons spring to mind immediately. Firstly, there are contradictory values at work here, especially in the irrational demands of the public. To use the television example, people want television to reveal reality, but never to reveal it as dull. Or to use the e-government example, people want perfect, personalised services (or so the government claims), but do not want to take any of the risks to security that go with this. A reliably-filmed documentary would bore the pants off people, just as a reliably-performed public sector bureaucracy would frustrate the pants off people. People want things fast, flexible, groovy, NOW, but they also never want them to fail. People need to grow up.

The second aspect of this relates to what is sometimes loosely called 'the information society' (amongst other things). People have spent some decades speculating as to what effect the internet, ubiquitous surveillance and abundant information would have on how politics is conducted. One thing is now very clear: these technologies offer very little assistance to governments in their efforts to control policy outcomes, indeed they sometimes undermine these efforts, but they greatly increase the risks attached to failure and the chances of those failures becoming publicised. I guess this is what others have described as growing complexity.

One solution to this is to devolve accountability to places where it more logically lies (and I see no reason to assume that this is automatically more local to where the individual happens to live). This is all very well, but how do you get the media or the public to play ball? Being answerable for cock-ups is something we expect of public-facing officials and politicians, even though this is in many respects a less and less reasonable expectation. After all, who else is going to speak on behalf of an error, when the error is endemic to a culture in which information is hurtling around in a scarcely controlled fashion? Certainly not the private sector company that first demonstrated how the corner could be cut (aka 'efficiency saving achieved'). On the other hand, no politician can stand up and risk appearing conservative by suggesting that sometimes we can achieve greater certainty through producing and sharing less information. Instead, the cameras, cables and computers are left to whirr away, creating a blizzard of misplaced representations of everyone from several million benefit claimants to the head of state.

Which leaves us with the politics of confession and forgiveness. An error occurs, that was ultimately somewhat inevitable, leading figures to emerge in public to confess to these errors, usually because an informal auditing process was about to sweep them out of the woodwork anyhow. These same figures then spend several weeks trying to hang on to their jobs. The question looking forward, if we insist on playing this game, is whether forgiveness could ever become a significant factor in British public discourse.

Update
Ministers 'forced to admit' on this occasion that they don't know what data has been lost by 9 NHS trusts.

it was a bad article. i read it.

I went to private school. I attended English lessons. They explained to us how to create tension. It's simple. You just write in short staccato sentences. Why use a sub-clause when you can use a full-stop instead?

But there is a problem. Writing in short staccato sentences may indeed create tension. But it also creates unutterable fury on the part of the reader. "Can you please chuck more than five frigging words into the sentence, perhaps use a comma, or even a present participle seeing as your schooling cost all that money? And did you unfortunately skip the lesson on adverbs or just not proper understand it? Maybe creative writing really isn't your forte you know. "

"Ah", say the parents and teachers in response. "The little darling is not under-educated, and can't conceivably be talentless. He is creating tension. Like this friend of the McCann family is doing in today's Guardian."

The Mark Warner nannies brought the children to the Tapas restaurant to have tea at the end of each day. It was a friendly gathering. The parents would stand and chat by the pool. We talked about the children, about what we did at home. We were hopeful about a change in the weather. We eyed our children as they played. We didn't see anyone watching.

One morning, I saw Gerry and his wife Kate on their balcony, chatting to their friends on the path below. Privately I was glad we didn't get their apartment. It was on a corner by the road and people could see in. They were exposed.

I have some advice. Don't give up the day job.

This Blog Post: why it will answer every question you've ever asked and make you 50 pounds lighter

One of the endlessly entertaining subsections of the American non-fiction market is the book offering to explain everything in the simplest possible terms. It is a response to what Adorno would call 'the ontological longing' - the desire for a type of truth that is obviously bogus but comforting, not just in spite of being bogus but almost because of it. I think Adorno was mainly aiming this barb at Heidegger (as per usual). What's interesting is not only how this phenomenon spans so many separate divisions of the non-fiction market, confirming that the ontological longing is found in every corner of our economy and society, but how in America there is a peculiar faith placed in the book as a potential source of authentication.

If the title of such books offered something it could possibly deliver, then they would be failing straight away. A self-help book called Happiness: Why You Can Find it Occasionally, but Clearly Not the Whole Time (What With Death and Everything) would be a disaster. A business book called Success: Why You Don't Have to Fail, but Have a Minimal Chance of Being Number One (because just think of all the other people reading this book wanting the same thing) would go nowhere. A make-over book called New You: Same as Old You but Less Self-obsessed would be doing the world a great favour, if only it had any chance of being bought.

Instead, we have not just one but two books called You Can Have it All (one, two). This is not just a lie, but the sort of lie which causes unhappiness. But anyway. I have a new-found favourite that formally makes all satire on this topic redundent  once and for all (like this does to management philosophy). Never before has so much complexity been dealt with so quickly and cheerfully! Just writing the title of this book is the route to some Barnes & Nobel equivalent of Nirvana.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything... in business (and in life). Genius.

the world is flat(ulent)

The rise of biological discourse in public life is a highly alarming thing. At some point it would be nice if my colleagues in the social science community were to rally and launch a counter-offensive against the Darwinists, genetic authorities and bio-policemen who want to divide us according to traits that apparently lurk in our bodies, deep beneath the limits of the visible. Remember this little piece of grotesque political posturing from the Tories at the last election? It's policies like that which can lead one to fall into the trap set by Godwin's Law, but I shall resist on this occasion. For the time being, we should be grateful that there are people like Nikolas Rose (in books such as this) and his Bios colleagues working to illuminate these processes from a sociological and political perspective, before they steam on into the future far beyond the grasp of the non-expert, only to be later gobbled up for use by racists and light-touch eugenicists.

But there's an additional component to this, which has far less to do with power, authority and expertise, and more to do with notions of the public sphere or civil society. I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds the 'most read' and 'most emailed' sections of the BBC news frontpage a bizarrely fascinating index, especially the 'most emailed'. For those who don't follow this, let me attempt to classify the main genres of news item that appear in these Top Fives:

• Animal does something human-like: In the last few days this has included a puppy which employed all of its intelligence to save an old lady, and is to be rewarded with a medal (which, as far as I can tell, won't be a chocolate medal or a medal that smells of another dog's bottom, but an actual medal that the puppy is unlikely to want),  a rabbit which has 'adopted' some kittens, and a, err, millionaire American dog which has been subject to death-threats. There was also some dolphin yesterday that saved someone from a shark (or whatever).

• Human does something animal-like: The most-read story on the BBC website at the time of writing concerns a 77-year-old man who can't stop breaking wind. OK, so not all that animal-like, but still a case of culture being shaken by biological necessity. A story that seems to have repeatedly entered the Top Five over the past year or two was more typical of this genre, and concerned a Sudanese man who was forced to marry a goat, after being caught having sex with it.

• Evolutionary mystery unravels: This can include anything from the fact that Chimpanzees have a better memory than us (a couple of days ago) to new scientific research linking any weird 21st century activity to some biological advantage it gave our (even weirder) hunter gatherer ancestors. In this genre, the ideal story would report new research showing that men leave the toilet seat up, because 100,000 years ago they would have been to busy fighting bison to put it down.

• Mythical creature might or might not exist: A couple of days ago there was this story about 'goat-suckers' then a couple of days earlier this story about yetis. This must represent some yearning for a re-enchantment of biology, wrenching it from the authority of the scientist with all of their magic-killing evidence. But ultimately this matters to people who view biology as all we've got.

So here is global civil society. It could be a lot worse I guess. If the BBC were inclined to stick up videos of people being happy-slapped in the street, perhaps these would rise to the Top Five, then we'd discover the truth of our universal id. But it could also be a lot better. The global public sphere finds its common denominator in novel blurrings of the cultural and the natural (the same blurrings, perhaps, that Simon Critchley sees as the condition of humour).

So if a shared sense of the biological - occasionally creeping into the comic bio-social - is all we have to work with, what can we do with it? Probably not very much. For every commonality biology offers us (we are all programmed in a certain way) it also imposes dangerous qualitative distinctions (some of us are programmed better than others). As soon as one attempts to ascend from the biological to the political, the threat of arbitrary, vicious division (along lines of race, health, 'talent') immediately outweighs the promise of some shared definition of the human of the sort rights-based discourses seek.

Both are present however, and it would be wrong to focus only on the former. Just as different types of DNA can be used to distinguish 'us' from 'them', the fact that people the world over share an interest in a donkey that goes shopping (or whatever) may represent some very distant hint of hope.