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The Slum Pastoral: Helicopter Visuality and Koolhaas's Lagos Tim Hecker Space and Culture 2010 13: 256 originally published online 15 April 2010 DOI: 10.1177/1206331210365257 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sac.sagepub.com/content/13/3/256
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The Slum Pastoral: Helicopter Visuality and Koolhaas’s Lagos
Space and Culture 13(3) 256–269 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1206331210365257 http://sac.sagepub.com
Tim Hecker1
Abstract This article explores issues of aerial visuality through Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s recent work on urban planning in Lagos, Nigeria. In particular, it focuses on the prevalence of the lowoblique plane of vision in Koolhaas’s helicopter-based photographs of the immense, sprawling complexity of Lagos. This essay also examines the inherent political economy of such an aerial plane of vision. Furthermore, it raises the question of to what extent this representational strategy promotes a fidelity to the subject matter, in this case the citizens and the city of Lagos, by portraying a city through an aesthetics of immensity and the apocalyptic sublime. Keywords visual studies, Lagos, Koolhaas, aerial visuality, urbanism
Figure 1. Koolhaas—Lagos 1
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Corresponding Author: Tim Hecker, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, 853 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada PQ H3A 2T6 Email: timothy.hecker@mail.mcgill.ca
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A photograph of the Krupps factory or of the AEG yields practically nothing about these institutions. The genuine reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations, the factory say, no longer gives out these relations. Hence it is in fact “something to construct,” something “artificial,” “posited.” Hence in fact art is necessary. —Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Trial Do human beings live here? Do they consent to do so? Will they not revolt against it?” —Le Corbusier viewing Place de l’Etoile from above, Aircraft
Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas visited Lagos, Nigeria, on numerous occasions in the late 1990s in preparation for what would be an ongoing study of this West African megalopolis (Koolhaas, 2002; Koolhaas & Harvard Project, 2000). He was interested in how this city, which one hears very little about through Western media networks, actually worked. Koolhaas was interested in understanding systems of order within a chaotic mega-city. In essence, Lagos appeared to be the epitome of disorder on a massive scale, but he wanted to examine what regimes of order lurked beneath a veneer of urban chaos. His first visit to the city was limited to ground-based vehicles, which yielded an alarming “aura of apocalyptic violence; entire sections of [the city] seemed to be smoldering, as if it were one gigantic rubbish dump” (Koolhaas, 2002, p. 177). During his second visit, Koolhaas admittedly ventured forth from the vehicle, where this apparent bedlam and chaos revealed itself to be much more highly organized and systemic. A visit to a garbage dump became a glimpse of structure, efficiency, distribution, and planning. By the third visit, the team managed to rent the Nigerian presidential helicopter. From the privilege of elevation, Koolhaas admitted that his earlier views of city as ad hoc and informal were possibly mistaken; Lagos in fact was a “city of processes,” a manifestation of radical 21st-century urbanism, even suggesting the city is a “form of collective research, conducted by a team of eight to twenty-five million” (Koolhaas & Harvard Project, 2000, p. 719). And so the helicopter revealed a city pushed to its material limits, but also prompted a celebration of the creativity and agency of its citizens. This was at the same time a recognition that the traditional language of urbanism was unsuitable to address contemporary Lagos. Koolhaas has begun to publish his work on Lagos. His first piece in the Mutations monograph was a juxtaposition of scattered observations, prophetic announcements, and a compendium of lush aerial photographs. The significant arsenal of stunning and vast helicopter-based photographs is prominent in this text as a form of documentary evidence in comparison with a relative absence of textual argumentation. These photos serve as witness to a form of countermodernity, as the empirical verification of this West African city as the radical other. Such aerial-based meditations recall Le Corbusier’s airplane-based clinical visions of his idea of the future city. Corbusier’s contempt for the violent and the sublime landscapes granted by his aerial overpasses of Rio de Janeiro hillsides or Parisian arrondissements reckoned a violent call for wholesale destruction, a call to start from scratch. I will argue that Koolhaas’s aerial visions take a different tact, promoting in essence a de facto celebration of poverty via a laissez-faire aesthetics of the status quo, an aesthetic realism emptied of any substantial social critique. This imagery uses a technique of downward vision, a plane of sight best described as low-oblique, where the horizon is all but vanquished in the immense, vast view of the city, the traffic, and the people below. In his earnest efforts to give back agency to citizens, Koolhaas seemingly presents a cultural field of vision divorced from his textual intentions—a dystopic voyeurism of the contemporary megalopolis, which relies on shock aesthetics yet in the end encourages little more than a celebration of the creativity of people on the fold. This essay will use Koolhaas as an entry point to look at the
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low-oblique plane of vision as an aesthetic of the sublime and ask related questions on the political economy latent in such imagery. These aerial images are important as they serve as a lynchpin to Koolhaas’s sweeping assertions on the rational maelstrom that is Lagos. Because they dwarf the scant amount of text in his Mutations publication, they are placeholders as empirical evidence, photographs in lieu of citation. Thus, it is key to interrogate such imagery on the basis as evidence for what, in this case, are debatable futurological assertions. Art historian David Joselit (2000) has argued that in the wake of the ascension of visual modalities to a dominant position of public discourse, techniques of art criticism have increasingly become an important tool of political science. What he calls “visual studies” is an attempt to unpack the aesthetic and political valences of the visual field; these valences lurk within the sublime images of Koolhaas’s Lagos. Yet scholarship related to aerial imaging has had a relatively narrow focus on the Foucauldian “gaze” and epistemic forms of domination. This has been to approach the probing, organizing, tendency of aerial imaging to make visible the unknowable and invisible aspects of public space. This has often manifested in an approach combining aspects of the Foucauldian gaze and Michel de Certeau’s dieu voyeur (see, e.g., Morshed, 2002; Pinck, 2000). This approach to aerial visuality as the gaze of domination and subjectivity neglects a spectrum of issues including the phenomenology of images, the apolitical paralysis suggested by an aesthetics of immensity, and the role of such imagery in anthropological work. Elevated images carry an entire ecology of negation and pathways of possibility. Backing up into the social scientific context for a moment, research on African cities has tended to focus on discordant themes of economic and sociopolitical breakdown as well as lagging development. On Lagos, in particular, it has been convincingly argued that social science has focused on “mechanistic accounts of spatial disorder, de-beautification, organized violence and crime, inter-ethnic strife, civil disorder, overcrowding, flooding, air and noise pollution, unemployment, widespread poverty, traffic chaos and risk-bearing sexual practices” (Ahonsi, 2002, p. 129). This doom-ridden collection of issues would suggest Lagos is on the precipice of a total meltdown. Yet it continues to avoid the alleged implosion prophesized by developmental pessimists. Koolhaas belongs in one sense to a counternarrative, which has tried to recover agency for the most downtrodden, arguing that despite daily hardship, the poor are not being crushed by overwhelming forces, rather creatively thriving in response to challenges from waste management to local governance. As such, they are a crucial building block in any transformative program (Ahonsi, 2002). So for Koolhaas, Lagos is a vital city and “one that works” despite the near-absence of traditional infrastructure. The absence of certain aspects of city infrastructure, the decaying highways system designed in the 1970s, and the nonexistent state of city services contrasts starkly with Koolhaas’s assertion of the “large-scale efficacy of systems and agents considered marginal, liminal, informal or illegal” (Koolhaas & Harvard Project, 2000, p. 652). Instead of focusing on what might be obvious shortcomings in terms of conventional infrastructure, Koolhaas focuses on hybrid, often fleeting systemic assemblages that fill such infrastructural gaps. This is at the same time a treatise on the limits of urban planning, a study of the radical possibilities of the modern city. Lagos represents a deeply asymmetric ontology, resource availability pushing toward absolute zero, “urban safety” pushing toward its logarithmic maximization—a society off the charts on all levels (Koolhaas & Harvard Project, 2000). Furthermore, Koolhaas argues, We are resisting the notion that Lagos represents an African city en route to becoming modern . . . Rather, we think it possible to argue that Lagos represents a developed, extreme, paradigmatic case-study of a city at the forefront of globalizing modernity. (Koolhaas & Harvard Project, 2000, p. 653)
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Thus, Lagos becomes a signpost for the West; that is, as a possible future of Chicago, Detroit, or Los Angeles in stark opposition to conventional developmental logic. This mixture of standoffish irreverence and vague quasi-millenarian assertions bleed through the fabric of his helicopter-based visions. Airborne imagery has a long and widespread history. The immense depth of field afforded by the airborne camera has its roots in the birds-eye balloon photography of the mid-19th century, yet manifestations of the aerial vantage point trace back to the early Renaissance period. Many of these visions strove to represent disparate and scattered aspects of city life as a coherent, rational unity (Schwarzer, 2004). This aero-technological optic has also made its way through the arts, from elevated landscape painting to arguably its ultimate realization in the environmental art of Robert Smithson and Christo, earth sculptures totally reliant on the aerial perspective. As mentioned, Le Corbusier was an architect who seized on the aerial vantage point relentlessly. His defense of the use of elevation as a tool of architectural understanding and abstraction was summarized in his well-known quotation: “the airplane indicts the city” (Le Corbusier, 1988, p. 5). According to Adnan Morshed (2002), Le Corbusier used the aerial view as a means of “discovery, imagination and, most importantly, reform of . . . geographical and architectural premises” (p. 204). The inherent logics of rationalization and classification granted by the aerial view meant for Le Corbusier, as mentioned above, the obligation and opportunity to build from scratch. Thus, he called for the destruction and rebuilding of entire neighborhoods, as a flowering of neosyndicalist reason against the palimpsest-like irrationality of the ad hoc city. However, for Rem Koolhaas aerial-based visions of the modern city led less to a program of radical reform than to a form of passive futurological speculation. The aerial view, which once represented the yearnings of secular transcendence uniting the immensity of the earth with the infinitude of the sky, becomes with Koolhaas a laissez-faire form of visuality, which turns from the horizon down toward the immense, paralyzing density of Lagos’ very human landscape.
Vanished Horizon Paul Virilio (1997), in the apocalyptic Christian prophecy of his Open Sky, devotes the introductory passage to a meditation of the skyline. He suggests that the horizon serves as the very first littoral, a seam that separates the “void” from the “full.” In this distinction the void of the sky, the blue infinitude, is bound to the full of all things earthen by the horizon. Hence, the horizon in some ways reflects the immensity of the physical against the metaphysical void of the sky. The horizon itself anchors the sky to the earth, holding the void and full as a bound unity. This combination of the immense and the void is found in the oppression of the boundless land and space in cinematic representations of Los Angeles, best described as an oblique line of sight. Pushing this oblique vision further downward, the low-oblique camera angle has been one technique to bracket off the metaphysics of the sky, displacing the vanishing point of the horizon itself. For Koolhaas, this has been a displacement toward the infinitude that is the West African megalopolis. The tension between the void and the full has been in flux since the dilated perspectival field of 18th-century subliminal landscape artists. For these artists, a synonymous relationship existed between the “divine infinitude and the immensity of nature” (Temple, 2007, p. 226). Due in part from the tension in this relationship, many of these landscape works presented a depth of field that was subsumed within a limitless expanse of flattened middle ground. Yet landscape forms of pan-horizon perspectivism served as a form liberated from the constraints on the viewing subject. This perspectivism became a conduit to rational possession, not just as a symbolic form of divine representation in its aerial transcendence, but an ordering mechanism subject to instrumentalism and objectification in the self-awareness of the transcendent act. It was along parallel lines that Jean Jacques Rousseau heaped scorn on the grand vistas of French formal gardens: “the taste for perspective and distant views proceeds from the disposition of men who are never satisfied with
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Figure 2. (Left) Kasmir Malevich, 1916; (Right) Moholy-Nagy, Dessau
the place where they are� (Temple, 2007, p. 200). The horizon-laden landscape, once scorned as a source of restless yearning for distant lands, became an increasingly prevalent mode of visual representation. To a certain extent the horizon has been instrumental in the epistemic and ontological development of the modern subject. As Virilio suggested, the oblique aerial view uses the horizon to seam together the void of the sky and the full of the distant landscape. But what happens when the plane of sight turns toward the ground to bracket off the horizon itself? That is to ask, what happens when the anchor of the horizon becomes detached from the visual field? This low-oblique plane of vision refocuses the dialectic between immensity and an ordering line of sight, away from optics of stability and order toward the immensity of the ground below. This technique of closing off the horizon, very much prevalent in Koolhaas’s airborne research of Lagos, could also be seen to occupy another interstitial position— existing in between the lofty god-powers of the vertical omniscient view and the horizontal comfort of being in the world (Dreikausen, 1985). The low oblique mixes the familiar, in that some sense maintains an aspect of being recognizable on the ground, with the utterly alienating abstraction of the purely vertical position. The horizon is always implied but rarely granted, lurking somewhere just above the cropped plane of vision. Yet the fundamental paradox of the low-oblique point of view is that the familiar comfort of the near-horizontal is also the farthest away from the viewer, rendering the comfort of the possibly familiar to that of an impressionistic noise. In this way the helicopterbased low-oblique viewpoint cannot help but slide into a form of abstract representation. Liberated from the anchor and the stabilizing power of the horizon, the low-oblique plane of sight rotates at will, deemphasizing the importance of documentary realism while encouraging abstract and nonrepresentational forms of image generation. The rise of air travel and the wide means through which aerial views have reached prevalence is linked to forms of art, which also presented landscape works on an increasingly abstracted basis. Early 20th-century Russian suprematist painter Malevich produced works inspired from aerial landscapes, with distinct angled lines which often suggest tilted oblique angles of sight (see Figure 2; Dreikausen, 1985). Bauhaus
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Figure 3.
artist Moholy-Nagy, a practitioner of many forms of photography from above, also pushed abstraction vis-à-vis the low-oblique vantage point, in particular, his Dessau work (see Figure 2), yet was also denaturalized antirepresentation (Hight, 1995). The contrast between the dreamy Bauhaus afternoon and the angular upright architecture marries his utopian aspirations with a pragmatist sensibility. Both works find company in the fly-by urban studies of Koolhaas, in their overtly abstract character but also through the implicit search for systemization, pathways, and congealing forms amidst the apparent chaos. The tilted low-oblique angle of his apartment block photo (see Figure 3) suggests an applied disorientation by the off-kilter plane of sight, but also an apparent fidelity to rescue order from the slanted form below. For Koolhaas, the recovery of order, his making a case for the claim that Lagos is a city that works, is predicated particularly on his arguments and, more important, his visual documentation of the function of traffic circulation, markets, and ad hoc regimes of infrastructural service.
The Aesthetics of Dystopian Circulation As mentioned, Koolhaas’ earlier ground-based visits yielded a different understanding of the city than what was granted from the Presidential helicopter. What was once the improvisational, dysfunctional, and informal nature of Lagosian life yielded to a view of Lagos as a massive self-organized system, a “city of processes,” a “self-administered enclave with strong rules and regulations” (Koolhaas, 2002, p. 178). The aerial photographs serve as a visual argument toward the notion that Lagos is more than infinite, intense, and chaotic—it is in fact highly ordered and systemic. To make this point, Koolhaas focuses specifically on the aesthetics of traffic and circulation in a move to unearth the logic of how the city functions (see Figure 4). The view from the helicopter reveals patterns of intense transportation, crumbling cloverleaf highway systems and roadways that disappear into the infinite, or rather the distant haze of smog
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Figure 4.
and smoke. Of the images published in Mutations text, the heavy focus on traffic systems is certainly a vein of aesthetic presentation that attempts to render systems visible in an almost cybernetic bringing forth of self-organization. The cybernetic logic in this servomechanistic visual field is a form of dynamic self-regulation. This metaphor was picked up on by Matthew Gandy, who argued that a strain of contemporary neo-organicist approaches to urban planning, emerging from the biophysical sciences, perceives the city as a homeostatic entity—a complex yet intricately ordered and self-organized system (Gandy, 2005a). However, Koolhaas’s dystopian aesthetic of circulation is different to cybernetic urbanist visions of the future city as generated and managed by a massive information-neurological system. For him, society in general and traffic systems in particular are systemically regulated via a form of biopower, where the system continues to work because of the creativity of the collective mass. Lagos is celebrated as site of reasoned chaos, where the role of the urban planner takes on that of an irreverent form of antiplanning, a laissez-faire school of urbanism (Gandy, 2005a). This is a view of urban systems, where chaos acts as the defining aspect of social order. So, in looking at one of the most densely congested market/traffic jam that is the Oshodi Junction, Koolhaas recovers intention, rationality, and even design: Flying over the city, Lagos reveals—at Oshodi Junction—the greatest density of both traffic and human beings ever known to man, literally unimaginable numbers of people. But here to what originally seemed to be simply a point of crisis, on closer inspection turned out to be a deliberately engineered situation. (Koolhaas, 2002, p. 179) Traffic congestion revealed itself as a structural provider of income, in that the “systemic layering” provided by such bottlenecks gave rise to the massive accumulation of microtransactions
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Figure 5. (Left) Koolhaas—Lagos; (Right) Tony Linck—U.S. Highway, ca. 1960s
required to survive, a “mutual confrontation of people and infrastructure.” The greatest density of these transactions takes place within the decaying infrastructure of the 1970s traffic system designed by Julius Berger. Evidence of intentionally destroyed highways, which encourage traffic funneling through a winding, slow path of small neighborhoods, is a situation rigged most certainly to bring traffic and thus business to those areas (see Figure 5). Photographs of the “go slow zones” of Lagos, which lead to congested markets, colossal evangelical mega-churches, and dead-end highway off ramps, seek to portray a society pushed to its physical and ontological limits, while celebrating its asymptotic status as city of the future through rhetoric both falsely neutral and realist. After all, why shouldn’t traffic go any direction and barricades removed which limit its rhizomatic flow? It is a liberatory maneuver that turns back the question of cold, sterile functionality back at Western cities. On this level, Lagos manifests itself as an emancipated city of intense flows, in which circulation is as important as any space or place; a landscape of mobile flaneurs crossing an interstitial terrain powered by leaded fuel. Yet the inherent abstraction in these landscape montages relies on a massive reduction down to systemic processes and a near negation of the multitude of political economies these landscapes contain. On a purely aesthetic level, Koolhaas’s aerial visions of immense and dystopic circulation bear a resemblance to many of Andreas Gursky’s massive sprawling digitally manipulated panoramic images of reified global capitalism. Alex Alberro, in commenting on Gursky’s images in Artforum, has suggested an inherent essentialism behind Gursky’s work, which was to render visible the structural principles at the heart of society, and more important, “unearth fundamental affinities between products of the organic world and that of human invention” (Alberro & Siegel, 2001, p. 110). The end result of this essentialism was a paralyzing reductionism that portrayed people like ants, cars like beetles, and highways as insect pathways, made comfortable by the smooth seduction of the massively framed photographs. There is also a strong link to Ousmane Sembene’s criticism of the ethnographic films of Jean Rouch. Semebene, commenting on the objectifying documentary presentation of Rouche’s anthropological subjects, noted that he “observe[s] us like insects” (Bickerton, 2004, p. 61). However, like Koolhaas, Rouch had affirmative and benevolent intentions. He was reflexive of his subject-position and wanted to show the people he was observing as equals and made efforts to demystify their cultural and social practices as being distinctly rational. However, does the push to demystify and reveal practices as “rational” in fact reveal more about the presuppositions of the observer as opposed to the unveiling of an inherent truth in the observed? From this perspective, Koolhaas’s visions of circulation reduce the
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Figure 6.
multitude of human aspects in those traffic jams and densely populated markets to the content of objectified and organized systems.
Slum Surfaces: Aesthetics of Immensity—Sublime No. 1 Landscapes viewed from the vantage point of helicopter-assisted elevation, be it pastoral hills, river systems, suburban housing developments, or the West African megalopolis, all have a particularly seductive grip. There is an unmistakable allure in the sprawling images portrayed in the work of Koolhaas or Gursky. This seduction is partially the result of a neighborhood, a city, a region being rendered as an object of awe and knowledge to be looked at, revealed as a vast, immense swath of space and suspended energy. Koolhaas attempted to show Lagos as rational and organized instead of a city of apocalyptic chaos. Yet the rhetorical lynchpin of Koolhaas’s project is the presentation of Lagos as a mirage of disorder, chaos, unbelievable population density, and an apparent breakdown of conventional forms of infrastructure. The immensity of Lagos is then recovered as an icon of human ingenuity and a dystopic paradigm for the future city. This coupling of seduction and shock seems to be a reaction to the vast aerial landscape itself. JeanFrancois Lyotard referred to the excess of presence contained within the immensity of the landscape, where estrangement and melancholia are inherent: “whether or not you ‘like’ a landscape is unimportant. It does not ask you for your opinion. If it is there, your opinion counts as nothing. A landscape leaves the mind desolate” (Lyotard, 1989, p. 215). The desolation contained in Koolhaas’s helicopter images is cloaked in an aesthetic of immensity very much in line with Edmund Burke’s distinction of the sublime (see Figure 6).
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Yet unlike the presentation of immensity captured in forms of documentary representation, Burke saw the sublime as the state of “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror” when faced with the grandeur of nature or works of art (Ohlin, 2002). For Burke, the sublime was quintessentially manifested when invoking the Divine, a sensation of terror faced in the recognition of the utter inconsequentiality of human beings. Despite these differences, there is something to recover from Burke in the context of Koolhaas’s Lagos. Burke’s notion of the sublime functions as an aesthetic motif of immensity at the very heart of these aerial photographs. It has been argued that Burke’s view of the relationship between landscape and history marks the turning point from the traditional view of landscape as a factual and symbolic representation of providence, toward the sublime landscape as an artifice open to reconstruction, duration, and aesthetic intensity (Temple, 2007). This was exactly the reaction of Le Corbusier, when he, flying over Rio de Janeiro in 1929, declared it to be a “violent and sublime” landscape, which according to Morshed spurred on his megalomaniacal urge to compete with it (Morshed, 2002). For Le Corbusier, this meant rebuilding against the challenge of nature; for Koolhaas this meant reveling in the new machinations of rational urbanity and junkspace hypermodernity. It is arguably exactly in the dystopian slum landscape where one can find the shock of Burke’s sublime today, perhaps one of its last vestiges in a culture overloaded by massive and rapid image circulation. Yet coming back to cybernetic urbanism, there is a disjuncture in Koolhaas’s argument that Lagos is both a city that works and is also a possible paradigm for the future of the West. This is manifest in an almost bifurcated aesthetic as both a clinical search for systems amidst the apparent chaos and as a gothic lens revealing the horror and terror of the sublime. Both aspects rely on an immense plane of vision. Order is revealed and in the same stroke presents an uncomfortable future. This neogothic aspect of his helicopter photographs comes through in the millenarian premonition that Lagos today is in fact a future London or Los Angeles.
The Spectacle of Collapse: The Patina of the Apocalypse to Come—Sublime No. 2 Koolhaas’s Lagos images posit an apocalypse-to-come, yet are almost a form of anti-apocalypse (see Figure 7). Apocalypses usually posit ends—the end of continents, worlds, or humanity. Koolhaas’s slumscapes point to the future. This is quite different from other recent citations of the end of the world. For Jean Baudrillard, the proliferation and production of notions of the apocalypse was an indicator that the world has already ended (Heffernan, 1995). Here, it is just beginning. Jacques Derrida, writing on the possibility of nuclear criticism in the mid-1980s noted the Greek origins of apocalypse as a “Revelation, of Truth, Un-veiling” (Derrida, 1984). Koolhaas’s images challenge the aerial gaze as truth-revealing objectivity; rather, here it takes the form of speculative doxa. Derrida referred to the decreasing possibility of science or episteme in the apocalyptic fog under the threat of nuclear warfare. Rather, belief became the operant metaphor under the logics of technoscience in the rhetoric and practices of deterrence and mutual assured destruction. Proofs slide into the terrain of war, where nothing is proved. “Truth” for him becomes a casualty and with it the apocalypse (Derrida, 1984). The history of aerial photography is very much bound up with the aesthetics of destruction. When the photographer George Lawrence received word of the devastating San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, he rushed to the city with a battery of photographic kites. His sweeping panoramic images (see Figure 8) captured a city in ruins from above (Newhall, 1969). But this awesome, sprawling ethereal destruction from elevation is contrasted with the more specific and particular photographs closely hinged to the ground. In San Francisco, it appeared that the carnage of the earthquake materialized more the closer the camera came to the ground. Aerial separation provides an abstraction and seductive gloss that increases with elevation. Koolhaas’s Lagos photos enjoy a similar privileged aestheticization of distressed urban life, which pulls out
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Figure 7.
Figure 8. San Francisco earthquake of 1906 from above (George Lawrence), from the oblique view (photographer unknown), and the ground view (Arnold Genthe)
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of the muck of particularity to present a smooth millenarian patina of the cities-to-come. Fredric Jameson, writing on Koolhaas’s work remarked: someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of the end of the world. (Jameson, 2003, p. 76) On one level Jameson is right, particularly in the context of Koolhaas’s photographs of the ad hoc capitalism of the Oshodi market. But one must also find something lacking here, which is that his textual proclamations and visual shock therapy are as much an apolitical ambivalence as they are a new type of realist-critical positioning. According to Jameson, Koolhaas’s new form of critique might serve to shatter the historical paralysis of contemporary life, “a sharp edge inserted into the seamless Moebius strip of late capitalism” (Jameson, 2003, p. 76). However, it may do the opposite and encourage a laissez-faire logic of self-help. Is this then the aesthetics of an anti-utopia? Perhaps, Jameson is correct in asserting that utopia is most useful as a negative conception. That it is most “authentic when we cannot imagine it.” This is to say that utopia serves society best not in the imagination of a concrete vision of a better world but in revealing our complete incapacity to imagine that world. Then utopia by its nonexistence via the absence of historicity or future reveals the ideological closure “of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined” (Jameson, 2004, p. 46). The question is to what extent Koolhaas unlocks this idea of utopia by his ambivalence, the celebration of creativity on the fold, and the irreverent speculation of Lagos as Future City of the West. In this sense, the realization of the ideological closure of Jameson’s negative utopia is nonexistent here. For Koolhaas’s aerial images lack a fidelity to the city or its inhabitants in the sense that the images serve more toward his doxa of the failures of urban theory than a concern for the very material political economy lurking in the shadows.
The Inherent Political Economy of the Mobile Planner The absence of a strong fidelity to Lagos’ citizens and their material plight is in part due to the failure to recognize the material and policy conditions that led to the city’s increasingly desperate state. Numerous critics have taken Koolhaas to task on this issue: that treating a city as a research laboratory or art installation dehistoricizes and depoliticizes mass experience (Cunningham, 2007; Gandy, 2005b). Lagos is the result of specific policies and programs adopted by the Nigerian military dictatorship under IMF and World Bank guidance, as well as decades of colonial exploitation prior to that. A city that was once the “jewel of Africa” with a relatively high standard of living in the 1970s had developed, thanks to numerous policy and economic failures, 200 distinct slum settlements spread out across the metropolitan area. So, for Koolhaas to note Lagos as a city that works is to narrow the requirements of civic life down to the ability of a city to sustain a market as the sole indicator of its health (Gandy, 2005b). How might a fidelity to materialist political economics manifest in aesthetic or representational strategies? Mike Davis, in his recent City of Slums, which might be read as an extended critique of Koolhaas, speaks of arresting visual metaphors of slum life, for example: “examples of poor people’s powerlessness in the face of the sanitation crisis are legion. Mexico City residents, for example, inhale shit: fecal dust blowing off Lake Texcoco during the hot, dry season causes typhoid and hepatitis” (Davis, 2006). p. 143-144. Whether its Egyptian squatters living inside crypts or dust storms of feces, Davis gives us a lexicon of the sublime akin to the power of aerial vision, which is not divorced from an inherent politics.
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The low-oblique aerial vision, a technologically manifested form of the modern conscience, has allowed for the transgression of notions of space and the place of people in the world. This new vision of landscape, a territory of possibility revealed as open to artifice and the reinvention of time, contains both the seeds of liberation as well as destruction. Unlike Le Corbusier, who irreverently and foolishly called for the destruction of cities, Rem Koolhaas does nothing of the sort. Emptying the dialectic of its oppositional negation, Koolhaas gives a litany of affirmation, suggesting Lagos is a signpost for the West and a wellspring of creative techniques of survival. What results is an aesthetics of circulation, a premonition of dystopian futures, and an ethos of self-help. This is similar to the self-organizational doxa that led Kevin Lynch to take aim at functionalist concerns of the early Chicago School of Sociology (Lynch, 1984). What might be needed is what Lisa Parks has called “forms of witnessing,” which work within and against ambivalent oblique perspectives (Parks, 2001). As Parks describes, this is “a practice of witnessing that involves critical engagement with and accountability” for the images that circulate, in this case, as a cultural field of vision (Parks, 2001). The cultural field of vision is revealed for what it is: as the “volatile discursive field”; from this it becomes obvious of the need to infuse images with debates, countervisions, and situated knowledges. This is what is lacking in these speculative-totalizing visual proclamations, which is not to take on the role of art police, because Koolhaas’s Lagos is different from Koolhaas the architectural grand auteur. Returning to the loss of the horizon brought on by the low-oblique plane of vision, it is perhaps best to give the last word to Ernst Bloch, who discussed the issue of vanishing horizons, albeit metaphorically, nearly 50 years ago. He suggested that the negation of the horizon is a path to a dead form of empiricism, one which denies the embers of utopian possibility. For the horizon is a stabilizing force, a herald of future-bearing virtues: Everything vital, Goethe says, has an atmosphere around it; the correlate of the objective imagination, has on the whole a horizon. There is an inner horizon, which stretches vertically so to speak in self-darkness, and an outer horizon of large breadth in the light of the world. Both horizons, in their background, are filled with the same utopia. Consequently, they are identical in the ultimate. Where the prospective horizon is omitted, reality appears there only as a has-been, as a dead one, and it is the dead, namely, the naturalists and empiricists, who bury their dead ones here. Where the prospective horizon is continuously kept in sight, reality appears there as what it is concretely: as a network of paths of dialectical processes that take place in an unfinished world, in a world that would be totally unchangeable without the enormous future, the real possibilities within it . . . Reality without real possibilities is not complete. The world without future-bearing qualities deserves as little regard, art, or science as the world of the philistine does. (Bloch, 1998, p. 155) Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.
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Bio Tim Hecker is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His current research involves an investigation into loud sound during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is also a musical composer with some 12 albums released on a variety of international recording imprints.
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