STATE LOOKS, BLACK DESIRE(S), HOUSING SCHEMES

Ife Salema Vanable

Ph.D. Candidate in Architectural History and Theory

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Not long ago, during the final review presentations of a second-year architecture design studio I was co-teaching, at a time when such amazing and, at times, troubling performative spectacles were occurring as had been the only way, in-person, a particularly prominent member of the faculty stood beside me looking simultaneously uninterested and somewhat tickled. Smiling in a self-amused way, this member of the faculty leaned over and said, “He’s too good looking,” at least the second time this observation had been gleefully uttered to me by this professor. “Stop saying that,” I contended. As if scripted, one of my co-instructors passed by and asserted, “Let’s move on quickly with this one.” An urging directed at me in my role as designated keeper of time. To which I flatly stated, “They all get the same time.”

A Black male student, a year older than most others in his class — having taken a year off to travel, study, and work beyond, outside of, and perhaps against the academy — stirred these sentiments unbeknownst to him. Sitting on a stool as opposed to the customary and ritualized standing done before one’s work when laid bare to such scrutiny, such review, a scene of subjection, if I may extend an analytical frame offered by Saidiya Hartman: this student fielded inquiry with calm, fortitude, and an outward lack of self-consciousness, presenting by way of a voice marked by a smooth depth in a slow taking-his-time cadence; his ongoing performance, the mundane drama of his showing, was likely irksome to those unfamiliar with and made uncomfortable by such displays of firm self-possession from a young person, from a student,

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

racialized as Black, though not in the way anyone would actually openly admit. “He’s just too good looking.” A Black male reviewer was awed by the display, smiling in what Ralph Ellison might have concurred was “the Negro sense.” “Fear me for I am God,” was what he felt this student emoted in such a most obvious and matter of fact way.

I think about this often: this student, his mode of thinking, making, and doing, thoughtful and full, beautifully considered, imperfect, longing, resistant, although, honestly seeking support and guidance, almost always performative, his command, his audacity, and this set of reactions to his physical corporeal presence, captively invoking a range of racial tropes, evinced ongoing modes of objectification, the thingified nature of Blackness (a la Bill Brown) and its simultaneous what Sylvia Wynter might call invisiblizing, its denial, and rejection; the flattening, erasure, and eviction from the category of legitimate student that often attends blackness in this context.

Fred Moten describes in his exploration, In the Break: The Aestetics of the Black Radical Tradition, that “Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectator-ship, enjoyment and being enjoyed, lies and moves the economy of what Hartman calls hypervisibility.” (Figure 1)

This hypervisibility is a condition of being seen, the excessive degree to which something, in this case notably Blackness, has attracted general attention, prominence, in this case superficially — literally at surface level — the level of skin, outward appearance, looks, embedded in what Hortense Spillers might suggest is a “bizarre axiological ground,” a strange site valuation and desire or desirability (Figure 2).

This student’s Blackness would typically render him useful, valuable to the marketing efforts of a particular school of architecture wanting to demonstrate, and even quantify, its diversity. What are the ethics, though, of his so-called inclusion to this sphere where he may be so violently, superficially regarded? How might inclusiveness connote not a bringing into, or providing access to rarified spaces of critique and evaluation, but instead, the active production of more capacious sites of study, a more hospitable opening up to a range of subjects, disciplinary and transdisciplinary dispositions, alignments, and subjectivities that instigate more bold and banal confrontation with a range of modes of being and knowing in spaces, sites, forms, uses, not commonly regard-

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

ed as legitimate sites or territories of architectural inquiry, analysis, or design, where unauthorized epistemologies are sought after.

In this context, today, I will focus on orality, to sonic gesture (of which my own performance with you here today is part), on tales, tall tales, on their telling, (reconfiguring, or perhaps attending to what could be understood as a more current state in “historical movement [that has passed] from the priority of sonic gesture to the hegemony of visual formulation.” (Figure 3) I will focus on tall buildings, the sky, and the land, on Black folks out in the street, and at home, on my emerging dissertation project “Tall Tales: State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes.”

A project that seeks to operate at a critical intersection of historical analysis, theoretical speculation, and a close reading of language and rhetoric as a way to interrogate how modes of architectural production are operative parts of the same project that has historically, and continues to mutate, to produce varying ideas about racial difference. These alignments, not merely material, but arguably also constitute a discursive system, an aesthetic and sociotechnical mode of operation that orders the world in particular ways. Specifically, my interrogation of New York, 1970s, high-rise residential towers developed under the scheme known as Mitchell-Lama, affords a compelling and essential course of study due to the hybridity of scheme for housing (the result of pub- lic-private partnering, not public housing, but not market rate), the simultaneous ambiguity and specificity with which the terms of its production have been managed (terms including “middle-income,” “family,” “household”), and the ways that its objects aesthetically deviate from and challenge expectations for how subjects racialized as Black are to be physically and materially housed, but also imagined as living in and dwelling.

I am curious about how housing, as a field of study and practice, praxis, and theoria, is often relegated to acts and discourse related to social justice and not also understood as a legitimate speculative and imaginative domain of action and thought, consciously willing to defy prevailing no- tions of type, taste, and form. Where, as Ruha Benjamin has noted, “Imagination is a contested field of action…most people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination.” (Figure 4) I wrestle with this “living inside,” inside someone else’s imagination, someone else’s imaginings of one’s place and the contours of that living, and also with living and learning otherwise; and as such have been studying modes of Black subjectivity and dwelling in tall buildings, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home; the hope, desire, contentment, and aberration of housing.

As concerned with orality, this work seeks the relation of the oral to the written mark, “the convergence of meaning and visuality—[as sites] of both excess and lack,” to the archival. Work that is in many ways about what Ann Stoler puts forth in her 2009 text, Along the Archival Grain, “the force of writing and the feel of documents..., about commitments

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

to paper, and the political and personal work that such inscriptions perform.” (Figure 5) By confronting archival documents, the aim is to interrogate the ways in which architectural objects may have been culturally, socially, aesthetically, formally, or otherwise received over time, interpreted or evaluated and the biases, assumptions, and inventions that have shaped those operations.

As Saidiya Hartman has articulated, this embrace of documents is not to suggest any fidelity to truth or authority of the document, but is an attempt to consider what may be done with official, archived documents, given the limits, lies, omissions, and fabrications (Figure 6).

Attentive to legal rhetoric put to paper in legislative acts and the ways in which persons are figured in texts as targets and architectural artifacts marketed and rendered desirable though real-estate advertising, among other schemes and devices, this work deals with categories enacted by state and municipal authorities and their enumeration; particularly attending to the oscillations, uncertainties, assumptions, and fabrications about what constituted “middle-income,” and the work of both gesturing to and eliding reference to racial categorizations. This work pursues architecture in the glut of bureaucratic documents that depict the daily work of city government. In so doing, this work mines those records teasing out predetermined parameters for how architectural developments meant to house were financed, developed, geographically situated across the urban domain, and designed, before any architect was commissioned; recognizing a kind of shadow architect therein. Pushed to outsize heights in the name of public benefit, simultaneously bold and unnerving, with aesthetics championed by the state, this work fundamentally seeks the often invisibilized (and often Black and Brown) residents, and their varied sanctioned, unauthorized, ingenious, pleasurable, sensuous, and, especially, quotidian domesticities and modes of dwelling.

With this, I aim to share questions I have posed simultaneously considering aesthetics, wanting, and the provision of accommodations and the relationships of these to modes of architectural production, practice, and pedagogy. This offering ponders the desirability of proximity to varying conceptions of Blackness (and Black students), alongside ongoing acts of its objectification, othering, and effacement, and asks how architectural thought within the academy, and as a physical, material praxis, might be endowed with greater depth, nuance, specificity, radical, and even seemingly banal imagination.

I am deeply committed to interrogating how more imaginative, critical, and hospitable modes of shared study may be fostered, particularly in architectural pedagogy and those related fields that seek to reckon with and speculate on the built domain.

I have many more questions than I have any remedies or prescriptions. As an emerging theorist and architectural historian, I am meditating and speculating on the systems, desires, values, etc. that have made it (seemingly) necessary for a symposium on “design consequences” in the first place. In the context of this symposium, I am asking precisely what is meant by “social equity?” How are design consequences measured? Is this an evaluation of the past, present, or future? Who is the “our” being referred to? Who exactly needs to take responsibility for their ideas? Why is the study of “housing” deemed a “valuable framework through which to understand the issues of [so-called] social equity more generally?”

In terms of “designing for a just society,” my questions are less about how to bring discussions of racial justice and social equity into the classroom and more about how racial categorizations have been constructed and have been structurally operative and have transformed over time; how resources have been both hoarded and rendered inaccessible. Ultimately, perhaps I have some approaches and am truly interested in how to cultivate ways of thinking (and designing) with greater depth and nuance, that avoid flattening and rehearsing particular narratives.

As an emerging scholar being trained as a doctoral degree candidate in the history and theory of architecture, I have no interest in reconstructing the past “as it really was.” (Figure 7) The past “as it really was” is an illusory territory. Instead, my interests are fervently aligned with engaging architecture as a product of culture; a sociopolitical, sociocultural, and sociospatial artifact constructed as a result of historical processes that continue to resonate in the present moment and endure into the future. As such, architectural objects — buildings, spaces, urban territories — operate at both a wholly undeniable material level, as well as at the level of the immaterial — an ethical, behavioral, affective mode of operation.

Both the material and affective modes of operation of architectural artifacts maintain an ongoing and continually transforming aesthetics and attendant politics. In this way, works of architecture that particularly intervene in urban domains populated by people of color, or more specifically inhabited by Black bodies, are regarded as what philosopher Jacques Rancière would refer to as “aesthetics acts, as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and produce novel forms of political subjectivity.”

(Figure 8)

At the confluence of the law, legal rhetoric, public policy, and the development and construction of high-rise residential towers in New York City from 1955-1975 (perhaps a sort of pre-history or back story to the neoliberal project), space exists for interrogating how these objects and their financial, political, aesthetically-designed framing, sought to instantiate motives for constructing a sort of urban “middle- classness” (or “dress up” a population regarded as undesirable and pathological in an architecture that would make them “respectable”), rooted in conceptions of race, geography, and finance. In my work, these hybrid objects, publicly funded and incentivized, though privately developed and managed architectural artifacts are regarded as “racial formations,” “historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.” (Figure 9) According to sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, from whom I borrow this analytical tool:

A racial project is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.

Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning. (Figure 10) Asking such questions as to how these objects came into being, under what circumstances, out of what body of legal, cultural, financial and social mores, directly engages what Luisa Passerini described as the “raw material of oral history.” In this manner, “the raw material of oral history consists not just in factual statements, but is pre-eminently an expression and representation of culture, and therefore includes not only literal narrations but also the dimensions of memory, ideology and subconscious desires.” (Figure 11)

Likewise, the raw material of oral history also, importantly, includes the dimensions of projection; that which is intimate and internal, as well as that which is thrown forth, outward, externalized.

Projection can be understood as a technique of self-preservation, a defensive act. Freud asserted that this “defensive projection” was an act of paranoia. The purpose of paranoia is thus to fend off an idea that is incompatible with the ego, by projecting its substance into the external world. The transposition is effected very simply. It is a question of an abuse of a psychical mechanism which is commonly employed in normal life: transposition or projection (Figure 12).

Transposition or projection as paranoid, thus defensive, protective, and preservationist, is also constructive; at once building up the self while simultaneously fashioning an external other. And while this defensive act may be upheld as the unconscious work an individual mind, I would suggest that this defensive act of self-preservation also operates at the level of society, at the level of collective imaginar[ies]. Paranoid projection at the level of society or nations undergirds racial formations, precisely those “historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized.” (Figure 13) At the level of society, this form of projection operates to determine the ways in which nations work to define belonging, access, rights, and citizenship, while they concurrently construct and disseminate their own image and mythologize their own tenuous and embattled sovereignty (Figure 14); systematically casting off or throwing forth that which is deemed incompatible with its sense of identity.

Identifying architecture as a cultural artifact, this work joins architectural historical and theoretical analysis with analyses of society and ideology. Racial projects engage the inequalities that racial regimes produce. As representational frameworks, the work of culture (through the various forms of media this work confronts), including real-estate brochures that announced the benefits of these works and solicited Black families, involves discursive practices that make sense of racial difference in the everyday, infiltrating and constructing the contours of seemingly banal modes of black (urban and middle-income/middle-class) domesticity.

As Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva assert, “houses are unsettling hybrid structures.” (Figure 15) The house as a juridical-economic-moral entity has even greater material (as asset), political (as dominion), and symbolic (as shelter) authority when agglomerated as highrise, high-density, multi-family housing for urban Black bodies (Figure 16). Schemes deployed in service of this system condition experience, delimit fields of action, and partition knowledge, becoming things with which to think and act. Mitchell-Lama housing as a State fabricated and

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

authorized, and municipally elaborated scheme for housing black bodies in the urban domain embody these processes, making power relations explicit with logics not always merely reducible to that of capital (or profit). “Tall Tales: State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes” exits at this critical nexus, where imaginative invention interacts with and complicates literal meaning and where blackness (and to some extent the state and city) is a constantly reworked, redefined, and reconstituted frontier.

The figure of the Black, throughout the diaspora, and especially in what is referred to as the United States of America, and Blackness by extension in this national, state apparatus, can be understood as a projection, an image, a fiction deployed to shore up the nation against reproach; the very “avoidance of self-reproach via the externalization of cause or blame.” (Figure 17) And while the category and notion of whiteness, as embedded in the narrative of the nation, is equally fictionalized and co-constructed, the “incalculably differentiated thing [is] the fetish character of Blackness and its open secret.” (Figure 18) Blackness, as such, is both magical and ordinary, rehearsed, constantly re-presented and practiced, embodied and structural, illusory, and haptic, rendered common at both the level of the individual and the collective social body. As Fred Moten scholar and poet asserts:

Blackness is the name that has been assigned to difference in common, the animaterial inscription of common differentiation, which improvises through the distinction between logical structure and physical embodiment. Physical embodiment is not this or that skin color or bodily shape but haptic graph. Logical structure is not this or that determined or determinate discursive frame but common informality. (Figure 19)

My work exploring this complex body of high-rise residential towers, sponsored

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

by well-crafted legal andfinancial maneuvers, is invested in the divergent tales of Black life, the “general gathering of dispersal,” (Figure 20) these buildings host. As racial projects, these buildings are simultaneously abstractions and wholly real. These projects are deliberately engaged, “not because of [their] centrality or authenticity but rather, because of [their] specific enactment of the marginality and minority that is the central and authentic feature of Blackness understood as a general, generative principle of differentiation.” (Figure 21) In this way, my work is particularly invested in an exploration of the “relationship between subjectivity and objects,” (Figure 22); in this case the object of the high-rise residential tower, as a large scale agglomeration, consisting of individual objects, apartments, and a mass of overwhelmingly Black bodies.

The high-rise residential tower at the macro level and the life lived within the individual unit, the individual apartment, constitute the territory wherein notions of Black domesticity are both projected and performed, as well as conceptions of respectability and where the legislation of dwelling is enacted. These objects act as, “a politically salient meeting ground of public authority and personal intimacy,” (Figure 23) whose tales can be told through the specific form of discourse identified as such by Alessandro Portelli as oral history.

Oral history has the potential to directly engage this territory of projection, where Blackness is the site of that which is thrown forth, cast as divergent from the social mores, behaviors, customs, and ways of being that have been imagined as constitutive of the core of the national and state identity. This paranoid work of social and/or state projection delimits where and how individuals contained therein are categorized, located, and expected to interact with objects both in the physical, material world and in the social, cultural imaginary. This is a decidedly collective domain — expressly political, highly aesthetic, and particularly intimate

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— involving the relationship of parts to a perceived or imagined whole. It involves what philosopher Jacques Rancière refers to as a “distribution of the sensible:”

A distribution of the sensible establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. (Figure 24)

This distribution of the sensible, as a “system of self-evident facts of sense perception,” (Figure 25) invokes those faculties by which the body perceives and understands its relation to the external world and ultimately stores and remembers that information, namely memory. By establishing what is common, as well as exclusive parts, the distribution of the sensible operates at the level of society and at the level of lived individual, affective, material experience and betrays modes of consensus at work and the proliferation of commo sense. And while the seminal work in the field of oral history of Luisa Passerini and that of Allessandro Portelli are different on many levels, I recognize a particular correspondence at work between the two in their respective references to “consensus” and “common sense,” as well as in Anna Green’s interrogation of “collective memory.” As I work to unearth the historical processes at play surrounding the conceptualization and physical intervention of the body of architectural objects I have chosen to study, I have sought out the methods and theories of oral history alongside Black studies and architectural historical and theoretical analysis to afford a means by which to directly engage those who dwell within these objects.

Oral history is defined by Anna Green as “the collection and analysis of autobiographical memory.” (Figure 26) While Green suggests that research into autobiographical memory often found itself “relegated to the sidelines by the scholarly community’s burgeoning interest in the social or cultural memory of the group,” (Figure 27) my approach is less interested in establishing a binary opposition between social or cultural memory and autobiographical memory and is instead interested in the ways in which the individual, autobiographical tale is mediated by collective remembrance. Citing historical sociologist Jeffry Olick, Green presents two facets of collective memory theory. Accordingly, collective memory may be either:

“...the lowest common denominator or normal distribution of what individuals in a collectivity remember, or…’the collective memory’ as a ‘social fact sui generis,’ a

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

The work of oral history gets at how one comes into knowing how to be. There is a performative quality that foremost interests me, in both how — through what types of language, references, associations, etc. — tales are told and how personal, intimate life has been lived in a particular historical time and space, as constructed in or by those tales — through what types of behaviors, rituals, corporeal, bodily events are described, distorted, or omitted. My interest is in both form and content. (Figure 29)

Anna Green concludes her interrogation of the use of the conceptual term “collective memory,” with the assertion that some would argue there is “much leeway in what one can claim to be,”(Figure 30) that “there is surely an element of conscious personal selection among the potential relationships and networks available in modern, multicultural cities.” (Figure 31) By contrast, this work seeks to complicate and undermine the supposition that the machinations of the wider society have fundamentally changed. The “creative autonomy” that Green — by way of her analysis and exaltation of the work of anthropologist Daniel Miller — argues is permitted individuals to a much greater degree in the “modern state,” ignores impositions and boundaries delineated by racial formations and their attendant politics. And while I disagree with Green’s analysis of the availability of choice, this work whole-heartedly agrees that “we must keep space for the resistant, curious, rebellious, thoughtful, purposeful human subject,” (Figure 32) the subject racialized as Black, especially the dissenting Black scholar has always and already made space, bent space, reworked space. (Figure 33)

A very distinct order and authority attends securing and maintaining housing, particu-

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

larly under impoverished circumstances. Residents who interact with the well-established order and authority of this system, enact a certain dwelling ideology, reluctantly accepting the imposed order and authority, but with little protest. It is a form of “consensus, in the form of acquiescence to the established order and authority,” (Figure 34) as Luisa Passerini asserts that is part of what I seek to tease out through oral history interviews. My work directly engages the “material component of consensus” (Figure 35) in that the towers I pursue as my objects of study are actually providing housing, they afford residence. How individual subjects confront, accept, dwell in, resist, and enjoy, are pleased by the tensions, imposed restrictions, and forms of surveillance and regulation that come with these residences is what I seek to deploy oral history to confront.

I am fascinated, and have been for some time, with the fantastic modes of operation of the seemingly banal and contradictory. I fully accept and relish the “tension between individual reality and general [historical] process…” (Figure 36) And while the high-rise residential towers I pursue are objects that have emerged from particular sociopolitical, sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts — equally constructed under the law, through certain development and financing schemes and are aesthetically determined in very specific ways — these highrise towers are also products of a specific cultural imaginary. I refer to this domain in a manner that Alessandro Portelli might agree with, as “Tall Tales;” sits enmeshed in fabrication, lies, tales, attended by deceit and fakery, always already operating on multiple registers. The specific dialogic nature of oral history is an essential tool for my work, particularly because it is equally fraught with its own contradictions and tensions. “The expression oral history therefore contains an ambivalence…: it refers to both to what the historians hear (the oral sources) and to what the historians say or write.” (Figure 37) What I hear is significant, however what I write is supremely important to me.

Architectural histories of housing perpetuate narratives that align Blackness with dispossession or totally ignore it and unconsciously universalize whiteness, while simultaneously working diligently to ignore architecture’s role in the development and implementation of racial projects. Revolving around categoriza-

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

tions of form and type, architectural histories of housing have in many instances neglected how deeply connected seemingly mundane configurations of domesticity have been tied to and been generated as a result of the constitution of racial categories and the perpetuation of a moralizing mission. As such, modernist “towers in a park,” when not narrated in terms of universal access to light and air, have alternatively been and remain a continuously vilified trope when taking into account any discussion of race. These narratives often render Black residents victims of architecture, for whom the high-rise residential tower as type is deemed inappropriate, damaging, and damning. As the story goes, Black bodies, particularly Black families with children, and the housing they have been relegated to are deemed pathological. Black poverty is overwhelmingly used to explain the overrepresentation of black folks in sub-standard housing and their presence aligned with the perpetual decay of urban domains.

For all its seemingly progressive intent, the Mitchell-Lama housing program (and the accompanying body of large-scale, urban architectural artifacts) could be read as a bellwether for the fate of Black Americans within an increasingly privatized and global-

Salema Vanable

ized economy; one version of a back story to the neoliberal moment (Figure 38). What some scholars may refer to as the rise and fall of a failed experiment in postwar largescale, middle-income housing, my dissertation finds striking the endurance and mutability of the program across time and media — as legislative rhetoric, financial scheme, marketed object, aesthetic entity, architecture, cultural artifact, and host of physically lived, domestic realities; infiltrating and working on the social, cultural imagination. While the last project enacted under the legislation was certified for occupancy in the late 1970s (as the city of New York was facing serious financial decline), this work recognizes its ongoing productivity in the realm of myth-making, spinning tales, promoting an image of benevolent government intervention, that in fact mask a particularly mundane maintenance of racial hierarchy and subjugation; where Blackness is constantly veiled and simultaneously centered.

Jack Halberstam, in this opening essay to Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, writes in “The Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons” that: “In the essay that many people already know best from this volume, ‘The University and the Undercommons,’ Moten and Harney come closest to explaining their mission. [A stance with which I feel methodologically aligned]. Refusing to be for or against the university and in fact marking the critical academic as the player who holds the ‘for and against’ logic in place, Moten and Harney lead us to the ‘Undercommons of the Enlightenment’ where subversive intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity: ‘where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still Black, still strong.’ The subversive intellectual, we learn, is unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate, and disloyal. The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend the university nor change the university, the subversive intellectual is not toiling in misery and from this place of misery articulating a ‘general antagonism.’ In fact, the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder; she does not want a room of his or her own, she wants to be in the world, in the world with others and making the world anew.” (Figure 39)