Notes on Eric Gordon - "The Urban Spectator" Introduction

Eric Gordon, “Introduction,” The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2010), pp. 1-20.

"Can the city, as an entity, continue to matter when digital networks
enable public gathering without requiring the public to gather in physical
space? The answer to these questions is a resounding "yes." The modern
American city has never been bereft of these complications- from the handheld
camera at the end of the nineteenth century to the mobile phone at the
end of the twentieth, the city has always been a mediated construct."

"The city enters into the cultural imaginary as a hodgepodge of disconnected signifiers, often organized by the technologies that produce them."

"Communication technologies ... provide the spectator the unique opportunity to at once experience space and possess its traces."

possessive spectatorship -- "the spectatorship structured around the desire for possessing these traces ... a way of looking that incorporates immediate experience with the desire for subsequent possession."

"The American city grew up in parallel to the technologies that enabled its possession."

"I argue that emerging media practices transformed urban practices by naturalizing
the notion that individual spectators could not only see the Conceptcity
but also possess it. And most importantly, I argue that this spectatorship
altered the material shape of the city as urban plans were drafted to meet the
expectations of a spectator eager to take control of the city's assembly."

Urban Practices/Concept-city

The concept of possessive spectatorship places a decisive emphasis on visuality.

Visuality is fundamentally embodied.

The notion that visuality and its corresponding technologies might alter the
way one engages with the urban environment is not particularly new.

Kodak camera -- "keeps his senses alert for the picture possibilities about him"

Ever since the handheld camera prompted shifts in the framing of everyday
vision, the process of collecting those visions has been framed through metaphor.

[I am] concerned with how the dominant understandings of technologies, shaped through metaphors of one kind or another, collide with the consumptive practices of spectators. And ultimately how this collision serves to shape the city.

Tbe view from on high is a fiction or facsimile of the city, like those drafted by planners or cartographers, but it does not provide access to the practices that actually compose the city.

Urban practices, themselves devoid of vision, always operate within what
de Certeau calls the Concept-city, a space of total vision. Each of the people on
that street corner is blindly interacting with their immediate urban spaces
(despite their use of media devices), while their understanding of those spaces
is framed by the evolving Concept-city (enhanced by those same devices).
Whether directly mediated or not, each practice of the city is embedded within some articulation of the Concept-city.

"De Certeau aligns this phenomenon to Ferdinand de Saussure's characterization of langue and
parole-the overall logic of any language (langue) is implicit in each individual speech act (parole). All urban experiences, he argues, comprise both the phenomenological encounter (the blind, embodied practices of the street) and the overarching logic of the Concept-city (the complete picture)."

Note: The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity.