Building the Cartesian Enlightenment

Abstract

The built form of the Los Angeles region manifests key ideals first cultivated within what Habermas refers to as the Enlightenment bourgeois public sphere. In its use of space and communication technologies, LA is an unanticipated monument to those eighteenth‐century Cartesian theories and practices that conceive of subjectivity and space as infinite, promote their mutual division, and encourage the modern subject to imagine itself as conceptually disembodied. Once conceptually disembodied, this subject comes to increasingly rely on practices of representation for communicating itself and its ideas to others. These practices begin with printed texts and now center on electronic networks. I historicize the connections between the LA region’s vast geography and the ideology of early boosters such as interurban railroad magnate, Henry Huntington, who, in 1912, proclaimed that the city could ‘extend in any direction as far as you like’. The intersection of geography and boosterism in LA would necessitate ever greater reliance on transportation and communication technologies. These technologies would be used by conceptually disembodied subjects to strive toward the individualist ideal of a private place in the sun organized according to an idea of nature reduced to ‘real estate’. I theorize both the conception of homelessness and its material reality in the city of angels in order to illustrate how privatizing Enlightenment ideals have been put into everyday practice in Los Angeles. I also examine homelessness as a means to better understand how space and subjectivity are linked in contemporary urban ideologies. In so doing, I probe the relationship between mobile bourgeois subjects organized according to the logics of representation and how publicly homeless bodies seem to ‘talk back’ to and refute the logic of these subjects.