The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500

Abstract

This mixed bag is the latest round in the ‘urban history meets cultural studies’ saga. Derived from a conference session at Venice in 2002, it looks like the product of a vague ‘call for papers’ powered up under four years of patchy editorial direction, and delayed (we are told) by deaths and the arrival of babies. It is published in the Rodger/Pinol Historical Urban Studies series. Many historians will need to take a deep breath before sampling the contents. With Walter Benjamin already appearing on the eleventh line of the main text, fair warning is given of the general tenor, and the contents vary between scholarly social history and Pseuds’ Corner. There is as much cultural geography as urban history and the current interest in spaces is well represented even though it has its own lineage. Bodies are fashionably on the agenda but brains are not mentioned. Memory, dreams and mental illness do not appear to affect the senses, and eyeglasses, hearing-aids and magnifying glasses are ignored. Light and dark, fog and bright sunlight, are not discussed. Photography and motion pictures are absent. Most of these authors hang off the opaque writings of the great continental philosopher-sociologists, but few read them in the original languages. Not only do they rely on translated texts, they also take many of their quotations from secondary works by Anglophone authors, with garbled, conventional or grotesque results. Lacking the necessary training and background, they rarely join in historico-philosophical debates on the Continent and poke about under the huge legs of Durkheim, Husserl, Sartre, Althusser, Lefebvre and Bourdieu. The editors’ introduction struggles to rise above the banal and much of it does little more than resume existing ‘tropes’ in urban history and accumulate references relating to the five basic senses detected in ancient Greece. The absence of contributors from France and Italy is disappointing, though translation problems are perhaps to blame. Italian writings, however pretentious, would have spiced this volume up. Perhaps Pinol could have recruited some authors and arranged for translations, but there is no sign of this. However, the main problem is how to relate history to the senses. Some contributors do not do this at all, or they get by with assertions or the odd reference, often using a fashionable lingo drawn from the social-control canon and related debates. Wheeler's scholarly essay on disease in Venice gets close to the target but Inglis, on disposal of bodily wastes, gets too involved with the political significance of sewers and seems unaware of the survival of dry systems into the nineteenth century and the use of cesspit contents in agriculture. More interested in solids than liquids, he ignores the use of urine in industry and does not mention that many owners of Harris Tweed jackets are proud of their ‘robust’ smell without knowing where it comes from, just as many gardeners like the smell of manure when mixed with straw. Wright is good on the ‘encoding’ of class distinctions in speech but this is linguistics and accent rather than hearing. Rowe on Berlin is best seen as art history. Hahn on advertising on the grands boulevards adds a little to the existing literature but it is obvious that you need eyes to see posters. Carpenter on beer in Munich is brilliant social history but the taste of the beer is ignored. Wakeman on Paris in the 1940s is billed as a space exercise. It uses all the latest words but is mainly an original treatment of the crowd in the Liberation. Annoyingly post-modern in structure (i.e. it has no structure), its use of contemporary newspapers and fairly recent French publications produces a farandole of fragmentary but powerful impressions which recreates a unique experience. She really should make that film now. Finally, two essays fail utterly to make the grade. Strohmayer's disquisition on the Pont-Neuf and all sorts of other things is self-indulgent social geography. And Cowan on social space and social structure in early modern Venice is an irrelevant ‘much needed gap’ piece which calls his role as joint editor into question. By the way, if the urban historians do another of these culture books they should consider including a free DVD (this is not a joke).