Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
Infrastructure as Political Unconscious
(on David L. Pike's Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworld of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001 [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007])
by Bruce Robbins | ns 70
"You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward." George Orwell, writing in The Road to Wigan Pier in 1936, was willing to forget that cars ran on oil in order to reach for a larger social truth: "all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel." For Orwell, this particular dirty job stood for a world of dirty jobs. Work underground, unpleasant to those who performed it and invisible to everyone else, was what enabled anyone to sit in a heated room in winter. The relationship of underground to aboveground was the model of society itself.
The model looks simple, but it transmits complex and even conflicting messages about injustice and dependence. These messages and the many mine-like structures to which they became attached are the subject of David L. Pike's Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworld of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001. According to Pike, it became possible to grasp modern society as a structured and unequal whole because of the intersection of two histories. One was the new vertical organization of urban space. The nineteenth century brought a sudden hollowing out of the ground beneath the city dweller's feet—sewer systems, railway tunnels, then subways—along with a multiplication of new angles of vision (like the commuter's view from elevated railways) and new zones of artificial illumination (like railway stations and covered shopping arcades, ancestors of today's malls). All of these induced people to look up and down, and to think as they did so that what they were looking at was not natural but social. Thus the "unnaturalness" of the coal miner's experience of totally manmade space became representative. That all this architectural innovation was part of a gigantic disturbance in everyday life, as well as an emblem of that disturbance, is not in itself news to urban historians. Lewis Mumford (whom Pike credits) was talking about the continuity between mining and the verticality of the modern city (and trench warfare as well) before Orwell visited Wigan. What Pike adds is a daring linkage between this familiar technological narrative and a second, seemingly unrelated history: the decline and persistence of religious mythology. In his view, people largely made sense of the new experience by updating ancient images of hell and the devil. And in doing so, they paradoxically produced a more nuanced and ambivalent story than Mumford's.
Groping for a way to describe the new space of the city, many of its inhabitants thought of hell. That is, the traditional topography of Christianity offered itself as a useful language of social critique. At the same time, the need for a language of social critique helped sustain the fading relevance of the Christian cast of characters. Satan, whom the nineteenth-century Romantics had deemed the most charismatic of those characters, was clearly losing much of his orthodox fearfulness. The Romantics had found in him a kindred spirit, modern and revolutionary. The devils lovingly catalogued by Pike from the dark corners of nineteenth-century culture are already figures of proto-camp, less likely to enforce a theologically stern moral code than to provide ironic, deliciously forbidden forms of entertainment. If the unwary were dispossessed of their souls, it might well be in a figurative and very unorthodox sense, as when a limping devil whisked someone up to the top of some urban structure and revealed a breathtakingly panoramic view of the metropolis from above. To invoke "the satanic presence" might intimate "that the entire city was an underworld, his proper demesne." But peeling back the rooftops and seeing the hidden connections beneath them was also serious fun. Among other things, it meant the devil's powers were at your disposal. You might even feel, in a Faustian or utopian spirit, that the transformative energies behind all this apocalyptic engineering were in some sense working on your behalf. Oscillating between the diabolical and the comic, the nineteenth-century Satan hinted that capitalism's new spectacle might in the end offer "nothing more than the same old story of damnation," but he also let you in on the thrill of inventing a mode of life that went against nature. The modern urban masses were attracted to the ancient figure because he allowed them to feel both things at once.
As a way of dealing with the new urban landscape, Pike argues, the Christian vocabulary sheltered some pretty heterodox viewpoints. But there was also a heterodoxy in the architecture itself. When railway viaducts were cut through the city, he notes, the neighborhoods of the poor (which were selected, of course, for viaduct construction) were abruptly exposed to the eyes of passing passengers. But new angles on the metropolis were also exposed thereby to the gaze of its poorest inhabitants. Who among them had ever looked at the city from the vantage-point of a viaduct? The very word must have been disorienting. This is one possible context for Chico Marx's immortal response to Groucho's real estate map (including viaduct) in Cocoanuts (1929): "Why a duck?"
Pike has a collector's passion for viaducts, arches, quarries, tunnels, sewers, and arcades, and for the many and varied things that nineteenth-century observers had to say about them. His enthusiasm is especially contagious in an era when long-term government neglect of infrastructure has filled the news with breached levees, collapsing bridges, neighborhoods falling off the power grid, and other end-of-the-world-style disasters. At the same time, what attracts Pike to these materials is a little hard to zero in on. It's not edgy nostalgia of the sort that draws TV audiences to watch urban spelunkers move through eerily abandoned subway lines. Nor is it politics in an everyday sense. He doesn't talk much about urban renewal's winners and losers, and not at all about Foucaultian surveillance or biopower. When he discusses nineteenth-century arrangements to open the Thames Tunnel and the sewers to tourists, it's without cynicism. On the contrary, Pike lets you imagine that something like the epic descent to the underworld, a motif that Dante and Milton borrowed from Homer and Virgil, might have been made accessible to ordinary urbanites, thus infusing their experience of the metropolis with elements of mythic consciousness that seem totally incompatible with modern technical rationality. (At this point I confess I wanted to hear about The Phantom of the Opera and what its decades of recent fans have taken away from it.) The sense of politics that does animate this very animated book refers more indirectly to enlightenment, class, and democracy.
Consider Pike on the Adelphi:
a riverside development of twenty-four luxuriously terraced houses, built upon a complex network of arched catacombs just downriver from what is now Charing Cross station....The Adelphi's vertical divisions concretized the class structure for its inhabitants, making visible in the center of London the social stratification expressed more abstractly in the railway viaducts, and being enacted by the swathes they cut through the north, east, and south of the city. While the passages, like many of the emblematic spaces of Paris, condensed fantasies of the mingling of class distinctions within a single space, those of London tended to figure increasing separation and to express mingling wholly in terms of fear.
To H. G. Wells, who lived for some time in the Adelphi, the building was a symbol of where history seemed to be heading: illumination and splendor on the higher floors, misery and artificial light for those toiling (and often sleeping) under the arches below.
Pike is interested in elaborating London/Paris comparisons and lesser-known allusions to the Adelphi. But most readers will probably want to stop with Wells, whose science fiction novel The Time Machine seems almost a transcription of what Wells saw around him in the Adelphi—and for that matter a direct ancestor of what Orwell saw in the mines of the north. And if you keep your attention fixed on Wells and Orwell, you start to wonder how good a tool of social critique the satanic reading of urban topography actually was. Pike quotes Orwell's passage about the miners in his previous book, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945 (2005). With his usual acuteness, he observes how Orwell had been inspired by the London Underground to notice the unremunerated time the miners spent merely getting to the coal face. The miners' "miles of creeping to and fro" paralleled "the City man's daily ride in the Tube." But there is an obvious problem with this parallel. The miner and the City man (presumably a banker or stockbroker) may have an "underground commute" in common, but for the rest of the day their experiences will differ considerably. In other words, underground travel is not in itself a marker of class division. It is a characteristic of modern urban life, shared by people of all classes. And in a sense the same is true even of underground labor. Pike recognizes this issue in Wells' The Time Machine, another classic text of social verticality. Arriving in the distant future, Wells' Time Traveler mistakes the refined vegetarian Eloi who dwell on the earth's surface for the ruling class. The subterranean Morlocks, he imagines, must be descended from East End workers who "live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the surface of the earth." So it appears. But the truth of who is living off (that is, eating) whom doesn't turn out to conform to our instinctive sense of the underground as the abode of the exploited. In Pike's words, Wells has confused "the class-divided space of the worker with the utilitarian use of the underground by all city dwellers."
There's a similar confusion in Orwell. Upon closer inspection, the underground/aboveground division doesn't do such a good job of representing class hierarchy. Orwell is appalled by the monotony and grinding sameness of the miners' underground labor, but it's not clear he can imagine overturning the society that insisted on it. After all, everyone, miners included, depended on coal for warmth. And if dependence is really universal, then how can it be complained about? Adam Smith himself anticipates Orwell, minus any reference to the underworld, at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations. He lists the many kinds of worker who are needed to produce something as simple and necessary as a laborer's overcoat: the shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, and so on. "The very meanest person in a civilized country" can't be clothed, Smith concludes, "without the assistance and cooperation of many thousands." Needless to say, for Smith this interdependence is not a scandal.
And yet, when Orwell insists on "what the world above doesn't want to see of the mechanism that makes its life possible," he gets a hearing. And he keeps getting one. The impulse may not be revolutionary; the resonant outrage may be forced to subside into a milder plea that conditions should be reformed, or merely that attention should be paid. But the words stick in the mind. For all its imprecision, this is a language that works on people's feelings. And the fact that it does work, whether despite or because of that imprecision, is the heart of Pike's case. The word he uses for that self-conscious imprecision is myth.
Today's political unconscious is harder to conceive as archaeologically layered, like Orwell's mines or Freud's Rome. It's more geographically dispersed, like Lacan's Baltimore or the export processing zones of the global south. As we now imagine the world, dependence on coal has been superseded by dependence on oil, which almost seems to spring unaided from the earth (no muscular, charismatic workforce required) and which often arrives from far away, as do many of our other staples. Things are different when you feel your reliance (if and when you do feel it) on products from Nigeria or Iran, Mexico or the Philippines. As Pike puts it, "the nineteenth-century obsession with all things underground" no longer accurately reflects "either the metaphysical or the physical reality of a globalized, virtual economy." But as the underground stops corresponding to our material reality, Pike argues, it shifts "back into its primary role" as myth. In other words, the myth survives, even unsupported by the social facts, and it continues to help us make useful sense of those facts. It's not just that we are stuck with "the affective power that continues to adhere to these outmoded forms for want of a better place to go." We should be glad we have some image, any image, that does manage to put our understanding of the world and our emotions about it together.
So is thinking mythically, using figures like the devil and his underworld, politically good for us, or inevitable, or what? One disadvantage of thinking of the world as disenchanted, hence in need of a re-enchanting lift from mythic thought, is its tendency to exaggerate the evils of the Enlightenment, or the value of triumphing over it. Pike sometimes writes as if "escape from the geometric order of Cartesian space"—one accomplishment with which devil mythology is credited—was the equivalent of feeding the hungry, ending racism, and so on. That we need to escape from this geometric order, or that this order in particular is what we most need to escape from, or that we might be better off in the darkness below ground—these propositions aren't argued so much as assumed. Of course this is pretty standard for those (like Pike, and like me) who make a living off the anti-geometry of culture. Following the lead of Walter Benjamin, to whom he often refers, Pike reflects brilliantly on the devil in Baudelaire, while he also uncovers plausible devil surrogates in Eugene Sue's Les Mystères de Paris, in the Gothic genre (relocated from the country to the city), in detective stories (the detective as another limping devil, taking off the housetops to reveal the hidden world of connections), in film noir and neo-noir. (But why not also talk about the good spirits of Dickens' A Christmas Carol? Readers sometimes forget that they stage-manage Scrooge's conversion by means of investigative reporting on how the other half lives—and thereby provide a pattern for Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, whose guardian angel offers another short course in sociology for beginners.) The supervillain of so many popular entertainments is described as "a mutated form of the old rebel angel, a devil figure whose supernatural powers had been recast in the form of a preternatural control over the new technology." In such examples myth seems to have been thoroughly secularized, like the hellishness of Orwell's coal mines. Here myth means no more (though also no less) than culture.
Pike's sympathy for the devil (he cites the Stones song, with a nice account of its opening bongos and yelps) leaves me a bit puzzled, finally, about the nature of his game. Maybe myth doesn't just mean culture. Maybe it means religion. Old-time religion. Can you bring back the devil, however campily, without bringing back the serious prospect of hellfire at the same time? If his tradition still lives, isn't it in part because hellfire does too? Pike is somewhat equivocal about how much he might be obliquely discussing the political usefulness of Christianity. The allusion in his title—to the river Styx—refers of course not to Christian but to Greek mythology, which has an underworld but no Satan, and no televangelists. For better or worse, the gods of Olympus are not the social force today that they once were. On the other hand, movies and television have not given up on the racier bits of Judeo-Christian myth, and the jury is still out on what all this recent dabbling in demonology has meant and will mean for likely voting patterns in crucial states.
In an autobiographical preface, Pike mentions the basement of his family house outside Louisville—a blue city in a red state—and a darker, scarier room off the basement, not wired for electricity, that was probably used for coal storage. "I can't recall ever exploring" that room, he writes, "except in nightmares." The fact that this basement represented male rather than female space, and was where his father chose to spend "much of his free time," sets up one possible context for Pike's association of the underground with a devilishness that's at once alarming and hard to get over, especially for a guy. What might it have to do with the rightward trend of the masculine vote? It would be interesting to light that basement room up, finally, and do some exploring.
Taken at its word, the familiar anti-utilitarianism of the disenchantment-of-the-world story would lead us away from the re-engagement with urban infrastructure that Pike's book so eloquently and valuably encourages. Public utilities inspire a grudging sense of obligation at best. It has often seemed that the more we prized the imagination, the less likely we were to invest our energies in such unsexy causes as sewage, water quality, garbage disposal, and public transport. The built environment of the city is art that gradually loses the power to remind us that it is art. We hardly notice it unless it malfunctions. Which it does, alas, ever more reliably. Space reasserts itself as extremely non-virtual when the infrastructure on which the global metropolis quietly depends suddenly makes itself heard, with exploding manhole covers and so on. Unwilling to be caught in Soviet-style hymns to electrification or drainage, the left has not been quick to catch the thread of such disasters. We have been slow to pick up on the language of systemic indignity with which Jamaica Kincaid assails an unsuspecting tourist: "the contents of your lavatory might, just might, graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water, for you see, in Antigua, there is no proper sewage disposal system."
The defense of infrastructure, as argued by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, is a job for the imagination as well as for politics. The issue is far from pure: the corporations need functioning infrastructure as much as anyone else, though of course they don't want to pay for it. Still, this cause is a natural extension of the anti-sweatshop movement consciousness that Klein has done so much to advocate. Who made your shirt, and how much were they paid for it? Do you know how your basic needs are met? Pike cites the diabolical Sweeney Todd and his explanation of where the meat in meat pies comes from. Contemplate the example, and you will be reassured that the Orwellian tradition of popular commodity consciousness is very much alive, though we would all like to see it more vigorous.
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