{"id":991,"date":"2013-08-01T15:54:36","date_gmt":"2013-08-01T15:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=991"},"modified":"2013-09-26T19:39:00","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T19:39:00","slug":"glosses-on-termites-and-the-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/urbanities\/glosses-on-termites-and-the-city\/","title":{"rendered":"Glosses on Termites and the City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Caracas<\/a><\/p>\n

The first time I arrived in Caracas, I remember being struck by the lights of the shantytowns spreading out all over the hills. You could see them from the plane, and later on the highway that leads from the airport into the city. This forest of lights was like nothing I had ever seen. I was young and knew little about cities. I naively imagined this is what people meant when they talked about their bright lights.<\/p>\n

An essay by Sergio Chejfec begins by describing those same lights. Disorienting also to him, they initially seemed \u201cinnocent signals, urbanism of the mountain.\u201d The lights flicker, he adds, and as you cruise down the highway, they signal new surfaces in the folds of the landscape. They insist, by simple means of their numbers, on the complex ecology veiled by the dark.<\/p>\n

In that essay, titled \u201cApropiaci\u00f3n de la ciudad\u201d (Appropriation of the city, Quimera<\/em><\/a> 291,\u00a02008), Chejfec quickly leaves these lights behind, as he begins to narrate rather his initial foray into the city center. Walking without destination, he writes, he happens upon a store that\u2019s liquidating its stock of school supplies, and there he buys a collection of old postcards. Two days into his residency in Venezuela, he feels oddly nostalgic for the past splendor represented in these images. He purchases the whole set, in what he calls a \u201cselfish gesture”–selfish because he wants simply \u201cto hide from the eyes of others… those landscapes that I imagined belonged exclusively to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

This narrative is, up to this point, unremarkable. However, Chejfec soon notices something that sends the essay in a new direction: some bugs, termites or moths, have eaten away at the postcards. They\u2019ve carved little tunnels through the stacks. The hole in one corresponds to the same space in the postcard below it, and so on. This simple observation becomes the basis of a theory of urban space and how we occupy and pass through it.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, Chejfec considers that the holes could be symbols of urban decay: the postcards have been ravaged by time, like Caracas itself by decades of overpopulation and government ineptitude. Or in another sense, the perfectly manicured views of the city in the fifties, the period of the dictatorship of Marcos P\u00e9rez Jim\u00e9nez, would be unveiled and revealed to be false.<\/p>\n

This interpretation, valid enough, is less interesting than the other one offered up: Chejfec takes the termites\u2019 tunnels as a \u201cconcrete manifestation\u201d or a \u201creality-fiction.\u201d He proposes we see the holes as little communicating vessels or, better yet, something like wormholes, drawing unlikely connections between distant areas of the city. The image of a streetlight, for example, now, through the hole opened up by the bugs, touches an attic in a different area of town. The termites act like cops on cop shows, plotting crimes on a corkboard map, but the pins they drive into maps overlay one another. They introduce new and impossible itineraries into the city.<\/p>\n

We could take this as simple fancy, but I think there\u2019s more to it than the fantasy of termites carving imaginary itineraries into cardstock. I think we can take their paper-eating (which Chejfec calls \u201cwriting\u201d) in itself as a significant moment of passing through the city. They do so by devouring a pile of representations, monumental and idealized and real and significant. I once impertinently told a caraque\u00f1a<\/i> that I didn\u2019t think the city was very attractive. She said it was, as long as you didn\u2019t look at the shantytowns. The way she experienced Caracas, I\u2019d venture, was something analogous to what was proposed by those postcards (and it was more or less how I experienced it too): a city that corresponded to the criollo<\/i> inheritance, that excluded its marginal outskirts. Postcards, themselves an infinitesimal artifact within the city, teach us about scale and limits; they tell us the places where one\u2019s displacements stop, or should stop: the limits and characteristics of different sorts of neighborhoods, metro stops in bad parts of town, etc. Chejfec might agree, as he attributes to the termites an effective sort of action: \u201cThey had changed the coordinates and scales of Caracas, the landscape had acquired another meaning, the urban motifs were different, the idea of the use of space and its regulatory capabilities had been modified, etc.\u201d And the termites can do this because the postcards were already doing something similar.<\/p>\n

Maybe the most significant item in that list is \u201cregulatory capabilities.\u201d The idea seems to be that images and representations participate actively in the governance of a city. Maps and the visibilities they allow aid in control, and they also contribute to the forms of knowledge that help decide what needs to be controlled in the first place. That is clear enough. But the same point holds true for more trivial, or at least less obviously strategic, objects like postcards.<\/p>\n

Those termites, of course, cared little for any of this. And in any case, the urban itineraries they marked don\u2019t suggest itineraries that are very interesting or significant in themselves. I think that what is more meaningful is the form of the experiment in reading that Chejfec proposes. For if the termites\u2019 tunnels through the stack of postcards matter at all, if they can be taken seriously, then so can other, perhaps more consequential, itineraries: those that make up other and better maps and guides for the appropriation of the city.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first time I arrived in Caracas, I remember being struck by the lights of the shantytowns spreading out all over the hills. You could see them from the plane, and later […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-urbanities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=991"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1113,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/991\/revisions\/1113"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}