Immemorial Visibilities: Seeing the City's Difference

Within urban studies, attentiveness toward social and cultural heterogeneity has come to involve a critique of metaphors of the city's visibility, on account of the association of vision with particular technologies of power and domination. This critical posture sometimes includes an overgeneralization in which the city's visibility is imagined as a screen which excludes and opposes the heterogeneity of everyday life. The resulting dualism restricts our attentiveness to difference and performatively repositions the critical subject within the same theatre of representation we had hoped to avoid. Although the work of Michel de Certeau describes the theoretical schema which devolves this danger, that of Jean-François Lyotard indicates directions by which critical urban studies might imagine the city's visibility differently, avoiding false generalization, dualism, and the presumption of a critical position. Through Lyotard, critical urban studies may grasp the paradox of an immemorial visibility, which proposes an ever-present difference within, rather than beyond, representation and visibility. The idea of the city's immemorial visibility suggests alternatives to the current tendency to canonize the investigation of everyday life, pointing instead toward formal experimentation in our representation of cities and toward the investigation of specific technologies which target our urban vision.