To return a little to this project (which is not forgotten…the online notes have only taken a hiatus).

From Latour, Pandora’s Hope:

When a phenomenon “definitely” exists this does not mean that it exists forever, or independently of all practice and discipline, but that it has been entrenched in a costly and massive institution which has to be monitored and protected with great care. (155-156)

Latour, speaking of science and Pasteur, could also be speaking about Detroit. The “phenomenon” of Detroit, particularly as it is conceived in rhetorical terms, is one that is asked to exist in an entrenched institution. That institution, the one we communally refer to as “ruins” or “1967″ or some other circulated tag, has become institutionalized within a collective vocabulary in very specific - and often, inflexible - ways. The agents who monitor and care for this institutionalization vary, but we can identify some as “public” agents. Examples include: the generic news, popular expression, gossip, academic discussion (most of which centers on at least two parts of the the triad of race, class, and gender; gender not getting much attention regarding Detroit). These agents guard against other readings and usages of the thing we might name “Detroit.” Any discussion of Detroit, for instance, that fails to mention the issue of race is deemed faulty even though the discussion of race is already well circulated and known (it is monitored and cared for). When we rush to point out the very real racial inequalities the city experiences, we do not add to a discussion or create a new kind of discussion; we enforce an already existing one.

Thus, Digital Detroit is a move towards Latour’s rejection of so-called independence.  The thing I - or anyone - names Detroit is not independent of a variety of forces, actions, things, people, and so on that interact and generate a number of spaces we have given this particular name (and then there are the spaces within the spaces). Latour is an excellent teacher for this project. Two notable examples - “research” in Aramis and Pasteur in Pandora’s Hope - explore how many (without ever reaching a specific number) forces are at play in any given moment, text, position, idea, etc.

From Doyle’s Wetwares - the body as information system. But more importantly, as anticipated information system. What will be. What will emerge.

“For the intermezzo, in its grafting of the imperceptible if not absent organism to the future, poses the question, the problem, and the ecstasies of becomings proper to the body, what bodies are capable of, and therefore what they may become, then” (98.9).

Detroit is a body. A spatial body. Made up of bodies. What will it become? Financial success? Or something else entirely….like a network…what is always becoming…

Mark Nunes.

Regarding the Web and web activity: “These are networks that do not represent a relation between points of affinity but actively construct them in competing, multiple forms” (85)

Grady Clay, Close-Up: How to Read the American City

“The city as a device for distributing surplus energies” (87)

For Woodward Avenue chapter, see work on strips and connection to road development (91). The final stage (there are five), “produced that familiar phenomenon, a multi-laned instrument of mixed access, and often a dangerous road to drive” (91). Thus, we have contemporary Woodward. A dangerous road to drive.

“At some point in its life - usually when the strip becomes part of a highway network or web serving a region and not merely connecting two activity nodes - the strip becomes specialized as a pit stop for special markets” (101)

Networks and Places: Social Relations in the Urban Setting

(so far - book explores personal relations in urban environment…but second chapter - “The Dimensions of Social Networks” alludes to and deals with a Detroit study. That can be an early hook)

“Network Analysis and Urban Studies” - Claude Fischer

“Networks influence individuals and networks are influenced by individuals” (30).

“Links can be defined as, for example:

- exchanging advice on professional matters

- casual neighboring

- being ‘close friends’

- conspiring on political decisions ” (34)

and of course - today (the book is from ‘77) so much more can be added to an urban network research agenda.

“The Dimensions of Social Networks” - Robert Max Jackson, Claude S. Fischer and Lynn McCallister Jones

“Networks change as a consequence of changes in the factors we have described: rewards, costs, and contexts” (43)

If networks must be placed in opposition to a pedagogical practice, then it is placed opposite critical pedagogy.

If networks have politics, the politics are ecologies, and are chora-in structure. Critical pedagogy depends on topoi: resistance, subversion, hegemony.

From Politics of Nature:

“We have to become capable of convoking the collective that will be charged from now on, as its name indicates, with ‘collecting’ the multiplicity of associations of humans and non humans, without resorting to the brutal segregation between primary qualities and secondary qualities that has made it possible up to now to exercise the kingly functions in secret” (55)

and

“a thing emerges before anything else as a scandal at the heart of an assembly that carries on a discussion requiring judgment brought in common” (54)

and

“Now in the word ‘collective,’ it is precisely the work of collecting into a whole that I want to stress. The word should remind us of sewage systems where networks of small, medium, and large ‘collectors’ make it possible to evacuate waste water as well as to absorb the rain that falls on a large city. ” 59

“[Thing power] emphasizes those occasions in ordinary life when the us and the it slipslide into each other, for one moral of this materialist tale is that we are also nonhuman and that things too are vital players in the world. Like Thoreau, I hope to enhance my receptivity to thing power by writing about it, by giving an account of the thingness of things that might enable me to feel it more intensely. I pursue this project in the hope offostering greater recognition of the agential powers of natural and artifactual things, greater awareness of the dense web of their connections with each other and with human bodies, and, finally, a more cautious, intelligent approach to our interventions in that ecology.”

“The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter” - Jane Bennett, Political Theory Vol. 32 No. 3, June 2004347-372

To mesh with Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” and Latour’s interest in things, things are vital hubs in a given network.

From
“On Recalling ANT” - keynote speech, Deparment of Sociology, Lancaster University.

“What is the difference between the older and the new usage? Network at the time clearly meant a series of transformations -translations, transductions-; now, on the contrary, it clearly means a transport without deformation, an instantaneous, unmediated access to every piece of information. That is exactly the opposite of what we meant. The double click has killed the last bit of critical edge left in the notion of network. I don’t think we should use it anymore.”

and

“ANT is not a theory of the social, it is a theory of a space in which the social has become a certain type of circulation. But then, the consequence is that there is now room for other types of circulations, plenty of places.”

and

“ANT is not a theory of the social, no more than it is a theory of the subject, or a theory of God, or a theory of nature. It is a theory of the space and fluids circulating in a non-modern situation.”

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A December 15, 2005 Saturday Night Live pre-recorded skit entitled “Lazy Sunday” featured comics Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg as urban New Yorkers who rap about their day in the city and subsequent decision to see the film The Chronicles of Narnia. At one point in the sketch, the comics must figure out the best route to the movie theater. They debate which online service is best.

“I prefer MapQuest!”
“That’s a good one, too.”
“Google Maps is the best.”
“True dat.”
“Double true!” (more…)