Srđan Radović
City as Text
2013, 358 pages
Price : 800 dinars
Srđan Radović (born in Titograd in 1976) is an ethnologist/anthropologist, and works at the Ethnographic Institute of SANU, where he became a research fellow 2005, a research associate in 2008, and a senior research fellow in 2013. He has bachelors’ and masters’ degrees and a doctorate from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade. He is the author of Pictures of Europe: A study of the representations of Europe in Serbia at the beginning of the twentieth century (Belgrade: SANU, 1999) and several articles, reviews and critiques. He edited the collection Cultural diffusion: Anthropological perpectives (Etnografski institut, 2013). His recent research i concerned with political identities and memories in connection with construction of public space and cultural heritage. City as text represents the results of Radović’s research in the project “Cultural heritage and identity,” financed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia.
From the introduction:
The time has long passed since we could say about anthropologists that they are “well known to be agoraphobic and antiurban by definition,” considering that a broad set of circumstances have brought researchers closer to the “other” and “exotic” in their own surroundings, frequently in urban surroundings. The city and urban culture have by now become traditional terrains of anthropology and ethnology, as well as an object of research in other disciplines. The city has become over time a site of general interest, a theme of both academic and public discussion, and questions related to the urban are considered and analysed from the most diverse perspectives. This interest in the problematics of the city is entirely predictable if one takes into account what appears to be the irreversible course of advancing urbanisation and the ever-increasing success and visibility of urban environments. In this light it is understandable that one might say, “if it is true that we are part of a civilisation that is irredeemable urban … then it is natutal that there should appear a growth in interest for something that we might call destiny .” Or, as a well-known Yugoslav architect observed, “the fact that since time immemorial, the idea of the city has been surrounded by a rich halo of picturesque images, tells us that humans have always been obsessed with the search for the meaning of the city; that could also be taken to mean that humans early on sensed its central importance.”
The incessantly increasing concentration population, power and knowledge in cities gives an added symbolic meaning and prominence to cities, especially the larger ones – metropoles and global cities. A semiotics can be observed of particular cities, which are read in a coded manner and which cannot be observed as examples of an established system of signs with their corresponding meanings – the picture of a city appears more as unified and complete text made up of many signs, and which determines how a particular city is perceived, and sometimes mythologised. Sometimes that indicates the existence of one dominant, widely diffused meaning of a city that is carried through various public discourses, that is the existence of a central symbolic and value-oriented representation of a particular city in a particular moment, though this dominant meaning can change in response to social or political circumstances. It could be said that the picture of a city is comprised of a mechanically reproduced picture which is usually created, systematically or not, by officials and politics, and of an imaginary representation that is created by means of certain cultural practices, taking into account that each of these two aspects are mutually reinforcing and influence one another – in every city there exist social actors who play a decisive role in the consolidation of its image, and sites where there develop polyvalent variations on the basic theme, and over time these create stereotypical and relatively well-founded representations of the city. Aside from the emanation of images of the present, cities have the capacity for powerful projection of images of the past. In that sense they can be viewed as palimpsests, as carriers of memory of a celebrated past, though readings that are conditioned by visible markers of space, by performance and by memories, which are sometimes forced to the background or proscribed.
The central meanings of such cities, these urban palimpsests, depend on individuals, and publicly constructed palimpsests change their content and symbolic quality depending on the time and on the groups that create them, although this type of dominant representation of a city may not necessarily be generally accepted. Although they are not built with the purpose of memorialisation, cities have the capacity to embody, materialise and represent collective memory and to sublimate it in space and time. It could be said that the city has a quality of textuality and that it can be observed as a constellation of signs and symbols, or as a type of language, a system of hieroglyphs. In that way the city can be understood as a text, that is as a symbolic polygon on which politics engages its actions of cultural and symbolic adaptation consistent with the political and/or national imaginary; in that way the city can be viewed through the lens of communication, as a text, as a relatively autonomous message, as made up of a combination of signs which in interaction with the receiver of the message create diverse meanings.
City as text reveals an arena of political discourses and practices in which cultures are endlessly reproduced and transformed, and of research into how the text is constructed, and how landscapes in general are created and used. At the same time it speaks of ways in which the city as symbol strengthens and creates meanings tied to the political sphere and collective identities. Adreas Huyssen defines the city-text (which can be understood as indicating the role of the city as a text, the urban text or the text of the city) as a conglomerate of signs that are written, erased and reinstated, and which are made as much of existing visible markers in the urrounding space as they are of memories and of images of the past. Alternatively, Maoz Azaryahu sees the city as text (which he also labels city-text) as a system of signs that transfer official history and identity onto the semiosphere of the city, a system that is in the first instance composed of street names and other namings in public space that constitute a representation of the past and a dominant system of values, and by means of which they construct an important component of official cultures. In that sense Azaryahu emphasises the odonymic component of the city as a text. Meanwhile the more inclusive term architexture together with urban names includes physical objects, places, memorials and other urban iconography that transform the city into a pace of historical memories, the cultural imaginary and political visions. The city is in that regard composed of a grouping of signs (architecture, memorial sites, streets, etc.), principally public symbols, and as a cultural/anthropological text influences the construction of identity and the formation and change of cultural values. The physical and social characteristics of the city are inseparable from the cultural meanings that that have been attached to them, and the revelation of these meanings, and the conditions surrounding the cultural conceptualisation of space, along with empirical and analytical approaches to the mutual relations between symbolically marked space and identies, can be an interesting theme for ethnoanthropological research.
On the pages that follow particular attention will be given to cities read as texts in the narrow sense, as proposed by Azaryahu, that is to the names of public spaces that are interpreted as signs (especially to street names). Of course, the names of streets and other public spaces are not the only principally political symbols in the urban environment. They make up only a part of the wide-ranging system of political symbols which are materialised by way of symbols which in various spheres express and perform particular political, ideological or national values. Political symbols in the public sphere are not some indefinite or coincidental sets of individual symbols, but rather parts of a polysystem that can be defined as a complex of different systems that interact with one another and overlap in part, and that act as a structural whole in the promotion of particular political, national or other values.
In the urban space, the names of streets (and other public spaces) function symbolically in synergy with other symbols, such as monuments, architecture, museums and the like. We will take such elements into account. Complex urban interventions, the construction of monuments and memorials, architecture (especially monumental architecture), are elements of a system of symbols in urban space that have great signifying power, and their declarative character is not at all hidden from the creators and inspirers of their design. As such, political symbols of this type have often been the object of consideration on the part of several disciplines, and have been widely recognised as means of political identity that have participated in the formation of everyday discourses and systems for the representation of people. They relate not only to the space that surrounds them, but also as mediators to the societies in which people play a part, in the final instance as members of a specific community that has its habitat in that symbolically signified space. Work on the construction of (political, national and other) identities is by no means confined to these gestures of creating grandiose environments, localities with large identity-based and political capacity, but is carried out through ideological and symbolic interventions of apparently lesser significance, like ordinary changes in the official names of spaces or objects like businesses, restaurants or cinemas.
This insight could be useful in interpreting the massive renaming of firms and factories across Yugoslavia after the Second World War (Bata became Borovo, Siemens became Končar, Union became Kraš and so on), which also masked linguistically the fact that what was often at stake was nationalised or confiscated property. A nearly ideal example of the political use of name changes is the renaming of the restaurant Ruski car (the Russian Tsar) in Knez Mihailova street in Belgrade after the liberation, when the name represented a clear ideological nuisance to the authorities who were consolidating the socialist system, and doing so in the context of a conflict with the Soviet Union. The resulting Zagreb restaurant was just as much a thorn in the side of a later leadership that replaced the Communist-era slogan “Brotherhood and Unity” with the oath “All Serbs in one state,” and consequently the Ruski car, under new political circumstances, regained its old name. In a similar manner, cinema halls, which are spaces of a meaningful flow of human traffic, are a frequent target of linguistic competition. During the German occupation, all of the cinemas in Belgrade that had “non-national” names (Kasina, Union, Rex…) had by 1943 received new “ideologically and nationally ‘appropriate’ names” – New Europe, or Šumadinac and Morava after sites associated with national characte . These types of interventions into the urban texture and names with which people inevitably interact in everyday life may be the most effective ones, because they establish dominance over apparently incidental signs in the city which people (to whom the symbolic communication by means of names and signs is directed) encounter regularly. This applies especially to streets and their names, where the symbolic “conquest” of meaning through (re)naming of public urban spaces is simplest and most frequent.