EXTRAORDINARY VIENNA: LANDSCAPE AND POWER IN THE METROPOLIS, Part 1

EXTRAORDINARY VIENNA: LANDSCAPE AND POWER IN THE METROPOLIS
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This article is in two parts. This is part 1

EXTRAORDINARY VIENNA: LANDSCAPE AND POWER IN THE METROPOLIS-PART I
Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University
In his recent essay on structure and meaning in complex societies, Ulf Hannerz reminds us that the whole idea that cultural knowledge is shared among people is the problem in ethnography (1992: 10-15). People with different levels of social power acquire different degrees of knowledge and expertise. When sharing does occur it is within a network of people who share the same life experiences at the same levels of social power. Hannerz calls these sub-cultures. Their existence in complex societies is guaranteed by the differences in social power. Sub-cultures preclude our assuming that spatially bounded units, such as villages, neighborhoods, work organizations and cities, share anything at all. Instead, we have to demonstrate that the sharing exists. How and why meaning becomes shared is the ethnographer’s highest priority.
The term “share” is itself ambiguous. If meaning is shared, does that mean it is mutually recognized by different people, the way readers of English recognize the reference to the common animal in the graphemic cluster “dog?” This is the simplest variety of sharing. This approach has the danger of equating culture almost entirely with semiotic systems of various types. Minimally, sharing does imply a knowledge of a set of signs. But learning a list of terms, such as the names of all the registered breeds of dogs, does not permit one to act on this knowledge. For that, increasingly subtle levels of distinction among breeds is required, leading to ranked preferences and evaluations of dogs in different contexts. People with very little knowledge of breeds feel perfectly free to make distinctions, rank preferences, and identify contexts. The lists of recognizable signs alone cannot be sufficient to define all that is implied when we speak of shared cultural knowledge shaping action.
The second possibility for what we mean by shared cultural knowledge, then, goes beyond recognition of the signs to a shared evaluation where we all immediately agree on how we judge dogs whenever we encounter them. This is the most rigorous form of sharing and therefore among the rarest. To use this as our criteria for shared culture knowledge would condemn culture to being the exception in human affairs, rather than the rule. While consensus may rule in “informed opinion,” there are always minority positions and dissenters. Sharing does not have mean a unanimity in evaluation in order to shape people’s actions.
A third possibility is that sharing involves the realization that for every reference we encounter there is a context which permits a variety of evaluative positions. What is shared among people is both the recognition of the reference and the knowledge that there are a variety of positions that people can take toward that reference, not all of which are positive. The shared knowledge of dogs includes the knowledge that the value people place on dogs in various contexts is contestable. This recognition of contestation represents and reproduces a moral universe, the evaluation of the dog. We may share in this discourse on dogs and still disagree on the value of the animals. This view of sharing goes beyond mere recognition but does not impose the stricter criteria of agreement on value. Thus, it comes closest to the actual experience of cultural knowledge as we encounter it.
The metropolis is one site in which the issue of shared meaning is particularly crucial. How can a region with a very large population, reflecting wide disparities in resources and power, and adhering to various ideological communities, be described as anything but a mosaic of contiguous, but non-mutual “knowers?” Is there a level of cultural integration at the regional metropolitan level, such that all residents of the region must over time possess the same knowledge, participating in the same discourse on the moral universe of metropolitan life? By knowledge I do not mean the lists of the metropolis, such as the locations of essential services, the names of government leaders, or where to get the pizza. Rather, I mean those same crucial distinctions about time, space and identity that represent and reproduce a urban moral universe. This is knowledge that defines the metropolitan social structure, even as that social structure defines who among the population of the metropolis will command this knowledge and at what levels of expertise.
The hunt for metropolitan knowledge is a search for extraordinary contexts. For the last twenty years, I have conducted just such a search in the Vienna. The search has yielded two potential sources of metropolitan knowledge which I have presented for critique to the discipline as monographs. The first concerned the ways in which daily schedules could be seen as imposing extraordinary constraints on all residents in a region, requiring people to share the meanings of particular segments of time (1992). The more recent book focuses on the landscape of the city and the ways in which it reflects the variety of models of the relationship between city and countryside, city dweller and social power. In this paper, I wish to use this recent work to demonstrate the possibilities of metropolitan knowledge and the conditions under which very large populations come to share meaning about their world.
This paper is about the relationship between the citizen and the metropolis as represented and reproduced in the planted environment. The planted environment is an extraordinary site/sight in a modern city. It could be argued, though I will not take the time to do so here, that the urban landscape only comes into existence under the conditions of planning and control within the design regime of Urban Modernism. Foucault has identified the extraordinary place as one what possesses six specific qualities not found in ordinary places. In a lecture given in 1967 called "Of Other Spaces (1986)," he calls these extraordinary places heterotopias, "other-places," to distinguish them from the utopias, "non-places," and defines them as "real places—places that do exist and that are formed at the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within cultures, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted." The name heterotopia requires that these sites are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about. This contradiction between the need to be different, but linked, gives heterotopias their special status.
There are two dimensions of space involved in distinguishing heterotopias as real spaces. The first differentiates utopic sites from the abstract, technological space of planners. Both are fantasies of power, but the latter is formulated with the express intention to act, while the former is didactic. Heterotopic sites have this didactic quality as well, but they are neither utopic nor abstract. The second dimension differentiates between the sites of ordinary, everyday experience and the heterotopic sites that reflect the everyday sites in some concentrated fashion. Ordinary sites have minimal specification and demarcation. We know where we are, but where we are is not particularly special. It might be the street, a shopping strip, or a parking lot. Ordinary sites might include the workplace, the home, or the local pub. These are middle range sites because they retain their ordinariness, but include important personal and social meanings that cannot be ignored. They are nevertheless ordinary compared to these "other places." The heterotopic sites attempt to reflect the everyday experience, but do so in a way that is highly selective of activities or ideas. Heterotopias are different from the geographies of everyday experience, and thus, are irreducibly linked to the ordinary geography. Without the ordinary, the extraordinary has no meaning.
Foucault names six specific characteristics for identifying heterotopic places. The first is a quality of universality within the scale of the society. The site is a common place, in spite of its special qualities. Unique or temporary sites cannot qualify. Foucault specifies two types of universality: places of crisis, such as seclusion huts or funeral homes, and places of deviation, such as asylums and hospitals. There are probably a number of further types that could be delineated. It is characteristic of Foucault’s lecture that important ideas, such as how one generates the universal criterion under differing social contexts, are undeveloped. This has left me room to define how the universality criterion applies to Vienna. With it, I generate two broad classes of heterotopias places of power and places of control. Places of power are public spaces in which those who control the agenda for metropolitan planning use landscape to enshrine their model of the relationship of the person to the state. Places of control are domestic gardens in which individuals use landscape to display their model of the relationship of the person to nature. These are neither unique nor ordinary. Their universality derives from the structure of urban society with each hierarchical distribution of social power and the virtual sanctuary of domestic space.
The second criterion is the necessity for such sites to have identifiable functions. Foucault suggests that this characteristic is best illustrated by the cemetery in Western societies. In periods of strong religious belief this site was centrally located and concern for the integrity of the physical remains was absent. It was small and internally undifferentiated. Under conditions of weak religious belief, the concern for the integrity of the individual remains requires larger areas, systems of streets and hierarchies of neighborhoods. In Vienna, the criterion of function is best thought of as an artifact of the conditions of social production that produce heterotopias. The word ‘function’ is itself embedded in a social science discourse that privileges the explanatory power of certain models of causal contingency. One way to avoid entering this narrow understanding of “function” is to place the emphasis of this criterion on the view of extraordinary places as containers for permissible actions. Henri Lefebvre calls this “the social order function of spatial practice (Gottdeiner 1985:123).” By emphasizing the broader vision of permissible activities, rather than the narrower and more abstract issue of causal contingency, Foucault's criterion of function in extraordinary sites can provide a connection between the formal elements, the meaningful content (or, what the space contains), and the planned function (or, what the space permits). This division mirrors Lefebvre's three phases in the production of social space: the perceived (spatial design practice), the conceived (representations of space), and the lived (representational space; 1991: 38-9). In Vienna, planned functions were often ignored or transformed by people in public gardens, and private gardens have layers of permissible activities, many of which have little to do with what gardening families do in their garden.
Third, extraordinary sites cannot be reduced to a single meaning. They are multivocal symbolic artifacts that mean different things to different people. Foucault offers the example of the Persian garden reduced to a design on a carpet that can be carried to the Mosque for prayer, but still exemplifying the geography of heaven. The carpet is simultaneously a carpet, a model of a garden, the garden itself, a model of heaven, and heaven itself. In the same way, Viennese gardens are designs that model social relationships in society. Unlike the Persian carpet, the gardens do not move. Instead, the citizen moves from garden to garden, meditating on the variety of models displayed.
Fourth, the sites are heterochronic. They constitute a break with the continuity of time, as well as that of space. The temporal break can be achieved through the accumulation of meanings over time. The contemporary meaning of the place and the aggregate of its past meanings are indistinguishable. The museum, or memorial square, operates this way. The temporal break also can be achieved through the creation of a feeling of the fleeting, the transitory, or the precarious. An example of this is the circus that appears overnight in an open field and disappears again a few days later. In Viennese gardens this heterochrony is served by the contrast between the annual life-cycle of botanicals and the conventional structure of metropolitan time schedules. Even so, there are different emphases constructed around this contrast to best suit the linkage to everyday life in every epoch.
The fifth characteristic is a clearly identifiable system of opening and closing. Such sites are neither completely inaccessible, nor are they completely open. Instead, entry is either compulsory, as with the army barracks or the prison, or it is available only through permission from some authority. Sites of purification, such the Moslem hammam, the Jewish mikva, or the Finnish sauna, qualify here, along with sites of familial intimacy, rooms marked "Authorized Personnel Only," and drug houses. Every garden form in Vienna has a boundary. Some are abstract, like the differences in zoned use, while others are masonry walls. Opening can refer to sight as well as site. Some gardens were intended to be viewed from the inside outward, while others were open to viewing by passers-by.
The final characteristic is that all heterotopic sites share some linkage to all the remaining places in society. The nature of the linkage can be as complex and multivocal as the sites themselves. The linkage can reflect on the total space, creating an illusion that the remaining spaces are not what they appear to be. Foucault suggests the brothel as a "heterotopia of illusion." Archetypal brothels, like Jean Genet's "The Balcony," certainly qualify here. The linkage can reflect the heterotopic sites, creating a feeling of order as perfect and meticulous as the remaining spaces are clumsy and jumbled. Foucault sees such "heterotopias of compensation" in the efforts by early seventeenth century colonists to create extraordinary communities in Puritan North America, or Jesuit Paraguay. As with the criterion of universality, Foucault leaves this important idea underdeveloped in the essay. I have concluded from his brief discussion that the notion of linkage refers to those aspects of everyday experience that are closed off, shut out, mystified or camouflaged by the extraordinary space. To be effective didactic fantasies, public gardens had to ignore the inevitable realities that contradicted the abstract and idealized view of society they put forward. Visitors to such gardens could choose to accept the program, agreeing to suspend disbelief in exchange for a satisfying ordered presentation of "nature," or they could mediate on the radicalizing juxtaposition of the ideal garden with the real city. Either way, the linkage remains self-evident and an integral part of the characteristics of an extraordinary site.
Places that can sustain this weighty apparatus are all around cities. We have not classed them as belonging to such an extraordinary genre before because their meaning is local, and therefore, elusive. The sites themselves display a variety of tropes. The prior expectations of the ethnographer are to see the urban landscape as wallpaper of little consequence to the unfolding of social action. Aside from my colleagues in the relatively small “Space and Place” network, landscape, per se, is not yet the cutting edge of culture theory among North American ethnographers. In fact, the landscape carries forward from generation to generation the discourse on the urban social order: who shall have authority; who can claim equality; and how will conflict be mediated. In Vienna, the landscape bears the scares of the many philosophical positions and the consequences of action of emerged from these positions over the past 300 years. It was through the landscape, replete with the complexity of divergent sub-cultural experiences, that ethnic, religious, metropolitan, and class boundaries are imagined, constructed, contested, and dissolved.
Extraordinary Places
I have identified nine separate standpoints from which to view landscape in Vienna. While all of these are available to any living Viennese, some are felt as more immediate and others as more archaic. While some of these positions overlap with those available to people living in other Central European cities, this particular configuration of positions is uniquely Viennese, representing and reproducing the social structure of the city as it evolved historically and spatially. This is the list [ representative images of these sites/sights are projected on the screen]:
Gardens of Order [Slide: Belvedere]. Gardens of order are among those sights I wish to call places of power: public spaces in which those who control the agenda for metropolitan planning use landscape to enshrine their model of the relationship of the person to the state. In the beginning of the modern era in Vienna (1680-1793), absolutist princes and dukes produced gardens that were systematically designed to extol the glories of the aristocratic state. The icon of these gardens was the geometrically straight line. Nothing is less natural than the uncompromising grid. By successfully imposing the line upon its antithesis, the anti-geometry of plant growth, the garden patron explored the limits of absolute rule. From conception to daily maintenance, the Barock garden was the product of command decision making. It evoked the image of security and harmony that emerges out of aristocratically imposed order. In the climate of today’s democratic municipality, the effect of these gardens, preserved in their Barock arrangements, is more sublime than beautiful.
The opportunity to define space as a place of power is a privileged form of symbolic production. Designers of various intellectual inheritances were employed to create links between garden forms and ideas, recontextualizing the forms in each generation to better fit the dominant views of those in power in the metropolis. At times, groups competed to dominate this emerging symbolic economy. Then, the images of landscape shine with multiple references and echoes of the most deeply held meanings. This pattern is first established in the eighteenth century. The Barock landscape is a fantasy palace where men have consecrated the recognition of their divine election to greatness by living in a house that rules nature the way a carpenter rules wood, or a mason brick and mortar. On this level, these landscapes are metaphors of construction. The materials are alive, and growing in disorderly and anarchic directions. Their movement towards light and water must be constantly monitored, snipped, redirected and disciplined. In this sense, the landscapes are metaphors for destruction.
Gardens of Liberty [Slide: Pötzleinsdorf ]. Absolutism made its statements about culture and nature, person and state, through the ideas enshrined in the gardens of orders. The Enlightenment carried on its images of these issues in a form I call the gardens of liberty. These places of power contest the absolutism of the Gardens of Order, just as the Republican-oriented aristocrats contested the power of the absolutists in the second half of the eighteenth century. These landscapes were symbolic calls to revolution. Only aristocrats whose loyalties were beyond reproach could afford politically to install such gardens. The free development of the landscape, like the development of civil society, was emblematic of the emerging liberal movement. Within a few decades this style grew in popularity as greater numbers of wealthy Bürgers endorsed it. It evolved into a canon of landscape design that held sway until the late nineteenth century and is still influential today.
[Slide: Memorial fabique in Pötzleinsdorf] This landscape is a fantasy world of a wild, unrestrained and unspoiled nature. It is a delusion of freedom that camouflages the grave inequities of the industrial transformation of capitalism. It offers a facade of an eternal pastoral, a heaven on earth in which all social contradictions are resolved. The symbolic repertoire stressed the emotions of attachment to the place, of freedom and civic responsibility usurped, and of hope in the paradise of Liberty to come.
Gardens of Domesticity.[Slide: Rosenbaum’s Garden] During the period between 1812 and 1848, known as the Biedermeier era, the garden of domesticity was a place of control, domestic gardens in which individuals use landscape to display their model of the relationship of the person to nature. Gardens produced under the political surveillance of the Absolutist reaction to Republicanism in the first half of the nineteenth century reflect a metaphor of domesticity enforced by the design preferences of the local metropolitan elite that made public exposure dangerous. In these gardens the metropolitan, “liberalizing” faction contested with the imperial, absolutist faction, with the imperial faction holding all the police powers. Locked inside the garden walls of the often tiny courtyards of the two and three story Bürger houses of the city, family and friends were shielded from the snooping of the secret police. The object was not conspiracy. Rather, it was protection from the provocateurs in an increasingly paranoid Absolutist state. In these gardens, a new domestic culture evolved based on a sentimentalizing of childhood and innocence, and rigidifying of gender roles.
Having established the garden as a separate preserve these Viennese then fill them with the Rococo fabriques borrowed from the experience of the Enlightened aristocrats. These fabriques convey many layers of meaning, including the playful, the childlike and the disinterested. The flowers are a novel element. Contemplating flowers links the symbolic with the material: the living with the dead, the fertile with the sterile, and the supernatural with the human. Flowers spoke a language of vice and virtues. Unlike the political messages of the Rococo, the Biedermeier flower texts spoke of personal longings, satisfactions, and disappoints. The capacity of a domestic garden to express both the rational and emotive sentiments of its owner is the lasting contribution of these gardens of domesticity to the received meaning of the Viennese landscape.
Gardens of Pleasure. [Slide: Hampel ground plans] The gardens of pleasure that followed the gradual emergence to civic power holding of Liberals around mid-century were also places of control. Described by garden historians as Neo-Romantic, they recall the Gardens of Liberty with their free-flowing plant growth. But the ground plan was one of geometric control. This time it was the control of the French curve, rather than the straight rule. They were part of a complex of middle class ideas about the meaning of owning a house and the land it sat on. Hösl and Pirhofer call this complex "Hausdenken," house thinking (1988: 39). Vienna had always been a city of renters. Only the aristocracy and a thin layer of the merchant class had the resources to purchase and maintain land for a house. As industrial expansion worked its way through the regional economy, the range of Bürgers who could afford to buy land and build houses increased. With more homeowners, Hausdenken began to pervade middle class experience. This involves viewing the house as interest bearing capital in the form of goods. The investment is understood as a safe one and one that insulated from economic cycles over the long-term. The investment is protected through maintaining the quality of the building and its grounds. This is where the garden form becomes important. The garden had to develop and beautify the land, but it also had to frame the house and display its charms in the best possible light.
One important element in this charm was the feeling of seclusion. This was not Biedermeier domesticity among Bürgers hiding from a hostile state. That danger was now past. The new threat came from the foreign workers crowding the industrial suburbs a mere twenty minute's walk from the villa districts. These newcomers were imagined to bring incompatible knowledge that disrupted and complicated the civic discourse. For this reason alone, they were polluting. Their relative poverty, ill-health, and penchant for drunkenness and wantonness were confirmation of their alien knowledge. This was one of the reasons why villas were built in only a few districts. No one wanted to share space with the newcomers. The code for talking about a property in a segregated district included such phrases as Heimlichkeit, secludedness, Behaglichkeit or Gemütlichkeit, coziness, Bequemlichkeit, comfort, Vergessenheit, forgetting, Abgeschiedenheit, seclusion, Eleganz, elegance, and Ruhe, quite.
Hausdenken characterized the high Bürger class in this period. From his ability to make such an investment, the Bürger could expect a high rate of return at the sale of the property. He could also expect a high degree of status because of the possession of such a fine investment. This status included political clout, political enfranchisement, and entree to the better society. In the idiom of the city, these were "die besseren Leut'," the better people. The concrete expression of success was bound up with the possession of property.
The pleasures provided by these Neo-Romantic gardens provide a rest from the activities that really underlie the garden's existence: wealth and power. The garden of pleasure is out of time with the rest of the city. It resonates with the landscape history of the pre-modern era. It is the hortus conclusus of ancient Rome; the garden set apart for the pleasure of the patrician. It is the monastic cloister garden, the personal refuge from the cares of the world. It is the virginal rose garden of the medieval troubadours, in which youthful love can blossom. It is the allegorical amor matis, the garden of love where one can love and be loved, but also where the labors of love can procreate. For the mid-century Bürger, the garden was a link to a timeless European identity. It transcended provincialism in the same way that the market transcended national boundaries.

condor.depaul.edu:80/~rrotenbe/aeer/articles/-- Revised 2/11/96

Robert Rotenberg, Managing Editor