Class #6 Post-Game and Reminders for Next Week

Announcement: Class will meet on Monday in the computer lab in Enterprise 420. This will enable us to do more of a writing workshop and begin to see how we can use the they say I say templates as building blocks for the upcoming essays. So for those who've been asking about the essays, I will address that on Monday. 

Announcement: I will not be staying late in my office Monday afternoon unless you have some sort of emergency. I will be there from about 12:00-1:30. I will be back on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday more or less as usual.

Quick post-class homework assignment: In the comments to this post, write the Harvey says ~ we say ~ Wire says ~ we say that your group developed. Be sure to indicate the names of all group members; using your names in the statement itself would be an easy way (e.g. Harvey says ~ Diondra and Sarah say ~ Wire says ~ Diondra and Sarah say). The deadline is Friday, but sooner is better.

Reminders: Watch episodes 2.7-2.10. Heads up to scene analysis worksheets 18-22.

Question: "Where do I find the other students' worksheets?"
Answer: I gave up on the Google Docs sharing for those assignments because it's been a bit of a hassle, so some of them are getting shared that way and some not. But you can find all of them in PDF form on this blog under the Article Analysis and Scene Analysis tabs. I really encourage you to read them, because we only scratch the surface during class. (Sometimes if the student is late to class or turned it in late I might even skip it entirely.) And then remember also that there are a whole set of students in the other class that you don't even know, who are writing other brilliant things.

Additional thoughts about Harvey, etc. I won't claim these as necessarily my thoughts, more like trying to bring some of the ideas we developed in the 9:00 class and in the 10:30 class together. 

-The idea of urban dystopia goes way back. You can find it for instance in the Hebrew bible, which after all was written by/for sheep herders. (Example: Sodom and Gomorrha, Babylon). You can find it more specifically in a lot of ideas that originate from the Protestant Reformation (Rome as the urban center of corruption). But I wonder if most of our ideas of urban dystopia might come from the early period of European urbanization and then industrialization running through the 1700s-1800s, a time when cities were in a literal sense quite more dirty and dangerous than rural areas. So I don't want to imply that urban dystopia or anti-urban themes in general are somehow new. They're probably as old as cities themselves. But they do share common characteristics, particularly the idea of the city as somewhere unsafe, unclean, and as somewhere where your individual identity is threatened (by lack of privacy, by the presence of weirdos, undesirables, foreigners, etc.). The flipside of that is all the things that are naturally appealing about cities, such as their diversity (of all kinds), the way they bring so many things into close proximity, make so many opportunities available, and how they tend to be places where you can reinvent yourself and alter your identity moreso than you can in small towns. Here is an interesting question: in the sense of anonymity, where are you more private, an urban or rural setting?


-It's also worthwhile to contrast various anti-urban utopias, which is something I did a bad job with in class. The classic version is what we would call a rural utopia, which is usually agrarian (growing crops) or pastoral (herding livestock) or maybe both. Generally this is a place of peace and safety, and probably even physical isolation or distance from other people or groups of people. Again, this idea goes all the way back to the beginning of urban civilization. There is also something we might call a wilderness utopia which seems to be specifically appealing to Americans, and this is the ideological power of something like "Sarah Palin's Alaska" or of those car commercials some of you mentioned. The idea of creating your individuality by somehow conquering or mastering wild and dangerous natural spaces. Now a suburb in the American style is not quite rural and it definitely isn't wilderness. In some general sense it reminds me of the rural utopia envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. Each person (read: white man) was supposed to have his own farm and family on that farm but he was also supposed to be educated and politically engaged when he occasionally met with others in the city to sell stuff or to vote, or communicated with them through writing letters to the editor in the newspaper and so on. So I guess Jefferson wanted it both ways to an extent. The modern American suburb is a creation of its time, that time being the past 50-60 years, but it shares that idea of connecting you to the benefits of the city but also retaining the benefits of the countryside. I think what specifically distinguishes the suburb is commuting, meaning by car or public transit you are able to move in and out of the city on a daily basis. But there are continuities with earlier rural utopias, particularly the idea of safety, privacy, cleanliness, proper separation of social identities, greenness (if that's a word), and so on.

-When you go somewhere like Taiwan, you realize on the one hand that they have some generally similar fantasies about urban and rural, but on the other hand that the specific content of these fantasies is very different. I had a weird experience of visiting one of the only American-style (separate unit, grass yard, driveway, subdivision, only accessible by car, gated etc.) suburban developments in Taiwan. The sign said (in English) "only for wise man" with the Chinese equivalent. This seemed to convey the idea that it was exclusive, and probably for someone with financial means, etc.

-Another point I made in class, and maybe I'm wrong here, but it seems to me that suburban or rural utopias are more common in the American imagination than urban ones. I pointed out how Obama, who grew up mainly in Jakarta and Honolulu and spent his adult life mainly in New York, Chicago, and Washington, took pains in all of his 2008 campaign messaging to link himself to his grandmother's small town in Kansas, where in reality he probably spent very little time. Part of this related to making himself racially acceptable, for lack of a better term, but I think it also had to do with making himself somehow a bit rural. And remember, something like 80% of voters live in cities. So then we were trying to figure out some counterexamples of urban fantasies. Some of you said the utopian idea of Manhattan that we sometimes get from commercial media (maybe Sex and the City would be a good reference point here). I mentioned Sesame Street as an urban utopia that was specifically created to give an alternative to suburban or rural utopias. And I can't believe we spent all the time talking about Super Bowl ads in the 9:00 class and forgot the longest ad in Super Bowl history, which was the Eminem/Chrysler ad that positions Detroit as a utopia of a certain kind!

-Baltimore in The Wire is by no means a utopia, but it isn't quite a dystopia either. You will see certain moments of what Prisca called "sudden joy" (the best example is when Kima reinvents the children's book Goodnight Moon in season 5) and then of course certain moments of absolute chaos and despair (consider the opening credits to season 2 and what the fire seems to imply; this will later be cut somewhat down to size when you find out that it comes from Cheese burning Ziggy's car, but in the credits it's almost like a vision of hell). You will also see characters who specifically comment on utopias and dystopias, as when Bubbles attends the McNulty children's soccer game in the suburbs and observes when he returns to the westside that "it's a thin line between heaven and (t)here." What we are trying to do is apply Harvey's analysis of utopias. Not that we need to agree with Harvey's ideas, but we have to at least consider the idea that any real situation of fact may be conditioned, structured, or perhaps even in some way caused by someone's utopian fantasy. But which fantasy? 

-I pointed to the various plans for redevelopment that we see Krawczyk and Valcheck discussing; Lester and Prez are beginning to uncover how Clay Davis and Stringer Bell fit into these plans in an interesting way. These should remind you of some of the real-life redevelopment examples Harvey cites. We also talked about the impacts of gentrification as seen in the experience of Nick and his girlfriend, who find out that they can't afford to buy a house that once belonged to the Sobotka family, and that according to the real estate agent (McNulty's ex-wife Elena), it isn't even in the same neighborhood anymore. Gentrification is usually the next phase of an economic/political cycle that begins with suburban flight ("white flight"); at some point it becomes desirable for city planners to incent the taxbase to return, but this is easier said than done and requires various arm-twisting and various tradeoffs. It's amazing how fast these shifts can happen. One of my brother-in-laws (brothers-in-law?) moved to Greenwich village in the early 1980s when there were crack dens there instead of gourmet restaurants, but within 10-15 years you'd practically need a Wall Street job or a trust fund to afford to live there. Harvey will argue that a lot of these shifts occur because of specific decisions made at the planning level, though it's entirely fair to say he may overemphasize the latitude that planners really have.

-Finally, I want to be clear about what is meant by fantasy or utopia here. It doesn't mean that we are talking about something that doesn't really exist or doesn't have real effects. Some schools really are "bad" in the sense of providing poor academic preparation and/or in the sense of  being unsafe (and perhaps more unsafe for some than for others). What I'm saying first of all is that "bad schools" or "good schools" is one of the principal euphemisms we use for speaking more generally about race and class, which we often aren't supposed to talk about even though so much of our lives are influenced by them. And second of all, Harvey is saying that the way a school or any other institution of a city or neighborhood gets to be the way it is, can be explained by an analysis of the underlying utopian fantasies that are motivating city residents and planners, or whoever else we take to be exerting decision making capacity. What does this all mean? I guess according to Harvey, utopias are in some sense more real than reality, since they exert real effects that create the distributions of power that make the world the way it is ("it is what it is"). He might argue further that the only way that shifts in power occur is when shifts in fantasy occur first. Think of Egypt right now; don't get the idea from all of these Foucault/Wire type ideas about the tight and mutually strengthening relationship between power and fantasy that nothing ever changes.