Networks? Flows? Underground Railways?

An artist friend (whose identity and ideas I shall keep confidential) got me to thinking about the history of the London Underground, the anniversary of which has just been celebrated earlier this year. Or should I say, about the nature of the London Underground?

What Americans would call the London subway system (we leave to one side the question of the New York and Paris underground railways) began as a number of different lines dug and operated by competing private companies. Each served to link a different neighborhood to the central city, though in some places the density of population was sufficient to warrant geographic competition all the way to the end of the line.

When the lines reached Central London, the tunnels had to be dug at different depths simply because the lines were all trying to serve the same destinations. (Eventually the independent lines were bought up and united into today’s system, which involved a good deal of pedestrian tunneling between the different levels.) The same principle obtained when new lines had to be added to serve previously unthought-of uses after historical change had brought population density to commercial areas formerly almost uninhabited. As a result, it is now possible at some stations to begin in deepest 21st-century gloom and emerge after many twists and turns into bright Victorian sunlight; at other stations, it is the chronological/stylistic reverse, and between them I should imagine the juxtapositions make the makers of metaphor happy.

The enforced linkages between what were originally autonomous systems may have been accidental, but they are not absurdly irrational; even where there are stations no more than a block apart that require multiple layers of escalators to unite very nearly overlapping lines, the sheer quantity of traffic flow is so immense that no line remains underutilized even at the slowest times of day.

Whether the newer and more rigorously rationalized subway systems of the world are superior depends on your particular taste; there are those who like the diversity of architecture and the surprises of the accidentally accreted labyrinths, and this enjoyment persists even when the disadvantages for wheelchair users or the cane-using elderly make such folks aware of just how much the original system assumed the needs of an able-bodied population traveling over distances that made surface transport less practical or less convenient. For all its extent and evident inclusiveness, the system was not meant to be used by everyone.

The map that flattens all this multi-layered history and geography into a comprehensible network was, if I recall correctly, originally designed after the model of diagrams of electrical circuits.

I am sure that all of this has been noted many times before in many different contexts; we are constantly reinventing or rewriting the work of others even when we are not aware of it, see the relevant lines in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

"Stay Liquid!" the Financial Doomsayer Urged Long Ago; Others Built Their Futures on Solid Rock

Since we live by our metaphors, and under the right circumstances we die for them, I am trying to reconfigure some of the rapidly fossilizing (“fossilizing” itself being a metaphor) metaphors in use in contemporary theory, just to keep them from solidifying too quickly. “Fluidity” is one such popular metaphor, popular to the point that “liquid modernity” seems at one point to have displaced what is still more usefully called “postmodernity”—modernity being a definable set of assumptions and operating instructions for making the world work the way we want it to work, and one that everyone agrees seems to have arisen slowly over centuries, come into prominence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that first used the word “modern” to mean something different than it meant in the traditional opposition of “antient [sic] and modern,” and then began to morph into whatever form of life the planet’s globalizing cultures are currently mutating towards. “Cultural mutation” is of course just as much a metaphor as “fluid” is, even though the cultural fictions of “memes” attempts to reify the metaphor into something more solidly related to biology—a clever but not necessarily thought-out linguistic maneuver.

The metaphor-constructed world can also be thought of in terms of a Tibetan sand mandala or information stored on a computer hard drive (but not on the more unalterable storage media now going out of use). In both cases, material bits are arranged in a transient order that creates both an object and a meaningful pattern, though the meaningful pattern on the hard drive needs a couple more steps to turn it into useful cultural information. (For that matter, the meaningful pattern of the sand mandala needs the eyes and heads of mentally prepared observers to turn from a gorgeous web of color into useful cultural information.) It takes very little to return the pattern to randomness.

Human patterns of culture are not always quite as fragile as sand mandalas or hard-drive configurations, as the different cultural responses to natural or political-military disasters around the world show us. But they are subject to merging and changing, and to redefinitions that are as easily created but hard to channel as flowing liquid or flowing sand would be—hence the persistence of these particular metaphors for social or cultural processes.

Sometimes the solid objects that come to symbolize cultures are surprisingly artificial concretions of patterns that have assembled themselves more—no, not “more organically,” but collectively without the particular awareness of most individuals or the overarching conscious intent of administrators. The patterns can pass out of existence just as readily through the similar life decisions or life circumstances of the individuals who compose a society, and it is bizarre to notice the moments at which these shifting circumstances are expressed in governmentally approved images and objects that take on histories of their own. The Great Mosque of Djenné embodies authentic Sahelo-Sudanese architecture, but the current one was created in the early twentieth century by a French architect as an expression of how French colonial authorities wished to synthesize West African cultural expressions, partly for administrative purposes and partly to satisfy the wishes of local populations. The town hall of Munich that appears at first glance to be the most authentic medieval building in Germany was built about ten years before the Great Mosque of Djenné, expressing the complicated cultural and political situation of the 1890s in its conscious construction of a quintessential visual metaphor of an entire culture. Such a seemingly solid and unambiguous object takes on shifting meanings as the culture and political landscape around it shifts and flows. The building remains, as a material object; its place and use in the cultural matrix changes dramatically as the invisible institutions and individual psychologies around it change and are changed.