Is a city wall a quantity or a quality?
If one walks from the heart of Paris (the geographical center is here) toward one of the poorer banlieues — north to St-Denis, say — one will not necessarily pass any clear marking when one has left the city proper, clambering over the memory of a wall. That is, unless one passes through a last remnant of the 1845 wall, born with a price on its head. The city has had many walls, rising and falling as civic boundaries, and the needs for defense, for tolls and imposts, have changed; the 1860 expansion didn't come with ramparts, and the last wall was gone by 1925.
Against this absence, an experience: the northward stroll. If one pays attention, there are qualitative shifts as one leaves the center for the periphery: the tall buildings get taller, their designs more modern even as their physical condition grows more decrepit. The amount of sun that falls on the pavement decreases slowly, at about the same rate as the price of a coffee. The value of appearance changes, block by block. The maintenance of the downtown as a museum-city gives way to a more contemporary daily life — though this may be inaccurate, as who is to say whether the urge for preservationist ecologies is less modern than apartment towers or hardware stores? Either way, the tourist economy cedes pride of place to other forms of life (though not entirely, by any means).
But there is another way to quantify this radial stroll: one might rather note the steadily increasing percentage of darker skin, a geometric progression at least. This is the kind of quantity that is often experienced as a quality — difference rather than differential, often a difference charged and problematic.
The differentials of each quarter, the ratios, are calculable, knowable; this is the point. It's a set of quantities that describe one's departure from the Paris of postcards to the Paris of the news. And one of these quantities maps onto the city wall: a differential, a skin-tone palette, that means one has crossed a limit. However, it is not experienced as a figure, but as a feeling, a sense of place that poses as an abstraction and is exactly what is left of the material of the city wall.
Perhaps this is what certain feelings are: the traces of calculations that can no longer be made, or that one wishes not to make. Certainly this describes something about the experience of excess; certainly this informs the seemingly mystical complexity of modern markets. One suspects further that critical moments in history are defined by a welter of conversions between quantity and quality.
Meanwhile, one could do worse than to imagine what it would be like for another, differently-colored, to walk from St-Denis inward, toward downtown, quarter by quarter and block by block.
Posted by jane at April 28, 2006 07:38 PM | TrackBack