The City Obscures Itself [re_configure / trans_fer]

All Images: Central & West Leicester, December 2025

[Reconfigured Appropriated Texts, Partially Transferred Across Platforms]

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Deleuzeian Diversion 3.1 (Fortress trans_late)

 

All Images: November - December 2021

"... The government continues to dismantle, reorganize, modify and regulate the movement.  The province for urban surveyors, convertors and highway junctions: the role of engineering in this regard.  Speed two boxes and absolute movement are not illegal, but the law of war, the smooth space in which it is placed and the war machine that fills it.  If the nomads invented the war machine, it is 'synonymous' with the invention of absolute speed.  We can also say that each time there is disobedience, riots, guerilla warfare, revolution, etc., the war machine restarts and the nomads acquire new capacities. . or a way of being in space like dessert [...]  In that sense, the answer to everything that is about to overtake the state is to move space.  Without even giving a relative form of movement, the state does not have a war machine: a castle model that regulates nomadic stumbling and stumbling movements.  thus breaking the absolute rotatational movement."

Deleuzeian Diversion 3 (Fortress)

 

All Images: West Leicester, November 2021

"...the State never ceases to decompose, recompose, and transform movement, or to regulate speed.  The State as town surveyor, convertor, or highway interchange: the role of the engineer from this point of view.  Speed and absolute movement are not without their laws, but they are the laws of the nomos, of the smooth space that deploys it, of the war machine that populates it.  If the nomads formed the war machine, it was by inventing absolute speed, by being 'synonymous' with speed.  And each time there is an operation against the State - insubordination, rioting, guerilla warfare, or revolution as act - it can be said that a war machine has revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied by the reconstitution of a smooth space or a manner of being in space as though it were smooth [...]  It is in this sense that the response of the State against all that threatens to move beyond is to striate space.  The State does not appropriate the war machine without giving even it the form of relative movement: this was the case with the model of the fortress as a regulator of movement, which was precisely the obstacles the nomads came up against, the stumbling block and parry by which absolute vortical movement was broken." [1.]

[1.]:  Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, 'A Thousand Plateaus' (Trans. Brian Massumi), Chapter 12, '1227: 'Treatise on Nomadology - The War Machine', London/NYC/Dublin, Bloomsbury Academic, 1988/2021

Significant Yellow Item: #2021.Y004.1 (Second Encounter)

 

Significant Yellow Item: #2021.Y004.1, West Leicester, February 2021

The second manifestation took place beyond a span of lost conveyance.  Transport froze, and few now sought out this route in commerce.  The ceremonial way still glistening from within submerged shadow, but the cherished zone beyond now churned amidst massive upheaval.  The lands beyond that portal had become a disputed tract where emerging edifices vied for resident dominance.  A thousand blank eyes opened upon the world, enmeshed for now in matrices too complex for analysis.

The traditional rituals of cellulose and steel were still observed in their reeking caves - but  desperate now, and grown increasingly peripheral.  How long could such rites prevail amidst the new demographic?  Old concentrations of part-worn devotion had been cleared away, and the donor stacks demolished.  Hopes of Recovery faded as the new modes regenerated on a fresh footing.  "Be part of something new".  The sediment tower was dismantled overnight.  The vantage point was surrendered amidst snow and mud - topographical oversight suddenly denied.

In such a region, the old drift felt threatened.  Access remained conjectural.  The routes of desire were curtailed and channelled - clotted now with machine prints and threaded through a polychromatic labyrinth.  Those old reams faded amongst the fences, even though the wind still blew.  The occasional seditious exhortation was stencilled over the sanctioned scrawl.  Plywood bulletins prioritised cartoon escape, despite that small yearning for rigour amidst placatory multi-fades.  Doubtless, The Revolution would not be live-streamed.  The barricades were now reversed - and would be dismantled soon enough, in any case.  The official version  was printed elsewhere - blandly aspirational and impervious beneath a sheen of laminate. 

That this new encounter should occur in such a transactional landscape must surely have come as no surprise - even if the motives remain obscure.  Could those livid moulded grids portend a new annexation, where time is made static and crated - or else, some unplanned and unimagined egress become available?  Might fresh dreams short-circuit the new geometries? 

The City Clears Its Lungs

All Images: Imperial Tobacco Horizon Site, West Nottingham, May 2019

As I discussed in my recent printmaking-related post, one of the biggest current influences on my local environment is the impact of significant redevelopment and construction work, here in West Leicester.  As I write, the clang of girders, and clatter of pneumatic wrenches drifts through my open window, as another section of the local skyline is filled in with a complex cage of steelwork.

But, before such transformative physical statements can be imposed on a city, it's normally necessary to clear space for them to occupy.  Indeed, this continual process of upheaval - of drawing, erasure and redrawing - of rising, falling, and rising again, is a big part of what lends any major conurbation its characteristic dynamism.  That churning dynamism, and the drive to invent, and reinvent themselves on a grand scale, is of course, what all cities have been about - ever since they first appeared as a mode of habitation, in the ancient Middle East.

Thus, before this blog, as seems likely, becomes an arena for my already expanding library of construction-related images - it seems only fitting to include a few relating to what goes on (or comes down) before.  In this case, the site under scrutiny is actually on the outskirts of Nottingham, rather in my own back yard - being the rapidly vanishing Imperial Tobacco 'Horizon' plant.  This edifice has long constituted an imposing behemoth on the western fringes of the city - an effect that was only magnified by its stark, Brutalist design.  It's perhaps only fitting then, that its removal from the landscape should play out with such post-apocalyptic grandeur.  My camera was certainly never going to resist a spectacle of such thrilling devastation.  

To read a little further into the events depicted, one could naturally find significance in the erasure of yet another large-scale concrete monument to the modernism of my childhood, or even draw some conclusions about the rapidity of our culture's turn away from recreational smoke inhalation.  And, depending on what replaces the plant - they may also represent  more evidence of our turn from manufacturing, towards a service and knowledge-based economy.

That's all perfectly valid.  But, to be honest, when I stood on a pile of rubble to take these shots, I was mostly just captivated by the raw, visual excitement of those pulverised ramparts and mountains of shattered concrete - and with the muscular steel monsters rumbling around amongst them.  As ever, experience first - theorising later.

Happy New... 2

All Images: Central Leicester, 31 December 2018

Everybody ready?