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Writing Berlin: On Disciplinary Seeing

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

There’s something strange about asking people to name their discipline and say how it looks at cities. The strangeness is that most of us don’t realize we have a discipline until someone asks us to articulate it. We just think we’re looking at the world. We don’t notice we’re looking *through* something.

Today we made that looking-through visible. And what became clear is that disciplines aren’t just different areas of expertise—they’re different forms of attention. Anthropology trains you to see power and exclusion. Sound studies trains you to hear what others walk past. History trains you to notice what persists and what gets erased. Each discipline is a technology for rendering certain things visible while making other things recede into background noise.

This matters because we’re asking a question that every discipline thinks it can answer: What survives in cities? But “survival” means completely different things depending on which disciplinary lens you’re wearing.

For someone trained in economics, survival is about market durability, about businesses that persist through waves of rising rents. For someone trained in literary studies, survival is about whose stories continue to be told, whose voices remain audible. For someone doing ethnographic work, survival is about everyday practices that continue even when everything visible seems to have changed. For someone thinking about heritage and memory, survival is about what gets marked, memorialized, acknowledged as having been here.

These aren’t complementary answers to the same question. They’re different questions masquerading as the same one.

What always strucks me is a certain anxiety around claiming disciplinary expertise. People start with qualifications—”Well, I’m sort of in anthropology but…” or “I guess you could say I’m working in the humanities, though…” This hedging isn’t just modesty. It’s uncertainty about whether you’re allowed to speak from within a discipline if you’re also questioning it, borrowing from elsewhere, working across boundaries.

But that uncertainty is productive. It means people are already sensing the limits of their frameworks. They’re already aware that their discipline gives them permission to see certain things but also restricts what they’re capable of seeing.

When people shared their initial writing, the gaps became audible. “Wait, you noticed the memorial plaques? I walked past those every day and never registered them.” “You’re asking about economic relationships? I was only thinking about social function.” The blind spots weren’t failures—they were the inevitable result of having trained attention in one frequency while becoming deaf to others.

This is what disciplinary training does: it gives you high resolution in certain frequencies and renders you nearly deaf to others. You become exquisitely attuned to particular kinds of evidence, particular forms of change, particular types of relationships. And you stop registering what falls outside that bandwidth.

The question is whether we can become conscious of this without trying to transcend it. Because you can’t study everything from everywhere. You can’t attend to all frequencies simultaneously. You need the discipline to see anything at all. But you also need to know what your particular bandwidth leaves out.

The word *Stadtbild* came up—cityscape—and it hung in the air differently this week because of what’s happening in German politics. Chancellor Merz suggesting there’s a “problem in the cityscape” that requires deportations. Protests responding “We are the cityscape.” The controversy makes visible what’s usually invisible: that describing what you see in a city is never neutral description. It’s always already a claim about what should be there, whose presence counts as normal, whose presence registers as disruption.

This is what happens when frameworks become invisible to themselves. When one particular way of seeing—nationalist, rooted in imagined ethnic coherence—presents itself as just describing what’s there rather than making a political claim about what should be there. When the discipline stops being a lens and starts pretending to be reality itself.

So we’re asking people to stay conscious of their lenses. Not to abandon them—you need them to see anything at all. But to recognize them as choices, not inevitabilities. To know what they illuminate and what they obscure. To be honest about the partiality of their view while still doing rigorous work within that partial perspective.

Because cities are too complex for any single approach to capture. You need economic analysis and attention to practice and historical perspective and sensitivity to narrative. You need all of it. But you can’t do it simultaneously. So you choose where to focus, you follow a specific question, and you acknowledge what your choice leaves out.

The work ahead is partly about developing these specific questions—making them sharp, making them matter. But it’s also about learning to see your own seeing. Learning to recognize when your discipline is giving you insight and when it’s giving you blindness.

That’s harder than it sounds. Because disciplines don’t just shape what we look at. They shape what we’re capable of looking at. They structure perception itself.

Assignment for November 5

Write 2-3 pages responding to:

Why should anyone care about your question? What’s at stake if we ignore this tension? What might we understand differently if we pay attention to it?

Don’t just say “it’s interesting.” Make a case for why it’s important.

Think about:

  • What larger patterns or processes does your specific question illuminate?
  • Who is affected by ignoring this question?
  • What assumptions might we need to reconsider if we take your question seriously?
  • How might answering your question change how we see cities, survival, community, or power?

Three References Worth Knowing

Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991): On creating temporary spaces of autonomy outside state control. Useful if you’re thinking about how communities create their own spaces and practices in the gaps of official structures.

Peter Hessler, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001): Ethnographic account of daily life in a small Chinese city undergoing rapid transformation. Useful if you’re interested in how everyday observation can reveal larger patterns of change, loss, and survival.

Jean Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948): Exploring the idea of committed literature (littérature engagée).

You don’t need to read these, but they represent different approaches to urban space, time, and agency that might inform your thinking.

Next session: Wednesday, November 5, 10am-12pm

Writing Berlin – Session cancelled today, task for next week

Dear all,

I’m sorry to say I’m still not well enough to teach today, so we need to cancel our session this morning.

We’ll resume next Wednesday, October 29, 10-12, same room.

Since we’re missing our session on disciplinary approaches today, I want to give you something to work on in the meantime that will help us move forward when we meet next week.

Task for October 29

Between now and next Wednesday, I want you to do two things:

1. Think about how your field (or a field that you know well or like) studies cities

Reflect on the question we would have explored today: How does your discipline approach urban spaces? What methods, concepts, or frameworks does it use? What questions does it ask? What does it help you see—and what might it miss?

You don’t need to write this up formally, just think about it. Maybe jot down some notes for yourself.

2. Write 1-2 pages before class next week

Respond to this prompt:

“Think about Berlin—neighborhoods you’ve walked through, spaces you’ve encountered. What tension, pattern, or question about what survives (or doesn’t survive) in this city catches your attention? What makes you curious? What bothers you or puzzles you?”

Don’t worry about framing it in disciplinary terms yet. Don’t worry about being profound or academic. Just write honestly about what draws your attention when you think about survival, persistence, or disappearance in this city.

Bring this writing to class on October 29. We’ll work with it together to help you identify your specific angle on our shared question: What survives in cities?

A suggestion

If you’re stuck, go for a walk this week. Go somewhere in Berlin you’ve been meaning to explore, or somewhere familiar that you can look at with fresh eyes. Notice what catches your attention (especially also if you have started reading one of the three books from the explorations course already). What makes you pause? What makes you wonder?

Sometimes the best writing comes from genuine curiosity about something you’ve actually encountered, not from trying to think of a “good academic topic.”

I apologize again for the disruption. Take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you next Wednesday (or Tuesday for the Beyond course).

Best,
Victoria