Paris-Amsterdam underground

199 Pages·2017·3.22 MB·English

paris-
amsterdam
underground
edited by christoph lindner and andrew hussey
Essays on Cultural
Resistance, Subversion,
and Diversion
AMSTERDAM
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
Paris-Amsterdam Underground
Cities and Cultures
Cities and Cultures is an interdisciplinary humanities book series addressing the
interrelations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce. The
series takes a special interest in the impact of globalization on urban space and
cultural production, but remains concerned with all forms of cultural expression
and transformation associated with contemporary cities.
Series editor: Christoph Lindner, University of Amsterdam
Advisory Board:
Ackbar Abbas, University of California, Irvine
Nezar AlSayyad, University of California, Berkeley
Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia
Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, University of New South Wales
Shirley Jordan, Queen Mary, University of London
Geoffrey Kantaris, University of Cambridge
Bill Marshall, University of London
Ginette Verstraete, VU University Amsterdam
Richard J. Williams, University of Edinburgh
Paris-Amsterdam
Underground
Essays on Cultural Resistance, Subversion, and Diversion
Edited by Christoph Lindner and Andrew Hussey
amsterdam university press
This book is published in print and online through the online OAPEN library (www.oapen.org)

OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) is a collaborative initiative to develop
and implement a sustainable Open Access publication model for academic books in the Humani-
ties and Social Sciences. The OAPEN Library aims to improve the visibility and usability of high
quality academic research by aggregating peer reviewed Open Access publications from across
Europe.
Cover illustration: Sarah Guilbaud
Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam
Lay-out: Heymans & Vanhove, Goes
isbn 978 90 8964 505 0
e-isbn 978 90 4851 820 3 (pdf)
e-isbn 978 90 4851 821 0 (ePub)
nur 694
Creative Commons License CC BY NC ND
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0)
C. Lindner, A. Hussey / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013
Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise).
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced
in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact
the publisher.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Foreword 9
David Pinder
1. Concepts and Practices of the Underground 13
Christoph Lindner and Andrew Hussey
Part 1: Projections 21
2. Metromania or the Undersides of Painting 23
Sophie Berrebi
3. Mapping Utopia: Debord and Constant between Amsterdam and Paris 37
Andrew Hussey
4. Amsterdam’s Sexual Underground in the 1960s 49
Gert Hekma
Part 2: Mobility 63
5. Detours, Delays, Derailments: La Petite Jérusalem and
Slow Training in Culture 65
Sudeep Dasgupta
6. Underground Visions: Strategies of Resistance along
the Amsterdam Metro Lines 77
Ginette Verstraete
7. Underground Circulation: The Beats in Paris and Beyond 97
Allen Hibbard
Part 3: Visibility 113
8. (In)audible Frequencies: Sounding out the Contemporary Branded City 115
Carolyn Birdsall
9. Red Lights and Legitimate Trade: Paying for Sex in the Branded City 133
Joyce Goggin
10. Visibly Underground: When Clandestine Workers Take the Law
into Their Own Hands 147
Anna-Louise Milne
11. Archaeology of the Parisian Underground 159
Stephen W. Sawyer
5
Bibliography 171
Illustrations 183
Contributors 185
Index 189
6 paris-amsterdam underground
Acknowledgements
This book – like its subject – is the product of a series of interactions and ex-
changes between Paris and Amsterdam involving a group of creative and critical
thinkers whose work addresses (and is sometimes implicated in) countercultural
movements, moments, scenes, and spaces in both cities. The project developed
from a pair of linked conferences on the topic of the underground – one held
in Amsterdam in 2010 and the other in Paris in 2011 – which involved a lot of
geographic and intellectual shuttling between the two cities on the part of the
speakers. The benefit, we believe, can be seen throughout this book in the often
surprising, sometimes strange, but always productive interconnections between
the various chapters. Our thanks, therefore, to the speakers and audiences at
both conferences for their energetic contributions, as well as to our respective
institutions, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the University of
London Institute in Paris, for providing financial support. For serious and sub-
stantial help in getting this book ready for publication, we are greatly indebted
to Miriam Meissner at ASCA, whose editorial and research assistance tied many
loose ends together. Most of all, we are grateful to the authors in this book for
participating with such a collaborative spirit in the extended conversation in-
volved in the project as a whole, from its guerrilla conference roots through to
its final published form.
Christoph Lindner and Andrew Hussey
7

Foreword
David Pinder
In one of the many striking images in this book, a figure scrutinizes the earth
through a giant magnifying glass. A painting by Jean Dubuffet, it is one of many
that he composed from the mid-1940s that depict the ground and what lies be-
neath. Readers of the book are often invited similarly to look downward, to
consider spaces that are literally under the ground of Paris and Amsterdam. Our
attention is directed to what is under the paving stones, asphalt, and concrete
on which so many people daily tread. What may be found there unseen, bur-
ied, sequestered, and forgotten? How can explorations of those depths trans-
form understandings of the urban? The vertical line down may be a relatively
neglected dimension of cities, the subterranean largely an unknown realm. But
the latter, in its darkness and opacity, as a place to which expelled matter and
waste flows and in which secrets as well as bodies are buried, has also long been
a source of fascination combined with repulsion. That is particularly the case
with Paris where the underground became an obsession during the nineteenth
century among many writers and artists as well as politicians and administrators
as the construction of new sewers, cemeteries, trains, and other infrastructure
proceeded. Traditional imagery of underworlds was reworked as spaces under
the city came to harbor all manner of fears, superstitions, fantasies, dreams, and
visions. Associated with danger, decay, criminality, terror, insurrection, and the
demonic, it was also a site of technological accomplishment, beauty, and wonder
as well as escape, shelter, and refuge (Williams; Pike).
Looking downward provides a distinct perspective on the city above, the un-
derground even perhaps offers a key to unlock certain of its mysteries. Yet the un-
derground cannot be comprehended through an abstract viewpoint and instead
requires entering its ‘shadows’. That is an observation drawn toward the end of
the book from one of the most famous chroniclers of Paris souterrain, Victor
Hugo. The preceding pages take us on many journeys below the surface. The
underneath is at times literal, for example via train or metro. But it is also meta-
phorical. The underground of these pages is both a place and an idea, one that
resonates in manifold ways with the histories of Paris and Amsterdam. They have
become renowned for their underground movements and practices of cultural re-
sistance, subversion, and diversion (and some of the paradoxes and recuperations
involved in that ‘renown’ are explored insightfully in what follows). Opposing
dominant power relations, these movements and activities have typically oper-
ated below dominant culture’s threshold of visibility, even clandestinely.
9