Code + Clay . . . Data + Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media by Shannon Mattern (review)

As the title suggests, Shannon Mattern's most recent book approaches the mediation of past and present in cities as a literal concern. The book is framed in terms of a polite but provocative conversation with archaeologists and urban scholars about the "stuff" that makes cities both durable and livable. Mattern argues against organizing history into progressive, teleological narratives of human mastery and against interpreting the materiality of cities too "metaphorically" and "figuratively." In keeping with historically minded urban sociologists such as Richard Sennett, she directs analytic attention to what gets left out of traditional perspectives—the ordinary objects that connect humans not just to each other, but to the built environment as well. Mattern's book is part of an interdisciplinary and ontological shift among scholars worried about the devastating effects of human hubris on the planet. All are turning to the nonhuman world and the liveliness of matter for their capacity to temper autonomous human agency.

Rather than dwell on weaknesses in standard formats of historical representation, however, Mattern presents media archaeology as a positive route to grasping the ontology of things. She honors the strengths of archaeological method while directly engaging correspondences among the properties and peculiarities of the technologies that traditionally connect matter and memory. Her central argument is that by simultaneously "confusing" traditional archaeological practice and media epochs by means of the material ecology of infrastructure, artifact, and communication technology, we might slow down our efforts to digitally disrupt the urban past. We might appreciate patterns and continuities in the ways we make cities and come to realize cities always have been "smart" and simultaneously old and new. We might further discover a much deeper history to the technologically mediated practices and modes of communication we assume are innovative, progressive, sublime.

There are four thematic chapters in the book, each following the scent of a strategic "emblem" or index of urban connectivity. These include: wire, paper, brick, and platform. Each enables Mattern to conjure historical relationships out of other people's projects while avoiding the trap of progressive stratigraphy, and the spatial, budgetary limits of traditional first-hand excavation. Each emblem amplifies and communicates meaning via infrastructures without revealing the true or correct nature of their origin. But these emblems move quickly, darting from one place and moment in time to another. Aside from, say, state formation and the Neolithic evolution of cities, there is no archaeological bedrock here. We don't actually arrive anywhere. In the spirit of Bruno Latour, each emblem is an actant without an actor.

The first case study, a history of wire, "grounds" mythical assumptions about the annihilation of matter and the generation of infinite wealth via radio waves and wireless communication without pointing to why such myths proliferate. The second, a history of paper, loosens the fixity of text by revealing the reciprocity of reading and built form without necessarily rendering the city more legible. The third, a story of brick, reminds us of a durable correspondence of abstract calculation or embedded standard and local clay with the built environment without revealing architecture's hidden semiotic secrets. The fourth, an exploration of platforms and public spheres, reveals that all cities are centers of political power; all have historically supported not just the amplification of privileged voices, but the collective reception of them as well. Abstract political power is thus always limited by the material that shapes what gets heard and what gets said. But aside from ensuring that design and layout supports production and reception of voice and human intent, there are no rules of good design to take away from these analyses. Hence, the four material trajectories are invitations to interpret and to follow where things lead, without staking a claim on where they should lead.

Mattern is thus correct to assume this is uncomfortable and frustrating territory for humanist and posthumanist alike. It is difficult to know what to actually do with these...