8 The Street

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In Santa Barbara, and in Kyoto, and in Cambridge, and Irvine, and elsewhere, we live in a “post-war” street, a street marked by the measures required to win the final battle (by armed police, health workers, sanitation crews, meter maids, ‘no loitering’ signs, ‘no sign’ signs, traffic signals, etc.)—a battle over disorder, disease, and discomfort.

In 1997, the City of Santa Barbara created a new law which prohibited sitting on the main city boulevard (State Street). Promoted by merchants on this street, the law is intended to push homeless persons away from the center of the downtown tourist destinations.
In this photo: during its first week of enforcement several protests were made to create a legal challenge to the law. Here a Santa Barbara police officer prepares to cite a protester.
Photo by author

Today, the goal of an orderly, disease-free, and comfortable boulevard is now at hand. But this street is also marked by a lack of people using it in diverse ways. Domination here appears not as a clockwork phalanx of uniformed soldiers with a marching band, but rather from out of the silences of what is not seen, and not heard at all. It is the loudness of the silence that makes the marching band unnecessary.

The task in front of us, as anthropologists and participants in the public sphere is to recognize the contours of the street in modern places, and to imagine moving beyond the restrictions that underpin the bourgeois coding of the street (i.e., the order and safety that is vouchsafed through the above agencies) into a space that may not appear or be as orderly or safe—for some—but which opens up to multiple forms of expression and representation. The role of festivity in articulating alternative uses for public streets cannot be understated (see: A festival counters the dominant...).

The job required to create an inclusive, multicultural public street, is to make a place for difference. Not the pastiche of difference that Disney’s Epcot Center shows us, where everything is similarly different, but a difference that arises, in part, from the vestiges of separate histories, and which is created, in ever greater numbers by processes of modern cultural production based on a late-modern logic of disparate desires.