No Place to Be

There is a sign next to the Barclays Center that sends pinpricks of revulsion down my spine every time I see it. You know the one: “We Belong Here,” in pink, neon cursive script. Opened in 2012, Barclays famously displaced hundreds of neighborhood residents, drove out small business owners by raising property prices, and created a permanent traffic jam on Atlantic Avenue. The arena’s arty welcome mat is, of course, a paean to the “authentic city” marketing tactic that effaces and tokenizes those who really did once belong. But read another way, the motto effects a defensive posture in the face of suspicion and recites the consumer’s prerogative: “We have our tickets, we bought our treats, we have a right to be here.”

Pay to enter, pay to park, pay to piss (bathroom for customers only). Everywhere you look, the city glares back and demands a dollar. The commodification of our shared urban space is mostly met with weary resignation; the homogeneity this process cultivates seems inescapable. We can expect every refuge of difference to be papered over (likely with a corporate Memphis mural), every snagged corner beveled to match the contours of your smartphone.

How To with John Wilson confronts this horror with an unshakeable commitment to the anomalous. The show is a compelling mixture of B-roll filmed from the first-person POV and deadpan voiceover, courtesy of documentarian John Wilson. Although each episode is ostensibly about a discrete subject, the digressive and intensely personal monologues often veer the on-screen incidents into unexpected territory, even as New York remains in the foreground.

Across its three seasons, How To documented the sidewalk weirdos, decaying structures, and chintzy commodities that are the unlikely sinews holding the city together. Critics and viewers were enthralled, with the disarmingly evenkeeled Wilson acting as the perfect guide to the most obscure corners of, say, North Brooklyn or Central Queens. Seen through Wilson-Vision, not even Manhattan quite looks like itself. The people and things that Wilson assembles in his beguiling anthology remain unassimilable in their bizarre singularity.

Toward the end of his landmark work, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1992), the late Marc Augé poses a challenge of sorts: “There will soon be a need—perhaps there already is a need—for something that may seem a contradiction in terms: an ethnology of solitude.” This is the challenge taken up, albeit obliquely, by Wilson. (In a fluke of synchronicity, Augé—the French anthropologist of the West African Alladian people turned ethnographer of urban France turned theorist of globalized modernity—died just four days before the premiere of How To’s third season.)

In Non-Places, Augé leads into the titular concept by defining its opposite, the anthropological place. Essentially a shorthand for “lived in,” anthropological places are those settings—the village, the city park—where collective history accrues over time, yielding some sense of shared identity for those who reside within them. One can be born into an anthropological place, can find oneself there and remain there without conscious effort.

The nonplace, on the other hand, is “surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral.” Paradigmatically, this would be the supermarket, the airport, the shopping mall—entire environs given over to exchange or, rather, to commerce. We could add the sports stadium, the coworking space, the food hall, or any such venue whose form contains within itself instructions for use. Nonplaces do not have inhabitants per se; they have users. Isolated from any social group, the user, Augé writes, “is always required to prove his innocence.”

But here’s the rub: People can live in nonplaces, and nonplaces can become, in some sense, anthropological, though in deformed ways. New types of atomized subjectivities emerge within the nonplace. The kinks refuse to be ironed out; if anything, they get kinkier. Sounds like good TV.

“HEY, NEW YORK.” Start with the city: if it isn’t already a nonplace, it’s certainly trending in that direction. Wilson, who lives in Ridgewood, Queens, does his most explicitly political work on the level of the built environment. In one of the show’s earliest and most memorable episodes, he offers a history of the ubiquitous scaffolding that swallows up buildings—sometimes whole city blocks—for inordinate stretches of time. “Scaffies,” Wilson says in his voiceover, referring to scaffolding framers, “may do more to alter the landscape than any other group of people in New York.” He proceeds to show us the ways in which the city has absorbed this wanton banality. Some store owners hang planters from brackets while others suspend lights. People take advantage of the coverage, setting up a backgammon board or simply idling in the shade. In one telling interaction, a man talks to Wilson about the city’s longest standing scaffolding (409 Edgecombe Avenue, now twenty-five years old) and how he used to play on it as a child. It’s now achieved the status of a local landmark, he says.

But such recuperation is subject to nonplacification. Instead of conceiving ways to bring down scaffolding more quickly, the city launched a design competition to improve the appearance of these putatively temporary structures. The winning design, arched and white, brightly lit but lacking waist-level cross-supports, is, as Wilson remarks, “less cave-like,” but also less customizable, less usable. The aesthetic wouldn’t be out of place in a dentist’s office, a blandness accompanied by the expectation of pain (and a bill). “It’s almost like they want to make New York a different city,” Wilson says, “where it looks like every building shops at the same store.”

It’s worse than that—the city itself is becoming one big store, a place of private exchange that precludes the very idea of an organic public. In “How to Wrap Furniture,” Wilson spins a meditation on preservation and, more literally, Plasticine furniture covers into a commentary on hostile architecture and the political pathology of cleanliness. The camera hovers on bench dividers made taller to make it even more difficult for people to lie across them. In one sequence, Wilson cuts from close-ups of pigeon spikes to a shot of cops loitering nearby; the movements of the birds are controlled, but “the pigs go wherever they want.” At the end of the episode, a corner of a corporate plaza that people used as a shortcut to someplace else is cordoned off with a red rope. There is no discernible reason for the closure, aside from “the raw power that comes with controlling ten feet of a private corner” and a desire “to discourage undesirables from using our beloved public space,” Wilson dryly notes.

Antipathy is not just directed at “undesirables,” but, again, at the public as such. In what is perhaps the best episode of the entire series, “How to Find a Public Restroom,” Wilson is repeatedly ejected from restaurants and bodegas and shops as he films himself trying to find a place to piss. He is chased out of Reese’s Times Square by two employees who tell him, “This is a private space. You cannot film here.” He is escorted off the grounds around the Vessel, a pay-to-play stairway to nowhere that, at the time of filming, was closed because people were using it to commit suicide. Eventually, Wilson chances upon a porta potty perched between the pedestrian walkway and the Williamsburg Bridge carriageway—exactly the kind of bizarre singular occurrence that nonplaces can engender.

Barclays Center. The Vessel. Oculus, the $4 billion shopping mall at the World Trade Center, and the entire Upper East Side, as secure and unvaried as an airport, only with far fewer bathrooms. Together, they form a kind of belt of nonplaces wending through the city, premonitions of what’s to come. In The Cultural Turn, Fredric Jameson writes that “despite the appearances,” Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis “is not really about Time at all, but rather about Space.” The collapse of alternatives to liberal democracy, and capitalism along with it, is not, Jameson argues, about the end of the future, but about the collapse of space, about its homogenization and the eradication of any frontier beyond which capital cannot extend. For whatever reason, the Jameson of the mid-1990s seems not to have read Augé, but it is precisely the nonplace that he is identifying as a symptom of our diminished horizons. There are no more elsewheres; there is only the ticketed transit to other heres outside of here.

The privatization of public space forecloses the possibility of unpredictability. Where commerce rules, everything must be accounted for in advance—there are creditors to pay, products to stock and market. What How To shows, however, are the eruptions of personality emanating from the cracks in this totalizing system, which, much to our delight and chagrin, remains dilapidated.

In this sense, Wilson’s use of montage and mostly static medium or close shots is not merely a consequence of financial or logistical limitations. He instinctively fixes his gaze on the dross that gathers in the cracks. Solitary objects plucked from the junk pile of daily life: bottles of piss left behind by cab drivers and truckers unable to find a free toilet, a traffic cone covered in a decorative jaguar rug.

This is, to borrow a metaphor from the filmmaker Agnès Varda, an exercise in “gleaning”—foraging for the things left behind by commerce and putting them to cinematographic use. Through its capability to frame, the camera imbues everything it touches with meaning and particularity, if only by virtue of its having been chosen out of the infinitude of time. Wilson films the detritus of late capitalism, not only elevating and aestheticizing that detritus but restoring to it a dignity it may have once had.

How To’s parade of images, each disconnected from the others save for their existence within the same thirty-minute episode, recapitulates the very form of the unintelligible superabundance of the city. But the rhythm of Wilson’s editing also imparts meaning. The images work relationally, odd connections emerging from disparate elements bumping against one another in rapid succession. This is not only another formal recapitulation of the contemporary image saturated urban experience, in which a profusion of signs and objects leave scattered imprints upon the psyche, but also an invitation to active viewing.

The montage form immerses the audience in the act of interpolation, enhancing the sense that we are traversing the city along with Wilson. The show’s political aspect is evident on the level of form as well—montage doesn’t just tell us what to see, but also actively prompts us to learn how to see the urban environment in real time. While it’s true that his reliance on voice-over renders the free association of the montage more accessible than it otherwise would be, Wilson channels the wordless dreamworlds of early experimental cinema. Without being overly effusive, How To is a successor of sorts to the Soviet city symphony, routed through mumblecore and post-9/11 ironic detachment.

THE NONPLACE IS NOT A STATIC concept, in relation to the anthropological place, nor to itself: it remains in constant dialectical tension. If capital hollows out the city of its organic content, this hollowing out gives birth to new forms of eccentricity. Indeed, in the atomization and erosion of the social, of which the nonplace is both symptom and cause, room is made for the complete conformist and the complete individual. Neither bears any connection to the people around it aside from their shared anonymity, their consumption habits, and, perhaps, an impotent or inept desire for denied connection.

How To is almost a taxonomy of these types: the neat freak, the deluded entrepreneur, the media obsessive, the lonely outcast. The through line is the commodity. The collector, a person who creates community with and through objects, is perhaps the starkest example. In Season 3, Wilson visits a vacuum convention whose exhibitors get oddly emotional about their prized sweepers. As strange as it sounds, theirs is a social bond, but an incredibly fragile kind inseparable from the act of consumption. They embrace the atomization of the nonplace as a way of coping with that very atomization.

The richest character study of the series, however, may be the paranoiac. In “How to Improve Your Memory,” Wilson asks whom he assumes to be a grocery store employee for help finding a product. In fact, the man is an inventory software developer eager to explain his product in detail. Dry. But as it so often does in How To, the conversation takes a turn when the man points Wilson’s attention to the eerie fluctuations in the food packaging around them. Was the dash in the Coca-Cola logo always there? Did the Raisin Bran sun always wear sunglasses? Then comes a spiel about the Mandela effect, a situation in which a mass of people all share a similar delusion regarding the occurrence of a nonexistent event.

Earlier in the same episode, Wilson observes that “New York can be a painful place to have a good memory, because the better you remember it the less you recognize over time.” He goes on: “There used to be a bar on Second Avenue called Mars Bar, but now it’s a TD Bank. They also recently demolished one of my favorite movie theaters.” In the nonplace, the organic needs and desires of a given community are secondary to the demands of capital, which, in any event, seeks to subsume the former and make the two identical. The city, then, inspires vertigo. Familiar places disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with you and are replaced by look-alikes: a TD Bank on Second Avenue is nearly identical to the TD Bank on Atlantic. Space loses its anthropological specificity, and direction becomes purely lexical.

Deterritorialization can lead to a kind of paranoia that has persecution built into it: someone has taken my home from me. But when the components of the nonplace—eminently modular in a way an anthropological place cannot be (history and social function being rooted in particular spaces)—begin switching around, the paranoia is aimless: I have lost my bearings. Something has changed, but I do not know what or how. Paranoiac dwellers of the nonplace, like collectors, seek to reterritorialize themselves within the physical world of commodity ownership, but the psychic damage has been done. Unlike the paranoiacs of the anthropological place, who retain a memory of sociality and so can cast their fears onto a social system, nonplace paranoiacs have no reference other than the commodities they hold. Cereal boxes and Coke bottles thus become objects of great suspicion, and conspiracy theories about their use as implements of gaslighting abound. Consumption habits begin to reflect the paranoid damage. The profusion of clean living “mommy bloggers,” of cottagecore influencers, of “woke brand” spotters—they all seemingly suffer, to one degree or another, from a paranoia transposed onto the world of commodity consumption.

Wilson attends a Mandela effect conference, where the prevailing theory is not that the effect is a result of faulty memory or human limitation, but rather a slippage in the multiverse. The important thing, though, is less the paranoid theory than the fact that the convention, like the vacuum collector convention or the support group for lonely Avatar fans featured in another Season 3 episode, exists at all. These are people who have forged a collective identity out of the very symptom of the nonplace. They have forged, in a certain manner, a culture.

Which brings us back to the beginning: Wilson takes up Augé’s challenge and seeks to map the emerging shared cultures of a nonplace, which by its very existence precludes the idea of an organic culture. More than simply finding the universal in the personal, How To gives us a blueprint for a specific way of seeing in the supermodern, globalized world that is rapidly becoming little more than a big box store.

Ever the dialectical thinker himself, Wilson leaves us with a mission statement of sorts in the series’ final line: “The city is a reflection of who we are, and it will always be our healer and oppressor.”