Automatic Coherence in Aleppo

July 8, 2007

The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh brings up an important point.. one which has broad application to the interpretation of a broad range of cultural texts. At issue is how to explain the coherence of the central corridor in Aleppo. Watenpaugh first notes the opinion of a previous scholar of the city:

Jean Sauvaget in his 1941 study of Aleppo forcefully argued against the notion of a broader urban plan governing single acts of patronage. He attributed the homogeneous appearance of the central monumental corridor to a fortunate coincidence, which was "fallacious" in that it produced an impression of planning while it was in fact the result of unplanned, haphazard growth. [53]

This argument makes sense.. to a point. Since complexes were the result of individual acts of patronage it is reasonable to deny the presence of a plan. There were no building commissions or urban architects that molded projects into a coherent form as the decades passed. This lack of a central plan does not equal randomness.. and that is where Sauvaget went wrong.

Watenpaugh does not argue for a plan, but points out another way coherence can be gained:

A series of actions taken by a succession of patrons can have a collective meaning independently of each individual action's circumstances. Even if there was no master plan, no civic or municipal body to devise such a plan, the coherence and continuity of the building habits over the 16th and 17th centuries suggest the maintenance of a practice, the awareness of a local tradition, and the will to uphold it. [54]

This is a smart way out of a bind. To explain coherence one does not need to show some shadowy and determinative plan, one simply has to understand the diverse mechanisms that can bring about coherence. A psychological mechanism that appears to have been at play in Aleppo is unity of sensibility. A series of 10 patrons who share some important aesthetic and practical assumptions about urban areas will tend to build projects that complement each other. At the completion of the building projects promoted by them there may well be a "central monumental corridor" that was not an atomistic mess, but a coherent group of structures.

There are many situations in life where it is useful to keep in mind the automatic construction of narratives. When Emily and I attended Quaker meetings back in Atlanta I was always fascinated by the ways that individual messages built upon each other.. until at the end I could sometimes discern a broad theme. It could be simply a trick of my own imagination, but I believe it would be more accurate to refer it to a subtle psychological gravitation toward coherence. One person's message pushes someone else to frame their message within that new context.. and the third person frames their theme according to the last two messages. Messages can be quite different.. and some people seem unconscious of context.. but an overall theme often does come about. Nobody planned it; human beings just do that: they deploy themselves in ways that seem most coherent for a given context.

In talking about this with Emily tonight I mentioned the game of starting a story and then passing it to a group of friends so that each can add a paragraph to it. Emily pointed out how her idea was always to make the story curve in a radically different direction. That practice comes from a strong notion of individuality. The Ottoman constructions in Aleppo worked just like a version of that game with conservative players. Each individual patron added materially to past constructions. The crucial difference from the game, though, is that shared cultural values made each succeeding patron build as closely as possible in the direction and style of the preceding patrons. If one patron in this line had been Russian, say, instead of Ottoman, then the pattern would have been badly broken. But that is the point: similar people with similar sensibilities will unconsciously create a text that has coherence. Such coherence can leave the later interpreter scurrying to locate a master plan.. but in fact there was none.