This paper represents a series of speculations concerning the imagination of the city as a space of government, authority, and ‘the conduct of conduct’ . The authors argue that it is possible to understand the myriad ways in which various authorities have sought to govern the city through an interrogation of the series of means through which the city has been ‘diagrammed’ as a space of power, regulation, ethics, and citizenship. These speculations take a historical but not a historically ‘periodised’ form; the authors consider in turn the diagramming of the city in the ancient Greek world, the nineteenth-century liberal diagramming of the city, eugenic models of the city, and latter-day neoliberal modes of visualising, programming, and governing urban spaces. The aim is neither to found yet another theory of spatialisation nor to advance a Foucauldian urban sociology but to gauge the parameters which have bequeathed us the contemporary city as a governed and ethically saturated space.

This paper is an investigation into the philosophy and the history of the social sciences. Some philosophers of the social sciences have suggested that a key feature of the natural sciences is their capacity to create phenomena, and that the social sciences do not meet this criterion. We suggest, to the contrary, that the social sciences can and do create phenomena, in the sense of new ways of describing and acting that have been used to produce all sorts of effects. Like the natural sciences, the social sciences create their phenomena through the procedures that are established to discover them. But the creation of phenomena is a complex, technically dif cult and contested process and its success rare. Historically, this argument is developed through a case-study of the development and evolution of public opinion research in the USA and Britain. We argue that by the 1950s public opinion produced a version of the world that had entered 'into the true'. Special attention is given to technical considerations in the development of public opinion research, especially the genealogy of a particular research technology, that of the representative sample. Whilst we are not concerned with demarcation criteria, we argue that there are some important differences between the social and the natural sciences; that the former have a less concentrated 'spatial mix' and a slower 'tempo of creativity'. None the less, in this particular case, the social sciences have played a key role in the creation of opinioned persons and an opinionated society.

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The aspiration to be creative seems today to be more or less compulsory in an increasing number of areas of life. In psychological vocabularies, in economic life, in education and beyond, the values of creativity have taken on the force of a moral agenda. Yet creativity is a value which, though we may believe we choose it ourselves, may in fact make us complicit with what today might be seen as the most conservative of norms: compulsory individualism, compulsory 'innovation', compulsory performativity and productiveness, the compulsory valorization of the putatively new. This article suggests that, in order to escape the moralizing injunction to be creative, we need to cultivate a kind of ethical philistinism, albeit disaggregating such philistinism from the negativism of outright cynicism or fatuity. However, there is not much use in outlining an abstract model of philistinism. Instead, we take some 'exemplars' of a philistine attitude to creativity -Gilles Deleuze, F. R. Leavis, and Paul Cézanne -in order to show how such an ethos can be accomplished, on the one hand, with or without philosophy, and, on the other, with or without even the very idea of creativity itself, invoking instead the notions of 'inventiveness' and an 'ethics of inertia' as against creativity as such. The message should be that, rather than this or that theory, only exemplars -the bit-by-bit assembly of reminders -can help liberate us from the potentially moronic consequences of the doctrine of creativity.

There are many ways in which humans articulate themselves through their ‘spatiality’. One neglected aspect of a historical anthropology of spatial relations and modes of existence concerns the role of the human and social sciences. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's multifaceted distinction between ‘smooth’ space and ‘striated’ space, we propose some ways to analyse the logics of spatialisation at work in the social sciences. We take as case studies the writings of two ‘technicians of space’, Charles Booth and Patrick Geddes, together with some of their contemporaries. The paper is intended as a contribution not to the ‘history of ideas' but to contemporary debates about human spatiality. Whilst some postmodern ‘affirmations' of space counterpose abstract disciplinary ‘striated’ technologies of spatial regulation to nonabstractionist ‘smooth’ modes of spatiality, we take a different perspective. In doing so, we suggest some non-‘historical’ uses to which we might put the history of the social sciences today. We also try to demonstrate some of the merits of an empiricist approach rather than a postmodernist approach to questions of spatiality.