URBAN SPACE AND CITYSCAPES (Questioning Cities)

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Urban Space and Cityscapes

From the verticals of New York, Hong Kong, and Australia’s Gold Coast to the sprawls of London, Paris, and Jakarta, this cross-disciplinary volume of new writing examines constructions, representations, imaginations, and theorizations of urban space and cityscapes in modern and contemporary culture. Linked by a shared concern for issues of spatiality, the topics are organized around three interrelated themes – image, text, and form – and range from the examination of cyberpunk skylines, postcolonial urbanism, and the cinema of urban disaster, to the analysis of iconic city landmarks such as the Twin Towers, the London Eye, and the Jewish Museum Berlin. Working at the intersections of visual, material, and literary culture, Urban Space and Cityscapes seeks in particular: •

• •

to provide new critical and theoretical perspectives on the city at a time when the condition and future of urbanism are major subjects of international and public concern. to examine the aesthetic, narrative, and representational strategies used to interpret the dynamic space of cities. to explore the relationship between urban space and a variety of pressing cultural concerns, including issues of identity, memory, technology, class, gender, nation, and ethnicity.

With original essays from the fields of architecture, cultural theory, film, geography, literature, and visual art, Urban Space and Cityscapes offers fresh insight into the increasingly complex relationship between urban space, cultural production, and everyday life. Christoph Lindner is Assistant Professor of Literature and Film at Northern Illinois University.

Questioning Cities Edited by Gary Bridge, University of Bristol, UK and Sophie Watson, The Open University, UK The ‘Questioning Cities’ series brings together an unusual mix of urban scholars. Rather than taking a broadly economic approach, planning approach or more socio-cultural approach, it aims to include titles from a multi-disciplinary field of those interested in critical urban analysis. The series thus includes authors who draw on contemporary social, urban and critical theory to explore different aspects of the city. It is not therefore a series made up of books which are largely case studies of different cities and predominantly descriptive. It seeks instead to extend current debates through, in most cases, excellent empirical work, and to develop sophisticated understandings of the city from a number of disciplines, including geography, sociology, politics, planning, cultural studies, philosophy and literature. The series also aims to be thoroughly international where possible, to be innovative, to surprise, and to challenge received wisdom in urban studies. Overall it will encourage a multidisciplinary and international dialogue, always bearing in mind that simple description or empirical observation which is not located within a broader theoretical framework would not – for this series at least – be enough. Published: Global Metropolitan Globalizing cities in a capitalist world John Rennie Short Reason in the City of Difference Gary Bridge In the Nature of Cities Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism Erik Swyngedouw, Maria Kaika and Nik Heynen Ordinary Cities Between modernity and development Jenny Robinson Urban Space and Cityscapes Perspectives from modern and contemporary culture Edited by Christoph Lindner Forthcoming Titles: Cities and Race America’s new black ghettos David Wilson City Publics The (dis)enchantments of urban encounters Sophie Watson Small Cities David Bell and Mark Jayne

Urban Space and Cityscapes Perspectives from modern and contemporary culture

Edited by Christoph Lindner

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 editorial matter and selection, Christoph Lindner; individual chapters, the contributors This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Urban space and cityscapes : perspectives from modern and contemporary culture / edited by Christoph Lindner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cities and towns in art. 2. Public spaces–Social aspects. 3. Space (Architecture)– Social aspects. 4. Public spaces in literature. I. Lindner, Christoph, 1971– II. Title. NX650.C66U73 2006 307.1′216–dc22 2005018286 ISBN10: 0–415–36652–6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–36653–4 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–36652–6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–36653–3 (pbk)

To Nicole, Gretchen, and Scott

Contents

List of illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements Foreword

ix xi xiii xv

EDWARD W. SOJA

1 Revisioning urban space and cityscapes

1

CHRISTOPH LINDNER

Part I Image 2 Cityscape with Ferris wheel: Chicago, 1893

15 17

MARK DORRIAN

3 Seeing only corpses: vision and/of urban disaster in apocalyptic cinema

38

BARRY LANGFORD

4 New York, 9/11

49

BRIAN JARVIS

5 The idea of Hong Kong: structures of attention in the City of Life

63

STEPHANIE HEMELRYK DONALD

Part II Text 6 Paris underground: Juan Goytisolo and the ‘Situationist’ city ANDREW HUSSEY

75 77

viii Contents

7 Negotiations of London as imperial urban space in the contemporary postcolonial novel

88

SARA UPSTONE

8 Reading urban spaces in African texts

101

TIM WOODS

9 Reading the illegible cityscapes of postmodern fiction

112

CAROLINE BATE

10 The death and return of the New York skyscraper: Cather, Libeskind, and verticality

122

CHRISTOPH LINDNER

Part III Form

135

11 The museum, the street, and the virtual landscape of Berlin

137

JULIA NG

12 The reversible city: exhibition(ism), chorality, and tenderness in Manhattan and Venice

155

TERESA STOPPANI

13 Australia’s Gold Coast: a city producing itself

177

PATRICIA WISE

14 Cognitive mapping the dispersed city

192

STEPHEN CAIRNS

Bibliography Index

206 217

Illustrations

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 8.1 8.2 10.1 10.2 11.1

Çatalhöyük: detail from reconstruction of volcanoscape New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005, exterior Rotterdam: Schouwburgplein at night Manchester: Piccadilly Gardens at night Vienna: Harry Lime and Holly Martins on the Prater wheel in The Third Man World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893: the Ferris wheel World’s Columbian Exposition: the Grand Basin and Court of Honor, White City World’s Columbian Exposition: the Temple of Luxor, Midway Plaisance World’s Columbian Exposition: the Javanese Village, Midway Plaisance World’s Columbian Exposition: the Street in Cairo, Midway Plaisance World’s Columbian Exposition, looking east along the Midway: the captive balloon and the Ferris wheel A comparison of building heights World’s Columbian Exposition: the view towards the White City through the Ferris wheel World’s Columbian Exposition: view towards the White City, from the Ferris wheel World’s Columbian Exposition: panorama of the Volcano of Kilauea Apparatus for catching and suspending hogs, 1882 Cincinnati: slaughtering and packing hogs, 1882 Eadweard Muybridge, ‘“Daisy” galloping, saddled’ Johannesburg: a squatter camp in Soweto Johannesburg: the central business district New York: the Singer Tower, 1908 New York: the Freedom Tower and World Trade Center site, design study, 2004 Jewish Museum Berlin: floor plan and vertical section through void bridges

2 4 5 6 18 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 31 32 33 35 36 37 105 108 124 130 139

x List of illustrations 11.2

Jewish Museum Berlin: model showing underground streets between the Berlin Museum and the Jewish Museum 11.3 Jewish Museum Berlin: three vertical sections 11.4 Über den Linden: elevation and plan 11.5 Über den Linden: scale model 11.6 Jewish Museum Berlin: the ‘architectural alphabet’ 11.7 Über den Linden: model showing its scale against the Brandenburg Gate 11.8 Über den Linden: ‘A Machine for Producing Gods’, landscape model 12.1 Manhattan, Rockefeller Center: Arata Matsumoto, ‘Attainable’, 1992 12.2 Manhattan, Rockefeller Center: Radio City Music Hall 12.3 Lisette Model, ‘Reflection’, New York City, 1940 12.4 Lisette Model, ‘Reflection’, New York City, 1950 12.5 Evsa Model, ‘New York City IV’, 1942/43 12.6 Evsa Model, ‘New York City V’, 1942/43 12.7 Kazuhiro Murayama, ‘Glass Venice’, 2001 12.8 Venice: La Serenata, Grand Canal 12.9 Venice: Ca’ d’Oro, Grand Canal 12.10 Venice: Palazzo Pisani, Grand Canal 12.11 Venice: Palazzo Surian-Bellotto 12.12 Venice: St Mark’s Square 13.1 Gold Coast, Australia: Biarritz Apartments 13.2 Gold Coast, Australia: Phoenician Spa Resort 13.3 Gold Coast, Australia: Q1 residential tower 14.1 Kronologi, Gamel Fauzi is heading to his office . . . 14.2 Kronologi, Hendrik Silalahi and Rudi Tinambungan are operating inside the bus . . .

142 143 144 147 148 151 153 157 158 159 161 162 164 166 167 169 171 173 174 178 179 188 204 205

Contributors

Caroline Bate is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Cultural Studies at University College Winchester, UK. Stephen Cairns is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design and Theory in the School of Arts, Culture, and Environment at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald is Professor of Communication and Culture and Director of the Transforming Cultures Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Mark Dorrian is Reader in Architecture in the School of Arts, Culture, and Environment at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Andrew Hussey is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK. He was also British Council Writer-inResidence for Morocco in 2004. Brian Jarvis is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Film in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University, UK. Barry Langford is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. Christoph Lindner is Assistant Professor of Literature and Film in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University, USA. Julia Ng is a PhD Candidate in the Department of German Literature and Critical Thought and the Program in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, USA. Edward W. Soja is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Teresa Stoppani is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Construction at the University of Greenwich, UK. Sara Upstone is a Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University and London South Bank University, UK.

xii List of contributors Patricia Wise is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Arts at Griffith University, Australia. Tim Woods is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK.

Acknowledgements

My first debt of gratitude is to the authors in this book for generously contributing their original work and ideas to the volume. For providing financial support for research and editorial work carried out for this project, I am also grateful to the Cultural Affairs Office of the United States Embassy in London. Katerina Johnson at the Çatalhöyük Research Project in Cambridge went above and beyond the call of duty to make available a crucial image for Chapter 1. And my thanks as well to David Jenkins for digitizing that image. For permission to reprint material, the editor, authors, and publishers are grateful to the following: EDAW, James Mellaart and the Çatalhöyük Research Project, the Museum of Modern Art, Scala Group, and West 8 Landscape Architects for images in Chapter 1; Canal+ Image UK Ltd, the Chicago Historical Society, Dover Publications, the Paul V. Galvin Library at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Oxford University Press, and Scientific American for images in Chapter 2; Getty Images, Per-Anders Petterson, and Tomasz Tomaszewski for images in Chapter 8; Archimation, the Frances Loeb Library at the Harvard Design School, and Studio Daniel Libeskind for images in Chapter 10; Blackwell Publishing and The Journal of American Culture for permission to reprint material revised from an earlier version of Chapter 10; Uwe Dettmar, Udo Hesse, and Studio Daniel Libeskind for images in Chapter 11; Mariapia Bellis, Ziva Kraus and the Ikona Gallery in Venice, and Arata Matsumoto for images in Chapter 12; Kathryn Mackey and the Sunland Group Ltd for images in Chapter 13; and the Warta Kota in Jakarta for images in Chapter 14. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of the book. Christoph Lindner

Foreword Cityscapes as cityspaces Edward W. Soja

The suffix -scape, coupled with city- in this far-reaching book, deserves some attention on its own. To appreciate its extraordinary versatility in word combinations, plug SCAPE into your Google search engine and it will generate more than 700,000 hits, with multiplying prefixes such as vision-, liquid-, wet-, soul-, gay-, viet-, sci-, skill-, solid-, art-, hero-, teen-, as well as the more worldly sea-, sun-, moon-, land-, city-, and town-. The abounding adaptability of -scape seems limitless. Adding an ‘e’ in front leads to escape. Changing the ‘c’ to ‘h’ produces the blunter quasi-synonym of shape, while changing the vowel in the middle gives us scope. In a now well known riff on the suffix, the cultural critic Arjun Appadurai adds further to these creative permutations, inventively exploring the global cultural economy through its ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. Not only for Appadurai, appending -scape seems to evoke a visual and panoramic sensitivity, an invitation to explore the globality of whatever is attached to it. What better way is there then to capture the contemporary cross-disciplinary resurgence of interest in cities and the urban imaginary than to thematically spin around the multi-faceted concept of cityscape, a term that on its own now generates more than 600,000 hits on Google, which also provides a stunning electronic bonus, a file of 57,000 images of real and imagined cities to peruse. Yet there is one more terminological twist I feel needs to be added right from the start, a simple reversal of the letters ‘c’ and ‘p’ to symbolize and keep in mind the need to think, write, and read about cityscapes as cityspaces. Seeing cityscapes as cityspaces not only retains the latter’s evocations of panoramic visuality and global scope, as well as the rich associations with the much more familiar concept of landscape, it opens insightful new directions that explicitly embed the interpretation of cityscapes in the wider framework of critical spatial thinking and analysis. In many ways, the spread of interest in cities across the humanities and the social sciences is part of a broader ‘spatial turn’ that has carried critical spatial thinking and writing into a wider range of disciplinary practices than at any time in the past 150 years. Recovering and exploring the interpretive significance of the spatiality of human life have sparked many new critical and theoretical perspectives on the city and contemporary culture, and underpin, in one way or another, nearly every contribution to this volume.

xvi Foreword Seeing cityscapes as cityspaces roots the analysis of cities and contemporary culture in one of the most remarkable intellectual developments of the late twentieth century. Western social thought since at least the middle of the nineteenth century was primarily focused on understanding the historical unfolding of societies, or what can be described as the interactive historicality and sociality of human life. Time tended to be seen as the dynamic carrier of societal development, of social processes and the making of history. Space, on the other hand, was often reduced to a fixed and neutral background, an extra-social environment, a mere container or stage for the human drama that was carried forward by and as history. Today, however, there is a slow rebalancing taking place, as scholars from nearly every discipline explore the social production of space with the same critical attention they have traditionally given to the making of history and the constitution of society. The spatial turn received its initial impetus in the 1960s, not coincidentally a time of explosive urban crises. It was only in the 1990s, however, that critical spatial thinking expanded well beyond the boundaries of the core spatial disciplines of geography, architecture, and urban studies to infiltrate such fields as art history, literature and literary criticism, anthropology, and cinema studies; fields for the most part dominated much more by a historical rather than geographical or spatial imagination. Critical spatial thinking, and along with it critical approaches to urban and regional studies, have become, to an unprecedented extent, transdisciplinary, with the diffusion of these approaches being especially widespread throughout the humanities. Urban space, as invoked in the title and substance of this book, has emerged from this process as an intellectual focus and meeting ground for an extraordinary variety of scholars and scholarship. Reflecting the city itself, this heterogeneous proximity and agglomeration of interests has become a source of interpretive innovation and creativity. Drawing from my own writings, let me briefly recount just a few of the earlier pathways that have most creatively defined the spatial turn and currently inform the interpretation of cityscapes as cityspaces. I start with Michel Foucault, whose brilliant spatial imagination immersed our consciousness in the little tactics of the habitat and the micro-technologies of control arising from the interplay of space–knowledge–power, his insistent and endlessly provocative triad. He made us aware of heterotopologies and heterotopias, revealing different ways of understanding the ‘other spaces’ of experience. Via Foucault (and many ‘others’), cityspace became connected with the space of the body, what the poet Adrienne Rich once called the ‘geography closest in’. The body and the city in turn become positioned within a larger nesting of regions of attachment, identity, and discipline that stretch in scale from the corporeal and the local to the outer reaches of global geopolitics, with lots of pertinent spaces of representation in between. The cultural critic John Berger enabled us to see the crisis of the modern novel, and that of all contemporary literature (and culture?), as arising from a change in the mode of narration, a radical shift from seeing the world through the diachronic flow of temporal sequencing to a more spatialized viewpoint shaped by simultaneities, lateral connections, and transgressive disorderliness. He helped us realize that in the contemporary world it may be space more than time that ‘hides

Foreword xvii consequences’ from us. Seeing the future, as well as understanding the past and the present, is no longer just a matter of historical projection. Any contemporary narrative, on cities or otherwise, that ignores the urgency of this spatial dimension is incomplete and reduced to the character of a fable. Henri Lefebvre takes us further still, into a triple dialectic of perceived, conceived, and lived cityspaces, each standing apart yet vitally interconnected. Lefebvre rewrites social theory and philosophy around the social production of cityspace and the powerful effects of the spatial specificity of urbanism. The social and spatial relations that are inscribed in cityspace are seen as mutually constructed, with neither the social nor the spatial taking precedence. For Lefebvre, the development of human society from the very beginning has been realized only as urban society, that is, concretely grounded and creatively generated through the stimulating effects of the (socially constructed) urban habitat. The repercussions of this view are enormous. It calls for seeing all societies, social relations, sociality itself, as not just spatial but inherently and generatively urban. To ignore this crucial urban dimension, as so much social theory and philosophy have done, is to create more fables. With the assistance of another renowned urbanist, Jane Jacobs, I will conclude with a journey back nearly 12,000 years to celebrate not just the first socially constructed cityspaces but also a revolutionary work of art, the world’s first known artistically rendered cityscape image. Permanent urban settlements began to be created in what is today known as the Levant and in a highland zone stretching along the southern part of Anatolia and northern Syria and Iraq to Iran, an area now in unusual and destructive turmoil. The oldest known of these early cityspaces was Jericho but the largest and most revelatory centre was Çatalhöyük, in south central Anatolia, a dense settlement that may have reached a population size of more than 12,000. Most established experts continue to deny that Jericho and Çatalhöyük were cities, for they do not fit traditional definitions devised by Western scholars seeking to identify the origins of civilization. These definitions, however, are products of a Eurocentric historical imagination that persists in privileging time over space. What Jane Jacobs did in a remarkable book published in 1969 was to ‘put cities first’ as the active progenitors of an astounding array of major cultural and economic innovations, including the first woven textiles and rugs, the first successful metalworking and pottery making, the first known tooling of hand-made mirrors for personal reflection, the creation of a shared religious culture, and two additional breakthroughs, the revolutionary development of full-scale agrarian society and the invention of specifically urban art. The artistic breakthrough is a wall painting found on three interior walls of a house in Çatalhöyük and dated to roughly 6,150 BC. It vividly portrays an erupting volcano in the distance, the invaluable source of obsidian, or volcanic glass, which was a vital part of Stone Age technology. In the foreground is a bird’s-eye panorama of more than seventy household compounds, the first real and imagined cityscape painting. All previous wall painting that we know of showed hunting scenes with men and animals, or else simple geometric designs. Rather than depicting the

xviii Foreword ‘raw’ of nature or a simple landscape, what was found in Çatalhöyük was a representation of the ‘cooked’, the world’s first representation of socially produced cityspace. In a wonderful comment on what was happening 12,000 years ago and continues to happen in the present, Jacobs stated bluntly that without cities we would all be poor! There would be no societal development, since we would have remained hunters and gatherers much as we were for most of our evolutionary existence. With this astounding recognition of the generative and developmental effects that can be found in the space of cities, we can fast-forward to the present moment, as the world enters what some have called a new urban age. For the first time, it can be said that the majority of the world’s population lives not just in cities of various sizes but in around 400 giant metropolises of more than a million people. But this new urban age is not just a matter of statistics. More than ever before, understanding cities, especially from a critical spatial perspective, is fundamental and necessary to understanding all aspects of the contemporary world. And also more than ever before, building on the transformative insights of Foucault, Berger, Lefebvre, Jacobs, and so many others, we are beginning to see and study the extraordinary array of positive and negative forces that emanate from cityspace and from the stimulus of urban agglomeration. We have been living an urban-generated history for twelve millennia, but only now has this entered significantly into our popular and intellectual consciousness. The chapters that follow build on these new foundations.

1 Revisioning urban space and cityscapes Christoph Lindner

URBAN NEOLITHIC In his foreword to this book, Edward Soja cites a wall painting from the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey as an important artistic breakthrough in urban culture. Showing a volcano erupting behind terraces of densely packed houses, the 8,000-year-old painting not only marks the emergence of specifically urban art, but also presents the earliest known panorama of an urban landscape. Commenting on the geohistory of cityspace in Postmetropolis, Soja elaborates on the significance of the Çatalhöyük mural, suggesting that this ‘original example of a distinctively and self-consciously panoramic urban art form . . . expresses a popular awareness of the spatial specificity of urbanism’ (Soja 2000: 40). When understood in Soja’s terms as a graphic record of the social production of urban space – one, moreover, that is rendered from a panoramic cityscape perspective – the Çatalhöyük mural resonates powerfully with the subject of this book. So much so, in fact, that further close analysis of the image brings into focus some of the key concerns underpinning the chapters that follow. As such, I would like to pursue a few additional speculations extending from Soja’s insights into Çatalhöyük. Among the mural’s most distinctive features is the geometric abstraction of the built environment of the city. The evenly spaced houses are homogenized into nearly identical cubes, which in turn are stacked into larger, linear blocks. The negative space between the houses creates a grid of perpendicular lines. And the twin peaks of the towering volcano, which dominate the background of the mural, are composed of symmetrical triangular forms. For Soja, this ‘creatively cartographic representation of cityspace’ suggests an ‘egalitarian yet individualized built environment’ (Soja 2000: 40), a view that is supported by James Mellaart’s (1967) original archeological excavations of the site in the 1960s. Yet, looking at the image from a twenty-first-century perspective, I cannot help but see certain aesthetic affinities between the cubed city of Çatalhöyük and any number of modernist pictorial representations of urban space, ranging from the early cubist compositions of Braque and Picasso to the industrial landscapes of L.S. Lowry, and even to some of Le Corbusier’s imaginative city sketches. It would be wrong, of course, to suggest that such affinities are anything but accidental, but it is none the less interesting to consider the possibility that the project of rationalizing

2 Christoph Lindner

Figure 1.1 Çatalhöyük: detail from reconstruction of volcanoscape (courtesy of James Mellaart/Çatalhöyük Research Project)

urban landscape and architecture, which has dominated so much artistic and intellectual engagement with the modern city, was already an integral part of urban culture in the neolithic period. Gary Bridge begins his book Reason in the City of Difference by observing that ‘the city has always been the home of reason’ (Bridge 2005: 1). Çatalhöyük’s urban volcanoscape, which could be interpreted as a sort of gridded urban master plan, certainly appears to illustrate this point. Yet in its subtle evocation of an ‘individualized built environment’ – suggested not only by the clear demarcation of each building’s boundaries but also by the slight variations in the size and appearance of the houses – the image also presents a register of difference. Difference is something that modern urbanism has often sought to pave over (sometimes literally), favouring instead an exclusive and homogenized ‘space of reason’ (Bridge 2005: 1). Reclaiming the place of difference within the discourse of urban rationalization is, as Gary Bridge argues, ‘central to current understandings of the directions of urbanism’ (Bridge 2005: 2). It is also a recurring concern for the contributors to this book. From the cartographic blind spots of postmodern Jakarta to the skyrocketing urban shoreline of Australia’s Gold Coast, many of the interstitial cityspaces examined in the following pages positively demand new critical and theoretical frameworks for conceiving and analysing difference. The other striking feature of the Çatalhöyük mural is its vivid depiction of a volcanic eruption in process. The image shows fire exploding from the summit, lava flowing from the mountain base, smoke and ash choking the air, and pyroclastic

Revisioning urban space and cityscapes 3 debris hurtling through the sky. While the reason for including the eruption in the mural was almost certainly to mark the volcano’s economic status as a producer of obsidian (Mellaart 1967: 177), the presence of the towering inferno could none the less be read in a more sinister way as an emblem of violence and destruction. This idea is reinforced if we consider the volcano’s probable religious significance as a link to ‘the underworld, the place of the dead’ (Mellaart 1967: 177). This additional symbolic valence might further explain why the spectacle of volcanic eruption proved so captivating to the neolithic urban imaginary. What I find particularly fascinating about this aspect of the mural is the explicit link it makes between violence and the city. In fact, with the absence of perspectival realism, depth in the painting is flattened to the extent that the volcano appears to be resting directly on top of – rather than behind – the houses. Viewed in this way, the volcano suddenly becomes an immediate threat to the city – no longer just a distant firework display. Given the volatile and often violent history of urban morphology, it is somewhat fitting – as well as just a little prophetic – that the world’s first cityscape painting should also contain the world’s first image of urban destruction. In the last few decades, such images of the city have achieved a new pre-eminence in our global media culture. In addition to natural disasters like the Mexico City and Kobe earthquakes, we have begun to experience a surge in images of other, manmade forms of urban violence such as inner-city race riots, gang warfare, and sectarian violence. The decades around the turn of the millennium have further witnessed a growing number of terrorist explosions in buildings and public spaces in cities throughout the world, including Barcelona, Beirut, Casablanca, Istanbul, London, Madrid, Manchester, Moscow, Nairobi, New York, Omagh, Paris, Riyadh, Rome, Tel Aviv, and Washington, DC. While this sort of violent politicization of urban space is by no means a development unique to the present age of globalization, it has arguably acquired a new, heightened significance in the aftermath of 9/11. Never before have cityscapes and cityspaces occupied such a prominent and symbolically charged place in political, critical, and cultural debate. It is not surprising, therefore, that the relationship between violence and the city – a link established pictorially some 8,000 years ago on the high plains of Anatolia – is another of this book’s key concerns, informing chapters on topics as diverse as the cinema of urban disaster, the architectural redevelopment of Ground Zero, the psychogeography of underground Paris, and the virtual landscape of post-war Berlin.

URBAN GROUNDSWELL The extent to which urban space and cityscapes continue to engage our cultural imagination in the twenty-first century was exhibited in a quite literal way at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Following several years of major redesign and reconstruction – an architectural project which in itself sought to reinforce the spatial connections between the museum and the surrounding cityscape (Figure 1.2) – the MoMA reopened with a series of innovative exhibitions that included

4 Christoph Lindner

Figure 1.2 New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi: exterior view (© The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence)

a showcase of contemporary landscape design entitled ‘Groundswell’. The idea behind ‘Groundswell’, as the exhibition’s curator explains, was to portray ‘the surge of creativity and critical commentary surrounding contemporary created landscape’ (Reed 2005: 15). To this end, the exhibition offered an international survey of constructed landscapes ranging from reinterpretations of public parks, walkways, and plazas to reimaginations of industrial wastelands and coastal landfills. Significantly,

Revisioning urban space and cityscapes 5 all twenty-three of the projects featured in the exhibition are either located within or directly linked to cities. In other words, what the exhibition placed on display were not just constructed landscapes, but specifically urban forms of constructed landscape – forms reclaimed from or generated by the wide array of transitional open spaces (such as parking lots, rooftops, and bomb sites) contained within contemporary cities. Each of these projects, moreover, shows an attentiveness not only to the transformative potential of urban space, but also to the ways in which that space relates to a wider cityscape. In the case of the Schouwburgplein (Theatre Square) project in central Rotterdam, for example, the conventionally static space of the public square is redesigned as an active stage for outdoor events conceived to consolidate the nearby performance spaces of the municipal theatre, cinema, and concert hall (Figure 1.3). However, the design is also intended to encourage public participation in spontaneous performative activities. To enable this, the square incorporates a row of towering, coin-operated hydraulic light masts, creating ‘a sort of kinetic sculpture recalling the steel cranes that unload shipping containers’ (Reed 2005: 34). During the day, these oversized industrial lamp-posts perform an improvised ‘mechanical ballet’ (Reed 2005: 34). At night, they illuminate the space, casting circles of light around the square. The overall effect is not only to enliven the form and function of the public square, but also to bring the space itself into dialogue with the city and its inhabitants. A similar concern for the interrelation of city and public space underlies the redevelopment of Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester (Figure 1.4) – another of the constructed landscapes featured in ‘Groundswell’. The main challenge facing this project was to contribute to the regeneration of Manchester city centre in the aftermath of the 1996 IRA bombing, which destroyed over a million square feet of retail and office space. The related challenge was to reclaim green space from the city’s growing transport infrastructure in such a way as to facilitate pedestrian

Figure 1.3 Rotterdam: Schouwburgplein at night (courtesy of West 8 Landscape Architects)

Figure 1.4 Manchester: Piccadilly Gardens at night (courtesy of EDAW, photo by Dixi Carrillo)

Revisioning urban space and cityscapes 7 use while also maintaining a smooth flow of traffic around the site (see ParkinsonBailey 2000: 268). One of the most interesting aspects of the final design is the way it incorporates the form and flow of a city street into the park itself. Extending in an uninterrupted straight line from the adjoining road, a pedestrian thoroughfare cuts across the width of the park. Intersecting this thoroughfare at a right angle is another walkway that gently arcs to connect the far corners of the park. The result is a blurring of the distinctions between urban pavement and garden path – a nearly seamless transition that invites pedestrians to stray into the park from the city as well as back into the city from the park. In this respect, the design successfully reconnects Piccadilly Gardens with the city centre by plugging the park’s walkways directly into a much larger and more complex city-wide network of human traffic. But perhaps the most poignant engagement with urban space and cityscapes in ‘Groundswell’ comes from one of the exhibition’s least obviously urban projects: the Fresh Kills ‘Lifescape’. Due to start construction in 2007, ‘Lifescape’ is an ambitious plan to transform the 2,200 acre Fresh Kills landfill on the edge of New York City into an eco-friendly park, complete with wetlands, grasslands, woodlands, playing fields, pedestrian and bicycle paths, and even a wildlife reserve. Interestingly, the design envisions retaining much of the artificial topography created by the undulating mounds of garbage, some of which reach heights of over 200 ft. These mounds will be sealed beneath a protective polymer lining and topped by a thick layer of soil, enabling the ecological and environmental recovery of the site. On the surface, therefore, ‘Lifescape’ will be a vibrant natural landscape – an idea reinforced by the word ‘life’ in the project title. Underlying this natural landscape, however, will be the cumulated waste of one of the world’s most excessive cities. So while ‘Lifescape’ will appear at first to be disconnected from the city – and, indeed, the parkland is partly conceived to offer an escape from urban space – the landscape will none the less remain intimately and inextricably connected to the city at a much more fundamental level. In a very real way, this rehabilitated natural landscape will be shaped and sustained by a hidden cityscape of urban waste. It is also worth noting that the Fresh Kills landfill is the final resting place of the World Trade Center towers. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the wreckage from Ground Zero was transported to the landfill, which was specially reopened to accommodate the 1.2 million tons of material. The ‘Lifescape’ design commemorates the Twin Towers with an earthwork monument formed by two inclining landforms that mirror the exact shape of each skyscraper laid on its side. In a further commemorative gesture, the monument is oriented on an axis with the skyline where the towers originally stood, allowing a panoramic vista of lower Manhattan in the far distance – a view soon to include the distinctive profile of the Freedom Tower rising from the redeveloped WTC site. The earthwork monument accordingly establishes another strong link back to the lived space of the city. The orientation of the monument creates a direct visual connection with the New York skyline, encouraging visitors to gaze at the city from the vantage point of its recycled dumping ground. Meanwhile, the shape of the monument evokes the origins of the urban wreckage contained in the ground beneath, transforming the softly sculptured landscape into a kind of grave – a burial

8 Christoph Lindner mound for the material remains of the urban superstructures that once stood as the world’s most prominent and emblematic icons of capitalist globalization. As such, the 9/11 earthwork monument simultaneously conceals and reveals the mutability of urban landscape. And, like the ‘Lifescape’ project as a whole, the monument also attests to the extraordinary versatility of urban space and the imaginative ways in which it can be recycled, renewed, and remade. The title of the ‘Groundswell’ exhibition suggests a burgeoning of innovation and creative production within contemporary landscape architecture and urban design. Projects such as Rotterdam’s Schouwburgplein, Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens, and New York’s Fresh Kills ‘Lifescape’ certainly support such a view in the way that each seeks not only to reclaim but also to reinvent a particular city space. For Peter Reed, MoMA’s Curator of Architecture and Design, such ‘palliative spaces’ are ‘causes for optimism’ because of the contribution they make to ‘the quality of civic life’ and the role they play ‘as catalysts for urban development’ (Reed 2005: 16). It is hard not to share Reed’s sense of optimism when surveying the exhibition’s full range of regenerative landscape projects, including such radically transformative designs as Hadiqat As-Samah (Garden of Forgiveness) in post civil-war Beirut and the Parc de la Cour du Maroc in the post-industrial train yards of Paris. Yet, looking at urbanism from a wider array of historical, critical, and disciplinary perspectives, this book finds that the cultural significance of urban space and landscape is arguably more complex, contested, and unsettled than Groundswell’s necessarily select survey is able to make evident. Drawn from the fields of cultural theory, architecture, film, literature, visual art, and urban geography, the chapters in this volume make a collective, cross-disciplinary case for the continuing importance of questioning cities – including their causes for social optimism. In making this case, the contributions offer what I am hopeful readers will see as another kind of groundswell: not just a surge of creative urban production but also a burgeoning of innovative critical urban analysis drawn from across the humanities, social sciences, and beyond.

IMAGE – TEXT – FORM Connected by a shared concern for issues of spatiality, the chapters in this book are organized around three broad, interrelated themes – image, text, and form – and range from the examination of cyberpunk skylines, postcolonial urbanism, and the cinema of urban disaster, to the analysis of iconic city landmarks such as the Twin Towers, the London Eye, and the Jewish Museum Berlin. The first part of the book, ‘Image’, focuses on imaginary, visual, and spectacular representations of the city. The second part, ‘Text’, contains chapters concerned with textual, intertextual, and other discursive treatments of urban space. And the final part, ‘Form’, contains chapters investigating the ways in which space and form intersect in the city. In the opening chapter of Part I, Mark Dorrian considers how the world’s first Ferris wheel, constructed for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, instigated a new way of seeing and experiencing cityscapes. As Dorrian argues, this specifically urban panoptic form, which has become such an integral part of the

Revisioning urban space and cityscapes 9 contemporary landscape of cities like London and Vienna, marks a turning point in the cultural history of the aerial view. Born of a late nineteenth-century culture of exhibition and consumption, George Ferris’s invention simultaneously functioned as a vantage point, a kinaesthetic device, and a new form of entertainment for the masses. For Dorrian, whose interests lie in the visual possibilities and effects produced by the wheel, the emergence of this giant ‘rotary eye’ comments forcefully on the ideological role of the aerial view within urban modernity, as well as on the cultural trajectory of the ‘hypervisual spectacle’. Dorrian concludes by speculating on the possible relationships between the Ferris wheel, proto-cinematic forms of still photography, and the production-line procedures for animal ‘disassembly’ that were pioneered at Chicago’s Union Stock Yards in the years leading up to the 1893 Exposition. Moving from the late nineteenth-century proto-cinematic flickerings explored by Dorrian to the full-blown scopic sensations of twentieth-century film, Barry Langford’s chapter focuses on the representation of urban disaster in apocalyptic cinema. In particular, Langford draws on Michel de Certeau’s thinking about urban voyeurism and imagined disaster to stage a series of strategic encounters between urban theory and urban film. Arguing for the importance of rethinking the function of fantasy and play in cinema’s post-apocalyptic urban visions, Langford deciphers the ruined cities of films ranging from Hollywood blockbusters like Deep Impact (1998) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) to European art-house productions like Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967) and Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987). The result is not only fresh insight into the strangely morbid fascinations of cinema culture but also a renewed understanding of de Certeau’s contribution to the critical analysis of everyday urban life. The theme of urban destruction continues in the next chapter, in which Brian Jarvis analyses New York’s cityscape on 9/11 in relation to theories of trauma and hyperreality. Reading the collapse of the Twin Towers principally through the lens of Freud’s theory of the uncanny and Jean Baudrillard’s work on hyperreality, Jarvis explores the disturbing ways in which the hyperreal mediation of the terrorist attacks in New York radically accentuated the cityscape’s sublime and uncanny dimensions. In the process, Jarvis reveals how the violence of urban destruction has been a long-standing obsession within modern and postmodern culture, implicating writers, artists, and film-makers as diverse as Upton Sinclair, Thomas Pynchon, Godfrey Reggio, and Orson Welles. The potentially controversial conclusion reached in this chapter is that the explosion and collapse of the Twin Towers can ultimately be understood as ‘an acceleration of the capitalist logic of creative destruction’ in which terrorism functioned as ‘the uncanny of capital’. The final chapter in Part I shifts the focus away from the iconographic skylines of Western culture to look at a different post-disaster urban landscape. In ‘The idea of Hong Kong’, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald examines the collaborative interplay of cinema and tourism in Hong Kong following the 2003 SARS epidemic. The discussion is centred on a series of short promotional films – each celebrating a different aspect of the city’s post-SARS recovery – which were produced by local film-makers in collaboration with the Hong Kong Tourism Commission. Working

10 Christoph Lindner within an innovative theoretical framework that combines Jonathan Crary’s thinking on visuality and ‘attention’ with Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structures of feeling’, Donald interweaves analysis of the films with findings developed from original case-study research into how Hong Kong residents imagine and relate to the city’s defining urban landmarks. This double analysis shows how, in the postSARS era, promotional film making has attempted to construct Hong Kong’s cityscape as a metaphor for modern experience while simultaneously condensing the city’s image into a logo and brand. Part II, which changes the emphasis from the visual to the textual, begins with a psychogeographical excursion through urban counter-culture. In ‘Paris underground’, Andrew Hussey maps the radical reconfigurations of Paris found in the work of the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, who was briefly a follower of Guy Debord in the late 1950s. And it is precisely in the context of Debord’s theories of psychogeography, and in particular their attacks on the capitalist regulation of urban space, that Hussey interprets Goytisolo’s 1982 novel Landscapes After the Battle, in which the inhabitants of Paris wake one morning to find that all the city’s signs in the familiar Latin alphabet have been replaced by Arabic. Reading this surreal cityscape, Hussey evaluates the extent to which the subversive content of Goytisolo’s invented Paris constitutes a genuine reframing of urban experience. He also considers Goytisolo’s view that Paris, the former capital of modernity, can recover its cultural eminence only by embracing margins and edges, such as the neglected immigrant spaces of the Arab and West African quarters of the city. Sara Upstone’s chapter continues the discussion of immigrant spaces, refocusing the analysis on the relationship between postcolonial fiction and contemporary London. From Sam Selvon and Salman Rushdie to Diran Adebayo and Zadie Smith, postcolonial novelists have long exhibited a fascination with urban space. For such writers, the city is a space of chaotic, fragmented, and sensorial experience. In this respect, as Upstone argues, postcolonial novelists share a discourse with postmodern commentators such as Edward Soja, Sophie Watson, and Steven Pile who conceive the city as multiplicitous, subjective, and often unknowable. Yet these postcolonial writers also add to this theoretical discourse a social realism and awareness of the inequalities of the city that indicates the potential limits of the postmodern project. Developing this line of thought, Upstone charts the ways in which recent postcolonial writing navigates London’s imperial urban space in order to address key aspects of the migrant experience, such as inter-community violence, Americanism versus Africanism, and classed and gendered prejudice. Space has always been a highly contentious issue in Africa and, as the next chapter shows, this is particularly the case in the context of contemporary urban Africa. In ‘Reading urban spaces in African texts’, Tim Woods investigates how contemporary writers from countries such as Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa have sought to represent the impact of Africa’s uneven urban development on the lived spaces of the city. As he illustrates, the shanty town, the high-tech mall, the residential tower, the gated community, and the business district are all significant urban sites for contemporary writers interested in exploring how the distortions of colonialism and capitalism have shaped – and continue to shape – African cities.

Revisioning urban space and cityscapes 11 Woods finds that the project of understanding the full complexity of Africa’s hybrid urban spaces remains a major challenge for writers as they seek to envision the continent’s uncertain urban future. Caroline Bate’s chapter undertakes the tricky task of reading the ‘illegible cityscapes’ of postmodern fiction. The discussion focuses in particular on Dhalgren (1974), a novel by the African-American science fiction writer Samuel Delany in which the mysterious city of ‘Bellona’ continually seems to shift and rearrange itself around its inhabitants. What emerges is a city that is fluid and disorienting – a shape-shifting space that forces a re-evaluation of the ways in which we visualize and theorize urban landscape. Drawing on both Kevin Lynch’s concept of ‘legibility’ and Michel de Certeau’s thinking on the ‘erotics of knowledge’, Bate considers the implications of the shape-shifting cityscape for postmodern culture, and reflects on how these relate to Edward Soja’s call for a radical ‘thirding’ of perspective. In Delany’s novel, the cityscape affords only distorted, refracted, and partial images, rather than embodying traditional notions of legibility and rationality. As such, Bate argues, the shape-shifting urban imaginaries of postmodern fiction foreground a critical spatial tension between the transparent logic of the legible cityscape and the illegible anti-logic of the lived city. My chapter, ‘The death and return of the New York skyscraper’, returns to a cityscape that not only exerts a strong hold over the popular cultural imagination but also proves a recurring source of fascination for many of the contributors to this book. While simultaneously sharing and questioning that fascination, my discussion examines cultural responses to the New York skyline at several key moments in its vertical history, and in the process revisits the theme of urban violence and destruction running through this book. Specifically, I adapt Max Page’s notion of architectural ‘creative destruction’ in order to read two very different yet interrelated New York texts. One is a 1912 short story about skyscrapers by the American modernist writer Willa Cather. The other is an actual skyscraper: Daniel Libeskind’s Freedom Tower, currently under construction on the Ground Zero site. My argument is that, in sharply contrasting ways, these two texts register deep-rooted cultural anxieties about modern urban development and the profoundly transitory nature of urban landscape. Although this chapter marks the last contribution to the ‘text’ section of the book, it is also partly interested in the interrelation of form and space. In this respect, it begins to pursue a concern that is addressed much more fully and explicitly by the four chapters grouped together in the final part of the book. The first chapter in Part III extends the analysis of Daniel Libeskind’s architecture and its relation to urban landscape in a different direction. In ‘The museum, the street, and the virtual landscape of Berlin’, Julia Ng examines the interplay of memory, form, and space in two of Libeskind’s Berlin projects: the Jewish Museum, which was completed in 2001, and Über den Linden, an experimental ‘non-building’ designed for a 1991 exhibition aimed at reimagining the city centre after the fall of the Wall. Reading Libeskind’s museum design in the context of Jacques Derrida’s 1992 critique of the project, as well as in relation to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘time image’, Ng sheds new light on the place of this distinctive memorial urban structure in the post-war landscape of Berlin. Further addressing Libeskind’s spatial

12 Christoph Lindner imagination of the city, Ng shows how the virtual streetscape of Über den Linden, conceived alongside the actualization of the Jewish Museum and sharing a common architectural alphabet, is critical to understanding Libeskind’s theoretical negotiation of urban space. In ‘The reversible city’, Teresa Stoppani offers a comparative architectural analysis of urban form and function in Manhattan and Venice – two ‘paradigm islands’ which are rarely analysed together, despite the way both cities represent unsolved complexities for the modernist discourse in architecture. The fist part of the discussion focuses on Manhattan, arguing that its grid is the rational tool for the city’s oneiric project. Taking the Rockefeller Center and Ground Zero as exemplary paradoxes that simultaneously transgress and comply with the spatial demands of the grid, Stoppani considers how Manhattan’s urban forms operate between representation and performance, creating an ‘artificial chorality’. The second part of the discussion focuses on Venice and urban performativity. Surveying the weaving waterfront cityscape, Stoppani suggests that Venice reverses Manhattan’s urban processes of replication and transgression. As she sees it, ‘chorality’ in Venice is not imposed by a predefined urban form, but lies instead in the tension that holds its elements together in what Le Corbusier describes as ‘a sort of diffused tenderness’. The conclusion reached here is that the performativity and pliability of Manhattan and Venice are what enable both cities to remain relevant in current architectural and urban discourse about the mutability of cityspace. Patricia Wise’s chapter moves from the urban stages of New York and Venice to the beachfront playground of the Gold Coast, Australia’s fastest-growing urban corridor. It has become conventional to read the Gold Coast as paradigmatically postmodern, marked by its diasporated growth, lack of history, and the play of surfaces taken to constitute its cultural expression and identity. However, Patricia Wise argues that confining the Gold Coast to its postmodernism cannot provide a satisfactory account of its urban processes. Seeking to develop an alternative conceptual framework within which to theorize this unique city, the discussion draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s work on ‘rhizomatics’ and spatiality to understand how ‘new’ cities are producing themselves, and how policy might respond more effectively in such sites. In Wise’s view, what the Gold Coast desperately needs is the adoption of new analytical procedures and policy frameworks adequate to its cultural expression and social and economic multiplicities. This chapter offers a far-reaching exploration of how this might be achieved, advocating an approach to mapping that allows what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe as ‘experimentation in contact with the real’. Rethinking approaches to urban mapping is also the central concern of the book’s final chapter. In ‘Cognitive mapping the dispersed city’, Stephen Cairns revisits Kevin Lynch’s theory of cognitive mapping, developed in the 1960s, in the light of newly emerging forms of ‘dispersed’ urbanism. While seeking to avoid reactivating the Lynchian project of urban representation, Cairns explores what he sees as latent possibilities within it. In particular, his interest lies in the way Lynch’s cognitive mapping idea might continue to inform the inventive aims of such a representational project in the postmodern era. As a setting for this theoretical exploration, Cairns

Revisioning urban space and cityscapes 13 uses the ‘dispersed’ Indonesian city of Jakarta, where the extended patchwork urbanism and variegated landscape pose a fundamental challenge to conventional conceptualizations and representations of urban space. The ensuing discussion not only provides an innovative theoretical perspective on the cultural politics of mapping cities, but also offers a fascinating glimpse into the urban future of our global metropolitan age.

URBAN SCAPELAND In his essay ‘Scapeland’, Jean-François Lyotard provocatively suggests that landscape is an excess of presence that leads to an experience of estrangement. Reading through this book’s wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary engagement with the landscape of cities, it becomes clear that a similar dynamic of estrangement frequently distinguishes the experience of ‘cityscape’, landscape’s specifically urban corollary. In the following pages, this dynamic registers in a variety of ways, though most often – and most visibly – as a consequence of urban violence and destruction. It would be misleading, however, to give the impression that this book finds no cause for social optimism, celebration, or renewal in its critical encounters with the transformative space of cities. In fact, few if any contributors to this volume would go quite as far as Lyotard in holding that ‘estrangement (dépaysement) would appear to be a precondition of landscape’ (Lyotard 1989: 212). Rather, Edward Soja’s conclusion in Postmetropolis that the social production or urban space has the potential to liberate as well as the potential to alienate comes much closer to capturing the overall outlook of this book. It is predominantly this spatial tension between estrangement and empowerment that the following chapters explore in their collective revisioning of urban space and cityscapes.

Part I Image

2 Cityscape with Ferris wheel Chicago, 1893 Mark Dorrian

I Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spend – free of income tax, old man, free of income tax? The Third Man (dir. Carol Reed, 1949) That’s Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man giving his old friend Holly Martins a lesson in moral relativism from the apex of Vienna’s huge Ferris wheel in the Prater fairground. It’s an old theme, this thinning of the ethical relationship through distance (see Ginzburg 2002: 157–72), its best-known expression perhaps contained in Diderot’s Letter on the Blind when he supposes: Do we ourselves not cease to feel compassion when distance or the smallness of the object produces the same effect on us as lack of sight does on the blind? . . . I feel quite sure that were it not for fear of punishment, many people would have fewer qualms at killing a man who was far enough away to appear no larger than a swallow than in butchering a steer with their own hands. And if we feel compassion for a horse in pain though we crush an ant without a second thought, are these actions not governed by the selfsame principle? (Diderot 1966: 17) In Reed’s film Lime is a charismatic black-marketeer dealing in diluted penicillin in post-war Vienna; a cynical but charming vagabond who knows how to exploit the new unmapped topography of the shattered city – a shifting world of shadows, ruins, and debris where only fragile and apparently ‘occasional’ structures, such as the fairground wheel, or those underground, such as the sewers, seem to be fully intact. The oppressive atmosphere of alienation and disorientation that permeates The Third Man has often been remarked upon: the film portrays an urban world in which the possibility of commanding a ‘cityscape’ – both visually and operatively – is constantly cancelled. And so, although early in the film the laterally spreading rhizomatic underground city formed by the sewers seems to be within Harry’s dominion, by the end it has turned into his trap. Disallowing any overview, the film

18 Mark Dorrian constantly places its audience and protagonists in shadowed and visually limited spaces whose connection to one another is obscure or even – like the ubiquitous and unstable piles of rubble – in motion. If the film gives us cityscapes, they are more akin to Jean-François Lyotard’s (1989) ‘scapelands’ of sensory disorientation, where interpretation misses its mark or is silenced, than to any conventional understanding of the term. This barring of the overview is perhaps most evident – because the opportunity to gain such an overview reaches, literally, its height – in the scene in the carriage of the Ferris wheel that vaults Holly and Harry high up into the dusty Vienna sky, whence the latter delivers his monologue and displays his truly Apollonian dispassion. There is a long understanding of the Ferris wheel, which it shares with other fairground rides, as an entertainment for lovers, and the scene reads as a parody of this. The intimacy of the upholstered carriage shifts into claustrophobia as the room with a view becomes a room with a drop. Despite the back-projection that flickers upon the car windows as the wheel turns, the city remains flat, its expanse ignored by the protagonists. Rather than the carriage opening on to a cityscape, the image seems paradoxically to press against the glass, shutting the windows down and leaving the extent of the vertical fall from the wheel’s zenith – from which Harry looks down, and with which he threatens Holly – as the only registration of the city’s space from the carriage interior.

Figure 2.1 Vienna: Harry Lime and Holly Martins on the Prater wheel in The Third Man (courtesy of Canal+ Image UK Ltd)

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 19 The Diderot-esque motif within the film continues later when Holly is brought into close quarters with the consequences of Harry’s racketeering. In a hospital, to which he has been taken by the military police, he stands pressed hard against the foot of a bed that holds a dying child. The child is unseen by the audience; instead we focus upon Holly’s eyes. He agrees to help the police trap Harry.

II This chapter is about the Ferris wheel and vision. More particularly, it aims to examine – or at least to begin an examination of – the Ferris wheel as an episode within the broader cultural history of the elevated or aerial view. It should be said at the outset that this is also a history within which the emergence of the notion of ‘cityscape’ is equally and deeply implicated, dependent as it was upon the prior concept of landscape with its associations of prospect and expanse. The earliest use of the term given in the Oxford English Dictionary makes this landscape connection clear: the extended citation, from an 1856 letter by Thackeray, reads: ‘A fairyland of frozen land, river, and city-scape, where all the trees were glistening with silver, and all the houses iced with plum-cake snow’ (Thackeray 1924: 82). (He is describing a journey by sleigh in the vicinity of Albany, New York; interestingly, after Thackeray, no further citations are given until 1952.) It is not by chance that in Thackeray’s description an atmosphere of enchantment arises from the sight of a world that is arrested and ‘frozen’ and which, as such, is presented as pristine and in important ways empty. We find the same relationship in that paradigmatic city poem of romanticism, Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802’, a eulogy to a metropolis that appears as a landscape, frozen in sleep before the start of the commercial day. Likewise it is not coincidental that today, as visitors queue to enter the capsules of the London Eye – the gargantuan hi-tech Ferris wheel that was built on the bank of the Thames as part of the capital’s millennium celebrations and that is now billed as ‘the way the world sees London’ – they are ideologically prepared by being guided past the text of Wordsworth’s poem, monumentalized in large stainless steel letters. While there are suggestions that pleasure wheels may have originated in the Islamic world (Anderson 1992), and documentary evidence for them going back to at least 1620, the motorized Ferris wheel – as we know it today – is undoubtedly one of the iconic ascensional apparatuses of modernity and its historical emergence can be located at a very specific moment within modern society, one characterized by the linked developments of mass tourism and the urban spectaculars of the turnof-the-century World’s Fairs. Consequently the Ferris wheel has a history of being a specifically urban form: it has a relationship with cities and may even be taken to be one of the modes – however minor – through which cityscapes are constituted, presented, disseminated and, potentially, challenged. In particular, it draws my interest because of its highly equivocal status: it was (and I think was unique in being so) simultaneously a vantage point, a kinaesthetic device, and an optical entertainment installed within mass society – the reception of which, I will argue, was informed by the optical toys and ‘hypervisual spectacles’ of the late nineteenth

20 Mark Dorrian century (Prodger 2003: 252). This chapter’s supposition is that this could historically give rise to more complex and ambiguous forms of visuality – and, by implication, a visual politics – than those normally associated with the aerial view. And while there is no doubt that early experiences of the Ferris wheel were shaped by, for example, dominant popular discourses on ascension, and could sometimes be resolved into them, it perhaps made other possibilities available too.

III Harry Lime’s speech at the top of the Prater wheel is rooted in a key ascensional narrative within Western modernity whereby the departure from the terrestrial surface is conceptually linked to notions of transcendent subjectivity, futurity, and abstraction that have the potential to license a violence directed towards the surface from which one has departed. This particular constellation is strikingly illustrated in a brief but loaded passage from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s (1942) description of his experiences as a war pilot: All I can see on the vertical are curios from another age, beneath clear, untrembling glass. I lean over crystal frames in a museum; I tower above a great sparkling pane, the great pane of my cockpit. Below are men – protozoa on a microscope slide . . . I am a scientist, and for me their war is a laboratory experiment. (Cited in Virilio 1989: 71) It is all here: the Promethean detachment from the ground; the consequent detachment from its historicity, so to look down is to look into the past; the dehumanization of those below and the emergence of a dispassionate, instrumental relationship towards them. Harry gives us one kind of view from above, but there is another – more auratic, more enchanted, and more characteristically associated with the idea of cityscape. Emerging from the pastoral tradition, but transforming in complex ways within modernity, it is grounded within the tradition of landscape representation – prospect painting – and appreciation. Its historical development intersects with mythologies of the city within modernism and is equally shaped by technical developments in ascensional devices (observation balloons, viewing towers, etc.). The sense of removal or distance from the city – of being in a separate world – becomes the condition of possibility within mass society for the transformation of the visual field of the city into a popular entertainment, a development foreshadowed with the emergence of 180° and 360° panoramic painting in the late eighteenth century. When he wrote of the ‘Haussmannization’ of Paris, Walter Benjamin (1997) commented that for the first time the citizens became aware of the city’s inhuman character. In the light of this, the development of techniques of estrangement from the quotidian reality of the city and its transformation into a distanced object of visual consumption assume a compensatory and ideologically recuperative effect as the violence of urbanism ‘on the ground’ – as it were – is sublimated into the

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 21 spectacle of the ‘urban landscape’. Certainly Nadar, who in 1858 took the first ever aerial photograph, recognized the entrancing effects of distantiation. Describing the transfigured landscape seen from a balloon in his memoir Quand j’étais photographe, he wrote: ‘Everything appears to us with the exquisite impression of a marvellous, ravishing cleanliness! No squalor or blots on the landscape. There is nothing like distance to remove us from all ugliness’ (Nadar 1900: 77–8, cited in Frizot). Notwithstanding Nadar’s opposition to Napoleon III and the Second Empire (Hambourg 1995), his imprecise but extraordinary aerial photographs – in their description of a relationship between city, landscape, and spectacle – powerfully contribute to this process. The historical trajectory of this visual modality leads in the last instance not to the abject, flattened world that Harry Lime looks down upon, but to the fascinating imagery of the commodity-spectacle. In 1889 the Paris International Exposition was held, the event that saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower, then the tallest structure in the world. The edifice was an engineering marvel, a stupendous observation pylon that rose from the heart of the city that was the acknowledged capital of aviation and the great dreamscape of the late nineteenth-century aerial imagination. The affinity between the tower and flight was evident from the start, and was consummated when Alberto SantosDumont rounded it in his dirigible in 1901 to win a 100,000 franc prize (Wohl 1994: 41). The enchantment of the view offered from the tower was clear: that of a city posed as a purely visual object, unified, cleansed of labour and social conflict, and utopic: a spectacle that dissimulated the conditions of its own constitution and that had the power to pose the city, as Barthes was to point out in his classic and affectionate essay on the tower, as a force of nature (Barthes 1997: 8).

IV The first Ferris wheel was developed for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 as an explicit competitor and counterpart to the Parisian tower, a kind of historical after-image of it (Kouwenhoven 1980: 171). The project for the establishment of a viewing device went through several iterations before the Pittsburgh bridge builder and steelman, the appropriately named George Ferris, proposed his wheel. The earlier suggestions had been towers: the first was a kind of enlarged and elaborated version of Eiffel’s. Others included a three-tower structure for bird’s-eye photographers. The last was a 400 ft high ziggurat served by an electric railway and described in the Rand McNally Handy Guide to Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition as the ‘Tower of Babel’ (Gilbert 1991: 107–8). The loaded epithet had much to do with the location of the proposed tower – and indeed the future Ferris wheel – and it is important to appreciate this, as it is crucial to the way the wheel was understood at the time. Recent scholarship on the Chicago fair has insisted on the importance of its local, as well as its international, context in the early 1890s. Chicago was a city hardly sixty years old and in some ways an unlikely location for the celebration of the quadri-centennial of Columbus’s landfall. But in fact it was precisely this newness that established its claim in the eyes of many

22 Mark Dorrian

Figure 2.2 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893: the Ferris wheel (courtesy of Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

to be the most characteristic American city: the most freed from history, and therefore future-orientated and universal. Certainly the fair was underpinned by the ideology and ethics of universalism and incorporation. But these were asserted on specific terms, and through a very particular vision of the city and its future: the famous White City, constructed under the directorship of the architect Daniel Burnham – ‘a pedagogy, a model, and a lesson not only of what the future might look like but, just as important, how it might be brought about’ (Trachtenberg 1994: 209). This was, the argument goes, intended to present a high-cultural and acommercial vision of the city palatable to the contemporary Chicagoan elites that was asserted in the face of the dynamism, diversity, and cultural confusion of the contemporary immigrant city. While the exhibition of manufactured products was one of the major functions of the fair, their commodity character was suppressed in the White City. In only one area did an explicitly commercial condition prevail,

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 23 the peripheral Midway Plaisance, described by Burnham in his notes on the exposition for visitors in the Rand McNally Handbook as ‘a most unusual collection of almost every type of architecture known to man – oriental villages, Chinese bazaars, tropical settlements, ice railways, the ponderous Ferris wheel, and reproductions of ancient cities. All these are combined to form the lighter and more fantastic side of the fair’ (cited in Trachtenberg 1994: 213). The Midway Plaisance developed as a sort of Wunderkammer hitched to the side of the fairgrounds. Its arrangement presented itself as an extraordinary commercial heterotopia of concessions against the utopic Beaux Arts uniformity of the White City. On the published plans, its divisions appear as diagrammatic lot lines – suggesting lettable areas – as opposed to the descriptive lines that outlined each structure in the highly composed sequence that comprised the White City itself. The Midway had been originally conceived as an anthropological Street of All Nations where a sequence of ‘living villages’ would be placed on display. Traces of this conception remain in Burnham’s description. It was placed under the direction of the Harvard anthropologist F.W. Puttnam, although it was perhaps Sol Bloom, a San Franciscan theatre impresario hired by Burnham to supervise the organization of the Midway exhibits, who was more responsible for the final result. There have been attempts to read the structure of the Midway in terms of a supposed sequence of racial development rising as one moved towards the White City – and

Figure 2.3 World’s Columbian Exposition: the Grand Basin and Court of Honor, White City (courtesy of Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

24 Mark Dorrian certainly some contemporary commentators saw in it a ‘sliding scale of humanity’ (Rydell 1984: 64–5) – but this was complicated by Bloom’s commercial acumen, his understanding of popular culture, and his appreciation of how to provoke and titillate his audience. In his hands the Midway developed as an avenue of simulacra where exotic and orientalist fantasies overlapped with theatrical presentations and ethnographic tableaux vivants. This was the world over which the Ferris wheel presided. The various tower proposals that had been put forward had been intended for the junction at which the Midway met the larger fairgrounds; but the site of the Ferris wheel became the midpoint of the Plaisance, where it sat surrounded by orientalist attractions such as the Moorish Palace and the Street in Cairo. Although at least one published plan of the Midway suggests, interestingly, that the wheel was orientated towards the city – that is, at right angles to the Midway itself (see Gilbert 1991: 112) – contemporary photographs show it aligned with the street as if the Plaisance was a mill race and the structure a prodigious waterwheel. To many it seemed distinctly American: on one hand an expansive and even vaguely cosmic emblem of unity – on 22 June 1893, the day after the Ferris wheel opened to the public, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran an article entitled ‘In an Endless Circle, the Ferris Wheel Commences its

Figure 2.4 World’s Columbian Exposition: the Temple of Luxor, Midway Plaisance (courtesy of Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 25

Figure 2.5 World’s Columbian Exposition: the Javanese Village, with the Ferris wheel in the background, Midway Plaisance (courtesy of Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

Journey through Space’; and on the other, an expression of the progressive machinic force of industry, at night a ‘rainbow of revolving light’, wrote Hubert Howe Bancroft, ‘like the bow of scientific promise set athwart the blackness of the night’ (Bancroft 1893: 869). Compared with this the inert stump of Eiffel’s tower was nothing but a historical souvenir, a ‘thing dead and lifeless’ (Graves 1893) in the words of an essayist for The Alleghenian. A 1:50 model of the tower was placed in a concession alongside the wheel. As John A. Kouwenhoven (1980) has pointed out, viewed from the ground the wheel had a visual dynamism, its form shifting as one moved around it, in a way the tower did not. Viewed end-on along the Midway, it displayed the strikingly abstract profile of an impossibly thin, linear skyscraper. As one moved around, the form of the wheel gradually opened out into an expanding ellipse and it developed an ocular quality, which was in turn emphasized in popular stereographic images (see Anderson 1992: 83). This, together with its animation, conferred a certain anthropomorphism: Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, called it a ‘Brobdingnag’ (cited in Larson 2004: 290). Ferris himself, emphasizing its great size, had described it as a ‘monster’ (Snyder 1893: 270), and, as with all monsters, it provoked anxieties of loss of control. In the popular literature related to the fair, this is most bizarrely expressed in the paranoiac episode on the wheel in Tudor

26 Mark Dorrian

Figure 2.6 World’s Columbian Exposition: the Street in Cairo, Midway Plaisance (courtesy of Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

Jenks’s The Century World’s Fair Book for Boys and Girls in which two Arabs, unable to extort money from the protagonists, superhumanly pull the towers supporting the axle apart, thus releasing the wheel, which runs amok down the Midway (Jenks 1893: 239–41).

V What was it, then, to look from this device? Some answers can be sketched. First, to some it undoubtedly provided a progressivist vision. James Gilbert (1991) has pointed out the importance of the Chicago tourist guidebooks produced in the years leading up to and during the fair in developing a genre of city literature that shaped responses to and interpretations of the city. Important to this genre was an interplay between vignettes of life seen on the ground and the synoptic overview of the city allowed from the tops of Chicago’s burgeoning high-rise buildings, the tallest of which was Burnham and Root’s Masonic Temple. The overview played precisely the role of the prospect – a looking forward that was geographic, temporal, and visionary. Thus Carroll Ryan, writing in his 1893 Chicago the Magnificent:

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 27

Figure 2.7 World’s Columbian Exposition, looking east along the Midway: the captive balloon and the Ferris wheel (courtesy of Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

Looking down on Chicago from the dizzy summit of the Masonic Temple, strange thoughts must fill the mind of him who has travelled far, who has seen the ruins of empires, empires in decay, and the new empire of the west rising with a civilization greater, more intense, more free, more universal than all that preceded it. (Ryan 1893: 43) The homology between Chicago’s contemporary high-rise buildings and the wheel – as ‘a skyscraper that moved . . . from the basement to the penthouse and back again’ (Miller 1990: 239) – has been emphasized and contrasted to the Paris tower, which dwarfed its surroundings: perhaps not coincidentally the height of the Ferris wheel at the top of its apex equalled the highest occupied floor in Burnham and Root’s building (Larson 2004: 290). This interplay of vignette and synopticism developed in surprising ways. When Frederic Puttnam rode the Ferris wheel he described the experience in his ethnographic guide to the Midway, Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types, an experience clearly akin to the auratic and enchanting visual modality that we have already discussed. From the Ferris wheel the anthropologist could see the Midway as a ‘magic gathering’, the wheel ‘enabling us to view this

28 Mark Dorrian

Figure 2.8 A comparison of building heights. From left to right: the Masonic Temple, Chicago; Trinity Church, New York; the Statue of Liberty, New York; the Capitol, Washington, DC; and the Ferris wheel (courtesy of Scientific American)

mimic world as from another planet, and to look upon an enchanted land filled with happy folk’ (Puttnam 1894: 2). Again this is an image both neutralizing and consoling, one that pictures a world from which social contradiction and conflict have vanished and which forms a counterpart to the experience of ‘dazzlement’ that some visitors, such as Owen Wister, described on visiting the White City itself: ‘a bewilderment at the gloriousness of everything seized me’, he wrote, ‘until my mind was dazzled to a standstill’ (cited in Trachtenberg 1994: 218). Puttman’s vision from the wheel was also potentially a strongly incorporating vision of diversity as a prelude to unity. In June 1893 a reporter from the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette rode the wheel on its inaugural rotation: his description carefully sequences ‘this great picture . . . disclosed to men’ by the ‘marvellous mechanism’: It was an impressive, almost weird scene, a memorable experience, this looking down for the first time on this wondrous street teeming with thousands swept by the breath of the effort of the ages into this narrow lane and there living and moving in careless gayety. . . . To the east was the wonderful city of glistening palaces . . . like the dreams of the biblical prophets who saw in their reveries the nations of the earth come together in mighty concourse and to whom the glories of heaven were revealed. (Anonymous 1893) There are other accounts, however, that suggest alternative visual modes provoked by the mechanism – less official and more elusive, complex, transient, and imbricated. Earlier in this chapter I suggested a reading of the wheel as a kind of

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 29 hybrid cultural phenomenon that displayed a threefold character of vantage point, kinaesthetic device, and optical entertainment. This hybridity made the wheel interpretable both in official, high-cultural terms (the elevated observation point, and the vistas it permitted) and in commercial, low-cultural terms (the carnivalesque fairground ride). Moreover it made these interpretations – or at least the experiences upon which they drew, and which they at least in part defined – spatially proximate, if not necessarily simultaneous. The terminologies applied to the wheel, and descriptions of it, register this ambivalence. Officially called an ‘observation wheel’, but popularly a vertical ‘merry-go-round’, it was not by chance that Ferris himself insisted on the former, thereby positioning his construction both within the lineage of its Parisian predecessor and within an officially sanctioned and elite, although now popularized, visual modality. Two of the three aspects of the wheel I suggested are clear enough: but what of the third? My argument here, admittedly conjectural, is that the experience of riding upon the wheel was shaped in important ways by the development and proliferation of public and domestic optical entertainments and toys during the nineteenth century, and that they are discernible in descriptions of the visual effects induced by the wheel. Certainly some contemporary reports suggest that the view from the wheel could be a kind of proto-cinematic spectacle. When William Gronlau – Ferris’s partner and the engineer responsible for much of the wheel’s structural design – first stepped upon it, it seemed ‘as if everything was dropping away from us, and the car was still. Standing at the side of the car and looking into the network of iron rods multiplied the peculiar sensation mentioned’ (cited in Anderson 1992: 62; my italics). The sense of being stationary while the city and fair ‘fell away’ implies an experience comparable in some regards to that of the earlier diorama, an entertainment that was based, as Jonathan Crary writes, ‘on the incorporation of an immobile observer into a mechanical apparatus and a subjection to a pre-designed temporal unfolding of optical experience’ (Crary 1996: 113). In Daguerre’s diorama, which had opened in Paris in 1822, the spectators were seated upon a central rotating platform that shifted by turns to address painted screens whose scenes were ‘animated’ using various lighting techniques. The two scenes that were displayed in the first diorama were ‘The Interior of Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral’ and ‘The Valley of Sarnen’. A visitor described it thus: While gazing in rapt admiration at the architectural beauties of the cathedral, the spectator’s attention was disturbed by sounds underground [presumably the mechanical apparatus]. He became conscious that the scene before him was slowly moving away, and he obtained a glimpse of another and very different prospect, which gradually advanced, until it was completely developed, and the cathedral had disappeared. What he saw now was a valley, surrounded by high mountains capped with snow. (Cited in Gernsheim and Gernsheim 1956: 14–15) Not only does Gronlau’s description of his impression of the city shifting in relation to a static viewing point reiterate the visual sensation of the diorama, but there is a curious resonance between the way in which Daguerre sequenced the two scenes

30 Mark Dorrian – with their shift from proximity to distance, from interior (however sublime) to Alpine landscape, the lateral shift of the diorama’s seating mechanism gaining, by implication, an elevational value – and the Ferris wheel. Compare it, for example, with another description of the wheel: ‘It seems as if the earth were sinking away out of sight slowly and quickly. Going up, the passengers had the whole of Chicago and the prairies for miles beyond them unobscured’ (Currey 1912: 85). In his – by now classic – Techniques of the Observer, Crary locates the diorama within a constellation of nineteenth-century toys and entertainments that bear evidence of a contemporary reconceptualization and reconstruction of the viewing subject, a ‘modernization of the observer’ as he puts it (Crary 1996: 113). His account situates the development of optical toys such as the phenakistiscope and the zootrope within a historical physiology of vision whose research into afterimages had prompted speculation about the persistence of vision when separated from the phenomenal immediacy of its objects. This discourse on the retinal afterimage, Crary argues, was the crucial context for the optical devices and toys that developed from the 1820s on (whose animation effects were dependent upon the persistence of vision), some of which were directly prompted by new experiences induced by mechanical movement (train wheels seen through railings, cogs in factory machinery, etc.). Pointing out the immobility of the body presupposed by these devices, the eye being aligned and spatially fixed in relation to a moving mechanical assemblage, Crary insists on their disciplinary character whereby the body is submitted to the machine and incorporated and regulated as a component within it (Crary 1996: 112). In this, however, the experience of the Ferris wheel diverges from that of the diorama: for while it submitted the body to the circular mechanical movement of the wheel (and its strange pleasures), at the same time it did, within the confines of the carriage, allow something of (and even something more than) the ambulatory and visual movement and autonomy that Crary associates specifically with the panorama form, in opposition to the diorama. In the end what is perhaps most striking in the descriptions, and what deserves emphasis, is the powerful bivalence in the views offered from the wheel. On one side – looking through the moving structure of the mechanism – was the unsettling vision of space shredded and set into motion around the carriage that so disconcerted Gronlau. But on the other, a more serene, transcendent, and tranquil vista opened up and all sense of motion was cancelled. Joining Gronlau again on the inaugural rotation: I advised any timid person riding in the wheel to look straight ahead and not into the wheel, when no sensation is at all experienced and the view is simply magnificent . . . I could do nothing but admire the great spectacle. Looking [east] one can see the beautiful buildings, grounds and lake. As I said before it was a fine day, with a brightly shining sun, which threw its golden rays upon the water and the harbour and presented a more magnificent sight than my mind had ever pictured. The harbour was dotted with vessels of every description, which appeared mere specks from our exalted position, and the reflected rays of the beautiful sunset cast a gleam upon the surrounding scenery,

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 31

Figure 2.9 World’s Columbian Exposition: the view towards the White City, through the Ferris wheel structure (courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society)

making a picture lovely to behold. Looking [north] one can see the city of Chicago with its many tall and grand buildings. The sight is so inspiring that all conversation stopped, and all were lost in admiration of this grand sight. The equal of it I have never seen . . . (Cited in Anderson 1992: 62) The descriptions suggest that within the carriages passengers were interposed between two incommensurable visual fields, the tension between which seems to have replicated something of that between the Midway and the White City itself: on one side the Midway, ‘always changin’ like one o’ those kaleidoscopes’, and on the other the ‘great beautiful silence of the White City’ (Burnham 1893: 201), as a character in Clara Louise Burnham’s novel Sweet Clover described them. Perhaps this tension was too much for some. In a news article from 1893 entitled ‘Madman in Mid-air; Kentuckian becomes Crazed in the Ferris Wheel’, there was a report of a passenger who lost control in one of the Ferris wheel cars, smashing into its sides with such force as to bend the iron bars that lined them. As the wheel completed its first revolution he became calmer and ‘breaking down completely, laughed and sobbed convulsively’ (cited in Anderson 1992: 66). Unfortunately for him, however, the wheel went through two rotations per trip, and as it rose again he tore loose

32 Mark Dorrian

Figure 2.10 World’s Columbian Exposition: the view towards the White City, from the Ferris wheel (courtesy of Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

from the men who were holding him down, before a woman in the carriage undid her skirt and flung it over his head, after which he became docile. Is this a simple case of ‘fear of heights’ as reported in the article, or is it something more akin to the late nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois hysteria’, as discussed by Peter Stallybrass and Alon White (1986) in their Politics and Poetics of Transgression, so closely linked to vision and triggered by the tension between desire and its interdiction? The reading of the Chicago wheel in terms of popular visual entertainments would have been encouraged by the specific context within which visitors encountered it. To the east and west of the wheel, among the other concessions and diversions on the Midway Plaisance, two panoramas were exhibited: one showed the Volcano of Kilauea, another a view of the Bernese Alps. The contemporary Rand McNally Miniature Guide Map to the exposition (reproduced in Appelbaum 1980: 102) also indicates a ‘Diorama of the Destruction of Pompeii’ close to the footings of the wheel. (Was the tableau of a city being destroyed by flame and submerged in ash redolent of Chicago’s own devastating, although subsequently highly allegorized, Great Fire of 1871 (Gilbert 1991: 63–5)?) This may have replaced, on the same site, the small Zoopraxographical Hall where the photographer Eadweard Muybridge had, on the invitation of the fair’s Fine Arts Commission, projected short action sequences based on his animal locomotion

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 33

Figure 2.11 World’s Columbian Exposition: the panorama of the Volcano of Kilauea (courtesy of Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago)

studies using his zoopraxiscope, a phenakistiscope–magic lantern amalgam (Solnit 2003: 233).

VI An afterword. The mythical origin of the wheel was at a chop dinner. According to Ferris, the idea came to him while dining with other engineers during a Saturday afternoon at a chop house, that most characteristic and emblematic of Chicagoan institutions. Ferris ‘got some paper’ and began to sketch, and before the meal was over had designed the wheel in ‘almost the entire detail’ (cited in Anderson 1992: 43). ‘The wheel stands in the Plaisance at this moment,’ he told a reporter, ‘as it stood before me then’ (cited in Anderson 1992: 43). Ferris’s story conforms to a familiar type – that of the genius who gives birth to his creation fully formed – and its likelihood has been discussed. But what I find most interesting and suggestive in the myth is its context of the mundane chop house and the way its narrative thus binds the final stages of the ‘disassembly’ of the pig to the birth of the wheel, in a kind of profane, Joycean reworking of the tale of the aerial Pegasus springing from an act of slaughter. Slaughter, butchery, and meat packing were central to the

34 Mark Dorrian Chicagoan economy of the later nineteenth century and they hung in the air, a nauseous reminder of the material basis upon which elite culture was being built. It may have been repulsive but, as one banker remarked, one soon realised it was the smell of dollars (in Flanagan 2002: 1). Chicago was the ‘porkopolis’ of America, of the world, having overtaken its rival Cincinnati in the 1860s after the Civil War. The industry was centred on the immense Union Stock Yards (which, by the early 1870s, were processing well over one million hogs each year (Cronon 1991: 230)), themselves a widely visited and troublingly fascinating urban spectacle that, in retrospect, look like a kind of obscene and sanguineous precursor to the ethereal and purged White City. As Louis Sullivan, architect of the fair’s Transportation Building, noted: ‘all distinguished strangers, upon arrival in the city, at once were taken to the Stock Yards . . . to view with salutary wonder the prodigious goings on’ (Sullivan 1956: 307–8). Characteristically, visitors to Chicago were asked first how they liked the city, and then, had they seen the stockyards? In 1948 the architectural historian and critic Siegfried Giedion published Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. In the ‘Foreword’ Giedion announced this study of ‘anonymous history’ as a development and extension of his book Space, Time and Architecture – that most canonical of histories of architectural modernism – which had been published seven years earlier. Whereas the first book had ‘attempted to show the split that exists in our period between thought and feeling’, the present volume – by studying the processes of mechanization – would ‘show how this break came about’ (Giedion 1948: v). In Space, Time and Architecture the Chicago fair had been briefly mentioned once, and only then to be summarily dismissed as the regressive counterpart of the 1889 Paris Exposition and a marker of the moment that the tradition of great exhibitions went into decline. Whereas Giedion epitomized the achievements of the Paris Exposition by Eiffel’s tower and the Galerie des Machines, Ferris’s wheel went unmentioned (Giedion 1944: 209–10). In Mechanization Takes Command, however, Chicago occupies what is very much the centrepiece of the book. Under the heading ‘Mechanization and death: meat’, Giedion develops an examination of the Union Stock Yards that both acts as a structural opposition to his reflections on revivification, water, and bathing at the end of the book and introduces a concern whose treatment is strikingly oblique and evasive for a study of this kind, researched during the war years. (There is no consideration at all, for example, of the rise of industrialized warfare.) Giedion’s comments on the Chicago stockyards are framed through a comparison with the huge abattoir of La Villette in Paris, which was developed under Haussmann at about the same time as the Chicago yards. At La Villette, cattle were slaughtered in individual booths in a ‘survival of handicraft practices’ (Giedion 1948: 211); but in Chicago, slaughtering at an unprecedented rate was achieved through a staged and increasingly mechanized ‘disassembly line’ process into which the live pig was input at one end and from which it was output as a variety of animal products (meat, lard, bristles, etc.) in a hitherto unprecedented rationalization of production that eventually attained, as one critic has written, ‘a level of “geometric” perfection’ (D’Eramo 2002: 32). Not only did the modern mechanical assembly line

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 35

Figure 2.12 Apparatus for catching and suspending hogs, 1882: from Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (courtesy of Oxford University Press)

synonymous with Fordist production develop out of a spatial organization of labour and mechanisms dedicated to the disassembly or breaking down of material – with its rails and endless chains upon which the pigs were conveyed during the stages of their dismemberment – but, Giedion argues, its development was, furthermore, ‘implicitly related’ to the vast spatial expanses of the Great Plains whose livestock was funnelled into Chicago (Giedion 1948: 211).

36 Mark Dorrian On page 217 of Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion published what he called a panoramic painting illustrating the hog slaughtering and packing line at Cincinnati, Chicago’s forerunner. Looking at it, one is immediately struck by the fact that it is not so much a panorama – at least as conventionally understood, as it has none of the implied circularity of visual field – as a stadial description of an inherently linear process. In the essential seriality of the disassembly line, the painted vignettes that illustrate the various procedural stages – each one separated by a spatial interval from the others – are reminiscent of the sequential images arrayed around the wheel of the phenakistiscope. But they are even more similar to Eadweard Muybridge’s serial and linear photographic studies of animal motion, which were taken by cameras set at intervals and triggered in turn in something like an image production line. These were the images of course that Muybridge animated using the zoopraxiscope and of which he tried – it seems rather unsuccessfully – to sell engravings, mounted on phenakistiscopic discs, in his hall at the base of the Ferris wheel (Haas 1976: 176). Whereas Muybridge’s process decomposed the continuum of movement by sequentially freezing the transient body, thus capturing its temporal development in space, its counterpart in the stockyards beyond the fairgrounds – the disassembly line – worked upon the material of the body itself, effecting its staged, temporal dismemberment through an analogous stadial and spatial distribution of transformations.

Figure 2.13 Cincinnati: slaughtering and packing hogs, panoramic painting, 1882: from Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (courtesy of Oxford University Press)

Cityscape with Ferris wheel 37

Figure 2.14 Eadweard Muybridge, ‘“Daisy” galloping, saddled’ (courtesy of Dover Publications)

The chops that lay on Ferris’s plate as he sketched his design may at first glance seem unlikely emblems of modernity. But in fact they, and the processes they signify, have greater resonance and kinship with the wheel than the more synthetic, ‘constructive’ industrial analogies that are usually made in relation to it (the tower, the bridge, etc.); and not least because of the wheel’s own dismembering and unhinging optical powers.

3 Seeing only corpses Vision and/of urban disaster in apocalyptic cinema Barry Langford

At the climax of Deep Impact, directed in 1998 by Mimi Leder for Dreamworks SKG, an asteroid fragment strikes the Earth off the eastern seaboard of the United States with devastating consequences. The ensuing special effects sequence finally rewards the audience (who have waited patiently through two hours of tedious domestic melodrama) with the spectacular mass destruction promised by poster and publicity, like Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) and Volcano (Mick Jackson, 1997), updating urban catastrophe, a staple of blockbuster cinema since such epics of the pre-World War I silent cinema as Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1912) and Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1913), for the CGI era. As ever, the end of the world is imaginable only through the spectacle of the destruction of great cities – here New York (strictly speaking, its universally metonym borough Manhattan) whose towers are toppled and whose street plan is obliterated by the towering tsunami generated by the asteroid’s impact. A brisk montage of panoramic longshot or ground-level medium shots depicts downtown’s destruction, its intended representative quality underscored by the absence from the sequence of any named or even individualized characters from the main narrative. One especially striking shot in this sequence gives the spectator a Greenwich Villager’s-eye view of the tidal wave racing up through the streets of lower Manhattan: it is centred visually on an elderly gentleman perched calmly facing the camera (i.e. uptown) reading the New York Times on the lip of the fountain in Washington Square, who as the tsunami races up behind him seems not simply oblivious but indifferent to its surely deafening roar. An instant before the torrent whisks him to watery perdition he merely glances up, not even in consternation but as it may seem in mild enquiry. In narrative terms, that the cataclysm seems to take him and his fellow Villagers by surprise as they go about their daily business makes absolutely no sense – unlike the impacts with which 1998’s other asteroid collision blockbuster, Armageddon, opens, the calamity in Deep Impact has been globally anticipated for the duration of the film’s action (see King 2000; Langford 2005). These Manhattanites’ sublime indifference to the broadcast certainty of their own imminent extinction and their lapidary insistence on pursuing their habitual daily rounds in the midst of what the US government in the film codenames ‘ELLIE’ (for Extinction Level Event) surely tells us something not just about New Yorkers

Seeing only corpses 39 but about city dwellers in general, as well as about the forces that would annihilate them, in deed or in thought. In a sense, the spectator of an urban disaster film is always allied – both formally (through the balance of suture and distanciation) and affectively (by the desire to consume spectacular visual effects) – with the forces of the city’s destruction. This chapter will explore this relationship between a particular way of seeing the city, what I will be calling ‘dominative specularity’,1 and the imagination of urban disaster. The chapter is structured as a set of encounters, primarily between urban theory and urban representation in films, which illuminate the images of the city they variously propose. The chapter is by design less a ‘reading’ or interpretation either of its principal point of theoretical reference, Michel de Certeau’s celebrated essay ‘Walking in the City’, or of the films analysed herein than a kind of hailing or chance encounter from one to the other, a relationship that seems appropriate to a discussion centred on the possibilities that pulse through the streets of great cities. In ‘Walking in the City’, first published in English in 1984 in The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau posits a mode of urban transit whose meanings consist neither in its teleological drive – its intended destination at origin – nor in its retrospective mapping as narrative – a process which, as de Certeau makes clear, entails an inevitable flattening out and elision of actual spatial practices into prescriptive norms – but in the act of movement. It is what Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick (1999) call the ‘transversal’ logic of this movement that I have in turn adopted for this chapter.

I By what is perhaps merely a suggestive coincidence, but may indeed be more than that, the juxtaposition of city and sea so catastrophically literalized in Deep Impact suggests itself also to de Certeau as he gazes down on lower Manhattan from 110 floors up at the start of ‘Walking in the City’: The urban island, a sea upon the sea, rises upon the crested swell of Wall Street, falls into the trough of Greenwich Village, flows into the renewed crests of midtown and the calm of Central Park, before breaking into distant whitecaps up beyond Harlem. (de Certeau 1984: 91) In translation, of course, we are offered here a homonymic play unavailable in the French between sea and see, between the sea that is seen and the scene that the urban sea proffers the seer. And as we shall see, the kind of sea de Certeau sees is itself a function of a specific kind of seeing. For the image of Manhattan de Certeau gives us is of a frozen sea, its tidal flows, its currents and its ceaselessly changing surfaces magically stalled: ‘For a moment, the eye arrests the turbulence of this sea-swell of verticals; the vast mass freezes under our gaze’ (de Certeau 1984: 92). Thus this act of seeing releases the urban sea from its condition of mutability and seals it into form – specifically, textual form: ‘freezes its opaque mobility into a crystal-clear text’ (de Certeau 1984: 92).

40 Barry Langford This then is de Certeau’s metaphor for the urban gestalt he receives from his privileged vantage, a totalizing image of the metropolitan body whose unity and legibility, he goes on to argue, belie the complex capillary networks and innumerably multifarious interactions at street level. It is only the spectator’s selfdistancing from the traffic’s roar and the body’s actual location in the city streets that makes it possible to think of the city as one vast, static panoramic text: the city is legible precisely and solely at the cost of its abstraction from the complex but vital ‘interlacings’ of everyday interaction. Like many others, de Certeau sees the spectacle of the city made available through such twentieth-century technologies as the steel-framed skyscraper and the aerial photograph as the realization of representational aspirations visible in the imaginary (that is, imagined) perspectives of medieval and Renaissance city views: ‘The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements’ (de Certeau 1984: 93). And what has made ‘Walking in the City’ a virtually programmatic text for urban postmodernism is the scepticism or even outright hostility de Certeau expresses to the totalizing enterprise that allegedly characterizes forms of Western urbanism from the early modern period through to classical modernity. (I say allegedly because, as Giuliana Bruno (2002) shows in her analysis of late Renaissance city perspectives, the monolithic qualities retrospectively attributed to the modern urban vision are qualified if not belied by demonstrable practices of fragmentation and disunity.) In this sense, ‘the same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted’ (de Certeau 1984: 95). This suspicion is motivated by a sense of the derealization that appears inevitably to be entailed in the project of seeing the city this way. Laid out before the spectator atop the skyscraper as a frozen urban sea, the city appears not only unified and contained but eerily silent and depopulated. Upon closer inspection, in fact, it appears as if one of the catastrophic visitations that beset the city in disaster films has indeed come to pass, and we are viewing its aftermath. That the city seen as a whole also appears petrified and deadened is no accident. For, as de Certeau goes on to argue, any such perception of the urban whole is necessarily predicated upon purging the city of what he calls ‘the obscure interlacings of everyday behaviour’ (de Certeau 1984: 99) – its multiple random encounters, its haptic shocks, its raucous sounds, its jostling crowds, its chaotic traffic. It is not that the realization of the urban panoramic vista reveals the city as if caught in a fossil record; rather, it is the intention to view the city in this way – to render it as summary and as spectacle – that freezes its lifeblood and stills its circulation. ‘The seeing god created by this fiction,’ de Certeau writes, must ‘make himself a stranger’ to everyday life. He ‘knows only corpses’ (de Certeau 1984: 96). But who would want to be such a god? Who could use such a city, stripped of all that makes a living city alive, and for what? According to de Certeau it is the modern technocratic visionary, paradigmatically perhaps the urban planner, whose project depends centrally on disciplining the unruly urban object into an abstract form, a suitable case for treatment, what de Certeau calls a ‘concept-city’, and as a result is heavily invested in an idealized representation of urban forms. This in turn relies upon the hygienic purging of urban space of the complexly multiplying

Seeing only corpses 41 and ephemeral practices through which that space is in fact shaped in urban experience. In a particularly resonant construction, de Certeau refers to ‘the “geometric” or “geographic” space of visual, panoptic or theoretical constructions’ (de Certeau 1984: 96) and identifies his own project with the processes overlooked or excluded by such ‘geometric’ imaginings. Developing a distinction first drawn by Merleau-Ponty, as Conley (2001) points out, de Certeau identifies an increasingly beleaguered, localized ‘anthropological’ quotidian space of poetry, legend, and memory under constant and growing pressure from the larger forces exerted across and through a geometrical space of grids and networks. ‘The city-panorama,’ he says, ‘is a “theoretical” (i.e. visual) simulacrum: in short, a picture, of which the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and misunderstanding of processes’ (de Certeau 1984: 99). The avatars of those ‘processes’ (a privileged term in de Certeau’s lexicon) are ‘the walkers, Wandersmänner’ (de Certeau 1984: 100), close relatives it would seem of the flâneur, whose purposeless appropriations and distortions of urban space belie the design that those spaces were planned to materialize. The bulk of ‘Walking in the City’ is devoted to a consideration – some have argued, a romantic and insufficiently critical celebration (Morris 1998) – of these ‘many-sided, resilient, cunning and stubborn’ ‘microbial processes’ that resist ‘the purview of the panoptic power’ (de Certeau 1984: 100) not by evading or exiting its structures but, in Foucauldian mode, by producing out of the blindnesses of its strategic overtures genuinely visionary recalibrations of urban space. To those who would see the city as concept, however, they appear as at best noise, at worst visual and experiential pollution, interfering with the project of rendering the body of the city visible and transparent. As is immediately apparent, and as de Certeau makes clear, the vision that freezes and fixes urban flows and currents aims at a perfectibility that is not only impossible but undesirable – indeed, profoundly inhuman. This dehumanization finds expression in the ‘imagination of disaster’ (Sontag 1966) that haunts the concept-city. Not only does the image of the frozen urban sea aspire to a fixity that the living city can never achieve, it intimates what that fixity would really amount to, in disavowed form as it were, through its own suppressed vision of urban catastrophe – the city overwhelmed by ice and/or by water (both fates to which New York has been condemned in such environmental disaster films as AI (Steven Spielberg, 2001: rising seas due to global warming), and The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004: tidal wave followed by new Ice Age). The city perfected, like the fully enlightened world upon which Adorno and Horkheimer gaze with such appalled fascination in the opening lines of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘radiates disaster triumphant’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 17). For the city’s refusal to cohere to the planner’s perspective in turn prompts the planner’s rejection of this resistantly disorganized and disorganizing city as a failed experiment, an instance of catastrophic systemic failure. De Certeau notes how in the construction of the concept-city, ‘management combines with elimination’ (de Certeau 1984: 103). Whatever does not cohere with or conform to the disciplinary construction of urban space is subjected to a ruthless process of extirpation as garbage, wreckage, urban blight. In Kristevan terms, the abjection of such elements,

42 Barry Langford and indeed the very construction of this realm of the abject as the other of the clean and proper urban body (see Kristeva 1982), is fundamental to the project of this kind of dominative specularity. Once, however, the clean and proper urban body is itself revealed as a fiction, then it is the city as a whole (that is, a whole that refuses to wholly incorporate itself ) that is abjected. In Susan Buck-Morss’s (2000) inspired couplet, having failed to realize itself as dreamworld, the city is re-dreamed as catastrophe. The radiant city becomes the carceral, cancerous, condemned city of not only so many specifically dystopian fictions from Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) on, but of the broader discourses of urban panic that proliferate through media and expert opinion. Yet this rendition of the lived city as catastrophe actually inverts the un- and anti-systematic life of the city that alone deflects the catastrophe that would befall the city if it became wholly subjected to the disciplines of geometric utopianism. De Certeau opposes to dominative specularity the non-programmatic, utterly unsystematic, unintended ‘utterances’ of urban flow that cannot be assigned a singular place or meaning. Pre-eminently it is the act of walking that for de Certeau exemplifies this processual, as distinct from conceptual, aspect of urban life: de Certeau points out that the action of walking through city streets conforms neither to the city-concept’s efforts to anticipate and direct the flow of movement (through maps, signage, directional indicators) nor to the retrospective project of charting a particular passage. Paradoxically, such unplanned and unrecorded movements are really what construct ‘our’ sense of the city, as a vast and inherently provisional series of spatial and interpersonal relations. Yet in understanding this we also understand that ‘the city’ itself – as a singular, or even a multiple yet somehow still systematic, whole – has disappeared from view, engulfed within a profusion of practices that are irreducible to textual semblance. The city, then, is to be retrieved by the very same, almost carnivalesque excess that constitutes the catastrophic city of the totalizing imagination. One of de Certeau’s illustrations of the ways in which the endless play of urban gesture and movement ‘cannot be fixed by a picture, nor can the meaning of their movements be confined to a text’ is: transit images, the yellow-green and electric-blue calligraphy that silently screams as it striates the city’s underground – ‘embroideries’ of letters and numbers, the perfect gestures of spray-painted acts of violence, handwritten Sivas, dancing graphics whose fleeting apparitions are accompanied by the roaring of subway trains: New York’s graffiti. (de Certeau 1984: 106) That graffiti is literally text yet encapsulates the impossibility of an adequate textualization of the city is an irony on which de Certeau doesn’t dwell. It is worth noting, however, that this same rhapsodic apparition of graffiti was, and at precisely the time de Certeau was writing, the generalized metonymic token and symptom of catastrophic urban failure and threat, used as a visual shorthand in such contemporaneous depictions of the urban wasteland as The Warriors (Walter Hill, 1979),

Seeing only corpses 43 Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980), and Fort Apache, the Bronx (Sidney J. Furie, 1981). Reading through de Certeau, then, we can approach a different formulation of catastrophe. It is not the official symbols of decay and catastrophe, but rather their elimination, that would truly betoken urban disaster.

II It is by opening de Certeau’s thesis to what one might call urban practice that we can further explore the specifically political dimensions of his essay. As clear as the politics of de Certeau’s critique of what he calls the ‘functional totalitarianism’ of the conceptual- or image-city may appear, it remains implicit. De Certeau nowhere addresses himself explicitly to political circumstances, or even to ‘power’, that rather amorphous and agency-free force that circulates through the theories of de Certeau’s peer and touchstone in this essay and elsewhere, Michel Foucault (most obviously the Foucault of Discipline and Punish). What there is in de Certeau that really seems to demand a degree of political actualization is a manifest concern that the capacity of what he punningly calls ‘local authorities’ – the traces and relics of other uses, processes, and transactions that haunt the cleansed spaces of the conceptcity: these include preferred or avoided routes and short cuts, polysemic rereadings and creative misprisions of place names, and so on – may be suffering erosion and even extinction. ‘The habitable city is being wiped out’ (de Certeau 1984: 107), he laments even as he demurs at specifying just what is wiping it out. Here though we need to historicize de Certeau’s own spatial history – and recognize that the particular forms of dominative specularity that provoke in him such anxiety have themselves mutated into less univocal and perhaps more porous practices. Certainly one should never underestimate the omnivorous drive of the ‘eye of Power’; and in the face of the profusion of contemporary technologies and forms of surveillance, and the ideologies that drive them, it would be foolish to do so. None the less, contemporary techniques of surveillance paradoxically confess their blindness through their very ubiquity. Commenting on cityspace and surveillance, Edward Soja (2004) noted the current ubiquity of CCTV (and the United Kingdom’s dubious privilege as the most photographed country in the world). But the security camera’s gaze, despite being everywhere – in fact because it is everywhere and not somewhere – is not panoptic. Security footage endlessly multiplies images of urban space into a multiperspectival supertext far beyond the capacity of even the most notional or theoretically constructed spectator to supervise, unify, or ‘apply’: and as high-profile criminal investigations always seem to prove, the definitive moment (that records the crime and identifies the culprit beyond reasonable doubt) somehow always seems to happen in an ‘elsewhere’ beyond the frame or when the camera has turned its gaze in the other direction. If, in keeping with certain strains in postmodern theory, we unproblematically ally whatever resists shaping, system, and unity with the progressive resistance to power, this would suggest that de Certeau’s fears have proved happily unrealized. Yet (as ever) the privileging of the multiple over the singular, micro- over macro-, leaves unresolved the question of how and under what conditions such

44 Barry Langford dispersed energies and forces can achieve sufficient collective force not merely to resist through inertia but actively to challenge the certainly active and aggressively undispersed project of power. This brings us up against the latent utopianism in de Certeau that he is reluctant to name as such – quite consistently, given his typically postmodern anxiety around the implicitly totalitarian prospects of utopian projects in general. In fact, de Certeau identifies the ‘atopia’ to which the technocratic vision of dominative specularity would reduce ‘urban life’ to the kind of ‘utopia’ that demands a tabula rasa or Year Zero/Stunde Null as the precondition of its systems building. If, however, one were to give that suppressed utopian dimension a name, it would be simply ‘play’. De Certeau concludes ‘Walking in the City’ rather unexpectedly by folding the walker’s creative spatial transversals to the ‘Fort/Da’ game Freud so famously described in his infant grandson – the game that so precisely rehearses the dialectical play of system and jubilant self-expression, of necessity (separation from the mother) and choice (the infant’s restaging of that separation on something like its own terms). Bearing in mind too the importance to de Certeau’s life and his theory of the events of May 1968 in Paris – the insurrection that above all prioritized play, rather than system or dogma, in and as politics – we can see why it makes sense to frame walking as play and to ascribe to that play at least the potential for political articulation. De Certeau’s arguments about city life are well illustrated in Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime – also, incidentally, a film in which many viewers have detected echoes and elaborations of Situationist theory (Heathcote 2000; Marie 2001). In Playtime Tati’s M. Hulot – already defined as a spirit of ludic freedom amidst the constraints of bourgeois pretension and conformity and technological modernity in Tati’s previous film Mon oncle (1958) – walks, or more accurately, repeatedly tries to walk, and is frustrated in or prevented from the attempt, in an almost unrecognisable ultra-modern Paris where the curtain-walled steel-and-glass bastard offspring of the International style have all but obliterated the Paris of Sacré-Coeur and Montmartre. Although Tati’s perspective is oriented more horizontally than laterally – that is, Hulot never ascends to the kind of bird’s-eye position de Certeau occupies at the start of ‘Walking in the City’ – the motif of a deceptive transparency unites them. The Paris of Playtime is a hymn to transparency, vast vitrines everywhere replacing walls; yet at the same time the urban spectacle presented by this festival of visibility erects not bridges but barriers to intersubjective experiences and transactions. Characters spend a good deal of the film mouthing helplessly at each other through soundproof windows, or walking smack into unsuspected panes of glass as they make to shake hands with someone on the other side. Tati’s/Hulot’s Paris is in the end redeemed from technocratic spectacle by the retrieval of play from the rationalized city’s joylessly rectilinear spaces – the carnivalesque (yet in a sense beyond even the carnivalesque, because unplanned, unscheduled, unpredictable, and unrepeatable) reappropriation and refunctioning of space without any overt project or intention. Thus in the film’s central set-piece sequence an absurdly over-designed and unforgiving modern restaurant space is riotously deconstructed into a ramshackle, human-scale party; a gridlocked traffic gyratory becomes a carousel; and so on.

Seeing only corpses 45 Its dystopic aspects notwithstanding, Tati’s vision retains an innocent confidence in urban play’s capacity to persist and thrive in the overlooked interstices of panoptic systems. A similar conviction of the enduring resistance of the random, though framed less optimistically as failure rather than transformation, is central to George Lucas’s dystopic urban SF film THX 1138 (1970), notably in the interpolated image of a lizard scuttling unnoticed through the wires and circuits of the totalitarian citystate’s mainframe. Fantasy films such as these may find it easier to maintain their confidence in the emancipatory qualities of play precisely (and paradoxically) because their closed systems, however transparently allegorical, are in fact finally under the control of their creators – the inadequacy and vulnerability of their panoptic regimes is a polemical function of their design; the dice, so to speak, are loaded. De Certeau is, however, concerned that in the real contemporary city the regime of ‘functional totalitarianism’ has reached a point where perambulatory play can no longer retrieve or redeem it because play itself has taken on functional and totalitarian characteristics. Films that stage an encounter with the disastrous lived history of the concept-city (rather than producing their own fantasy versions that finally reassure by their inbuilt inadequacies) are compelled to engage with this disturbing possibility. Retrieving ludic redemptive from such disasters must be a more difficult affair. The following section explores such difficulties in two filmic representations of Berlin, a city that has been ruinously subject to the dominance of the concept at the expense of human life.

III As we have already seen, ‘Walking in the City’ resonates strongly with powerful literary and in particular cinematic renditions of the modern city’s destruction as the shattering encounter with sudden absence. From René Clair’s Paris qui dort (1928) to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), it is not the razing or burning of cities but their spectral persistence in abandonment and emptiness that seems to haunt the urban imagination. And what in fact is this deathly vacuum if not merely the reductio ad absurdum of the totalitarian insistence de Certeau describes, on rendering the resistant materiality of urban life, in its stubborn refusal to arrange – or erase – itself into the clean and proper urban body of the utopian – or atopian – imagination, as entropic catastrophe? In the American urban imagination, these contesting urban imaginaries can safely play themselves out within the inexhaustible maze of the symbolic order, since canonically in the Manhattan street plan lower Manhattan’s tangled streets resist the overtures of the orderly grid above 14th Street. This I think is why de Certeau uses Manhattan as the jumping-off point for his essay (obviously there are more and higher skyscrapers in New York): an important part of his argument is that walking and its related processes are not anti- but un-systematic: they rely on the overlay of system to find the spaces to which they give ever new, if never adequately recordable, meanings. The scarred topography of the European city, however, bears ongoing witness to ideology’s traumatic irruption into – and finally as – the real. Those who survive to look down upon the shattered city in such films as Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero (1946) and

46 Barry Langford Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) behold a city whose abjection at once fulfils and mocks the relentless geometries of racial and urban hygiene. In Berlin, above all, the final consequences of the empty supremacy of the concept-city are written – but not legible – in the literal dismemberment of the urban text. A thematically central scene in Germania anno zero – though at first sight it is tangential to the main line of the (in any case basic) narrative – portrays Edmond, the young boy who is the film’s central character, selling a recording of a Hitler speech as a souvenir to a group of British squaddies touring the ruins of the Reichstag. As Edmond starts up a portable phonograph, Hitler’s voice takes spectral flight through the rubble: the camera rises alongside it, adopting a series of lofty bird’s-eye perspectives on the shattered city that are strikingly at odds with the ground-level shots Rossellini employs elsewhere in the film (and that came to typify neo-Realist style). The camera here is not identified with any character (unless it be the posthumous perspective of Hitler himself): it is a ‘pure’ expression of the dominating vision that in dreaming a ‘new’ Berlin finally reduces the actually existing city to ruins. In the film’s final sequence, as the camera follows Edmond through the ruined streets to what will prove to be his death, the acute relevance of the earlier scene becomes clear. As he wanders, Edmond sporadically attempts to play in and around the city’s ruined spaces. But such acts are inadequate to the massive task of redeeming either Germany or even Edmond himself. On the contrary (and as is often the case with post-apocalyptic narratives in cinema), Rossellini depicts the persistence into the post-apocalyptic period of the same destructive modes of behaviour that brought on the catastrophe: Edmond has just killed his own ailing father under the lingering malign spell of Nazi Social Darwinist and eugenic doctrines. In the absolute ruin brought about by the catastrophic triumph of the concept-city, play seems to lack the necessary purchase to refashion the self or its environment. Appropriately, Edmond climbs to the top of a gutted building to look out over the razed city: his last act before throwing himself to his death is to share in the totalizing and totally destructive perspective of the ideology to which he remains in thrall. Wenders’ Wings of Desire seems to offer a more optimistic vision. The film’s opening images of Berlin from on high represent the literally heavenly perspective of the angel Damiel, gazing down upon a Berlin he cannot be a part of but can only observe – a timeless inertia that is clearly identified, or at least associated, by Wenders and co-scenarist Peter Handke with the stasis in which in 1987 Berlin seems to be trapped, like a fly in amber, pinned beneath the crushing weight of an arrested and inescapable history. The work assigned to Wenders’ angels is to record and accumulate the numberless ephemeral experiences, hopes, fears, and fantasies of the city’s inhabitants, at once inconsequential yet (at least to Damiel, if less so to his more sceptical angelic partner Cassiel) all that matters. As an angel, Damiel sees everything, risks nothing, and can do nothing to the city: cannot prevent a man leaping to his death, come to the aid of the victim of a car crash, cannot truly understand – though he can long for – the ineffable value that mortality rests on every human action. When Damiel decides to sacrifice his angelic immortality for

Seeing only corpses 47 a fully implicated and delimited human life, he awakes to his new mortal existence at ground level – in the no man’s land of the Berlin Wall. This no man’s land is the human equivalent of the limbo inhabited by the angels: Damiel’s translation from the one to the other and in turn beyond them both into historical life proper, reflects Wenders’ hope (which of course in 1987 was just and only that) that Berlin too could escape the freezing, totalizing gaze of its own terrible history and move back into process. Again, it is play that holds they key to this restoration of urban life: the particular spaces into which Damiel steps are all ludic spaces within the city – a film set, a night club, an itinerant circus with whose trapeze artist Damiel has fallen in love.

IV Such films pose the question of whether, amidst these ruins, urban play’s own redemptive capacity can survive: does a child’s game, an itinerant circus – or, to take another example, Roman Polanski’s Holocaust film The Pianist (2001), a Chopin sonata – still have the ability identified by de Certeau to remake the city through unmaking it? Here we may return to Deep Impact and the other urban disaster, or apocalypse, films mentioned at the start of this chapter. For one way of characterizing this genre might be in terms of infantile play: literally toppling blocks, making a mess – the ultimate mess, in fact. Yet just as with the ‘Fort/Da’ game there are the security and safety of knowing that the damage is only temporary. Just as Freud’s grandson could pull back the spool he had thrown out of his crib by its own thread, so not only do the narratives of Hollywood urban disaster films offer reassurance of continuity and recovery (as the tag line for Deep Impact insisted: ‘Oceans Rise. Cities Fall. Hope Survives’), but their CGI spectacles of gross destruction are enjoyable rather than horrifying because they are fantasy: in fact, because the technological capacity to deliver a photo-realist simulation of the end of the world reassures us of technology’s ability to contain by imagining and acting out any threat, however final and non-negotiable. (The underlying fantasy interpellation of end-of-the-world cinema is of course not the end of the world as such but the end of our own individual worlds, the survival of the definitively unsurvivable – our own death. The spectacular appeal of mass destruction might be regarded as the enactment of an infantile rage at the endurance of everything else that will and must survive our own extinction.) But what then of the moment when this fantasy, this play, becomes reality (at least of a sort)? As most readers of this chapter will have been aware, thus far I have deliberately elided the identity of the specific location from which de Certeau looks down on Manhattan – it was, of course, from atop South Tower of the World Trade Center. Is it necessary to reconceive de Certeau’s sense of the terroristic impulse underlying dominative specularity, given the levelling of his emblematic vantage point by a gesture that both literalized the playful catastrophes of the disaster film in an anything but playful fashion, and while simultaneously ‘reading’ the ‘test’ of the city in a way that perfectly enables its mutilation? Is it merely a cheap irony to note that in the end the eye of terror turned out not to be the gaze from the top of

48 Barry Langford the towers, but the murderous gaze directed at them? There is almost certainly no definitive or even consensual answer to questions such as these; but we may none the less note that de Certeau is profoundly concerned, not only with the elimination of play from the city, but with play’s recuperation by power. The question is whether in the contemporary city the regime of ‘functional totalitarianism’ has reached a point beyond perambulatory play’s capacity to retrieve or redeem it, because play itself has taken on totalitarian characteristics.

NOTE 1

Recalling but distinct from ‘dominant specularity’, a term current in Althusserian and psychoanalytic screen theory from the mid-1970s, which designated the subject position allegedly constructed for the spectator of ‘realist’ (i.e. continuity, and especially Hollywood) film and television through which contradiction and process were suppressed in favour of an imaginary transparency.

4 New York, 9/11 Brian Jarvis

An uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality. (Freud 2003: 32)

On 11 December 1895, in the basement of the Grand Café in Paris, the Lumière brothers held the first public screening of twelve short films. The image of a train speeding towards the camera reportedly had members of the audience ducking for cover and even fleeing the building. The birth of cinema was attended by a ‘scream that was heard around the world’. Screams were heard again in June 1896 when the same images arrived at Edison’s kinetoscope parlours in New York. Fastforwarding from the fin de siècle to New York at the millennium and on 11 September 2001, the sight of two passenger planes crashing into the Twin Towers induced another scream that was heard around the world. Whilst some spectators of the Lumière brothers’ cinematographe believed a train was about to crash into the theatre, the sight of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center has frequently been described as cinematic spectacle. Victims and voyeurs, journalists and politicians, writers and critics have repeatedly framed the attack on New York as ‘disaster film’, or ‘war film’, or ‘horror film’. The history of cinema and the history of modern cities are inseparable. Walter Benjamin offered pioneering insights into how cinema corresponded to ‘profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus – changes that are experienced on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic’ (Benjamin 1982: 252). These profound changes are possibly nowhere more apparent than in New York: the birthplace of the moving picture industry and the most hypermediated of urban landscapes. Since the 1890s, as James Sanders documents in Celluloid Skyline, New York’s status as the capital of cinécities has been consolidated by over a century of film images (Sanders 2001). Following some postmodern flânerie around New York, Jean Baudrillard asks the following question in his polemical travelogue, America: Where is the cinema? The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies. To grasp its secret, you should not, then, begin with the city and

50 Brian Jarvis move inwards towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards towards the city. (Baudrillard 1990: 56) Perhaps then, we can grasp some of the secrets of New York on and after 9/11 by starting with the screen.

UNREAL CITIES In what cinema are the dreams of mass destruction / so dear as ours? (Jones 2002: 70) A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. (Pynchon 1975: 3)

Whilst the symbiosis between urban and cinematic space is relatively recent, the bond between cities and war is ancient. According to Eduardo Mendieta, cities have always been ‘the crown jewels of war . . . the locus, the maelstrom from which the storm of war surges’ (Mendieta 2004: 6). Mendieta supports Lewis Mumford’s contention, in his seminal study The City in History, that: the modernity of war was made possible by the emergence of the city. The emergence of the city as a societal institution allowed, nay necessitated, the transformation of rituals and ceremonies of appeasement of totemic and bloodthirsty gods, into rationalised and regimented projects of ‘mass extermination and mass destruction’. (Mendieta 2004: 6) In the opening lines of Thomas Pynchon’s war novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a V-2 rocket, the Nazi ‘terror weapon’, is being chased by its own supersonic screaming as it descends on London. In the immediate aftermath of the ‘acts of war’ on 9/11, Mayor Guiliani invoked an analogy between New York and London during the Blitz and repeated Churchill’s advice that the city should try to go about its ‘business as normal’. In the closing lines of Gravity’s Rainbow another V-2 is descending on the Orpheus (an old movie house) and its blast is likened to the burning out of a projector bulb and the breaking of a film. This climax may have been inspired by the V-2 that claimed more lives than any other single rocket in the Second World War. On 16 December 1944, 567 people were killed in the Rex cinema in Antwerp whilst watching the Cecil B. DeMille western The Plainsman (1936). DeMille makes two appearances in Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel which, as well as being crowded with references to directors, actors, and films, also proposes intricate cabals between cinema and the theatre of war. The analogy between a rocket blast and the breaking of a film alludes to the nitrocellulose devised

New York, 9/11 51 by Du Pont and used in both explosives production and early film stock. In this respect, the technological synergy traced in Gravity’s Rainbow anticipates Paul Virilio’s stunning genealogy in War and Cinema. Virilo (1989) claims that the Lumière brothers’ camera was partly inspired by Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic rifle; that Henri Chretien’s pioneering work on naval artillery telemetry laid the groundwork for Cinemascope; and that synergistic developments in lighting technology took place between artilleryman, air defence co-ordinators, and cameramen. Only hours after terrorists converted two passenger planes into flying bombs and crashed them into the World Trade Center, politicians were describing this ‘act of war’ as a ‘second Pearl Harbor’. The US public were perhaps more receptive to this parallel given that the film Pearl Harbor (2001) had been one of the summer’s blockbuster movies. Baudrillard has been prominent in a chorus of voices proclaiming that 9/11 was a fundamentally cinematic event that highlighted the hegemony of the hyperreal: ‘in this Manhattan disaster movie, the twentieth century’s two elements of mass fascination are combined: the white magic of the cinema and the black magic of terrorism; the white light of the image and the black light of terrorism’ (Baudrillard 2002: 29–30). Although the literature of 9/11 does not always confirm Baudrillard’s sense that this ‘Manhattan disaster movie’ was a monochrome and Manichaean production, it is often preoccupied with image. The contributions to Ulrich Baer’s collection of 110 Stories, for example, repeatedly splice the skyline with the screen. In ‘The Sky was so Blue’, Roberta Allen reports that, not wanting the disaster to be merely a ‘TV event’, she went out on to the streets, but only to witness a ‘movie-ready image’ as the first tower fell (Allen 2002: 26). In a similar vein, A.M. Homes writes in ‘We All Saw It, or The View from Home’, of shuttling back and forth between his window and the television and being plagued by ‘the sense that my own imagery, my memory, is all too quickly being replaced by the fresh footage, the other angle, the unrelenting loop’ (Homes 2002: 152). Robert Polito, in ‘Last Seen’, describes Sixth Avenue as ‘a scene from a monster movie’ (Polito 2002: 88) and Susan Wheeler’s (2002) ‘The Movie Set on the Horizon Glows’ features an appearance by Steve McQueen – an allusion to his performance in The Towering Inferno (1974) as a fire chief unable to save the people falling from a blazing 135-floor glass tower. The Towering Inferno was part of a cycle of disaster movies, including Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and Earthquake (1974), that enjoyed considerable commercial success during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. The strangely therapeutic cinema of catastrophe enjoyed another renaissance at the millennium with the destruction of the New York skyline and various US landmarks figuring prominently in Independence Day (1996), Mars Attacks (1996), Armageddon (1998), Godzilla (1998), and Deep Impact (1998). After 9/11, these gleeful and glossy cartoons of urban apocalypse seemed uncannily prophetic. Earlier examples of pop culture prolepsis abound. Two years after building work on World Trade Center was completed, King Kong (1976) arrived. The finale to the film and focal point in the poster campaign was a battle between the beast and American planes at the top of the towers. Five years later, John Carpenter’s Escape

52 Brian Jarvis from New York (1981) opened with Air Force One crash-landing in Manhattan, which had become a post-apocalyptic prison island. Inevitably, post-9/11 images of New York are similarly haunted. The money shot in Vanilla Sky, which premiered in December 2001, saw Tom Cruise taking a swan dive from a New York skyscraper with the Twin Towers visible on the horizon. Conversely, trailers, publicity images, and the final cut of Spider Man (2002) were all doctored to remove images of the World Trade Center. The first theatrical trailer for Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers (2002) happened to coincide with the first anniversary of the 9/11 attack, and in the trailers for Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow (2004), two things were immediately conspicuous. First, the focal point of destruction was Manhattan island as it is bombarded by tornadoes and tidal waves. Second, the focal point of the publicity campaign was a specific date – 28 May – which was both the day of devastation in the film and the day of its general release. This was clearly intended to evoke another recent date with disaster. The middle to late 1990s saw a wave of ‘natural disaster’ films that included Twister (1996), Tornado (1996), Volcano (1997), and Dante’s Peak (1997). David Savran has argued that, whilst terrorist acts assume the guise of disaster movies, disaster movies have also learnt to feed off the discourses of terrorism: A new and unpredictable monster that may strike at any moment, destroying property, killing innocent people . . . a localized and random threat that (in principle) can never be eradicated . . . a new kind of enemy preys on the fears of those who imagine disaster lurking in every passing cloud. (Savran 1998: 316) Eerie prescience does not end with the apocalyptic disaster movie. David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) concluded with a terrorist attack on financial headquarters, the image of collapsing skyscrapers, and the repetition of a phrase: ‘We’re at ground zero’. Incidentally, the location of ‘ground zero’ is specified in Palahniuk’s novel as the ‘Parker-Morris Building’, which at 191 floors is the ‘world’s tallest’ skyscraper (Palahniuk 1997: 13). Whilst some compared the devastated city of 9/11 to the disaster film or war movie, others drew analogies with the horror film: victims falling from the sky, or buried alive, whilst shellshocked survivors moved like zombies across a necropolis consumed by black clouds. Norman Mailer, in aptly gothic B-movie metaphors, has summarized the Baudrillardean consensus here concerning the metastasis of simulation: [It’s] as if part of the Devil’s aesthetic acumen was to bring it off exactly as if we were watching the same action movie we had been looking at for years. That may be at the core of the immense impact 9/11 had on America. Our movies came off the screen and chased us down the canyons of the city. (Mailer 2002: 27)

New York, 9/11 53 In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zˇizˇek underlines Mailer’s contention by affirming that ‘the September 11 attacks were the stuff of popular fantasies long before they actually took place’ (Zˇizˇek 2002: 17). Zˇizˇek is referring here to the ‘big catastrophe productions’ (Zˇizˇek 2002: 15), but his frame of reference might be extended beyond millennial Hollywood since, almost as soon as they were built, Manhattan’s skyscrapers were being toppled in popular fantasies. In 1888, Benjamin Park’s short story, ‘The End of New York’, had an invading Spanish armada using balloon bombs to level the city’s burgeoning skyline. Aerial bombardment of New York was repeated in H.G. Wells’s The War in the Air (1907) and George England’s Darkness and Dawn (1912). In the celebrated 1938 radio dramatization of Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), interplanetary invasion commenced with the destruction of New York. Orson Welles’s Hallowe’en hoax allegedly produced mass hysteria and widespread disruption to transport and communications networks. (Paul Virilio (2002) reports in Ground Zero that many viewers of the initial media coverage of 9/11 believed they were watching a ‘hoax’ disaster movie, only to have the authority of the images confirmed by channel hopping.) Although the extent of the panic was no doubt exaggerated – a second media simulation – underlying anxieties concerning the threat of attacks on US cities were very real on the eve of war in Europe. It was just as the First World War was breaking out in Europe that the first atom bomb exploded in Manhattan. Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Millennium, written in 1914 and set in the year 2000, begins with the grand opening of a Manhattan skyscraper that is over half a mile high and represents the zenith of urban capitalism. The party is ruined, however, when a scientist drops a jar containing ‘X-radiumite’ and causes an explosion that wipes out all animal life across the globe. A Manhattan skyscraper, the tallest in the world, becomes ground zero. There are only eleven survivors of this holocaust, safe above the city in an intercontinental superplane. They descend to survey the ruins and are faced with the task of rebuilding the city of the future.

INVISIBLE CITIES At first glance the spectacle [of the Grand Canyon] seems too strange to be real . . . For one thing, the scale is too large to be credited . . . For a time it is too much like a scale model or an optical illusion. One admires the peep show and that is all. (Krutch 1989: 64) [T]he skyscrapers . . . did not seem like man-made, man-inhabited constructions, but rather like rocks and hills, dead parts of the urban landscape one finds in cities built on a turbulent soil. (Sartre 1968: 107) It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will only be a point in the sky. (Palahniuk 1997: 13)

54 Brian Jarvis After 9/11, New York was faced with the task of physical and psychical rebuilding. Although the site was named Ground Zero, something, or more precisely, a substantial nothing, was still forcefully there. The absent presence of the Twin Towers foregrounded the extent to which cities are invisible – founded on the spaces between things, the spaces where things once were. The spectral haunting of the skyline by ‘invisible cenotaphs’ (Baer 2002: 5) was highlighted by the laser memorial, the ‘Tribute of Light’, which some spectators felt was itself ghosted by Albert Speer’s ‘Cathedral of Light’. Hitler’s architect always claimed to be ‘strangely moved by the idea that the most successful architectural creation of [his] life was a chimera, an immaterial image’ (cited in Virilio 1989: 68). The light show that illuminated the celluloid skyline at the close of 2001, like Speer’s chimerical cathedral, sought to convert ruins into art. For some, however, this installation was entirely dwarfed by the aesthetic spectacle of the attacks themselves. Most infamously, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen declared that 9/11 in New York witnessed ‘the greatest work of art there has ever been!’ (cited in Virilio 2002). Stockhausen’s claim goes beyond comparing 9/11 to a disaster movie by insisting on an essential aesthetic dimension to the act of urban demolition. Comparable claims appear repeatedly in the literature and criticism of 9/11. Jessica Hagedorn, in ‘Notes from a New York Diary’, for example, writes of staring ‘at the smoke and flames, mesmerised by the awesome beauty of destruction’ (Hagedorn 2002: 134). In America, Baudrillard claims to have been similarly mesmerized by the spectacle of wrecking crews in New York: Modern demolition is truly wonderful. As a spectacle it is the opposite of a rocket launch. The twenty-storey block remains perfectly vertical as it slides towards the centre of the earth. It falls straight, with no loss of its bearing, like a tailor’s dummy falling through a trap door, and its own surface area absorbs the rubble. What a marvellous modern art form this is. (Baudrillard 1990: 17) Whilst Baudrillard was visiting New York, Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi (1983) was released and it included a collage of images of buildings being demolished in slow motion to the accompaniment of a Philip Glass score. Baudrillard describes demolition as a spectacular modern art form, but the key to understanding the structures of feeling involved here lies in romantic philosophy and, in particular, the concept of the sublime. Although romantic philosophy was preoccupied with encountering the sublime in nature, both Kant and Burke also discovered this quality in the man-made world – in architecture, for example, such as the pyramids. More recently, in American Technological Sublime, David Nye (1994) has examined the city as a second nature of scenes that produce shock and awe and skyscrapers figure prominently in his account of the urban sublime. The terrorist attack on two of the world’s tallest skyscrapers seems to combine key components in the sublime as conceptualized by Kant and Schiller: the mathematical sublime in which a vast representation refuses to be reduced by the imagination to a single intuition; the dynamic sublime which attends scenes

New York, 9/11 55 of devastation that dwarf the human subject; and the pathetic sublime in which one is afflicted by the sight of immense human suffering. The key word in discourses of the romantic sublime is, of course, terror: the terrifying scene that stuns reason into silent submission. There is, however, a critical distinction to be drawn here: the sublime involves proximity to terror, but it is not terror. In The Critique of Judgement, Kant defines the sublime as ‘amazement bordering on terror, horror and a sacred thrill: but since [the spectator] knows he is safe, this is not actual fear’ (Kant 1978: 186). The sublime, essentially, is a spectator sport. Disaster films, such as The Day After Tomorrow, offer a diluted, digital morphing of this sublime sensibility.

WOUNDED CITIES Trauma occurs when something happens that shatters the ego and its defences. An event persists as an image that awakens other images buried in the psyche, images bound to repressed memories that bring with their return an anxiety that threatens psychic dissolution. (Davis 2003: 43) All around us, a city in shock. (Hagedorn 2002: 135)

The sublime involves a ‘violence of feeling’ (Lyotard 1994: 4), but the shock is basically healthy and does not produce trauma. The subject of trauma (literally translated from the Greek as ‘wound’) is invoked repeatedly in the cultural fall-out from 9/11. New York is anthropomorphized as a city in shock, wounded, a traumatized topography. Joyce, Calvino, Lefebvre and other city writers have often traced urban space through a somatic stencil: the people on the streets as lifeblood; the transport infrastructure as veins and arteries; panoptic technologies as eyes; and the sewers and treatment works as digestive tract. In ‘When the Skyline Crumbles’, Eliot Katz describes the World Trade Center, those vertical cities of glass, as ‘50,000 individual heartbeats working in Twin Bodies’ (Johnson 2002: 23). In Mao II (1992), Don DeLillo genders these Twin Bodies, since the North Tower, the male, was topped by a television tower. A.M. Homes similarly invokes a corporeal trope in ‘We All Saw It, or The View from Home’ by describing the fall of the towers as ‘a sudden amputation’ (Homes 2002: 152). The traumatic wounding that left the New York horizon haunted by phantom limbs was replayed in news reports, documentaries, films, video walls at globally broadcast concerts, photographs, paintings, graphic novels, street art, and kitsch memorabilia. The imagistic iteration in this cultural fall-out from the collapsing towers – the maelstrom of city images and images of images – might be symptomatic of a collective repetition compulsion. In ‘Senseless’, Alice Elliot Dark writes of watching the buildings explode into fire and collapse over and over again . . . She believed . . . that if she watched enough television and learned enough

56 Brian Jarvis facts, if she controlled the information, there wouldn’t be another attack. It was all up to her. (Dark 2002: 62) According to Freud, neurotic repetition is driven by the subject’s desire to become the agent rather than victim of a devastating experience. But trauma undoes time: It should be understood that repetition as conceived by Freud’s genius is in and of itself a synthesis of time . . . It is at once repetition of before, during and after, that is to say it is a constitution in time of the past, the present and the future. (Deleuze 1995: 115) The past invades the present and determines the future. Or, as Blanchot puts it in The Writing of the Disaster, ‘It comes before it comes and lasts after it has happened’ (Blanchot 1995: 54). The attack on the Twin Towers produced such a crisis in temporality. The use of the date, 9/11, when most disasters and conflicts are known by their location, is perhaps compensatory for the ways in which historical trauma undoes time. 9/11 is not over. In the case of millennial disaster movies, some of the most important images after 9/11 were replayed before the attacks even took place. 9/11 is a time of uncanny doubling and déjà vu. The attack on the city was foreseen in film, it was seen in the first attack, it was repeated in the second attack. The images of the Twin Towers subjected to a twin attack then endlessly repeated. According to psychoanalysis, the trauma victim simply repeats an event rather than remembering it as something that happened in the past. This dynamic is also the key signature of postmodern culture with its compulsive recycling of images alongside a waning of historical sensibility. Habermas has been at the forefront of critics proclaiming that 9/11 witnessed the collapse of postmodernism’s Tower of Babel, the ‘first historic world event’ to be followed by an imminent ‘return to history’ (Borradori 2003: 48). However, despite the rituals of remembrance and the memorials, the site of the attacks is also a space of forgetfulness. The choice of place name for the events of 9/11 signifies critical amnesia over 8/6 and 8/9/45. The term ‘ground zero’ was coined at Alamogordo, New Mexico, to describe the epicentre of a nuclear explosion, but much of the early work on ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, the nuclear warheads detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, took place in Manhattan. Accounts of the 9/11 attack referred to the ‘mushroom cloud’ and ‘fall-out’ that enveloped Manhattan Island and subsequent scenes of ‘nuclear winter’. The nuclear symbolism deployed at Ground Zero spoke to nightmare fantasies of reverse imperialism and perhaps indirectly staked a claim on the suffering of the victims of US terror at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The wounding of Japanese cities was motivated and publicly legitimated in part with reference to the ‘sneak attack’ on Pearl Harbor. This lax analogy invoked myths of American innocence and laid the groundwork for retaliatory vengeance. As Deleuze warns, ‘beyond Eros we encounter Thanatos; beyond the ground, the abyss of the

New York, 9/11 57 groundless; beyond the repetition that links, the repetition that erases and destroys’ (Deleuze 1995: 67).

URBAN UNCANNY A massive and sudden emergence of uncanninness . . . A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me . . . that sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us. (Kristeva 1982: 2, 210) In this war where fire already attacked space more than men, I felt completely alien to my own person, as if I had been looking at myself through binoculars . . . The landscape had the transparency of glass. (Junger, cited in Virilio 1989: 34) There is glass between us. We cannot speak. (Heinemann 1983: 167)

Two Pearl Harbors. Two Ground Zeroes. Uncanny doublings. In his work on the uncanny, Nicholas Royle has offered a series of signatures which can all be read in New York on 9/11: The uncanny involves, above all, strange kinds of repetition . . . déja vu (the sense that something has happened before), and the idea of the double (or doppelganger) . . . odd coincidences . . . anthropomorphism . . . a fear of being buried alive . . . Death. (Bennett and Royle 1999: 36–40) It is well known that the German for ‘uncanny’ – unheimlich – translates as ‘un-homelike’; however, the root of the English word is perhaps more cogent here. In House of Leaves, his gothic exploration of the architectural uncanny, Mark Danielewski traces the etymology as follows: While lacking the Germanic sense of ‘home’, uncanny builds its meaning on the Old English root cunnan . . . meaning know . . . The ‘y’ imparts a sense of ‘full of’ while the ‘un’ negates that which follows. In other words, un-cann-y literally breaks down or disassembles into that which is not full of knowing or conversely full of not knowing. (Danielewski 2000: 359) As urban uncanny, Ground Zero may thus be described as a space full of unknowing, a locus haunted, in Wallace Stevens’s chilling phrase, by the ‘nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’ (Stevens 1990: 10). In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard insists that the collapse of the Twin Towers was attended by an implosion of meaning into nothingness: ‘We try

58 Brian Jarvis retrospectively to impose some kind of meaning on it, to find some kind of interpretation. But there is none’ (Baudrillard 2002: 30). Although for different reasons, Baudrillard’s negativity is echoed throughout the literature of 9/11. Often, the common ground among writers at Ground Zero is a sense of senselessness, as though the attacks produced an event horizon on the New York skyline, a black hole of meaning from which nothing can escape. Ulrich Baer offers the following oxymoron as the rationale behind his collection of 110 Stories: ‘September 11 calls upon us to put into words the feeling of being at a loss, of not having an adequate expression for what happened’ (Baer 2002: 3). Many of the stories that follow are caught in this double bind: We would like to write something new, we are very tired of our stories, but we don’t know what the next sentence should be. We have tried to proceed to the next sentence. But to write you must know something, and we know nothing beyond the intolerable questions that assail us. Grief, at an infernal temperature, has burnt knowledge out of us. We try to write the next sentence, and senseless, contrary words come out, as if from a cauldron . . . We long to hear an intelligent word. No, we long for silence. Enough words have been spoken. The words are ashes poured in our ears. (Schwarz 2002: 261) In her ‘New York Diary’ Jessica Hagedorn is similarly unable to ‘write something about war, peace and race . . . Words fail me’ (Hagedorn 2002: 136). Precisely this phrase is repeated by Jenefer Shute in ‘Instructions for Surviving the Unprecedented’: ‘Someone will hand you a felt-tipped marker. You will kneel. You will write: “Words fail me”’ (Shute 2002: 261). After the ‘screaming comes across the sky’, in the literature and at the memorials, there is silence. ‘And once more: what is the origin of the uncanny effect of silence?’ (Freud: 2003: 27).

URBAN TRAUMA Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. (Levi 1995: 40) Ground zero, is it possible to get lower? (Dunn 2002: 3)

Much of the fiction and poetry after 9/11 converges at the ground zero of communication and thus seems to belong under that umbrella term ‘the literature of trauma’. Within this canon, whose ur-text is the Holocaust, the radical negativity of trauma is often mirrored in writing that circles around its own impossibility and seeks to refuse the ‘obscenity of understanding’ (Lanzmann 1995). The ‘dark and

New York, 9/11 59 dismal subject’ (Freud 2003: 8) of trauma is conceived as the ineffable horizon of representation, unknowable except as profound lack. It is perhaps unsurprising that deconstructive critics, such as Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth, have been at the forefront of the ‘turn to trauma’ in critical theory. In some quarters trauma appears to be in danger of becoming a privileged discourse, one which repeats and confirms post-structuralist orthodoxy concerning the ineluctable breakdown of meaning. Linda Belau has expressed reservations concerning those ‘recent studies of trauma [which] have invited a dangerous elevation of traumatic experience to the level of an ideal’ (Belau 2001). Belau insists that to position trauma as an exceptional experience beyond the symbolic is to ignore the materiality of the signifier: ‘Because traumatic experience – and experience in general – is tied to a system of representation, to language’ (Belau 2001). Belau underscores this point by invoking Mladen Dolar’s observation that ‘only in and through language is there an unspeakable’ (cited in Belau 2001). Beyond the psychoanalytical paradigm, it is possible to view the turn to trauma as problematic in other respects. To characterize a historical event as beyond the ‘limits of representation’ may be convenient avoidance. A preoccupation with trauma and loss, forms of physical and psychological hurt, can drift towards a sentimental discourse that precludes forms of historical inquiry. Pain, as Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘has an element of blank –’: It cannot recollect When it begun – or if there were A time when it was not – It has no Future – but itself – (Dickinson 1983: 276) This futureless blank that erases history features prominently in narratives of trauma associated with the Vietnam War. US war stories, in fiction and film, often eloquently articulate the structures of feeling associated with combat experience but are less lucid in relation to the social and economic structures of imperialism. Historical representation becomes a casualty of conflict and war is expediently shrouded in a mystique of unintelligibility. The crisis in signification evident in many literary responses to 9/11 repeats this kenotic drive. Ultimately, a preoccupation with the ‘unspeakable’ nature of historical trauma may be complicit with the covert imperative of terrorism as defined by Lyotard: ‘To arrest the meanings of words once and for all, that is what Terror wants’ (cited in de Certeau 1984: 165). Terror, in its various forms, cannot be silenced by silence.

NEW YORK: UNCANNY CAPITAL Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel of history] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm

60 Brian Jarvis is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress . . . Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious. (Benjamin 1982: 259–60) And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm. (George W. Bush, inaugural address, 20 January 2001)

Don DeLillo (2001), surveying the ‘ruins of the future’ at Ground Zero, has underlined the urgent necessity of talking back to terror. DeLillo defines terror as a ‘narrative that has been developing over years, only now becoming inescapable . . . The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative’ (DeLillo 2001). This definition repeats prophetic passages from Mao II, published ten years before his 9/11 essay, in which he proposed that novelists and terrorists were bound by a ‘curious knot’: Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness . . . What terrorists gain, novelists lose . . . The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous. . . . the major work involves mid-air explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative. (DeLillo 1992: 41, 157) DeLillo detects a ‘curious knot’ that binds the novelist to the terrorist, but perhaps the entanglements extend further. If terrorism can and must be read as a narrative, then it is clear from 9/11 in New York that this narrative is predominantly visual. Terrorism seeks to counter a society of spectacle with spectacle. Spectacle is one of the key words in the counter-narratives offered by critical theory. For Zˇizˇek, 9/11 was a ‘theatrical spectacle’ (Zˇizˇek 2002: 9), whilst Douglas Kellner, in recognition of the terrorist rhetoric of excess, prefers to label the event as ‘megaspectacle’ (Kellner 2003: 64). Baudrillard’s belief that ‘the spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us’ underscores the incestuous nature of this atrocity exhibition. The towers themselves, as grand architectural performance, were a logical stage on which to mirror made-for-TV war with made-for-TV terrorism. New York on 9/11 dramatized the violence of images: the blunting of ethical sensibility by hypermediation. In his analysis of US wound culture, Mark Seltzer has argued that ‘fascination with scenes of a spectacularised bodily violence is inseparable from the binding of violence to scene, spectacle, and representation’ (Seltzer 1998: 129). The counter-narrative to terror must aim to unravel this curious knot. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag insists ferociously that there

New York, 9/11 61 are ‘hundreds of millions of television watchers who . . . do not have the luxury of patronising reality’: To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalises the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment . . . It assumes that everyone is a spectator. (Sontag 2003: 98–9) This is the view from the tower. Surveying New York from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center, Michel de Certeau discovered a ‘utopia of optical knowledge’ (de Certeau 1984: 93). Such a vantage point might encourage a casual conflation of urban space with televisual or cinematic space. Worse still, from this prospect a sightseer might even succumb to a Nero Complex and indulge in aesthetics whilst a city burns. Of course to view the demolition of the Twin Towers only as movie or, after Stockhausen, as ‘art’ is a sign of moral collapse, a dubious Nietzschean turn. At the same time, it would be reductive to ignore what Virilio terms the ‘perfectly orchestrated image strategies’ of 9/11 (Virilio 1989: 42). Terror is tuned in to the optical economies of late capitalism. The attack on the World Trade Center was not primarily intended to inflict material damage on the city so much as to maximize the spectacle of urban disaster. Pixels were as important as planes in producing a deus ex machina for the key symbol of globalization. One of the consequences of this ‘global superproduction’ (Virilio 2002) was a subversive defamiliarization of the city which DeLillo documents in ‘In the Ruins of the Future’: For many people, [9/11] has changed the grain of the most routine moment. We may find that the ruin of the towers is implicit in other things. The new Palm Pilot at a fingertip’s reach, the stretch limousine parked outside the hotel, the midtown skyscraper under construction, carrying the name of a major investment bank – all haunted in a way by what has happened, less assured in their authority, in the prerogatives they offer. (DeLillo 2001) The defamiliarization performed by terrorist ‘image strategies’ uncovered uncanny menace in urban space. For Freud, of course, the uncanny is ‘that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar’ (Freud 2003: 27). Although the mainstream media generated an aura of the exceptional around the attack on the World Trade Center the event was in fact paradigmatic. The terrorist aesthetic utilized the raw materials of globalization against globalization: cities, aeronautics, computer technology, media networks, and white-collar bodies. Baudrillard uses gothic images of premature burial to illustrate the uncanny mirroring evident in the life and death of those glass symbols of globalization: ‘we can say that the horror for the 4,000 [sic] victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them – the horror of

62 Brian Jarvis living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel’ (Baudrillard 2002: 45). Surveying this ‘stage of concrete, steel and glass’, de Certeau described the World Trade Center as the most monumental figure of Western urban development . . . the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production . . . The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. (De Certeau 1984: 91–3) The explosion and collapse of the Twin Towers must be read as an acceleration of the capitalist logic of creative destruction, the monstrous sublimity of waste and seriality at high speed. If a radical counter-narrative is to emerge from the rubble it has to begin by reading terrorism as the uncanny of capital.

5 The idea of Hong Kong Structures of attention in the City of Life Stephanie Hemelryk Donald

This chapter examines the idea of the city as ‘ideal’ cityscape. The argument is developed through case study material on cinema and tourism, collected in Hong Kong from 2000 to 2004, with the major focus on Hong Kong post-SARS (2003). Film is a fundamental contributor of images for ‘the idea of the city’, which is itself a (cinematic) metaphor for modern experience (Lynch 1960; Robins 1999; Donald 1999). Tourism – already understood as a cultural phenomenon of immense importance in understanding modernity and globalization (Graburn 2001; Harrison 2001; Craik 1995) – also contributes to the way in which cinematic cities are understood, as places of potential or imaginative visitation. Unsurprisingly, then, the cinematic idea of the city, the cityscape, is resonant with touristic strategies in peculiar local conditions, and is approached here through ‘structures of attention’ that are responsive to the political, social, and historical interests of residents and citizens.

STRUCTURES OF ATTENTION In 2003, Hong Kong was struck down by SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The disease was highly contagious, and therefore lethal in the densely populated, high-rise residential city. The effect on Hong Kong life was profound. The city was subdued, scared, and intensely aware of its isolation. Most people wore masks outside, used gloves (or pens) to avoid touching public surfaces – lift buttons, train doors – and no longer dipped their chopsticks into the shared food servers in the middle of the dining table. Some janitors installed extra doormats saturated with antiseptic in the hallways of up-market apartment blocks. The impact was complex, however. Fear was attached to other emotions, in particular an emergent pride in local heroes, in Hong Kong’s historical resilience to suffering, and in the city’s ability to fight back and take care of itself. The ‘heroes’ were those who died working as doctors, nurses, and medical orderlies in the SARS wards. Their courage was likened to that of arriving migrants from mainland China in the post-war period, and even to those who fought the Japanese during the war itself. Cinema and tourism were commercial casualties of the SARS months, but cinema and tourism workers took the lead in building and giving visual form to the positive emotions that the epidemic induced. A group of film-makers, led by Peter Chan,

64 Stephanie Hemelryk Donald collaborated with the Hong Kong Tourism Commission to develop a sequence of short promo-films, each celebrating an aspect of Hong Kong’s ‘Recovery’. The series was entitled 1:99, the ratio of bleach to water being used to clean the city in the anti-SARS effort. The film-makers’ aesthetic response to the tangible crisis was passionate, pragmatic, collaborative, and watchable. Moreover, it belied the other crisis, that of the Hong Kong film industry since the 1997 handover, by showcasing a cityscape that is clearly and passionately known to both film-maker and audience. In Chan’s own film, Awakening Spring, a man (played by the elegiac Tony Leung) in a long greatcoat walks alone through deserted city streets. The light is grey, the buildings are ominous, and the ground is frozen. He glances at the myriad windows and sees a masked face staring out of each one. The city’s skyscrapers have become elongated tombs for the living. Suddenly, a medical team rushes by with a patient on a stretcher. They slip and fall on the ice. There is a beat of despair, and then the orderlies and the man start hammering on the ground, at first with anger, and soon with determination. As they strike the asphalt, the city wakes up, the trees blossom, and the people in the buildings take off their masks. It is an image of spring, awakened by the city dwellers and by the response of the built and natural environment to their attentive passions. It is also an ideal cityscape, in which the urban character is negotiated from the natural, the built, and the human. As the Tourism Commission would say, it’s a ‘City of Life’. The observations presented here arise from an interdisciplinary project, supported by the Australian Research Council, looking at the cinematic cultures and urban branding of cities on the West Pacific Rim: Shanghai, Sydney, and Hong Kong. The work is premised on the contention that the built environment of a city must to some degree be represented in its cinema. The nature of this representation will in turn influence the way in which local people and visitors experience that environment. Moreover, such cinematic images are likely to be replicated in other forms of cultural narrative, such as tourism marketing, in order to leverage that experience – in the case of tourism – to support the management of the place-brand of the city. The ‘cityscape’ thus encompasses and arises through the folding over of place, stories, marketing, and consumption. But how might we understand the idea of the city, as it moves through the passions, ennui, and interactions of everyday sociality and survival? How does ‘the idea of Hong Kong’ in 2003 allow the city to understand itself, to pay attention to its conditions of survival, and to conduct itself as a social entity? The suggestion in this chapter is that it occurs through structures of attention evidenced in images and the fabric of the city and shared in the perceptions of residents and visitors. The research demonstrates this ‘paying of attention’ through its research methodology, which draws on local professional and expert comment, media analysis, and focus groups inviting people to describe the ways in which they pay attention to their place. Groups of film-makers and urban planners have also been invited to focus groups, where they have explored their ideas of the city in some detail. Film and tourism merchandising surveys have also been undertaken, looking at historical and contemporary films and film movements, as well as at tourist campaigns and

The idea of Hong Kong 65 iconographic representations of the built and natural environments. The methods of data gathering and analysis in Hong Kong itself were designed to ask questions in multiple ways for complementary readings and interpretative translations to be possible. Open questions were structured to accommodate but not insist upon industry-specific responses, although targeted questions in the interviews also asked respondents to comment on the value and impact of the city environment in their creative and conceptual work. In such open questions, we soon, however, began to expect a career-specific element in the response. When tourism strategists and film-makers were asked to describe ‘the main visual characteristics of Hong Kong’, they tended, for example, to turn to professional language and interests in their answers. Generally, tourism interviewees would discuss ‘attractions’, whilst film-makers would acknowledge those places as important ‘for tourists’, but move quickly on to ‘locations’, ‘shooting’, and authenticity. Ann Hui (film director) was typical in this respect: . . . to tourists, it can be villages in New Territories and the Junk. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Hong Kong Tourist Association used the Junk as a symbol of Hong Kong. In my work, I have also shot the Junk. Other visual characteristics include martial arts movies – foreigners love Jackie Chan’s action films – but basically I don’t regard anything as a representation of Hong Kong. If you ask me, I can only think of local cafés. Meanwhile, Jacqueline Tong, the general manager of Strategic Planning and Marketing at the Hong Kong Tourism Board, answers the same question: The most unique characteristic of Hong Kong is the harbour, and particularly the internationally renowned night view. For us to promote tourism in Hong Kong, the visual image we usually use is Victoria Harbour – or the Peak tower and the big Buddha – which all can attract tourists. The responses from industry-specific residents of Hong Kong are professionally slanted, but indicate shared elements of place loyalty. Professional attention is mediated through an idea of the city as a product, or the means to an end of a produced place of visitation and spectacle, but respondents also offer credible expressions of strong personal attachment: Researcher: Thinking about character, how would you describe the relationship between HK and its inhabitants? Tong: For me, working for the HKTB, naturally I have a very strong passion, adding that I am a Hongkonger. I wish to recommend all the wonderful things in HK to tourists all over the world, even though they might not have the chance to come. In identifying emotional attachment to place, this chapter therefore refers to ‘structures of attention’, a term developed as an amalgam of theoretical concepts

66 Stephanie Hemelryk Donald in cultural studies and art history. The term affords a description of how people produce and consume the idea of the city by paying emotional attention to it, as well as by the attention they pay through their professional practice. Raymond Williams created the concept of ‘structures of feeling’ to understand why people and communities think the way they do about place and social interaction: We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating community. (Williams 1977: 132) This definition opens the possibility of dialogue between different aspects of everyday life. It refuses a dichotomy of thinking versus feeling, whilst still offering a structural approach to content and data. Williams is positive towards structures of feeling where they support communities of interest and are in a fluid relationship to the pragmatics of community life. In this chapter, the concept is developed as ‘structures of attention’, taking up the implication of dialogue in Williams’s concept as a positive analytical tool for looking across cultural, commercial products and responses as images and ideas that provoke, demand, and inspire attention. ‘Feeling’ and ‘thought’, Williams says, are not in competition, but are dynamically engaged and ‘interrelating’ in practice, even where that practice crosses commercial boundaries. Likewise, it is argued here that the end product in image making – whether a film or a tourism brand or campaign – and emotional connectivity are coterminous and dependent in the building of the ‘idea of a city’ as a coherent cityscape. The art historian Jonathan Crary (1999) describes ‘attention’ as a condition of living in modernity. He explores regimes and codes of visuality, recording the travails of the human sciences, educational institutions, industrial manufacturers, and government agencies to insist on attentiveness as a prerequisite of secure, productive, and organized modern living. Crary then argues that an appearance of inattention is an equally necessary aspect of the ‘delirious operation’ of modernity (Crary 1999: 13), allowing – and indeed requiring – the modern subject to shift attention across an apparently endless stream of new ideas, new configurations of the world, and to simultaneously leave behind the obsolescent residues of progress and transformation, whatever their affective pull on the subject her/himself. Crary’s argument tessellates usefully with Williams’s earlier formulation of structures of feeling, in that it suggests a formation of the feeling subject, although it prioritizes the immediacy of individual attention and inattention above the long-term structures of feeling attributed to communities. Crary argues that the attentiveness of an individual is always susceptible to moments of disruption, to shifts, fragmentations, and transformations. A structure of attention drawing on these contested regimes of phenomenological relationship with society therefore refers to a paradigm of research that expects to see change, inconsistency, and random incoherence, but

The idea of Hong Kong 67 which none the less clusters its findings around forms of attention which seem to prevail in modern urban spaces and environments. In 2004 an internet chat host, Kevin Sinclair ‘On the Spot’, asked online readers of the South China Morning Post to contribute some thoughts on their idea of Hong Kong. He asked specifically for good things rather than bad, but he was, basically, asking for residents to pay attention to the city: Welcome, Chatmates. Today, I’ve challenged you to tell me some good things about Hong Kong. Give me examples of some of the things you love about our city. They don’t have to be brilliant ideas or well-thought-out essays, just some thoughts about what aspects of Hong Kong attract you, make you smile, cause you to laugh, make you shake your head in wonder. The responses mentioned lifestyle, organization, access to technology, and everyday engagement with iconic places (morning walks on the Peak, commuting on the Star ferry, taking a slow beer by the harbour, going to the races). The comments encapsulated two of the structures of attention that have been identified across this research process in Hong Kong: aspiration and everyday life. Aspiration is connected to the idea of the city as a place in which dreams are manufactured and fulfilled. It is tied to social status, access to consumption and lifestyle choices, and material self-fulfilment It is also related to the predominant Hong Kong cinematic narrative of rags to riches through hard work, and it is encapsulated visually by the manufactured and built beauty of an urban environment. Everyday life is closely related to aspiration in the attention to distraction, which Hong Kong respondents appear to value in their descriptions of the city. Everyday life is also very much part of the mediated modern world referred to in Crary’s account of attention and inattention, and media theorists’ descriptions of mundane media usage (see Silverstone 1994). Paddy Scannell (1996) relates audience consumption to sincerity (a mis-recognition of nostalgia), but also to dailiness, or ‘everyday life’. Dailiness is central to the chat show host’s invitation to pay attention to Hong Kong, and – given the apparent lifestyle and socio-economic status of the South China Morning Post online readers – attracts aspirational forms of paying attention. The third structure of attention is nostalgic, which manifests itself in different guises as people talk about their idea of the city. Nostalgia is commonly understood as a sense of loss, often in relation to childhood, or places of personal significance. The phenomenon is also usefully glossed as a false description of the remembered past in order to displace traumas of the actual present. This usage captures the links running between all three structures of attention. Arjun Appadurai describes ‘nostalgia for the present’ as already a feature of mass marketing: a ‘stylized presentation of the present as if it has already slipped away’ (Appadurai 1996: 77–8). Nostalgia underlies many of the contradictions in the consumption of postcolonial Hong Kong by indigenous, European, and first, second, and third-generation post-war migrant Hong Kong residents, and by visitors, from the mainland or from outside Greater China:

68 Stephanie Hemelryk Donald [my iconic places . . .] One is the China Bank, Shanghai Bank, one of course is the Clock Tower at Tsimshatsui, that’s the landmark. When we are little, in primary schools or high schools, will meet friends at Tsimshatsui under the Clock Tower . . . at the Five Flags, everybody knew it, you didn’t have to describe, just tell them the name . . . In the old days, ten to thirty years ago, they (the tourism industry) always used the fishermen village, Stanley, Aberdeen, because that showed the poor side of HK. It caught the foreigners’ eye and that’s how they saw Hong Kong: people in the boat make their living by catching fish, poor, just like ‘San Pan’ from Nancy Kwan’s Taipan. It happens in Tsui Hark’s films as well. They also used Stanley and Kowloon City, before they tore down the old buildings there were a lot of very unique kinds of places, and they hid a lot of prostitution. Kowloon City is a public garden now, and new visitors just want to look at Chungking building . . . (Indigenous university professor) Hello Kevin. Thanks for giving me the chance to set out some things I love about Hong Kong. It’s a challenge. There’s the efficiency of the place. There’s the can-do spirit even in the worst of times (and let’s be honest, the reaction during the SARS crisis was nothing short of amazing as groups such as Fearbusters showed). Great things? Watching my sons playing mini-rugby on a Sunday morning. Watching my daughter in her school plays. The ride on the Star Ferry early on a weekday morning; one of the very best commutes in the world. If I ever had to leave Hong Kong, here’s three things I would miss. The view over the Lamma Channel from my flat on a misty morning. The fact that Hong Kong is undoubtedly one of the safest places in the world for residents and visitors. The convenience of living in one of the most vibrant, lively and well organized cities in the world. The long distance walks, with my personal favourite being from Stanley to Chai Wan along the Wilson Trail. (British HK tourism official and resident) These two opinions are from professional men in their late forties, both with a great deal of knowledge about Hong Kong’s image industries (tourism and film respectively) and both with a commitment to the city as their home. There is a difference, however, in their attention to the city. The first respondent remembers the iconography of Hong Kong through a nostalgic return to his youth and then to a somewhat critical take on foreign (British) approaches to tourism in the 1970s and early 1980s. The second writer is upbeat about the current lifestyle he enjoys, but his praise – both personal and professional, given his position as a senior official in the tourism industry – is couched in a nostalgic statement of predicted loss, a nostalgia for the present ‘if I ever had to leave Hong Kong’. Presumably, as a British-born Hong Kong resident, there is a possibility that one day he might indeed have to leave. So the attention paid to the city weaves everyday life, memory, and its nostalgic manifestation together with the determined aspirations of a global city, living, none the less, with what a Hong Kong-based cultural studies scholar

The idea of Hong Kong 69 described at a research seminar as a ‘very deep, very very deep socio-political uncertainty’.

CINEMA AND THE IDEA OF HONG KONG Hong Kong’s city-wide aspirations are focused on being understood and consumed as a world city on the West Pacific Rim, a globally significant geopolitical area that encompasses Greater China, Japan, South East Asia, and Australasia. It is differentiated from the more widely discussed ‘Pacific Rim’, which, of course, includes the western cities of the United States. In cinematic terms, the mythological and imaginary power of the US cities on the Rim is extremely well understood, and indeed has had global cultural purchase for a century. Shanghai audiences were watching the American city on film in the 1920s, and the elision of the US city as apparent filmic location (Sydney was the actual location of some shoots and for design and post-production) and as ultimate iconic urban environment has been summarized in the conceit underlying the Matrix film trilogy (2000–03). The idea of Hong Kong is also, however, defined through urban-specific cinematic imaginaries that do not have the industrial overlay of Hollywood, but which none the less articulate a vision of the city that corresponds with the desires and perceptions of the permanent and visiting populations. Cinema needs identifiable and visually interesting locations for storytelling on film. Locations are chosen to support the tone, the coherence, and the emotive affect of a particular narrative or genre. As the cinematic presence of a particular location builds over time, it may become iconic, giving film-makers a shortcut to desired meanings and responses. But cities can borrow back their cinematic presence to re-invent and renew their urban identities (Enticknap 2001). Alan Blum argues that the ‘imaginative structure’ of a city may be understood as a cultural invention, that it indeed may be ‘nothing but a sign’ (Blum 2003: 26) – that cities are what they are owing to the artistic and cultural self-representations that they produce. Yet, argues Blum, cities are also environments where certain social functionalities must prevail (communications, transport, work, trade), and where different contexts provoke different problem-solving responses from the collective city population (Blum 2003: 40–1). Blum describes this version of the development and maintenance of urban identity as a dialogue. In the complexity of a city, and within the challenge of a regional dialectic, dialogue should be understood more as a conversation among competing voices, interests, producers, and consumers of a shared cinematic identity. The stories of cinema, in so far as they pay attention to the location, are contributors to such a conversation. In cinema, the idea of the city is explored in narratives, iconic structures, colour systems, local characters, and dramatic tension. These stories epitomize particular cultural histories and contemporary social formations as much as they present images of beautiful and iconic locations. Jackie Chan, a transnational film star and official tourism ambassador for Hong Kong, is a world-famous character, with strong local credibility. He has been described as the ‘best side of the city. He works

70 Stephanie Hemelryk Donald hard, he is comedic and he is really honest’ (Law Kar, Hong Kong Film Archive, interview, 2003). He was also the actor whose films, particularly the Police Story series, made the most humorous and ironic comments on Britain’s 1984 agreement to leave the colony by 1997. One could contend therefore that Chan, far from being the bland face of Hong Kong, owes his enduring popularity among older Hong Kong residents, and indeed metonymic status as ‘the best side of the city’, not only to his skills as a performer but also to his previous, comedic attention to the idea of a postcolonial Hong Kong. When asked to describe the character of Hong Kong, the generation of filmmakers who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s – Mabel Lee, Fruit Chan, Derek Yee, Ann Hui – look back on their youth, which ranges from privileged days at Hong Kong University in the late 1960s to toughing it out as an apprentice in the 1970s studio system. These memories re-emerge through the emotional intensities of narrative and visual forms in their films. Mabel Lee’s City of Glass (1998) and Derek Yee’s C’est la vie, mon chérie (1993) both featured buildings that were due to be torn down shortly after shooting. In both cases the directors were articulating a grief at the apparent loss of tangible history, which would link them to their resistant colonial childhoods. As Derek Yee admitted in 2003: the inhabitants of the city are changing, the entire structure is changing too. So it’s hard to work out what’s happening. I was born in Hong Kong, I love this place, but sometimes I do feel disappointed, I don’t feel as good as before. It was sad but when we were still a colony, we would long to have our own people ruling in our own home, but now . . . well, it’s very paradoxical. (Yee, interview, 15 September 2003) Yee’s paradox lies not only in the slip between autonomy and sovereignty, but also in the bitter realization that consuming the political present cannot replace the nostalgia of fighting for freedom as part of a shared youth and idealism. His perspective is peculiar to the forty-something Hong Kong intellectual who demonstrated against the British in the late 1960s and again in the 1970s but who has none the less been shaped by a Chinese past outside China. At the same time, there are heterogeneous modes of attention occurring from film to film, and from generation to generation of filmgoers. The Hong Kong of fisherfolk and Cantonese opera is the starting point for the nostalgia and aspirations of the 1950s generation of mainland migrants. For them and for their icon, Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong Tourism Board’s red junk logo, which combines references to the Chinese mainland, to Hakka fisherfolk migration, with a general narrative of rags to riches, makes perfect nostalgic and historical sense. For cosmopolitan directors like Mabel Lee, the junk is an inappropriate reference to colonialism. For her, Hong Kong resides in the memories of the elite university and the steps up Victoria Peak, all of which are memorialized in City of Glass. So the films compete and merge over time as they give structure to the image-capture of a city that is fast moving yet again towards something entirely different, perhaps an example of Crary’s ‘disintegration(s) of modernity’ (Crary 1999: 13).

The idea of Hong Kong 71 The distillation of everyday experience through the past and the future is a task common to film narrative and tourism marketing, and is clearly seen in the making of place identities and cinematic locations. Everyday life is understood, by local tourism professionals in Hong Kong and Sydney, as a reference to authenticity and lifestyle. This again underlines the close relationship between the structures of attention mediating and maintaining the idea of Hong Kong. In tourism literature, however, everyday life is thought of as ‘ordinariness’ and, rather unfortunately, ‘shallowness’ (McKercher and Chow 2001). This academic reading better describes the supposedly anti-cultural interest of mainland Chinese arrivals to Hong Kong. In MTR trains at the mid-autumn Festival 2003, there were many mainland tourists in Hong Kong, taking advantage of the easing of visa requirements in China and time off in the recently created golden week holiday. Cantonese-speaking Hong Kongers fell quiet as the sound of loud and excited putonghua (official Chinese, Mandarin) filled the carriages. Everyday acoustics were suddenly different with the arrival of these visitors from Beijing, Guangzhou, and Tianjin. The immediate local reaction suggested that the everyday in Hong Kong is underpinned by nostalgia for the feared loss of language identity. This nostalgia appears to bind together the heterogeneity of Hong Kong’s generations and class groups. The silence of young commuters was echoed in the thoughts of film professionals and audiences (generally older people) who remembered the intimacy of early Cantonese films and compared them with the ‘shallowness’ and escapism of Taiwanese and Korean soaps and multilingual films of the 1990s and 2000s (interviews and vox-pops, Hong Kong Film Archive, September–October 2003). Tourism marketeers meanwhile use nostalgia deliberately to articulate the Chineseness of Hong Kong as a journey from fishing to finance, junk to skyscraper, indigenous village and shanty town to ‘Asia’s only world city’. In Hong Kong in 2001–03, the city fabricated a locational backdrop through the retention of a ‘real’ junk in the harbour when they decided to keep the red junk logo for the Tourism Board (HKTB). This is nostalgia with an aspirational edge. The contrast between the junk, a symbol of Hong Kong’s poverty-stricken origins, with the towering Bank of China, ‘another big modern building’ (Fruit Chan, interview, 16 September 2003), tells the story of contemporary success as much as it reminds international visitors of the East–West dichotomy that they have come to savour as an aftertaste of European occupation (interview, Rebecca Lai, Tourism Commissioner, Hong Kong, 2000). Among film-makers everyday life tends overall to be understood as social realism and domesticity. Fruit Chan and Ann Hui both consider that their work is about making the everyday available to audiences that either never see themselves represented on screen, or choose not to be aware of the underside of Hong Kong life. These film-makers mistrust nostalgia as a return to colonialism and an outdated and orientalist attachment to the underprivilege of indigenous (bentu) Hong Kong people. None the less their social realism plays into an overall sense of Hong Kong as a place with its own distinct past, rooted in a colonial experience that is not shared or understood by the Chinese mainland.

72 Stephanie Hemelryk Donald Not only do films support the process of urban mythologization, but this in turn leads to films taking on a quasi-touristic quality as people envisage a real place through the stories and the images to which they have had access through cinema. There are differences, of course, between the imagined city and the lived city, and the structures of feeling and perception that support these ideas must be nuanced to allow for such contradiction. Urban ‘pleasure’ includes good services, impressive facilities and exciting, worthwhile activities, and – crucially for a world city – a sense of being at the centre of things. That may be the nostalgic centre of colonial loss, the centre of finance and everyday Chinese creativity, or the heart of the aspirational migrant. But wherever and however that centre is claimed, much of the emphasis in tourism place-building is a common focus on marketing and quality assurance, and thereby on the management of expectations. Visitors must be attracted to a destination, and they must not be disappointed once they arrive. The tourism industry and related government agencies have therefore attempted to promote their cities by condensing their unique appeal into a city brand (see LePla and Parker 1999; Häussermann and Colomb 2003), and then having that brand supported through planning, infrastructure, and design initiatives. Cinema could arguably be both a help and a hindrance in this respect. How, for example, might a film culture such as Hong Kong’s – that excels at ghost stories, gangster thrillers, and loony comedy – support a vision of an aspirational, nostalgic, and everyday city that ‘works’ for residents, tourists, and foreign investment? The idea of the city as expressed in these films is witty, sharp, tough, and energetic. The branding campaigns of 1998–2003 pursued the same set of attributes: the City of Life! Live it: Love it and Asia’s World City. But, the very fact that so many campaigns have been started and discarded over a short period also hints at a distracted attention to the city, and possibly a recognition that Hong Kong is not the kind of place that can be easily summed up for international or domestic consumption.

PAYING ATTENTION AND THE CITYSCAPE In Peter Chan’s film Awakening Spring, paying attention to Hong Kong by smiting the frozen ground awakens the city and produces the perfect cityscape, where smiting is the originary act of that idealized spatial configuration of residents, buildings, trees, and air. This is a sentimental but cinematically adroit address to the six million souls who may have watched it on their televisions. The idea of Hong Kong is of a city increasingly becoming aware of itself, and learning to pay nostalgic but sharp attention to the minutiae of its character. The ideal cityscape is picture-perfect not because its emotions are undeveloped or inelegant but because it is so very composed – poised on a seemingly endless cusp of dramatic change. The city’s long history of multiple colonizations and migrations give both the city and its residents this cosmopolitan sophistication. It is that which informs the elegiac beauty summed up in Tony Leung’s screen performance and in his persona in general. But sophistication without power is not as politically effective as it is cinematically affective. Hong Kong has only passing strength in negotiations between East

The idea of Hong Kong 73 and West over territory, trade, and cultural priorities. Its political situation is fragile. It has, of course, been challenged in the streets by marches in July 2003 and 2004, protesting in particular against Article 23, a media-gagging piece of legislation in the Basic Law that had been shelved since 1997 but which was due to be passed in July 2003. The response of the city government was to refer to the ‘City of Life’ brand, suggesting that open demonstrations would lead Hong Kong to become a ‘city of turmoil’ as it had been during China’s Cultural Revolution. This did nothing to convince residents and commentators that the government was ready to align public feelings with a collective reassessment of the city’s image and the state of its residents’ nostalgic affiliation with the past, and indeed their nostalgic attention to the present, with their aspirations to everyday democratic practice. Ackbar Abbas (1997) has famously argued that the cultural history of Hong Kong is premised on sedimented city development, and so is always prone to ‘disappear’. The structures of attention that surfaced in this project suggest that the idea of Hong Kong is indeed premised on disappearance. Nostalgia, aspiration, and everyday life interweave to outline a city that knows itself very well, but which is aware of the possibility of the future overwhelming the present. The Angeline Jolie film Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) was partly set in Hong Kong and featured shots of the International Finance Centre in Central Hong Kong Island but the narrative was unrelated to Hong Kong’s past, its aspirations, or everyday life. As locals remarked, in a scene with Hakka people where she uses their boat, they are even talking the wrong kind of Chinese. In these international structures of attention, the cityscape is evacuated of its originary and life-giving energy. The smiting on the ground cannot happen in the wrong language and with the wrong kind of beauty. But, then again, such premonitions of loss also serve to highlight the striking emotional attention and distraction of the Hong Kong cityscape in 2003.

Part II Text

6 Paris underground Juan Goytisolo and the ‘Situationist’ city Andrew Hussey

In the past century, Paris, the former battlefield for the meaning of modernity, has been reproduced in posters, postcards and prints that are sent around the world as empty metonyms for art, sex, food, culture.1 The Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur, and Notre Dame are all part of a global visual culture, a Disneyfied baby language which distorts and destroys real meaning. This process is greedy and all-consuming. Not only monuments and churches but also the paintings of Degas and Manet, the photographs of Robert Doisneau or Willy Ronis, and the films of Marcel Carné or François Truffaut, have all been separated from their true context, reduced to cliché and commodity. Little wonder that in recent years it is the vibrant and unpredictable territories of Sydney, New York or London which have captured the world’s imagination. And little wonder either that in the gloomiest of recent times, as its city centre has been once again violated by state and capital, one former lover of Paris has likened the city to ‘the corpse of an old whore’.2 The argument of this chapter is, however, that, in literature, in politics and in real life, Paris can still be a city of the imagination, not just a museum. Its starting point is a reading of the novel Paisajes después de la batalla (Landscapes after the Battle), in which the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo invents a comic version of the city, whose inhabitants wake one morning to find that Arabic has replaced all signs in the familiar Latin alphabet. It follows from this incident that the hierarchical world of the city is literally turned upside-down, or inside-out. The European capital of modernity can be deciphered only by Third World immigrants, who are suddenly the cultural masters of the metropolis. In a reversal of the well known Spanish dicho (or proverb) that ‘Africa begins in the Pyrenees’, the narrator of the novel observes that ‘Africa now begins at the boulevards’ (Goytisolo 1987: 31). Parisians themselves are literally lost in a ‘babelic confusion’ (Goytisolo 1987: 31). Interestingly, Goytisolo also describes an imagined Paris that is very clearly based on scenes in the changing city at the cusp of the 1980s, with the focus in particular on the streetscape of the deuxième arrondissement. The original illustration for the Spanish edition of the book is a collage by Eduardo Arroyo of métro tickets, maps, flyers, taken randomly from everyday experience of these streets. The novel itself is, however, the very opposite of the kind of realist montage which this illustration suggests: it is rather Paris as a hallucinatory labyrinth, a

78 Andrew Hussey compendium of nightmarish tensions, needs and desires. Julián Ríos sardonically describes the book in his text La vida sexual de las palabras (The Sexual Life of Words) as a ‘guerrilla manual of urban warfare’ and a ‘cynical invitation to bestiality and “paedophilia”’ (Ríos 1991: 31; my translation).3 It is also – and this is perhaps the most disturbing fact of all – hilarious and terrifying in equal measure. This unsettling strategy is entirely in keeping with a writer whose main theme is the displacement of cultural and geographical identity. Goytisolo’s stated project is to destabilize fixed notions of identity, especially European or Spanish identities which he associates with religious or political cultures of control (Goytisolo 2003a: 95–105). Goytisolo is these days praised as a great writer in Madrid and across the Spanish-speaking world. One of the reasons for this status, it is often argued, is that Goytisolo has probably done more than any other living Spanish writer of his generation to uncover the plural and sometimes taboo identities which make up contemporary notions of Spain and the legacy of Spanish linguistic and cultural identity. This at least is the view, for example, of Paul Julian Smith who has related Goytisolo’s description of Paris to the realist cityscapes painted by Antonio López, the architectural work of Santiago Calatrava and the writings of the urban theorist Manuel Castells. What brings these apparently unrelated artists and thinkers together, says Smith, is that they each engage with a theorized form of modernity which is shaped and defined by a specific and intimate urban milieu. From this position, Smith argues that the construction of Spanish identity and its relation to the larger, more hybrid world of ‘la Hispanidad’ is founded upon local identities (Smith 2000: 82). These themes are undoubtedly true and a major political issue in the post-Franco, postcolonial Spanish-speaking world. The first aim of this chapter is, however, to turn the reader’s gaze directly back towards Paris, or rather Goytisolo’s constructed version of the city. More specifically, I wish to consider the relation between Goytisolo’s invented Paris and possible theoretical frameworks which shape this construction. Most notably, between 1954 and 1956, Goytisolo was for a short time a follower of Guy Debord, who would later become famous as the author of La Société du spectacle. In particular Goytisolo was close to Debord during the late 1950s, when he was developing his theories of ‘psychogeography’ as expounded first in the journals Les Lèvres nues, Potlatch and, later, the journal Internationale situationniste. Goytisolo was also a participant in the ‘psychogeographical’ experiments conducted by the members of the group around Debord, who were first named the Lettriste internationale (1953–57) and who would become the Internationale situationniste (1957–72) (Goytisolo 1990: 123; also author interview with Goytisolo, Tangiers, 16 August 2004).4 In his analysis of Landscapes after the Battle in his book Significant Violence, Bradley C. Epps (1996), in one of the rare references to Situationists in Goytisolo criticism, cites the remarks on Debord and the Lettristes made by Goytisolo in his memoirs, Forbidden Territory. In this section of his memoirs, Goytisolo recalls that he met Debord and his then companion Michèle Bernstein on his second trip to Paris in 1954 and that:

Paris underground 79 the subtle dovetailing of their tastes and mine, strengthened with the passage of time, conferred a baptismal, initiating value on that first tour with them around districts that I would soon assiduously trawl on my own: that compact, aged, broken-down Paris, shot through by canals, viaducts, railways, and rusty underground arches. (Goytisolo 1990: 123) Goytisolo goes on to say that his later love and admiration for the Islamic world have their origins in his explorations, in the company of Debord and Bernstein, of a Paris that lay beneath the spectacular surface of monuments and commerce. In his reading of Landscapes after the Battle, Bradley C. Epps takes this as his cue to indicate that Debord’s ideas on the city perhaps offered to Goytisolo a method for making ‘a map of the unmappable’, that is to say, the city of Paris which ‘cannot be represented by established codes or sewn together in an identifiable pattern’ (Epps 1996: 362). Surprisingly, however, Epps does not develop this point any further, although his analysis of the novel – he explains at some length – is driven by a need to explore and explain its ‘political’ content. My overall aim in this chapter is, in contrast, to locate Goytisolo’s encounter with Debord and the Situationists in a specific historical and theoretical context before making any consideration of the possible political meanings encoded in Landscapes after the Battle. Although it is consistently entertaining, Landscapes after the Battle is also a difficult and deliberately elliptical text where any fixed or stable meaning is elusive. For this reason, it has often been described as a ‘postmodern’ novel, apparently fulfilling all the criteria of an unreliable narrator, lack of plot, authorial trickery and a random design that all too often apply to this dated genre. One commentator has even described the novel – quite ludicrously – as a ‘structuralist text’ (Braun 1989: 15). My argument here, however, is that Goytisolo is indeed the very opposite of a model ‘postmodernist’ novelist. Throughout his career his political journalism has clearly demonstrated his distance from ‘postmodern’ Marxism: his straightforward discussion of issues and debates concerning the Third World, war, terrorism and racism is indeed informed with a moral and theoretical severity which is entirely alien to his postmodern contemporaries. This rigour is perhaps at odds with the comic sensibility revealed in his novels, but the level of political commitment, I would argue, remains the same. More precisely, as Goytisolo himself puts it, he writes ‘always for provocation and always for effect’ (author interview, Tangiers, 2004). It is therefore no accident that Goytisolo was, at one stage, a committed member of Debord’s inner circle and sympathetic to the Situationists, a group who consistently stood apart from the currents of the French left which drifted into postmodernist theory throughout the 1960s and 1970s.5 More to the point, Goytisolo’s writing, as a journalist or novelist, is defined not only by its form but also by its content. This is a practice clearly at some remove from the empty ‘antinovels’ produced by many of his postmodernist contemporaries. Although, like Surrealism or Communism, the word ‘psychogeography’ has long since entered the cultural language of our era (the British Airways in-flight magazine

80 Andrew Hussey even has a column called ‘psychogeography’), the term was first defined and used with a subversive political purpose. The original series of encounters between Goytisolo and the Situationists was between 1954 and 1957, when the term still had this meaning. The first question this chapter asks is, how did this definition come about? The second question is to what extent ‘psychogeographical’ methods have been integrated or reconfigured in Goytisolo’s vocabulary in Landscapes after the Battle. The third question, which arises from this issue, is what this process might say about the recent cultural history of Paris, or indeed the European city. It is, finally, from this perspective that this chapter will consider the potential and possible ‘political’ content of Goytisolo’s textual cityscape. This chapter will then ask to what extent Goytisolo’s representation of Paris in Landscapes after the Battle, influenced directly and indirectly by the Situationists, can be said to constitute a true reframing of urban experience rather than, as many critics have suggested, a refracted and therefore merely literary gesture. The origins of the term ‘psychogeography’, as with the term ‘Situationist’ itself, are famously obscure. Guy Debord first used it in print in his article ‘Introduction à une critique de la géographie urbaine’ in a 1955 edition of Les Lèvres nues, a journal published by Belgian surrealist fellow-travellers who were also friendly to the proto-Situationists. He attributed the coinage of the term to an ‘illiterate Kabyle’ (who regularly sold dope to Debord and his comrades in the rue Xavier-Privas).6 The determining feature of ‘psychogeographical’ activity in all its forms was that it was both rigorous and aleatory. This is how Debord first describes it: Psychogeography addresses itself to the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. The adjective ‘psychogeographical’, which retains a certain pleasing ambiguity, can therefore be applied to the results of their influence on human feelings and indeed to any situation or activity which might reflect the same spirit. (Debord 1981a: 5) ‘Psychogeography’ was a game, or series of games, in which the participants set out to create an atmosphere that had the power to disrupt the routine and functions of everyday life. Drink, drugs, music, boredom, despair, fear, and awe all had a role to play. Not long after Debord had first used the term, the Lettriste internationale, with Debord at the helm, began making maps of the city that were intended as a record of real, lived activity. The texts of Mémoires, made by Debord in 1953, were an exemplary form of this sort of map, which brought disparate elements of everyday life in the city (advertising, snatches of songs, overheard conversations) alongside arbitrary journeys through Paris. This subjective mapping of Paris also owed much to the poetic adventures of Baudelaire and the Surrealists, the sublime dreamscapes of De Chirico and Claude Lorrain. All the above, most significantly, were exemplary illustrations of the play between light and dark, image and illusion, which constituted a

Paris underground 81 ‘psychogeographical’ encounter with urban space. It was indeed the deliberate pursuit of this form of ‘constructed situation’ that constituted the earliest documented form of ‘Situationist’ activity. The most important (and highly theorized) form of these ‘situations’, and the defining inspiration behind these maps, was the practice of the dérive, or drift. This was a game in the course of which members of the Lettriste internationale, usually drunk, would float across Paris, launching commando raids against the city they saw as a capitalist work camp. The first dérives were partly provoked by a transport strike in Paris, which inspired the Lettristes to take taxis on pointless journeys across the city, stopping only to buy wine along the way. Other dérives were motivated by pleasure as much as theory. The Lettristes would, for example, walk to the rue de Chalon behind the Gare de Lyon, then the site of a burgeoning Chinese community, to eat cheap food, or they would dérive to Saint-Paul in the Marais, then predominantly a Jewish or working-class district, to eat salted anchovies. This activity was given its guiding theory in the most concrete form when, in 1953, Guy Debord scrawled the slogan ‘Ne Travaillez Jamais’ (‘Never Work’) on a wall of the rue Mazarine. This was meant both as a statement of intent and as a demarcation line, signalling a frontier between the mercantile Right Bank and the sovereign utopia of endless play which the Lettristes had declared on the Left Bank.7 The Lettriste headquarters was the café Chez Moineau on the rue du Four and Debord greatly prized the work of the Dutch photographer Ed van der Elsken, who had captured the daily life of the Lettriste in his books Love on the Left Bank and Paris! Fotos 1950–1954. The first objective of Lettriste ‘play-tactics’ (Andreotti 2002) was to blur the distinction between meaning and function in the city. At one point the Lettristes urged in their journal Potlatch that the métro should be open to pedestrians, that pharmacists should sell cigars and that street lighting should have an on–off switch. The aim was to disrupt the organization of the city to new and more passionate meanings. The dérive paralleled another technique currently being presented by the Lettristes and which they called détournement. Literally translated from the French this term means ‘diversion’ or ‘rerouting’. It also carries nuances which are closer to terms such as ‘hi-jacking’, ‘kidnapping’, ‘corruption’, and ‘theft’. This appealed to the Lettristes as a way of describing their game of stealing art by plagiarizing and stealing ‘pre-existing aesthetic elements’ to make new work entirely disconnected from the original (Debord and Wolman 2002). The objective of the dérive was to détourne the city in the same way. In his essay ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ Ivan Chtcheglov argues precisely in these terms for a city whose shape is determined by the subjective vision of those who live in it or who journey through it, rather than the artificial demands of work, capital, leisure. The duty of the ‘psychogeographer’, as defined by Chtcheglov, was to excavate the traces of past experiences in the city in order to give them new meanings: All cities are geological, you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed

82 Andrew Hussey landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. (Chtcheglov 2002: 2) The Situationists aimed, through the practice of the dérive, actively to engage with and document the ‘murky, intertwining behaviours’ of everyday life (McDonough 2002: 241–67). The maps they began to produce at this stage were the direct corollary of this ambition. In early Lettriste or Situationist texts on the city, aerial photographs of Paris are constantly placed alongside and in opposition to maps of the city made by those who live in it. Guy Debord’s Guide psychogéographique de Paris (Discours sur les passions de l’amour) of 1956 is also an aerial map. It is, however, made out of fragments of a deliberately vandalized map of Paris (this map was the Blondel la Rougery, Plan de Paris à vol d’oiseau of 1956). The fragments are connected by a series of arrows which point the map reader towards an infinite set of journeys, directed entirely by the subjective desire of the map maker. (In this case the map charts Debord’s wandering through the city in pursuit of erotic fulfilment.) One of the most potent symbols on this and other of Debord’s maps was that of the plaques tournantes, or turntables, to be found at railway and métro stations, and which offered an ever-changing invitation to random journeys through the city. For the Situationists, the plaque tournante in the underground city was the very emblem of a counter-narrative to the city of spectacle (Debord 1981a: 5). It was indeed crucial that Situationist maps were read at street level or in the Paris métro: the twin axes of the urban labyrinth where visibility is limited to immediate surroundings. What was most important about this mapping of the city for Debord was that it privileged the contingent and fugitive vagueness of experience of space in the city. Most important, Debord and the Situationists saw the twentieth-century city, and especially Paris, as the battleground between ‘actors and spectators’, the ‘organizers’ and the ‘organized’. Resistance to this condition, and victory in this conflict, was the real meaning that the Situationists sought in the city. This much was later theorized by Debord in his 1967 book La Société du spectacle as the necessary ‘negation’ of the spectacular society where ‘everything that was once truly lived had moved into representation’ (Debord 1967: 1; my translation). The practice of ‘psychogeography’, which preceded this theoretical position, was both a necessary and potent method for disrupting the false continuity of the spectacular urban environment. Making maps of the Situationist city, the imagined utopia which could be glimpsed in ‘psychogeographical’ practice, was therefore, in every sense, the necessary prelude to revolutionary change. The emblem of the plaques tournantes is also one of the central motifs in Landscapes after the Battle. Goytisolo expounds upon it most fully in the section subtitled ‘In the Paris of Forking Paths’. Here the narrator describes a visit to the Bonne Nouvelle métro station and the possibilities the system opens up in the underground city. More specifically, the métro is described as a compendium of possible journeys: ‘vast and rich in possibilities: ramifications, intersections, connecting

Paris underground 83 points, one-way journeys, roundabout itineraries, parabolas, half-circles, ellipses, dead ends’ (Goytisolo 1987: 87). The métro also contains the history and future of the city. ‘To examine the map of the metro system,’ the narrator says, ‘is to yield to memory, to escape, to delirium; to accept utopia, fiction, fable: to visit the monuments, the abominations, the horrors of the city, without ever having to leave home’ (Goytisolo 1987: 87). The narrator himself rarely leaves the area known as Le Sentier. This district traverses the historic and commercial centre of Paris but is still largely unknown to the thousands of Parisians and foreign visitors who cross it every day. The western edges of the district are criss-crossed by the nineteenth-century passages that so fascinated Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists; but the triangular formation of Le Sentier, from rue D’Aboukir to Place du Caire, is today mainly known as the heart of the Parisian textile industry. The writer spends his days in the porno cinemas of this district. (These flourished in Le Sentier until they were swept away by the video boom of the late 1980s.) Or he spends his time lingering around public parks, constructing paedophile daydreams on the model of Charles Dodgson. In his journal, which we are never sure whether to believe, he describes the chaos created if the citizens of Paris were to wake up one day to find that – in an apparently perfectly executed act of Situationist détournement – all signs in the Roman alphabet have been replaced by Arabic, with messages in Farsi, Kurdish, Turkish and all dialects of Arabic. The first sign of this process, the writer tells us, is the appearance of street graffiti in Arabic script on the walls of the district. Then street signs, advertising and even the familiar décor of the Parisian café and the local McDonald’s are, in Goytisolo’s words, ‘de-Europeanized’ (Goytisolo 1987: 34). Surprisingly, most commentators on Landscapes after the Battle have thus far focused on the ludic and literary nature of this reversal rather than suggest any political content. Lucille Braun (1989), for example, sees this movement also as an essentially literary shift. She describes the territory the novel covers as a textual game in which the author dissolves the distinction between author and character to create a third self-generating text. It is true that Landscapes after the Battle is full of texts. The book indeed consists of seventy-seven apparently random fragments, which alternatively ape the style of a newspaper, a scientific journal, the poetry of Sufi mystics, street graffiti, a paedophile porno magazine and a terrorist manifesto. Each section is given an elliptical headline, which (in the best Lettriste tradition) may or may not give a true indication of its contents. These texts also have their own autonomous life. The reader is hardly surprised when the narrator of the novel is blown to pieces by fictional terrorists that he has himself created. The unifying feature of all of these texts is, however, the unstoppable movement of city life. The narrator, confronted with this movement, is accordingly unable to give any coherent meaning to these texts. To this extent, he resembles Michel de Certeau’s ‘ordinary practitioners of the city . . . the Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they are able to write without being able to read it’ (in Corner 1999: 231). His textual blindness has, however, another dimension.

84 Andrew Hussey Most significantly, the narrator also describes himself as ‘transparent’, ‘like a camera’ (Goytisolo 1987: 136), disconnected from the movement of the streets, their history and their meaning. Like the first Situationist ‘psychogeographers’, the narrator seeks to reintroduce the living subject back into the city by a deliberate process of alienation, negating the spectacular city before reinventing it. Psychogeography for Debord was a systematic provocation and deliberate disconnection in the name of total freedom: ‘The production of psychogeographic maps . . . can clarify certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness, but complete insubordination’ (Debord 1981a: 9). The city uncovered, or excavated, in this ‘psychogeographical’ practice is – as Goytisolo himself put it in his account of his encounters with Lettristes – the ‘allogenic, postcolonial, barbarized Paris of Belleville or Barbès, a Paris that has nothing cosmopolitan or cultivated about it, but on the contrary is uncouthly foreign and illiterate’ (Goytisolo 1990: 107). This city is, for Goytisolo, ‘fluid’ and ‘feverish’, a ‘dense and everchanging territory . . . already going by Byzantium time’ (Goytisolo 1987: 98). The narrator describes his own quartier as a mongrel chaos ‘not yet subject to a rigorous process of disinfection and control’ (Goytisolo 1987: 99). As he makes a larger textual map of Le Sentier it is as a necessarily fragmented structure, a plaque tournante pointing in all directions at once. As he maps the city, the narrator also aims to break down the synoptic totality of the urban fabric. His maps, however, do not show the way out of the labyrinth, but only draw the narrator deeper into it. Like the Situationists, the narrator seeks to make visible the invisible currents that flow through the city, below the surface of the spectacular society, and which are its true guiding principles. Most important, the Situationist city revealed in this ‘psychographic map’ of the city is not merely a theoretical space – the refutation of ‘the abstract space of academic geography’ (Sadler 1999: 31). Rather, for the narrator and Goytisolo, it is an active weapon in the struggle to determine who speaks through the city. Like a nineteenth-century anarchist, a contemporary terrorist, or indeed a Situationist, the narrator in Landscapes sees monumental Paris as a spectacular matrix of signs and symbols in the service of authority and control. And this is why he dreams of their annihilation. It is also important to note that Goytisolo’s construction, or rather deconstruction, of Parisian city-space (the term ‘deconstruction’ is used here in a literal Situationist sense of ‘wrecking’ the city), is as the locus of resistance as well as domination. Interestingly, the final sections of Landscapes are written away from the city, in Kreuzberg, the predominantly Turkish district of what was then West Berlin. From this position of real rather than metaphorical exile, the narrator describes his ‘literary ideal’ as ‘the wandering Sufi dervish’ (Goytisolo 1987: 123), the drunken mystic who uncovers the universal truth that all men are divine and insignificant. The writer dreams obsessively of Paris, wrecked and defeated, apparently overwhelmed by the Islamic hordes which have been Europe’s defining ‘other’ for more than a millennium: ‘I walk amid a landscape of ideological ruins: smashed busts, fallen statues, shattered columns, remains of architraves and friezes devastated by a cataclysm, a sudden fierce invasion’ (Goytisolo 1987: 123).

Paris underground 85 ‘The construction of situations begins on the ruins of the modern spectacle,’ wrote Guy Debord in his first address to the Situationist International in 1958 (Debord 1981b: 43). In the same way, the narrator of Landscapes after the Battle argues that the sacking of Paris will be its salvation. This is indeed an argument made by Goytisolo himself in a short essay called ‘París, capital del siglo XXI’ (‘Paris, Capital of the Twenty-first Century’) in El bosque de las letras. In this text he revisits the city theorized and experienced by Baudelaire and Benjamin and declares that this city must be reinvented again if it is to occupy the universal status it held in the nineteenth century (Goytisolo 1995: 177–91). The reinvention of the city, he says, will also be a reawakening of forces already present in the city, its immigrants, outcasts, vagabonds, drinkers, losers, criminals, sex perverts, exiles, and outsiders; all those whose everyday experience of the city – in the language of the Situationist International – has been colonized by the forces of spectacular domination. Both Debord and Goytisolo, as map makers of late twentieth-century Paris, present an explicitly political reading of the contemporary European cityscape and the central symbolic role it plays in our civilization and culture. Goytisolo has openly acknowledged his debt to Debord with regard to this notion in an article where he praises the Situationist theoretician as one of the few truly important thinkers of the twentieth century (Goytisolo 2003b). More significantly, for both Goytisolo and Debord the destruction of the European city, at least in symbolic terms, is a necessary prelude to the creation of a new society. This is why and how the prevailing atmosphere of Landscapes after the Battle moves from something like a comic apocalypse to something like the atmosphere after a terrorist attack. With this in mind, it is perhaps unsurprising that the initial encounter between Goytisolo and the Lettriste internationale was the starting point for the long trajectory that led Goytisolo away from the conventional postures of the European left. This journey began with forays into the Arab cafés of the Parisian districts of Barbès and La Goutte d’Or, where he met his first illiterate, immigrant lovers, and culminated in a slow drift towards an understanding of and identification with the world of Islam. He traces this trajectory in Landscapes in the section entitled ‘From the hamlet to the medina’, observing that his version of Le Sentier has the ‘wondrous complex microcosm of the living cell’ like the Medina of an Arab city (Goytisolo 1987: 123). Appropriately enough, Goytisolo these days writes about the Arab world with an informed tenderness. His ideal cities are Istanbul, Marrakesh, and Tangiers (the city which Jean Genet famously called ‘the capital of treason’). Goytisolo has consistently described his primary literary motif as that of ‘betrayal’ (another notion which he acquired from Jean Genet) and which he applies to his political convictions as well as his aesthetic method. Through the 1990s he has written timely and important articles on Sarajevo, Algeria, Palestine, and Chechnya. At the same time, Goytisolo has deliberately made himself a stranger to European culture and in doing so has arguably become one of the few European writers best placed to provide insight into the religious and cultural conflicts of recent times. Unlike Jean Genet, Juan Goytisolo has never been able to make a case for terrorism.8 This does not mean, however, as I have tried to show in this reading of

86 Andrew Hussey Landscapes after the Battle, that strategies of opposition to the present social and world order, whether in real or imaginary forms, are futile in the post-9/11 world. Rather, I think, the opposite is true. Jean Baudrillard (2002), who is another indirect descendant of the Situationists, has indeed written that we can understand modern ‘spectacular’ terrorism only by recognizing the fact that all symbols invite their own annihilation. This makes it even more urgent that those who are writing the contemporary city can also imagine it in ruins.9 Those writers or historians who best glimpse the future – argued Guy Debord (1989) following Walter Benjamin – are those who are also able to stand in deliberate exile from that moment. This is precisely the authorial standpoint that Goytisolo acquired from Guy Debord, the Lettriste internationale, and those who were to become Situationists. Goytisolo has also acknowledged this in his memoirs, where he describes Debord as an ‘initiator’ and a ‘prophet’, and even goes on to describe Le Sentier itself as, like all Situationist activity, an act of ‘continuous creative improvisation’ (Goytisolo 1990: 107). This standpoint and this assertion alone are more than enough to justify reading Landscapes after the Battle alongside the Lettriste and Situationist texts which Goytisolo read as a young writer in Paris, and in whose development and composition he was a participant. More significantly, however, Goytisolo’s mapping of Paris in this novel, some forty years after his first encounter with the Situationists, takes place beneath the surface reality of commodity spectacle and illusion which Debord theorized and attacked with such energy throughout his career. The urban streetscape of Landscapes after the Battle is, in this sense, in the strictest Situationist terms, literally and metaphorically beyond the reach of the society of the spectacle. And it is indeed this aspect of the novel that makes this polyphonic clatter of dissident voices from the living city an authentically political work: the true and still dangerous voice, in fact, of Paris underground.

NOTES 1 2

3 4 5 6 7

This point has been a key theme in several relatively recent studies of Parisian cultural production (Sheringham 1996; Rifkin 1993; Prendergast 1992; Hazan 2003). This description was coined by the Paris-based artist and former Situationist Ralph Rumney on recent architectural projects in Paris around Les Halles and Bastille, with particular reference to the grands travaux of the Mitterand years. For more on urbanist projects in contemporary Paris see Rumney and Woods (2001), Laughland (1996), Chevalier (1999), and Hazan (2003). According to Juan Goytisolo himself, Ríos’s description of his book is the best and most accurate in any language (author interview with Juan Goytisolo, Café Maravillosa, Tangiers, Morocco, 16 August 2004). See in addition author interview with Michèle Bernstein, Normandy, 2000 (Hussey 2001: 106–7). Bernstein was Debord’s first wife and, as a member of the Lettriste internationale and the Situationist International, was a key figure in Situationist history. Debord was particularly scornful of the group around Philippe Sollers and the journal Tel quel (see Ffrench 1995: 5). Author interview with Michèle Bernstein, Normandy, 11 November 2000. For a colourful account of early Lettriste ‘play-tactics’ see Jean-Michel Mension (1999: 34–9).

Paris underground 87 8 9

See Jérôme Neutres (2003: 329–41) for a useful discussion of the differences between Genet’s thinking on terrorism and Goytisolo’s positions. See Paul Julian Smith (1989) for a discussion of Goytisolo’s and Baudrillard’s fascination with destruction.

7 Negotiations of London as imperial urban space in the contemporary postcolonial novel Sara Upstone The melting pot doesn’t melt. (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 158)

As early as George Lamming’s The Emigrants and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, the city of London has been a focus for postcolonial representations of urban space. Such representation, however, is not stagnant, and has altered significantly since the 1950s as new voices have emerged within postcolonial fiction. What may be loosely termed a second generation of British-born postcolonial authors have added a significant dimension to the exploration of the city in postcolonial terms. From Lamming’s The Emigrants to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, at the centre of postcolonial narratives has always been the relationship between the city and the migrant, the individual who arrives from elsewhere, who locates him or herself on the margins, outside a perceived dominant indigenous culture. London has a particular significance here, as an embodiment of the migrant’s desire to enter the imperial centre and be immersed in urban modernity where, for migrants, ‘it was the life of the city which called to them’ (Phillips and Phillips 1998: 383). Narratives produced in the service of capturing such a relationship imbue London with a sense of chaos, confusion, and dislocation resonant with postmodern accounts of urban space such as those by Edward Soja (2000), Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (2000), and Steve Pile (1999), that represent urban space as multiplicitous, unreadable and alienating. Yet as starkly realist in their representations of racial prejudice, the postcolonial migrant narrative also interrogates postmodernism’s free-play of possibilities with a sense of harshly delimited boundaries, inequalities, and violence. Here the postcolonial narrative reflects London’s status as an imperial city, where colonial prejudice has continued in the form of institutional racism, what Salman Rushdie famously referred to in relation to the police force as ‘that colonising army, those regiments of occupation and control’ (Rushdie 1991: 132). This sense of London as an even now imperial space challenges the migrant’s celebratory entrance into the city with a panoptic location that controls, orders, and monitors its inhabitants. Reaching its height perhaps under the oppressive antiimmigration policies of the Thatcher administration, such a city is embodied in

London as imperial urban space 89 works such as Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album, though London’s prompting of migrant chaos and alienation is also felt in the less vitriolic narratives of V.S. Naipaul, or in the work of the writers of Lamming and Selvon’s generation. I would contend, however, that since the mid-1990s a whole group of new voices, from a different perspective, have added themselves to the literary construction of postcolonial London, a group defined not by the trope of the traveller, or the migrant consciousness, but by what will be loosely termed here for the sake of convenience second-generation British-born experience. Such narratives answer the need, expressed by Paul Gilroy and others, ‘to engage with what it means to be “born here”’ within the specifics of a sharply defined, located urban identity (Procter 2003: 5). While this alternative narrative may to some extent have been foregrounded already by the work of Hanif Kureishi in particular, regarded as ‘the first major Asian or Caribbean writer to have been born in England’ (Sandhu 2003: 231), I would argue that it is only since the mid-1990s that such literature has developed with the strength to challenge the sheer number and popularity of migrant narratives. These include, but are not limited to, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black and My Once Upon a Time, Andrea Levy’s Never Far from Nowhere, Every Light in the House Burnin’, and Fruit of the Lemon, Patrick Augustus’s Baby Father novels, and Bernadine Evaristo’s Lara and The Emperor’s Babe. To explore such narratives is to investigate how British-born writers have transformed the representation of London as a postcolonial city. It is also to assert that such narratives have important relevance to how the role of ethnic minorities within the urban space now needs to be viewed. Yet as the migrant refuses to be so easily moved out of the frame, in order to move forwards towards such texts, it is first necessary for us to cast our attention backwards.

URBAN COALITIONS AND GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCE Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses in many ways seems to continue a tradition of literary representations of postcolonial relationships with urban space defined in terms of migrant consciousness. Shared with earlier narratives is both the sense of the migrant’s confusion and the presence of a neo-colonial, racist metropolitan police force indicative of a racially polarized city. Yet at points in his narrative Rushdie’s text suggests a complexity of urban interactions that belies such easy identification. I therefore return to this text as a possible starting point for divergence from the classic model of London migrant narratives, towards a more problematic interaction with the city. Rushdie’s narrative continually betrays any simplistic reading of the city as racially divided. In the communal uprising that dominates the conclusion of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie presents London as a space where power interactions cut across delimiting lines of race, gender, and class. Where opposition is being organized in the Brickhall Friends’ Meeting House ‘every conceivable sort of person’ comes together (Rushdie 1998: 413). When crisis finally erupts, differences are

90 Sara Upstone buried by a shared antagonism to official forces. In these terms, the status of London as an imperial city is transformed into an awareness of wider colonial patterns of order that crush any sort of difference. Rushdie’s description of the council estate at the centre of the riots is a representation focused not only on racism, but on the interaction of this prejudice with poverty and social deprivation: Low-cost high-rise housing enfolds him. Nigger eat white man’s shit, suggest the unoriginal walls . . . The towers stand up on stilts, and in the concrete formlessness beneath and between them is the howling of a perpetual wind, and the eddying of debris: derelict kitchen units, deflated bicycle tyres, shards of broken glass, dolls’ legs, vegetable refuse extracted from plastic disposal bags by hungry cats and dogs, fast-food packets, rolling cans, shattered job prospects, abandoned hopes, lost illusions, expended angers, accumulated bitterness, vomited fear, and a rusting bath. (Rushdie 1998: 461) While the council estate’s racist graffiti suggest Rushdie is well aware of the poor urban community’s tendency to turn to racism as an answer to its problems, such sense of multiple oppressions, and a coalition based on a shared response to these oppressions, represents a significant rewriting of the conventional readings of intractable divisions between the white urban working class and deprived migrant communities. Rushdie follows one short line of racism, nine words long, with one over seventy words long on the decay and decline that have allowed it to emerge on the estate walls. This clearly privileges wider social comment over the more obvious racial argument represented in earlier novels such as Lamming’s The Emigrants (see Sandhu 2003: 203–4). Rushdie’s list overwhelms us with image after image of the desolation of working-class life on an urban estate, producing through its narrative structure the same sense of lethargy, the overburdening, that its inhabitants face on a day-to-day basis. In Rushdie’s London, what Peter Marcuse terms enclaves rather than ghettoes – ‘voluntary clusters . . . in which solidarity provides strength’ – are no longer limited, as he would suggest, by ‘ethnicity’ (Marcuse 2000: 277). These distinctions have a significant effect that complicates divisions of insider and outsider in urban space, and problematizes any easy associations of London as neo-imperial city simply in terms of its treatment of its non-white inhabitants, offering concomitantly the possibility of cross-community resistance. Such an image is resonant with readings of later real-world urban uprising such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, where the fact that ‘everybody who differed from the white conservative model was excluded’ meant the possibility of a ‘rainbow coalition’ (Keil 1998: 35). At the same time, a different distinction is also being gestured towards. Ultimately not divided by race, The Satanic Verses posits an alternative urban division in terms of generational tensions. For the Sufyan family at the Shaandaar Café, the tension is not between themselves and white capitalism; indeed, they themselves profit from its aggressive economics, filling the bed-and-breakfast’s rooms with refugees – ‘five-person families in single rooms’ (Rushdie 1998: 264) – for valuable financial

London as imperial urban space 91 remuneration from the local authority. Instead, the battle is between parents and daughters, challenging gerontological privilege, but also standing as metaphor for the wider shift in how space is occupied, and how – in terms of the writer too – new voices interrogate and satirize the old. Hind and Muhammad’s children exist in a world that is as different from their parents’ existence as it is from the official London they exist beneath. They are ‘growing up refusing to speak their mothertongue’ rejecting their parents’ homeland of Bangladesh as it is comically renamed ‘Bungleditch’ (Rushdie 1998: 250, 259). Significantly, they are also refusing to stay silent about London’s inequalities. In defence of her locality, Hind’s and Muhammad’s eldest daughter, Mishal, ‘had developed the habit of talking about the Street as if it were a mythological battleground and she, on high at Chamcha’s attic window, the recording angel and the exterminator, too’ (Rushdie 1998: 283). She proclaims defiantly: ‘It’s our turf . . . Let ’em come and get it if they can’ (Rushdie 1998: 284). As an unseen migrant community underlies Rushdie’s palimpsest Thatcherite city, so from under the city’s interpretation through migrant consciousness emerges the interrogatory voices of a new generation of South Asian urbanites. If Rushdie diverges, therefore, from the classic migrant narrative, his generational distinctions, I would suggest, offer the greatest indication of where such alternative postcolonial readings of urban space might gain ground. In the relationship between the Sufyan parents and their children exists a transitional, liminal stage in ethnic minority identity that mirrors the status of Rushdie’s own novel in relation to such an issue. As a migrant, Rushdie here attempts to think beyond the realms of his own personal circumstances, and to situate a consciousness not of his own encounter with urban space, but of second-generation British-born experience. In focusing on generational difference, Rushdie’s novel indicates not only a literary theme, but also points directly to the consciousness of a new generation of authors, themselves as distinct from their migrant forebears, including himself, as the Sufyans are from their children.

BLACK BRITISH URBANITES In order to illustrate the important distinctions being made by such fiction, I would like to focus on two narratives that both exemplify and also at times question a new second-generation urban consciousness. Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, both first novels, epitomize a new generation of postcolonial urban literature centred upon London. As London-born authors themselves, Adebayo and Smith represent the closest interaction with such representation: second-generation Black Britons, born in the city, recounting the experiences of similarly constructed characters. In the case of both novels, racism and alienation are undoubtedly still represented, caught in Some Kind of Black in Dele’s confusion about his own identity – unable to separate his white girlfriend Andria ‘from the people out there’ (Adebayo 1997: 190) – and in the violent mistreatment of his sister; and in White Teeth in Irie’s attempts to come to terms with the complexities of her mixed-race background. What is more significant, however, is how both these writers echo Rushdie in

92 Sara Upstone complicating any distinct sense of racial divisions within London. As a diverse coalition riots in The Satanic Verses, so Dele is involved in a campaign against anti-racist policing after his sister’s unlawful arrest encompassing socialist campaigners as well as the black community, acknowledging ‘this connection was not exclusive’ (Adebayo 1997: 228). Like Rushdie, Adebayo complicates simple divisions by acknowledging the ‘poor white trash’ who live alongside the immigrant population, forced to accept that, though his race makes him more marginal than Andria in one sense, as an ‘Oxbridge man’ he is in others ‘more establishment’ (Adebayo 1997: 185). At the protest meetings where ‘there was no serious talk of culture, just of colour’ (Adebayo 1997: 198) race is seen by Dele simply to obscure the complexities of cultural identification: Dele sees the speakers as related to neither his immigrant father nor to what Dele refers to as ‘flesh and blood Africans’ (Adebayo 1997: 199). Drawn into the activities of the Thirty-threes, a gang involved in ‘black-on-white, black-on-black, they didn’t care’ (Adebayo 1997: 135), and where Dele’s campaign is exploited not by his white friends but rather by his new black colleagues, Adebayo indicates a city in which people’s individual interests clash with any simple racial solidarity. In the wake of violence, cultural groups strategically come together, but the meetings are filled with in-fighting and antagonism. Echoing Rushdie’s cross-cultural Brickhall community, in White Teeth Willesden is described as where ‘there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing’ (Smith 2000: 54). In the London school attended by the three central British-born characters of Irie, Millat, and Magid ‘they were Babelians of every conceivable class and colour speaking in tongues’ (Smith 2000: 252). And in the revelation of Irie’s white ancestry and her unborn child’s uncertain parentage comes the ultimate assertion of this unclear position: a child whose racial background will mirror the complications of the city into which he or she is born. Millat’s own gang, the Raggastanis, embody a city no longer divided on racial lines, instead reflecting a new strategic blackness, a ‘hybrid thing’ fusing Islam, Black Power, Bruce Lee, and US dress: Nike trainers and bandanas; all the children speak with Jamaican accents, ‘whatever their nationality’ (Smith 2000: 145). This is, as Henry Louis Gates Jnr asserts, a city in which black culture is – within urban youth at least – the culture of the mainstream (Gates 1999: 174). Here Adebayo and Smith represent Stuart Hall’s now famous proclamation of the ‘end of the essential black subject’ (Hall 1988: 28) with a particular urban provenance: James Procter’s position that any sense of a unified urban black identity constructed in opposition to a united white opposition has now become ‘untenable’ in the wake of ‘internal differences’ (Procter 2003: 211). In a postmodern statement that would resonate with Rushdie’s text, all identities are cultural constructions rather than natural connections that would survive any interrogation of their claims to authenticity. Interestingly, among Procter’s list of internal differences is the ‘generational’. Rushdie’s nod to this facet of city difference emerges in both Adebayo’s and Smith’s narratives as a pronounced distinguishing factor in urban identity. In Some Kind of Black Dele’s father must come to terms with the fact that his own children are ‘dual nationals’ (Adebayo 1997: 211), and resists his son’s Western interests and laments

London as imperial urban space 93 his disrespect for Nigerian culture. With characters involved in discussion as to ‘what had gone wrong with these first descendants of the great ocean-crossing experiment’, a distinction between ‘fathersons, oldyoung, bornthere-bornhere’, directly referred to as ‘second generation’, Smith’s text also makes distinction between migrant and British-born Londoner explicit (Smith 2000: 189, 190, 298). Millat’s and Magid’s mother, Alsana, dislikes other minorities, and is concerned about her children growing up around Archie and Clara’s mixed-race offspring. She fears Millat’s relationships with white girls as the possibility of ‘disappearance’ (Smith 2000: 282). Their father, Samad, feels the same loss as Dele’s father, children who ‘won’t go to mosque . . . don’t pray . . . speak strangely . . . dress strangely . . . eat all kinds of rubbish . . . have intercourse with God knows who . . . No respect for tradition’ (Smith 2000: 282). Yet Samad, unlike Dele’s father, acts on his loss, sending one of his sons to Bangladesh in the hope of instilling Muslim values. Extending Rushdie’s motif, difference is now a matter of age as much as skin colour.

LOCAL ALLEGIANCES AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE Such narratives do not simply echo Rushdie’s representation, they also extend it in a perhaps surprising direction. For while second-generation novelists use their second-generation characters to reject a simplistically racially divided London, they do not replace it with a postmodern sense of a space without fixed identities and of fluid subject positions celebrating movement and transience in the way Rushdie’s texts are so often identified as doing. Instead, in their focus on Procter’s ‘internal difference’ as an interrogation of racial unity, they establish locations filled with ever more subtle and narrow spatial allegiances. It is here, in this demarcated urbanity, that opportunities arise for further sophistication of postcolonial urban narratives. No longer divided simplistically by race between the migrant and indigenous population, Adebayo’s and Smith’s visions of London represent instead increasingly complex and localized affiliations. The very first line of White Teeth introduces a limited location within London – Cricklewood – which, more than the city as a whole, will define its characters’ experiences. Moving to her grandmother’s house, Irie feels ‘she was being whispered about in NW2’ (Smith 2000: 342). Almost the entire novel is limited to the north London that Zadie Smith, growing up in Willesden, is most familiar with. Indeed, the tribal nature of her characters betrays a localism that Smith, in interview, herself reveals: ‘I love London. It’s more like I can’t live without it. And it’s much more specific – it is the area I live in from about Willesden up to about Hampstead Heath and back’ (Smith 2004).While Millat’s gang are not racially united, they are instead drawn together by their north London location, and their belief in a fusion of African-American and Islamic culture. At McDonald’s, for instance, there are ‘black guards to keep out the blacks’ (Smith 2000: 143). Here it is economic difference, and not race, that divides the city. Adebayo’s text recounts this new sense of urban identity even more explicitly. London is represented not as a unified, monolithic, urban whole, but rather as sharply delimited by local alliances, where ‘eight hundred yards was a long distance’

94 Sara Upstone (Adebayo 1997: 131). In his second novel, the futuristic My Once Upon a Time, Adebayo goes even further in pursuit of such distinctions. The city split between ‘out west – the land of pukka postcodes, mansions by the load, boulevards for roads’ and the dilapidated, run-down south-east, ‘the crime side’ (Adebayo 2000: 7, 14). In Adebayo’s vision of the future, the past is referred to simply by its postcodes, firmly situating the subject within a sharply defined locality – ‘those SE13 days’ (Adebayo 2000: 34) – while the present too has become simply a list of alphanumeric abbreviations: ‘the SE11 main’, ‘the SW3 bridge’, ‘a motley but trouble-free selection from the SE10s’ (Adebayo 2000: 165, 28, 17). Instead of racial solidarity, Adebayo chooses to highlight the distinct divisions between divergent and often conflicting Black British urban identities, where ‘London was a bit more tribalistic than it used to be’ (Adebayo 1997: 104). Like Smith, Adebayo highlights his own personal affinity for such localized models, stating that he prefers the company of ‘second-generation West African-Brits’ (Adebayo: 2004). Referring to the novel’s title, Adebayo’s central character, Dele, recognizes himself as ‘some kind of black’ (Adebayo 1997: 190). This ‘kind of black’ recognizes a plethora of different Black British identities within London’s diverse communities. These include the divisions between Dele’s own Nigerian community and Afro-Caribbeans, the Jamaican Peckham and Dalston, and the Nigerians ‘resident off the Jubilee Line’ (Adebayo 1997: 180). Taking this further, there is also a significant class division within Dele’s own African community – between the cultural nationalists and what Adebayo refers to as the ‘cult-nat lites’ – which is directly tied to an urban dynamic: those who ‘had been brought up in the inner city but bought their first place in the suburbs’ (Adebayo 1997: 117). London is split not by race, but between the ‘Distinguished’ who live in the ‘lowernumbered’ postcodes – the poverty of the ‘low-cost black housing association studio flats at the Vauxhall end of Wandsworth Road’ and London’s East End – and the ‘upmarket restaurants in Fulham’ (Adebayo 1997: 46, 204, 187). This world reflects what Paul Gilroy has expressed as the ‘much more radically localised’ Black British experience (in Phillips and Phillips 1998: 386). Taken beyond Gilroy’s level, Adebayo and Smith identify such differentiation not just between cities, but within them. Identities are no longer racial; instead they are based on a complex dynamic of cultural, class, gender and generational difference that defines belonging to a particular location or group, itself localized. Adebayo’s choice of epigraph, from Vibe magazine’s Danyel Smith, that ‘young people are trading complex identities for more tribal affiliations’ indicates the intricacies of such representation. For while the new tribal identities are in fact a step forward from the simplification of black–white divisions in favour of cultural fusion, as a retreat from the postmodern position of the migrant to one that identifies firmly with locality, they are paradoxically a step towards more universalizing tendencies. While the migrant faces confusion in urban space, he also represents a constant state of unbelonging that, particularly in recent postmodern migrant narratives, has been seen to offer ironical possibilities outside racial and national identities. In contrast, while the British-born rejects simple identification with race, or a position as outsider, he has exchanged this position for new fixed identities at ever more

London as imperial urban space 95 narrow scales. This new fixity has implications for the narrative style of such second-generation fictions, a movement away from the fluidity of magical-realist description to textual strategies focused on the realistic and the representational that represent a return to the known, and to the certain. In this certainty emerges the awareness that the British-born is involved in constructing a new territorial battleground with its own absolute, and potentially destructive, classificatory dynamic.

SPATIALIZED RESISTANCE IN THE CITY Yet, in postcolonial terms, these new affiliations combine with an ownership of the city that holds important consequences for continued construction of London as imperial space, complicating the sense that such tribalism is only a negative phenomenon. As localized identities predominate, the ethnic community resists homogenization of their difference into an easily accessible, controllable, and definable form – what Procter asserts as the New Labour government’s desire to ‘silence these regional differences’ (Proctor 2003: 3) in the service of the construction of a nostalgic and illusory united nationhood. Moreover, with clear local identities, the second generation largely do not experience the migrant’s chaos and confusion: they challenge the very positioning of the ethnic community on the margins of urban society. In White Teeth the migrant reality of 1975 that preoccupies the first half of the novel is replaced in its second half with a narrative in which such distinctions no longer apply. The London-born generation are not limited in their movement around the city as their parents are, and racists become pathetic anachronisms like Mr Hamilton, presented as representing ‘a different era’ (Smith 2000: 146). When a racist begins to tell the children to ‘go back to their countries’, Smith cuts the narrative mid-sentence, so that it ‘found itself stifled’ (Smith 2000: 142), drifting into silence in this new urban reality. In the literature of these second-generation urbanites, those who would cast them as outsiders exist only as a trace, their words fading to blank space on the author’s page that will be overwritten with the strident voices of a confident black population. In such circumstances, the East London so feared in 1975 as the territory of the National Front is now re-characterized as home, epitomized in the Indian restaurant’s waiters, for whom the ‘furthest expedition East was the one they made daily, back home to Whitechapel, Smithfield’s, the Isle of Dogs’ (Smith 2000: 176). Both of Samad’s twins make a claim on north London through language, assuming not only its culture, but also its ‘North London slang’ (Smith 2000: 141). Tellingly, Magid, the twin who leaves, experiences none of his father’s dislocation on his return: he is still London-born, and his childhood allows him to quickly reclaim the city streets. Whereas the migrant approaches London from the position of a colonized mentality, the British-born minority is as likely to be the colonizer of London’s myriad pathways as colonized by its structure, exhibiting what Darcus Howe refers to powerfully and succinctly as an ‘ease of presence’ (in Phillips and Phillips 1998: 388). For Howe, the second generation maintains its roots, but also refuses to be hidden, no longer accepting that ‘to be noticed too much is to be a target’ (in Phillips

96 Sara Upstone and Phillips 1998: 388–9). Instead of Selvon’s migrants, read by Sukdhev Sandhu as living ‘hermetic, enclosed lives’ (Sandhu, 2003: 60), they instead invite confrontation. As Rushdie’s Mishal indicates the beginnings of this mentality, so Millat embodies such a relationship to urban space. Hence his relationship to the city’s danger: ‘Aged twelve, Millat went out looking for it, and though Willesden Green is no Bronx, no South Central, he found a little, he found enough. He was arsey and mouthy . . . a street boy, a leader of tribes’ (Smith 2000: 188–9). Irie, too, claims her own less antagonistic version of belonging, suggesting not only a postcolonial, but also a gendered, right to London’s urban space: Irie stepped out into streets she’d known her whole life, along a route she’d walked a million times over. If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves . . . through the high road – Mali’s Kebabs, Mr Cheungs, Raj’s, Malkovich Bakeries – she could reel them off blindfold . . . (Smith 2000: 393) Irie illustrates a detailed knowledge of the city that the migrant can never claim. Similarly, in Some Kind of Black, Dele may still face persecution by the police, but he exhibits none of the migrant’s alienation and uncertainty on the city streets. Instead, he displays an easy confidence in London’s public spaces, ‘perched in the small park by Russell Square, chatting over a cigarette and a drink with a friend’ (Adebayo 1997: 3). Rushdie must situate his characters in the imagined locale of Brickhall, a conflation of Brick Lane and Southall, to indicate a migrant’s dissociation from London reality, lack of knowledge of its real spaces. Both Adebayo and Smith display knowledge of the city that stakes an ethnic minority claim on its very real streets and districts. Their estates, Brixton’s ‘Angell Town’ and Harlesden’s Stonebridge, are real. Outside familiar landmarks, they are distinct from the migrants’ tourist geographies. Adebayo’s characters negotiate an accurate geography: ‘Up Tottenham Court Road, towards Goodge Street, taking a left into the School of Oriental and African Studies’ (Adebayo 1997: 12). The author’s details are those of a long-time Londoner. The Mr Kyscinski of Goldhawk Road, for example, indicates Adebayo’s knowledge of Hammersmith’s strong Polish community. For Smith, the plethora of place names within the first fifty pages – Cricklewood, Hendon, Swiss Cottage, Primrose Hill, Willesden – similarly act to mark an exact engagement with the city, with her own knowledge of the city’s cultural intricacies indicated in accurate reference to details such as the predominance of Australians in Willesden. Here I would like to challenge the celebratory discourse that so often surrounds the postcolonial act of renaming. For while Procter contends that there is radical significance in the renaming of parts of London in The Lonely Londoners, I would contend that such action in fact nevertheless indicates the need to claim the city, a ‘claiming’ that marks a need to appropriate that therefore marks a position of

London as imperial urban space 97 marginality. What Procter refers to as the creation of an ‘imagined cultural community’ in its ‘imagined’ status (Procter 2003: 55) reveals the absence of Howe’s ‘ease of presence’ in favour of the need to possess from outside, as an outsider: Selvon’s characters must rename London – Bayswater as ‘the Water’, Notting Hill as ‘the Gate’ – from their own Caribbean, migrant perspective in order to belong. Similarly, while Procter criticizes The Satanic Verses because of its desire to ‘disengage itself from the politics of locality and territory’ (Procter 2003: 118), such an act must be seen rather as the necessary distance of the migrant, who must rename the entire city as ‘Ellowen Deeowen’ in order to make some sense of its geography. In contrast, these second-generation figures can take London just as it is, a marker of harsh realism, perhaps, but also a reflection of confidence. In contrast to Sandhu’s claim that ‘many contemporary black writers feel that they have to destabilize narrative flow and use jarring juxtaposition in order to chart the fractious and schizophrenic relationship to England and Englishness held by many immigrants and their children’ (Sandhu 2003: 295), there is a surety and comfort about these authors’ descriptions of London, a steadiness of tone, and, in Adebayo’s case, in conflict with Sandhu’s assertion that ‘a linear narrative would be too tidy’ (Sandhu 2003: 295), a completely calm, linear progression perhaps as far from Rushdie’s whirring, hyperbolic representation as one could get. London as naturally belongs to this second generation as to anyone else, these authors suggest, and no clever linguistic subversion is needed to stake a claim on its geography. Easy affinity for the space, knowledge of its pathways, marks a right to belong.

NAMING THE SPACE Such differing knowledge of London may be indicated, I would suggest, by comparing one particular incidence that typifies migrant/British-born differences: that of the Tube journey. For Rushdie, Adebayo, and Smith, the interaction of central characters with the Underground acts as synecdoche for their relationship to the urban space in its entirety. With only a migrant’s outside knowledge, Rushdie’s characters negotiate a confusing system, personified as an active avatar of their alienation: That day Gibreel fled in every direction around the Underground . . . And even though he did not have any idea of the true shape of that most protean and chameleon of cities he grew convinced that it kept changing shape as he ran around beneath it, so that the stations on the Underground changed lines and followed one another in apparently random sequence. (Rushdie 1998: 201) Unable to make sense of his colonizer’s map, Gibreel can find no way to negotiate the city. Though Rushdie mentions Tube lines and stations in his description, he mirrors Gibreel in being unable to pair them together to form a route. Contrastingly, for both Smith’s and Adebayo’s characters, the knowledge with which they

98 Sara Upstone negotiate the transport system reveals intellectual ownership of its space. For Adebayo, the journey from north to south London is marked by clear urban awareness, captured in the pairing of details so absent from Rushdie’s account: from the Victoria Line of Finsbury Park, changing at King’s Cross and Liverpool Street, and then finally on the overground to Stratford (Abedayo 1997: 100–1). This journey marks not only a particular space in London, but also a particular moment: before south London would be connected to the rest of the city through the Jubilee Line extension, when it was, instead, still a disconnected outpost that makes Dele’s confident negotiation even more significant. Similarly, Irie’s grandmother Hortense, mimicking Rushdie’s migrants, shows her ‘contempt for London Transport’ (Smith 2000: 328). Yet Irie is happy to use its night buses, and Smith correctly plots the 98 bus from Willesden Lane to Trafalgar Square. And while Millat shows unease on the Underground, ‘imagining the journey as one cold sure dart’ (Smith 2000: 430), Smith herself plots an accurate route that mirrors the confidence of Millat’s companions: from Finchley Road on the Metropolitan Line to Baker Street, changing to the Bakerloo Line to Charing Cross. It is also, like Adebayo’s journey, historically specific. The straightforward journey from Finchley Road to Charing Cross that Millat originally imagines is no longer possible around the time of the novel’s publication, owing to the Jubilee Line extension, but it was still very possible in the novel’s setting of 1992. Travelling as part of a political movement that begins with the challenging of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, it is ironic that, as they do so, Smith’s characters also challenge the representation of the ethnic minority’s position in the city that he represents. Here both Adebayo’s and Smith’s characters exhibit what Kevin Lynch terms the ‘legibility’ of the city – an ability to read its structures that is inherently tied to a sense of inclusion, an awareness that ‘subjects who [know] the city better [have] usually mastered parts of the path structure’ (Lynch 1960: 49). This has particular relevance to London as an imperial space, where immigrants have always been associated with working in transport and, as Felix Driver and David Gilbert note in their study of inter-war Underground posters, ‘the imperial capital was represented through its transport networks . . . offering the visitor an experience that could be gained only through movement between them’ (Driver and Gilbert 1999: 14). In gaining legibility of the Underground structure, these British-born characters assert the same knowledge as the imperial insider.

CONCLUSION Neither Adebayo nor Smith has yet found the confidence to fully express the possibilities of this new reality. While Adebayo’s hesitancy may be put down to an understandable wariness about the consequences of claiming urban space, the need to maintain diversity and be ‘unusual’ (Adebayo 1997: 209), Smith fails to fully realize the definite London-born consciousness often promised for less laudable reasons. Like Rushdie, Smith refuses to give up the familiar tropes of migrant chaos and confusion. Smith uses the following quote to describe the Iqbal brothers, despite their being born in London:

London as imperial urban space 99 Likewise, the brothers will race towards the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past, the place where they have just been. Because this is the other thing about immigrants (’fugees, émigrés, travellers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow. (Smith 2000: 399) Such inaccuracy, reflective of Sukhdev Sandhu’s equally illogical use of the term ‘second-generation migrants’ (Sandhu 2003: 284), illustrates how Smith cannot resist descending into Rushdie’s stylized wanderings, to cast all London’s ethnic minorities as immigrants. This means that, without denying the impact of continued racism, the main characters’ crises sit uneasily with their strongly defined urban identities. This stereotypical trauma may have added to the success of Smith’s novel in the short term, its appeal to an existing readership of postcolonial fiction, but it undoubtedly limits its impact on urban literature when compared with Adebayo’s less popularistic text. In his reconciliation with his son, Dele’s father acknowledges that ‘his children might actually have a point of view’ (Adebayo 1997: 212), offering the possibility of a merger of British-born and immigrant identities. Yet in foregrounding the idea of a unique ‘point of view’, it also substantiates the sense in which the position of Adebayo and Smith as British-born authors allows them to explore more fully a parallel urban consciousness than the migrants who preceded them. Despite its limitations, the cultural significance of this shift away from the migrant consciousness to an alternative urban voice should not be underestimated. In cultural terms, such texts mark an important assertion of perhaps a more unique, less derivative discourse within London. If we accept Gates Jnr’s reflection that, on a visit to London in the 1970s, he could see only ‘forms that were borrowed, essentially unmodified, from the Caribbean’ but in 1997 could see a culture ‘distinctly black and British’ (Gates 1999: 170, 171), then texts such as Adebayo’s and Smith’s document this culture, a shift from the Caribbean dialects of The Lonely Londoners to a distinctly urban Black British identity. And while Gates Jnr’s belief that the second generation in London are ‘more integrated’ (Gates 1999: 176) may be a simplification of the continued racial hierarchies that exist in London today, nevertheless these novels do indicate an increased confidence among the secondgeneration urban population. Whereas Rushdie marks the development of a more diverse migrant novel with London at its centre, it is only with the fiction of Smith’s and Adebayo’s generation that a London novel emerges as a true postcolonial possibility. While Rushdie’s vision of London ends in the inability of his migrant characters to effectively challenge the city’s oppressive official forces, both Smith’s and Adebayo’s central characters triumph. The survival of Dele’s sister in Some Kind of Black, in particular, indicates a new refusal to be intimidated by colonial order or racist violence. In both cases, the legibility of London to the British-born marks an inability to constrain the minority in colonial patterns of mapping and ordering. If, as Stuart Hall asserts, there has been, post-Thatcher, a ‘tilt in the balance of forces . . . towards the

100 Sara Upstone opening – the possibility – of being black and British’ (in Phillips and Phillips 1998: 390), then urban fiction such as that created by Adebayo and Smith marks London at the centre of this shift. In both these texts, there is a blurring of distinct racial divisions, but also a solidifying of local identities that challenge national or racial cohesion, complete with its own tensions and problematics, a questioning of the popular ‘diasporic reading’ of ethnic communities in much postcolonial theory in favour of ‘an intention to settle’ (Procter 2003: 205, 209) where, as Adebayo (2004) himself comments, divisions are more cultural and tribal than racial, more localized than city-wide. More significantly, in contrast to the ‘panic, hysteria, and livid confusion’ (Sandhu 2003: 386) in terms of which black London is so often cast, there is in this new generation of narratives a confidence that asserts the right of the ethnic minorities to its space. The city may no longer just mark the locus of migrant experience, caught in the dynamics of colonizer and colonized. Instead it signals the potential for a truly postcolonial location.

8 Reading urban spaces in African texts Tim Woods

Space has always been and continues to be a vexed issue in Africa. The Western exploitation of Africa was arguably the inevitable result of increasingly wealthy European nations needing economic Lebensraum and displacing that need for expansion into another easily suppressed continent. Consequently, geographically and historically, nation space has been a frequently sorely troubled issue, in many cases the legacy of colonial state bureaucracy and arbitrary map making, resulting in a contemporary heterogeneity and plurality of cultural experiences. Reading African spaces is therefore even more complicated; and in this context, cities in Africa have only recently been regarded as spaces and places for representation. City spaces in modern South Africa, as all over Africa, were produced by colonialism and posed a direct threat to its stability. The conflictual space of the city is intricately entwined with the cultural politics of race, and in South Africa in particular, apartheid rigorously and continuously regulated racially diverse groups through the constant reorganization of city space. This morphology of urban places can be seen in Langa, a former township in Cape Town. Opened in 1927, it is the oldest surviving formally planned township in South Africa. It was the first to be established under the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which was designed to entrench racial segregation in South African urban places, to control the non-white access to cities, and to control development of residential space for Blacks within urban areas (see Davies 2002). This is one salient example of the way in which radicalized constructions of people and communities were quite frequently literally forged by place and urban landscape. The morphology is currently entering a new phase, as, along with the neighbouring township of Kyalitsha, Langa is now a tourist destination in the Cape Town area, displaying the urban racial segregation as a ‘heritage site’. The morphology of urban space is not peculiar to African urban space in particular; but the ways in which co-ordinated and systematic efforts have been made to create cities that embed racial and class politics is starkly evident in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Accra and Johannesburg. Such an architecture of power structured upon racial values is not simply a vestige of colonialism; it persists within the structures of contemporary African cities and its representations (see Jacobs 1996; Keith and Cross 1993). One excellent example of the study of the African novel’s development in relation to African cityscapes is Roger Kurtz’s Urban Obsessions,

102 Tim Woods Urban Fears, that specifically analyses the postcolonial Kenyan novel and its relation to the development of urbanization. Kurtz identifies the publication of Leonard Kibera’s much acclaimed city novel Voices in the Dark (1970) as marking a fundamental shift in Kenya’s literary history, as ‘the first novel to be set entirely in the city and the first to treat the city as a complete microcosm, a world unto itself that stands for what Kenya is rather than merely an aspect of Kenyan society’ (Kurtz 1998: 71). The unifying feature for Kurtz’s study is Nairobi; yet many of his arguments could be transplanted (at slightly different times) to the contexts of Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, as a series of fictions testify to the ways in which the city has rapidly become the locus of reading the politics, identities, and trajectories of the postcolonial (or neo-colonial) state. South Africa has been a slightly different example, since its position vis-à-vis colonialism has been quite different from that of other African ex-colonies that achieved their independence in the mid-twentieth century. In South African literature, the city has been a defining feature of the radicalized politics of apartheid since the publication of Peter Abrahams’s novel Mine Boy (1946) and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), both of which employ a narrative structure of ‘Jim comes to Joburg’. With the impact of modernism and modernity, African writers across the continent grew intent on examining the emergence of ‘modern’ city spaces and their inhabitants – the metropolitan figure of the prostitute, the neo-colonial bourgeois bureaucrat, the military dictator; the pressures placed by modernization upon the traditional spaces of the rural village and family compound; the clash of Christian values and traditional beliefs; and the gradual erosion of rigorously defined traditional gendered spaces. Within this heterogeneity of African cultures in contemporary Africa, African novelists explore the discordant and jarring hullabaloo of the market-places in Lagos, Accra, Nairobi, and Bamako, alongside the wide deserts and savannahs of Mali, Somalia, Uganda, and Kenya, and the highly surveilled high-tech malls and gated communities of South Africa. Considering fictional representations by such novelists as the Ghanaian Kofi Awoonor and the South Africans Nadine Gordimer, Zakes Mda, and Phaswane Mpe, this chapter will investigate the ways in which this urban space is often represented as Janus-faced – harbouring grand office blocks and industrial city-centre edifices, check-by-jowl with slums, shanty towns and uncontrolled settlements. Furthermore, it will consider how the changing profile of African politics is imprinted on the city space. For instance, under apartheid, there was the erasure of the ‘coloured’ District Six, an inner-city area in Cape Town, whose verve and vibrancy were ably captured in Richard Rive’s compelling novel Buckingham Palace: District Six (1986). This ‘lost history’ is now commemorated in the District Six Museum (established in 1992) which seeks to reclaim the social histories of the people who were forcibly removed from the area under the Group Areas legislation, thus providing a memory bank of human resilience in the face of adversity. A different erasure of city space occurred with the ‘substitution’ of the suburb ironically called Triomf (Afrikaans for ‘triumph’), a white suburb built by the apartheid authorities for housing white working-class Afrikaners on the site of the levelled black African Sophiatown

Urban spaces in African texts 103 in Johannesburg. The Afrikaans lives of Triomf are excruciatingly dissected in Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf (1994, translated 1999), while the lives of the ‘erased’ population of Sophiatown are celebrated and depicted in Bloke Modisane’s insouciant autobiography and damning critique of apartheid in the 1950s called Blame Me on History (1963). Many of these hybrid African city spaces are frequently the site of a Bakhtinian carnivalesque, the city read as both a postcolonial fortress and as an arena for political conflict and resistance. Both fascinating and repulsive, the city provides a focus for many African narratives that seek to articulate the belated and deferred crises wrought upon African cultures by the distortions of colonialism. Africa is certainly not a homogeneous space. The culture and history are neither continuous nor uninterrupted. One needs to recognize the plurality of cultural experience when dealing with the differences of the specific instances of colonial eras in the East, West, and South; the Islamic influences in the West, North, and East; and the different colonial masters of parts of the continent and their linguistic and cultural legacies. Within this heterogeneity, one might well question the direction of Africa after the effects of colonialism. Bearing in mind the immediate pressures of its burden of modern histories, how ought Africa to tackle its looming future, without forgetting its recent, haunting past or stirring up wistful legends of validity as a way of keeping in check the ostensible futility and indecision of the present? To what extent is this challenge reflected in, or mediated through, the experiences of Africans in the range of urban spaces that are evident in the metropolises of the continent? This chapter focuses upon two recent representations of cityscapes that define the ‘new’ post-apartheid South Africa – the high-rise central business district of Johannesburg, with all its towers and office blocks that are the recognizable signs of capital in any ‘First’ World city; and the distinctly low-rise shanty town, so prevalent on the periphery of many South African cities, the direct effects of apartheid’s policies of racial deprivation, only just being ameliorated under the new post-apartheid regime. This stark and glaring juxtaposition of ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World urban environments in South Africa is testimony to the peculiarly devastating indifference of the ‘divide and rule’ policies of apartheid. Such townships or ‘locations’ as Sharpeville, Orlando, Soweto, Tembisa, and Sebokeng have become synonymous with not only the poverty and brutality meted out by the policies of apartheid, but also as the sites of resistance to them (16 June is now annually commemorated as a national day of remembrance, as the day in 1976 that gave rise to the Soweto riots). Soweto, in particular, achieved resonance in the international consciousness, and is marked in numerous representations by poets and novelists alike. The shanty town is arguably the flip side of the sign of capital, and such urban environments are evident in cities like Rio de Janeiro, London’s ‘cardboard city’, and slums in New York and Chicago. The Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor, in his only novel, entitled This Earth, My Brother . . . (1971), presents a quite savage satire on the new bourgeoisie that has sprung up after the departure of the colonial power. The urbanizing society appears to be decadent, corrupt, morally bankrupt, and at odds with itself in terms of social

104 Tim Woods division. This can be seen in the description of the squalor and putrid foulness of Nima, the shanty town on the outskirts of Accra: No river runs through Nima. Only a large open gutter that stinks to heaven. [Accra] itself grew with vengeance. Nima grew alongside it like an ever growing and eternal dunghill . . . The conspicuous landmark is the Harlem Café. Another set is the two septic latrines, a fitting memorial to Nima, the city within a city, Nkrumah once said he would make it. These latrines are ever full. Those in a hurry take a shit right on the floor. Near the septic latrines are huge dunghills which in the language of the Accra City Council are called refuse dumps. No one ever removes refuse in Nima. (Awoonor 1971: 151–2) This scatological imagery is echoed in the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer’s searing representation of Soweto: These restless broken streets where definitions fail – the houses the outhouses of white suburbs, two-windows-one-door, multiplied in institutional rows; the hovels with tin lean-tos sheltering huge old American cars blowzy with gadgets; the fancy suburban burglar bars on mean windows of tiny cabins; the roaming children, wolverine dogs, hobbled donkeys, fat naked babies, vagabond chickens and drunks weaving, old men staring, authoritative women shouting, boys in rags, tarts in finery, the smell of offal cooking, the neat patches of mealies between shebeen yards stinking of beer and urine, the litter of twicediscarded possessions, first thrown out by the white man and then picked over by the black – is this conglomerate urban or rural? No electricity in the houses, a telephone an almost impossible luxury: is this a suburb or a strange kind of junk yard? The enormous backyard of the whole white city, where categories and functions lose their ordination and logic, the ox and the diesel engine, the pig rootling for human ordure and the slaughterer, are milled about together . . . The little house into which we crowded, family, relatives, friends and furniture . . . The diningroom ‘suite’, the plastic pouffes, hi-fi equipment, flowered carpet, bar counter, and stools covered in teddybear fur were the units of taste established by any furniture superama in the white city. The crowding of one tiny habitation with a job-lot whose desirability is based on a consumerclass idea of luxury without the possibility of middle-class space and privacy; the lavish whisky on the table and the pot-holed, unmade street outside the window; the sense all around of the drab imposed orderliness of a military camp that is not challenged by the home-improvement peach trees and licks of pastel paint but only by the swarming persistence of children and drunks dirtying it, tsotsis, urchins and gangsters terrorizing it – this commonplace of any black township became to me what it is: a ‘place’; a position whose contradictions those who impose them don’t see, and from which will come a resolution they haven’t provided for. (Gordimer 1979: 149–51)

Urban spaces in African texts 105 From this lengthy quotation, it is clear that Gordimer’s portrait is an anti-portrait, a place that resists description, a non-site, laced as it is with metaphors of the obstructions to reading the cityscape: ‘definitions fail’. As the clutter of tin shacks and other improvised, ad hoc living quarters shown in Figure 8.1 demonstrate, Soweto resists interpretation as a definitive urban space, hovering between the urban and rural, suburb and junk yard, where everything is jumbled together, ‘where categories and functions lose their ordination and logic’. Using Raymond Williams’s model of cultural dominant, residual, and emergent, the black shanty town and its ways of life can be understood unsurprisingly as having been a dominant ‘genre’ in black South African writing over past decades. Some of South Africa’s most significant literature derives from writers such as the Drum magazine writers centred in Sophiatown like Henry Nxumalo, Can Themba, Esk’ia Mphahlele, Arthur Maimane, Casey Motsisi, and Nat Nakasa, and the Soweto Renaissance poets like Oswald Mtshali, Sipho Sepamla, Mafika Gwala, and Mongane Wally Serote. Writing about the white city is more of an emergent genre. Access to cities was for decades so rigidly controlled and defined for nonwhites under apartheid that black South African experience is inevitably more closely associated with life in the peripheral, racially zoned so-called ‘locations’, such as the infamous Soweto in Johannesburg and Crossroads on the Cape Flats. Not surprisingly, black South African fiction is more closely associated with such urban places, sites that surrounded the white city centres as parodies of urban life,

Figure 8.1 Johannesburg, South Africa: tin shack dwellings in Chris Hani, a poor squatter camp in Soweto, outside the city (courtesy of Per-Anders Petterson/Getty Images)

106 Tim Woods with their lack of elementary amenities, and their houses built from the cast-offs of white life. Such associations are still evident in contemporary literary attempts to represent and construct urban spaces under the new ‘post-apartheid’ regime. One key figure is Zakes Mda, whose fiction addresses the culture and history of the Xhosa people. Both Ways of Dying (1995), which won the prestigious South African M-Net Book Prize in 1997, and The Heart of Redness (2002), which won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, address the circumstances of black South Africans during the transition to black majority government. Ways of Dying was a big hit in South Africa, where it was even adapted into a jazz opera. The novel narrates the quirky and idiosyncratic life of Toloki, who is trying to establish himself as a professional mourner and observer of the numerous ways of dying and thereby eking out a meagre living by attending funerals in the Cape Town shanty towns where he lives. In his outworn suit he adds ‘an aura of sorrow and dignity’ (Mda 1998: 14) often serving as pacifier when arguments ensue. He encounters Noria, a childhood acquaintance whose son has just died, and the two renew their friendship, finding comfort in reminiscing over the harrowing events of their lives. There are shades of the absurd in Mda’s darkly comic descriptions of the crime, poverty, violence, and ethnic unrest that plague the characters. Writing from the heart of the new South Africa, Mda tells his country’s stories through beautifully realized characters whose search for love and connection takes readers up close to the black experience, past and present. Set in the transitional years before the first democratic elections, the itinerant Cape Town life of Toloki and his romance with Noria are gradually unfolded as his village childhood past is juxtaposed in parallel with his present existence on the dockfronts and settlements on the Cape Flats such as Crossroads and Guguletu. As he meets his childhood friend Noria and gradually sets up home with her, the novel charts the lives of the ‘squatters’, or settlement dwellers in the Cape shanty towns, where lives are constantly threatened by death, and existence is a daily precarious and fragile struggle. As Toloki states: ‘Death lives with us everyday. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living. Or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying?’ (Mda 1998: 98). The novel is punctuated and studded with random murders, deaths by starvation, sadistic slayings, criminal killings, racial attacks, ‘necklacings’, tortures, deaths, funerals, and fatalities. The different ‘ways of dying’ are a testimony to the instability of the society, as well as the consequences of a black South African communal space riven by internal dissension. The irony of the novel and the source of its black satire is that death becomes a business for many people, such as allowing Toloki to develop mourning as a profession, and Nefolovhodwe as a coffin maker. ‘Unlike the village, death was plentiful in the city’ (Mda 1998: 125) and as Toloki observes, ‘Nefolovhodwe had attained all his wealth through death. Death was therefore profitable’ (Mda 1998: 133). The novel hinges upon an opposition between traditional village life and the hurly-burly of modern city existence. The movement from the village to the city for Toloki is an explicit attempt to forget village life and ostracism by his father Jwara.

Urban spaces in African texts 107 Yet Toloki’s mind is dogged by the frequent memories of that village life, Noria’s childhood, her mystical powers of song inspiring Jwara’s blacksmithing and forging of figurines. These memories both torture Toloki and keep him rooted in the village ethos and culture, which is regarded by others as stultifying: ‘How was Toloki to know that homeboys who did well in the city developed amnesia?’ (Mda 1998: 133). Yet meeting Noria and gradually talking through these memories allows Toloki to reaffirm communal life, and to combat the alienating existence of the city. Although the narrative acknowledges that ‘the stories of the past are painful’ (Mda 1998: 95) and that the present is structured by death, the novel concludes with hope for the future born out of the upbeat mood of children’s laughter, Toloki’s newfound skill of drawing to Noria’s song, and their newborn love. Yet this occurs in a time which sees township tourism as a major growth dimension in local tourist development. Erstwhile sites of violent resistance to apartheid like Langa and Soweto now advertise tourist trips to view the places where Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu once lived. Although this activity aims to enhance local employment prospects, such a commodification of the vestigial rifts of apartheid forces the question of whether this is a genuine sociocultural tourism or an exploitative tourism that allows a distorted view of people’s hardship to be posed. It is a difficult question to answer affirmatively one way or another when people’s livelihoods are at stake, yet one cannot easily escape the conclusion that a large degree of voyeurism is involved when tourists visit sites for their histories of violence rather than for the experience and knowledge of cultural and ethnic diversity. The indecipherability of the regulated township and the commodification of low-rise shanty towns depicted by writers like Gordimer stands in stark contrast to contemporary well practised and versatile readers of Westernized high-rise cityscapes. Indeed, no self-respecting city is without its defining soaring landmark. Taiwan now boasts Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building. New York has the Empire State Building. Johannesburg has the long, thin Hillbrow Tower, one of the tallest towers in Africa. The tower is situated in the eponymous district of Hillbrow, and dominates the Johannesburg skyline, visible to visitors long before they reach the city itself. It is a tribute to the tower’s symbolic power that it has been incorporated into the city’s official logo, in which the upward stroke of the ‘b’ in ‘Joburg’ is a small image of the Hillbrow Tower. Hillbrow is one of the suburbs within the central business district, along with Joubert Park and Berea, and all these areas are characterized by a large number of high-rise apartment blocks (see Figure 8.2). The existing residential buildings in the CBD are insufficient to meet the demand for housing in the area and as a result there is a large demand for the residential conversion of underutilized office buildings. Suburbs such as Yeoville and Bellevue have a mix of apartment buildings and single residential units on small stands. The estimated population of the CBD region is 200,000, but the number of people living in the inner city on a temporary basis is unknown. Over the past few years, a gradual shift has seen higher-income residents and whites moving away and being replaced by a lower-income population of blacks. The unemployment rate is estimated to be half the national level, with 58

108 Tim Woods

Figure 8.2 Johannesburg, South Africa: skyline of the central business district (courtesy of Tomasz Tomaszewski/Getty Images)

per cent of the households earning less than R3,500 per month. The age profile and educational level of the population is unknown. Most of the key social and urban issues to be tackled are related to the decline and transformation of the inner city. They include: • • • • • • •

City blight, the degradation of buildings, and physical deterioration of service infrastructure. High levels of crime and lack of security. The flight of office and associated uses to suburban nodes. The physical degradation of the public environment owing to litter and untidiness. A decline in rentals and property values. Rapidly increasing illegal occupation and land invasion in residential suburbs and vacated buildings. The increasing presence of immigrant entrepreneurs and associated xenophobia.

It is within the context of these problems affecting African urban centres that the late Phaswane Mpe’s debut novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) deals with issues devastating the ‘new South Africa’ – criminal violence, immigrant mobility and xenophobia, and the debilitating effects of HIV/AIDS within a community positioned right within the centre of Johannesburg. All this seems very much in the

Urban spaces in African texts 109 present, as the novel depicts the characters of a university student named Refentse and his erstwhile girlfriend Refilwe charting their respective suicides and deaths by contracting AIDS. None the less, Mpe cannot manage this without delving back into the past, partly evoking the conventional opposition between village and city life, but also showing how the experiences steeped in village traditions pre-empt adequate understanding of AIDS and the ways to combat the spread of this ruinous illness. Phaswane Mpe, who died suddenly aged thirty-four (the cause of his death is unclear), was one of South Africa’s most promising young novelists. Welcome to Our Hillbrow was the first novel to chart the huge changes that have transformed South Africa’s inner cities since the mid-1990s. Aiming to ‘explore Hillbrow in writing’ (Mpe 2001: 30), the novel grapples with the struggle of black South Africans to create a post-apartheid identity after the collapse of the old racial hierarchies, a process that was complicated by the influx from elsewhere on the continent of thousands of black Africans, many of whom were often more confident and better educated. Mpe belonged to the generation who grew up with the humiliations and deprivations of apartheid and expected to enjoy the fruits of freedom under democracy. Instead, they were confronted by new social ills: unemployment, poverty, and AIDS. Born and brought up in the northern city of Polokwane, Mpe went to Johannesburg in 1989, the year before Nelson Mandela was released, to study African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). Needing a cheap place to live, he ended up in Hillbrow, an inner-city area close to the university. Hillbrow is to Johannesburg what the East End has been to London, or the lower East Side was to New York. Ever since the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, Johannesburg (eGoli, Gauteng, the ‘City of Gold’) has been an attraction for migrants from all over Southern Africa, and even farther afield. For those seeking work or education, Hillbrow has been a magnet for successive waves of immigrants who have settled there, only to move to better areas once their fortunes improved: Your first entry into Hillbrow, Refentse, was the culmination of many converging routes. You do not remember where the route first began. But you know all too well that the stories of migrants had a lot to do with its formation. By the time you left Tiragalong High to come to the University of the Witwatersrand, at the dawn of 1991, you already knew that Hillbrow was a menacing monster . . . Hillbrow had swallowed a number of children from Tiragalong, who thought that the City of Gold was full of career opportunities for them. (Mpe 2001: 3) During the last decades of apartheid, Hillbrow’s high-rise flatland was home to students, single mothers, and a small number of mixed couples who managed to evade the law forbidding interracial sex. Its cafés were full of old immigrants from Eastern Europe playing chess and backgammon and drinking coffee, a fidgety and

110 Tim Woods edgy cosmopolitanism poignantly captured in Ivan Valdislavic’s ‘Hillbrow novel’ entitled The Restless Supermarket (2001). Hillbrow now houses waves of African immigrants – Zimbabweans, Malawians, Nigerians, and Mozambicans mix uneasily with black South Africans, who resent competition for scarce jobs. Prostitutes, drug dealers, and gangsters live alongside respectable families unable to afford better accommodation. As hawkers and street traders ply their wares in the shadows of the glittering skyscrapers of Johannesburg, here is an example of the hybridized space of territorialization, the fragmented and distended migrant space analysed by Stephen Cairns (2004) in Drifting: Architecture and Migrancy as he seeks to define the conflict between urban permanence and stability and the particular sorts of flux and flow introduced by a migrant population. As a country boy, Mpe was entranced by the nervous chic of Hillbrow, stating that he wrote his book to escape the devils of his depression and to make sense of the chaos around him. During this time, Mpe wrote poetry and short stories, many of which are about AIDS. In Welcome to Our Hillbrow he explores how the epidemic exacerbates xenophobia: This Aids was caused by foreign germs that travelled down from the central and western parts of Africa. Aids’ route into Johannesburg was through ‘makwerekwere’ (the derogatory name for foreign Africans); and Hillbrow was the sanctuary in which ‘makwerekwere’ basked. (Mpe 2001: 25) By examining how urban and rural economies of sex and power differ, this novel locates AIDS in a narrative about the city. AIDS redefines South Africa in particular under new markers and signifiers of experience, suffering, myths and taboos, and Mpe examines AIDS as an urban-based phenomenon, forming part of a literary tradition of city spaces. Will AIDS become an overwhelming narrative of the future? The literary landscape in Johannesburg, dissected in Phaswane Mpe’s novel, describes a small neighbourhood within the urban sprawl of South Africa’s richest city, a city of ‘gold, milk, honey and bile’ (Mpe 2001: 56). The narrative encompasses the sexual relations of friends in the city, their movements to the village and abroad, and investigates the ways in which markers of sexuality and power are overturned by the importation of disease from ‘outside’ the accepted fabric of society. AIDS redefines space both in human relationships and within the city, particularly in relation to modernity and the corruption of the city. The home, the sickbed, the hospital, the street, the cemetery: Mpe investigates whether these are now ‘no-go’ areas or neighbourhoods, and whether this ‘plague-like’ contamination is associated with particular places and people, or just in the air. These multiple representations of the city are related to cultural ignorance about AIDS, but with a staggering estimate of 30 million AIDS carriers in South Africa, it is clear that AIDS will overshadow any visions of the city’s future. This pandemic factor is likely to have such profound social and cultural consequences in the next twenty years that urban

Urban spaces in African texts 111 and non-urban spaces alike will be affected in their areas of development and regeneration. At a pan-African conference leaders representing African cities noted that urban areas in Africa face challenges directly related to their colonial legacy. Some of the pressing ordeals, considered particularly pronounced or extreme in Africa, relate to rapid uncontrolled urbanization, the preponderance of informal settlements, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the uneven development of cities, the lack of amenities, and the poor transport networks. Some African cities have embarked on programmes of urban renewal, with varying degrees of success. Among the countries that have presented their strategies for reversing urban sprawl were Senegal, Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa. These countries are intended to serve as models of development for other African cities, with other countries following suit. Nigeria, for example, Africa’s most populous country, has experienced the fastest rate of urbanization, with more than 40 per cent of the population based in urban centres. Most of the newly urbanized remain unemployed and live in slums. The government, however, has introduced multi-faceted measures to clear slums and to attract investors. Yet, as the juxtaposition of the two literary cityscapes in this chapter demonstrates, no short-term solution appears to be on the horizon. If the comparatively thriving and wealthy economy of South Africa finds it difficult to adjust the parameters of urban living, it will be doubly difficult for those African nations still labouring under the immense problems of vast national debts, of internally riven ethnic populations, of being ravaged by the extremes of severe drought and massive floods, and of being deprived of basic human amenities. Picking a way through the rhetorics, tropes, and metaphors of urban environments, and reading the hybrid diachronic and synchronic spaces of African cities, remains a major task for contemporary African writers as they seek to represent and construct the urban communities of the continent in the twenty-first century.

9 Reading the illegible cityscapes of postmodern fiction Caroline Bate

We didn’t say all those things in that way; but that is what we talked about. Reading it over brings back the reality of it for me. Would it for him? Or have I left out the particular, personal emblems by which he would recall and know it? (Delany 2001: 747)

I In The Image of the City, published in 1960, Kevin Lynch set out to determine the ‘visual quality’ of the American city by studying what he described as ‘the mental image of the city which is held by its citizens’ (Lynch 1960: 2). Central to Lynch’s study is the concept of ‘legibility’: the ease with which we can recognize and organize a city’s different parts into a coherent mental image. A legible city, Lynch suggested, is an ‘imageable’ city; a city in which markers (districts, landmarks, or pathways) are ‘easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an overall pattern’, and thus readily transformed into ‘legible’ images (Lynch 1960: 3). For those interested in urban narratives, The Image of the City is, as Fredric Jameson has suggested in his own discussions of postmodern space and cognitive mapping, an ‘extraordinarily suggestive’ work (Jameson 1995: 415), the concepts of which can be projected outwards beyond the empirical origins of Lynch’s thesis. In this chapter, I wish to engage the Lynchian concepts of ‘visual quality’ and ‘legibility’ as a starting point from which to explore the predominantly ‘illegible’ cities of postmodern fiction. The illegible and often shape-shifting city is a recurrent feature of the postmodern novel. In Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), for instance, the city undergoes a phantasmagoric redefinition to become an arbitrary realm of mirages. Her vision of an apocalyptic, ‘alchemical’ New York in The Passion of New Eve (1977) is similarly kinetic and unreal. In later postmodern fiction, Paul Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ in The New York Trilogy (1985) persistently foregrounds the contingent nature of city images and city narratives; as does the labyrinthine, maze-like city of Venice in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987). There is also, of course, the hallucinatory ‘Zone’ of occupied Berlin that lies at the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Not one of these cities is

Cityscapes of postmodern fiction 113 ‘legible’, but all of them tell us a great deal about how in spite of, or perhaps because of, their mercurial natures we, like the Minister confronted by Doctor Hoffman’s phantasms, endlessly pursue the concept of legibility. Samuel Delany’s science fiction novel Dhalgren, published in 1974, constructs one of the most fascinating and singular prose cities of postmodern fiction, and it is this novel in particular that I wish to focus upon here. Unlike Carter, whose novels Doctor Hoffman and The Passion of New Eve are contemporaneous with Dhalgren, Delany – as a writer of ‘genre’ fiction – has received relatively little critical attention beyond the field of science fiction scholarship. However, Delany is as much a prose stylist as Pynchon, Carter, or Auster (‘literary’ writers who, let us not forget, all draw on various science fiction tropes and stylistics), and in Dhalgren he presents a radical and provocative engagement with the ways in which we have come to imagine and theorize contemporary cityscapes and city spaces. Dhalgren is, I will argue, a crucial text, which engages not only with a historically significant American cityscape, but also asks much broader questions about the relationship between cityscape and city space.

II Dhalgren is a vast, elliptical, and fragmentary novel, and consequently difficult to summarize. The third-person omniscient narrative with which Delany begins the novel is quickly interspersed with passages in the first person. This voice, to borrow from the summary offered by Jeffrey A. Tucker, in his discussion of race and sexuality in the novel, represents ‘the thoughts of a thirtyish, multiracial, ambidextrous, bisexual madman who becomes known as “Kid”’ (Tucker 2000: 85). Kid may also be the voice of the omniscient narrator; the reader can never be sure whether Dhalgren is in fact Kid’s ‘journal’, a book which he claims to have found, but which he in fact may, or may not have written. Dhalgren opens with Kid’s entry into the city of Bellona and goes on to trace the course of his experiences and relationships within its labyrinthine spaces. Bellona is a ruined city, a disaster zone set in 1970s America. Its exact location remains as vague as the cause of its post-apocalyptic terrain. Something has happened in Bellona, a riot perhaps, but we are never quite sure. Most of the population has fled the city and Bellona is squalid, burnt-out, and depopulated, with no discernible government. It does, however, have a thriving, predominantly black, subculture referred to as the ‘Scorpions’. Kid enters the city unable to remember his name, and the few memories he has return to him only transiently. He crosses into Bellona over the city’s bridge, which he then notes as the landmark or ‘monument’ from which he can construct his ‘mental image’ of the streets and buildings that lie before him. Only a few hours later, however, he finds that the bridge’s location has apparently shifted. The city’s ‘visual quality’, Kid realizes, has altered, and instantly the legibility of his ‘mental image’ (along with reader’s), is shattered. The metamorphic transformations of Bellona are unrelenting, and although sometimes almost imperceptible, are always unsettling. Bellona is a secretive, mysterious city, its existence ‘suspected’, we are told, by only a ‘very few’:

114 Caroline Bate It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by . . . It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions. (Delany 2001: 14) In his discussion of our perceptions and experiences of urban space in The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau has suggested that there is an ‘erotics of knowledge’ involved in seeing the city from above (de Certeau 1984: 92). In this way, the viewer is able to close himself off from the ‘inner discordances’ of the city and its crowds, and become a voyeur god. From this perspective, the viewer’s gaze totalizes the city: the city becomes a ‘cityscape’, a view framed into a totality (the kind of view Kid seeks in Bellona, but never achieves). Consequently, the city appears rationalized and fixed and, as de Certeau puts it, all the ‘physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it’ are repressed (de Certeau 1984: 94). This ‘erotics of knowledge’ then, finds a pictorial expression in the cityscape: the ‘legible’ image of a city. The problem with such images of the city, however, is that they are accorded false objectivity, when this view or ‘image’ is in fact that which is constructed by hegemonic power. In this way, the cityscape acts as a signifier for a rational, homogeneous city space. The ultimate goal of this ‘erotics of knowledge’ is to rationalize the city into an ordered and fixed image, to eradicate ‘retinal distortion’, and in this process the cityscape erases the ‘lived city’ from our view. However, in Dhalgren, Delany’s shape-shifting cityscape denies us this reassuring, homogeneous ‘erotics of knowledge’, and instead confronts us with the ‘physical, mental and political pollutions’ of the irrational, the unfixed, and the heterogeneous. In his foreword to Dhalgren, William Gibson has written of ‘a city that came to be’ in 1960s America – a city that ‘was largely invisible . . . If America was about “home” and “work”, the city was about neither, and that made the city very difficult for America to see’ (Gibson 2001: xii). The city Gibson recalls here is the counter-cultural city of the 1960s; the city of civil rights demonstrations, anti-war demonstrations, and of street riots; the city space that was, as David Harvey has described it, ‘grist for the seething mill of urban discontent’ (Harvey 2000: 88). This was the ‘largely invisible’ city within America. This was the ghettoized, nightmarish underside of the suburban America of ‘home’ and ‘work’, an America that, as Robert Elliot Fox comments, ‘had bought the illusion that the cities were steel-and-glass monuments to success’ (Fox 1996: 130). More specifically, as both Tucker and Fox have argued, Dhalgren is a narrative about the ‘social realities faced by urban African-American communities in the 1960s and 1970s’ (Tucker 2000: 85). For a large part, these social realities were the inner-city riots that took place throughout the 1960s, the worst occurring in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King. Delany would seem to make direct reference to this when, describing a ‘loose line of old cars’ along one of Bellona’s sidewalks, Kid comments: ‘nothing parked on this block later than 1968’ (Delany 2001: 382). Bellona, with its rubble-strewn streets, looted and burning buildings, and indigent black populace, ‘is reminiscent of real, squalid, urban American terrain’ (Tucker 2000: 95). The material reality we see reflected (or

Cityscapes of postmodern fiction 115 refracted) in Dhalgren, then, is on one level a determinedly and historically specific black city space ‘bypassed’ by the totalizing perspective of the (white) voyeur god. Returning once again to Lynch and Jameson, we can define ‘the alienating city’ as ‘above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves’ (Jameson 1995: 51). Are these, then, the terms in which we are to understand Bellona, as an alienating city? It is certainly unmappable, even for the imperturbable Tak Loufer, the first Bellona resident Kid encounters on crossing the bridge: I go down a street: buildings are burning. I go down the same street the next day. They’re still burning. Two weeks later, I go down the same street and nothing looks like it’s been burned at all. Maybe time is just running backwards here. Or sideways. But that’s impossible too. (Delany 2001: 377) Drawing, as Jameson does, on Lynch’s suggestion that ‘urban alienation is directly proportional to the mental unmapability of . . . cityscapes’ (Jameson 1995: 415), it does not seem unreasonable to argue that Delany’s shape-shifting, temporally indeterminate cityscape serves to foreground the alienation of African-American urban experience. In their literal inability to map an alienating, shape-shifting urban totality the citizens of Bellona are a metamorphic reflection of the broader social, political, and cultural marginality and alienation of 1960s African-American urban existence. It is around and through the figure of Kid, however, that our vision of Bellona takes shape; and Kid is characterized as fragmentary, amnesiac, and decentred. He is not, then, alienated in ‘the classical Marxist sense’, which presupposes, as Harvey points out, ‘a coherent rather than a fragmented sense of self’ (Harvey 2000: 53). In Postmodernism, Jameson develops his understanding of alienation and fragmentation from Lacan’s description of schizophrenia as a disruption or shattering of the ‘signifying chain’ (Jameson 1995: 26), and it is in these terms that we can best understand the text of Dhalgren, the city of Bellona, and the characterization of Kid: Kid is emblematic of a postmodern, schizoid self. Thus, through the fragmented subjectivity of Kid and the shifting cityscape of Bellona, Delany demands an antihumanist refiguring of the socio-spatial relationship, of the relationship between the lived city space and the abstract cityscape: the voyeur god is displaced by the polluted and polluting formations of schizophrenic spaces and subjects. Bellona’s cityscape resists the humanist viewpoint characteristically invoked by the panoramic cityscape ‘image’, and in doing so, it opens up the city to new (anti)narratives of race and sexuality. Just as he unfixes the cityscape, Delany unfixes social structures within urban space itself, and race and sexuality are central issues in Dhalgren. Kid himself is half Native American, half white, and Delany describes, often in explicit detail, his various sexual activities, which begin almost immediately upon his entrance to Bellona, with Tak Loufer. Kid then meets a woman called Lanya, who comes to be a girlfriend of sorts. He then begins a relationship with Denny, a young male member of the Scorpions, who, with Lanya,

116 Caroline Bate takes part in a mutual and sexually active tripartite relationship with Kid. Alongside this highly visible sexuality, Delany also explicitly racializes the city: the black areas of Bellona are the poorest and most violent. At a more micro-level, Delany confronts the politics of race through the most visible and complex of Dhalgren’s black characters, George Harrison: an alleged rapist and ‘macho sex symbol to white women and white heterosexual men alike’ (Govan 1984: 47), whose sexuality is mythic in the city. Naked posters of George appear throughout Bellona (including in Tak Loufer’s apartment). Most significantly, George stands accused of raping June, a young white girl: a relationship that Delany refuses to resolve. George describes their encounter as consensual sex, and June, although allegedly a victim of a violent rape, continues to pursue him, at one point begging Kid for a copy of a poster. However, rather than focusing on Delany’s interest ‘in challenging contemporary American myths about marginal groups’ (Tucker 2000: 91), as Tucker has done in some detail, what this chapter seeks to address are the much larger questions Delany asks about the contemporary myths which order our spatial consciousness. What I turn to now is Dhalgren’s radical revisioning of how we read and/or view the city. The shape-shifting cityscape of Bellona is significant not only because it highlights the marginalized and repressed narratives of urban space, but because, at a much more fundamental level, it radically reconfigures the very nature of the socio-spatial imaginary itself.

III In Dhalgren, then, the cityscape is no longer the signifier of a rational, ‘legible’ urban space. Rather, Bellona is a place of ‘retinal distortions’, a shape-shifting space of constant reorderings, of habitation and rehabitation. Equally as compelling and significant as this shape-shifting cityscape, however, is the use Delany makes of optical devices, which are as constant a presence in the novel as the city itself. The Scorpions, Bellona’s subculture, of whom Kid assumes leadership, literally create a luminescent group identity on their forays into the city by means of ‘light shields’ – projector-like devices strapped to the waist which veil the wearer completely in a holographic, disturbingly surreal image. More intriguing, though, are the ‘optic chains’ worn by Kid, and other members of the Scorpions. Before he reaches Bellona, in the novel’s opening chapter ‘Prism, Mirror, Lens’, Kid has a fleeting and erotic encounter with a nameless woman. Without any explanation, she leads Kid to a cave, inside which he finds the optic chain: links of brass chain, randomly fitted with prisms, mirrors, and lenses. Kid wraps these links around his body, and, when he enters Bellona, he finds others have done the same. The wearers do not discuss the significance of these optic chains, but their symbolism suffuses the novel: prisms, mirrors, and lenses all play with light in such a way that they, to quote Delany himself (from a 1994 interview), ‘shatter unitary images’ (Delany 1994: 203). Prisms and mirrors refract, direct, and redirect light waves, whilst the reflective surface of the mirror can be deceptive just as often as it is ‘true’. What Delany is confronting us with in Dhalgren, whether in terms of

Cityscapes of postmodern fiction 117 sexuality, race, or the very nature of subjectivity itself, are contradictory and partial ways of seeing. The shape-shifting cityscape of Bellona is crucial to this shift of ‘scopic regime’ (Jay 1988) from legibility to illegibility: the cityscape is one of the most iconic ‘unitary images’ of contemporary culture. What is most important in this paradigmatic shift of perception, and what Delany’s use of optical devices underlines, is that, by recasting the cityscape as partial and mobile, Delany is not simply asking us to resist or deny the totalizing gaze of the voyeur. He demands that we revision it in terms of a shattering or refraction. In what terms, then, is the fragmenting and fragmentary ‘scopic regime’ of Dhalgren to be understood? If Bellona ‘shatters the unitary vision’ of the voyeur, should we instead read this ‘refracted’ city in de Certeau’s terms from the position of the city’s ‘ordinary practitioners’ (de Certeau 1984: 93)? Is Bellona the city of the Wandersmänner, the walkers? In direct contrast with the Icarian figure of the voyeur, de Certeau locates the ‘murky intertwining’ spatial practices of the walker in the city, ‘down below, below the thresholds at which visibility begins’ (de Certeau 1984: 93). These ‘walkers’, he writes, ‘follow the thicks and thins of an urban text’ that they ‘write without being able to read’: The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility . . . It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. (De Certeau 1984: 93; my italics) Certainly, the ‘unrecognized poems’ of the city walkers seem a useful analogy for the elusive legibility of the urban text of Dhalgren. However, it is de Certeau’s suggestion that the illegible spatial practices of the walker are characterized by ‘blindness’ that is most interesting for us here. For if, as de Certeau’s ‘Walking in the City’ implies, only the voyeur is capable of sight, are we then to suppose that all vision, all attempts to ‘see’ the city, will necessarily be guilty of the voyeur’s objectifying and oppressive gaze? In contrast to the paradoxical descriptions of de Certeau, the ‘spatial practices’ described in Dhalgren are not characterized by blindness, but rather highlight an alternative theory and practice of seeing, an alternative ‘scopic regime’ of contingent and contested images: ‘You meet a new person, you go with him,’ Kid mused, ‘and suddenly you get a whole new city . . . You go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn’t know were there. Everything changes . . . Sometimes it changes even if you go the same way.’ (Delany 2001: 318–19) Bellona is undeniably a science-fictional space; a city in which streets undergo fantastical physical alterations, not only for Kid, whose descriptions could be dismissed as those of an unstable fantasist, but also for the far less schizoid character

118 Caroline Bate of Tak Loufer. What Kid’s thoughts also reveal, though, is the extent to which all cities – whether those of the writer or of the urban planner – are metamorphic in nature. Obviously, this is not to suggest that the fabric of the contemporary city fluctuates with the mystifying rapidity of Bellona, but rather that the reality of every city is always mobile in so far as every city is a mobile site of social relations: ‘You meet a new person, you go with him, and suddenly you get a whole new city.’ This metamorphic city, embodied by Delany’s depiction of Bellona, is evident even in Lynch’s desire for legibility. At the heart of Lynch’s work is the realization that any ‘image of the city’ is a subjective image, a ‘mental picture’ held by the citizen, and that furthermore the citizen is ‘active in perceiving and creating’ the image (Lynch 1960: 6; my italics). The Image of the City was groundbreaking not because it sought legibility, but because it recognized that such legibility could only ever be an ‘open-ended order’ (Lynch 1960: 6). Lynch’s desire for a form of urban planning that would use the concept of legibility to rebuild the city in such a way that its ‘shape, color or arrangement’ would ‘facilitate the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment’ (Lynch 1960: 10) was also crucially a recognition of the variable and mobile nature of city images. ‘While one man may recognize a street by its brick pavement,’ Lynch concedes, ‘another will remember its sweeping curve, and a third will have located the minor landmarks along its length’ (Lynch 1960: 110–11). In Dhalgren, because Kid cannot rationalize or fix his perceptions of Bellona, he must develop a less systematic and less totalizing approach to his lived space: ‘the way anywhere in this city, Kid realized, was obviously to drift’ (Delany 2001: 487). There is an intriguing resonance here with the Situationist theory and practice of dérive (dérive translates literally as drift), described by Guy Debord as ‘a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances’ (Debord 1981b: 45–6). In short, the dérive, like Kid’s passage through Bellona, can be understood as a more committed and engaged version of the Baudelarian flâneur: to dérive is to drift through the city, resisting the habitual influences that would ordinarily dictate movement. In this way, the Situationists aimed to subvert the reification of capitalist (spectacular) society by reconstructing the city as a terrain of passion and desire. Thomas F. McDonough, in his essay ‘Situationist Space’, has noted that the psychogeographies of Debord and the Situationists are ‘simultaneously related to and distinct from Fredric Jameson’s “aesthetic of cognitive mapping”’ (McDonough 1994: 68). Jameson likens the condition of the subject in postmodern society to the alienating experience of the illegible city outlined by Lynch. He describes the cognitive map as an ‘as yet unimaginable mode’ of representation that will ‘enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole’ (Jameson 1995: 51, 54). As McDonough observes, both Debord and Jameson see the ‘“spatial confusion” of the modern city as symptomatic of the violence inherent in capitalism’s configuration of the space of the production and reproduction of its social relations’ (McDonough 1994: 69). However, whilst the dérive is open-ended and contingent, the cognitive map takes shape around what

Cityscapes of postmodern fiction 119 McDonough terms a ‘regulative ideal’ of spatial legibility (McDonough 1994: 69). In other words, in its desire for a ‘practical reconquest of place’ (Jameson 1995: 51), Jameson’s cognitive map risks negating ‘the positionality of the viewer and the relations of representation . . . in order to obtain a “coherent”, “logical” view of the city’ (McDonough 1994: 69). According to Jameson, it is by means of this ‘practical reconquest’, facilitated by the cognitive map, that we ‘may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion’ (Jameson 1995: 54). This leads McDonough to conclude that if the cognitive map ‘is a means toward “a capacity to act and struggle”’, then the space of the dérive ‘is a site of struggle itself’ (McDonough 1994: 69). It is in light of this assertion by McDonough that the resonance between Delany and Debord is revealed: both can be understood as impassioned critiques of voyeuristic, homogeneous, and spectacular perceptions of the city and of socio-spatial relations in general. Delany’s descriptions of Bellona, along with the other shape-shifting cities of postmodern fiction, are suggestive of a spatial imaginary far more radical than a reconquest of place. These prose cities subvert totalized and totalizing perspectives. They do not exist ‘below the threshold of visibility’ but rather refract and reflect determinedly contradictory and partial city images.

IV In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey has written of the ‘triumph’ of ‘disruptive spatiality . . . over the coherence of perspective and narrative in postmodern fiction’ (Harvey 2000: 302). My reading of Dhalgren, however, suggests that in the shape-shifting cityscapes of postmodern fiction we encounter not a triumph of disruption over coherence, but rather a contested space that articulates both the transparent logic of the legible cityscape and the illegible anti-logic of the lived city. Interestingly, in his work Thirdspace, Edward Soja has described what he regards as: [a] growing tendency in postmodern critical urban studies to overprivilege the local – the body, the streetscape, psychogeographies, erotic subjectivities, the microworlds of everyday life and intimate community – at the expense of understanding the city-as-a-whole. (Soja 1996: 20–1) Arguably it is this tendency to ‘overprivilege the local’ that lurks in Harvey’s affirmation of postmodern fiction’s ‘disruptive spatiality’, and it is this dichotomy of vision – between the micro-level intimacy of the street and the macro-spatial ‘city-as-a-whole’ – which this chapter has sought to address. Soja’s response has been to develop the concept of ‘thirdspace’ as ‘an-Other way to approach the micro–macro, local–global, agency–structure oppositions’ of spatial narratives (Soja 1996: 21). By ‘drawing selectively from both spheres’, he attempts

120 Caroline Bate to ‘third’ the debate, developing ‘new directions that transcend any simple additive combination or strict either/or choice’ (Soja 1996: 21). If we consider Soja’s theorizing here alongside the spatial imaginaries of postmodern fiction such as Dhalgren, what emerges is a significant correlation between the concept of ‘thirdspace’ and the complex city geographies of the postmodern literary imagination. We can think of Bellona, then, as both counterpart and precursor of the radical ‘thirding’ of perspective Soja calls for: Bellona can help us to envision and to understand the possibilities for, and the necessities of, thirdspace geography. Through his symbiotic representation of visual perspective and urban narrative, Delany does more than describe a new type of space in Dhalgren. He demands that we re-examine how we see and read this space, how our spatial imaginary takes shape and, most importantly, he foregrounds these issues – much like Soja in his foreword to this book – in relation to both city space and cityscape. In this respect, Delany has much in common with feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s proto-thirdspace demand for ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1991: 188). ‘Vision,’ suggests Haraway in her discussion of knowledge and perspective, ‘can be good for avoiding binary oppositions’ (Haraway 1991: 188). ‘I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision,’ she continues, ‘and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere’ (Haraway 1991: 188). According to Haraway, then, we can avoid the dangerously reductive binarism of disembodied perspective and sightless embodiment, or, in Soja’s terms, the macro–micro-spatial dichotomy, by asserting the embodied or perspectival reality of ‘all vision’. A similar reclamation of vision confronts us in Dhalgren. Delany’s representations of Bellona are not visions from ‘nowhere’, they are not a ‘god trick’, and they do not seek to ‘reconquer’ our spatial imaginary. Instead, Dhalgren unequivocally foregrounds embodied vision. The ‘optic chains’ Kid and others wear are symbolic not only because of their reflective and refractive surfaces. Entwined around the bodies of Bellona’s citizens, these chains are also a constant staging of the relationship between vision and the ‘marked’ body, between the cityscape and city space. Bellona is emblematic of the way in which shape-shifting cities in postmodern fictions, such as those of Carter or Pynchon, work to foreground the spatial imaginary as infinitely mobile and partial, and thus to highlight the socio-spatial relationship as disrupted and disrupting. The importance of Dhalgren lies with Delany’s juxtaposition of Bellona alongside the scopic regime of the shape-shifting city and the optic chains. In this way, Delany ensures that we see/read both the cityscape and the city space of Bellona – that we read both as voyeur and as walker. In doing so, he avoids the dichotomy of vision outlined by de Certeau and critiqued by Soja, instead creating images of the city that work through partiality and reflexivity. Delany reminds us that we do need ‘the view from above’ – not to fix a ‘regulative ideal’, but in order to construct an open-ended map, a temporary and reflexive representation of our urban space, a representation that Gibson has described, in his foreword to Dhalgren, as a ‘recombinant’ city (Gibson 2001: xi), and which we can also understand in terms of Soja’s ‘thirdspace’.

Cityscapes of postmodern fiction 121 In spite of the metamorphic nature of Bellona and his transient passage through it, Kid persists in his pursuit of legibility – whilst acknowledging that his images of the city will only ever succeed temporarily. Thus Delany confounds the voyeuristic nature of the legible cityscape, but does not deny the macro-spatial perspective of the cityscape itself. Ultimately, then, whilst the shape-shifting cityscape undermines the voyeuristic concept of a truly legible city, at the same time it also demonstrates the extent to which such panoramic images are always already inseparable from the illegible, itinerant, and resistant realities of the urban text.

10 The death and return of the New York skyscraper Cather, Libeskind, and verticality Christoph Lindner There must be something wonderful coming. When the frenzy is over, when the furnace has cooled, what marvel will be left on Manhattan Island? (Willa Cather, 1912) It seems to me that architecture is, in fact, the machine that produces the universe which produces the gods. It does so not fully through theories or reflections, but in the ever non-repeatable and optimistic act of construction. (Daniel Libeskind, 2004)

CREATIVE DESTRUCTION In The Creative Destruction of Manhattan Max Page offers a new vision of modern urban development through a history of New York City’s architectural destruction. Central to Page’s thinking is the idea that the convulsions of capitalist urbanization that shook Manhattan in the early twentieth century were ‘not defined by simple expansion and growth but rather by a vibrant and often chaotic process of destruction and rebuilding’ (Page 1999: 2). Exploring the impact of the wrecking ball on New York’s shape-shifting cityscape, Page shows how this continual cycle of ‘creative destruction’ encapsulated ‘the fundamental tension between the creative possibilities and destructive effects of the modern city’ (Page 1999: 3). The result is a fascinating account of the mutability of cityscapes and the competing social and economic forces that are still shaping urban space today. This chapter considers the ways in which a similar urban tension between creation and destruction animates two very different yet interrelated New York texts. One is a 1912 short story about skyscrapers by the American modernist writer Willa Cather. The other is an actual skyscraper: Daniel Libeskind’s Freedom Tower, which is under construction at the Ground Zero site in lower Manhattan. What links these two city texts is the theme of urban disaster. Cather’s story is about the destruction of a high-rise building at the height of the city’s first great moment of vertical expansion. Libeskind’s design, which comes in the wake of precisely such a disaster, is about the architectural renewal of the skyscraper form in the postterrorist landscape of New York. In such terms, both Cather’s story and Libeskind’s design are implicated in the process of creative destruction described by Max Page.

The New York skyscraper 123 Cather’s narrative concedes the creative possibilities of the modern city but stresses its destructive energy. By contrast, Libeskind’s architectural vision responds directly to an act of urban destruction but emphasizes creative possibility. My argument is that, in contrasting ways, these two disaster narratives register longstanding cultural anxieties about modern urban development and the deeply transitory nature of urban landscape. To develop this line of thought, I want to focus my discussion on the diverse ways in which Cather and Libeskind interpret the vertical city, paying close attention to the symbolic significance they both attach to the city’s modern skyline.

CATHER’S TOWERING INFERNO In May 1912, Willa Cather published ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ in the New York magazine Collier’s. The story, as John Murphy notes, is ‘emphatically about New York as futuristic American City’, complementing ‘the theme of destructive ambition in her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (which also came out in 1912), and anticipating Carl Linstrum’s complaint in O Pioneers! about the city’s tendency to overwhelm its citizens’ (Murphy 2000: 24). To this I would add that ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ is also about the legibility of urban space, what Michel de Certeau, adapting Henri Lefebvre, calls the ‘texturology’ of the city (1984: 92). For one of Cather’s main points in the story is that a close reading of the skyline can offer insight into the form of modern urbanism she refers to as ‘the New York idea’ (Cather 1970: 44). In a morbid prefiguring of the skyscraper explosions of September 11, ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ is set in the smouldering aftermath of a high-rise hotel fire that traps and kills hundreds of people on the upper floors of the building. Though based on the real-life disasters of the Windsor Hotel fire of 1899 and the Triangle Waist Company fire of 1911 (Miller 2000: 75), Cather’s story also has parallels with one of the twentieth century’s most haunting maritime disasters: the sinking of the Titanic, an event that occurred less than a year after Cather originally wrote the piece in 1911 and only a month before its first publication in May 1912. Robert Miller explains the connection in his transatlantic reading of the story: When ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ was first published on May 18, 1912, American readers had good reason to receive with interest a story about a major disaster in which hundreds of prominent people lost their lives at a time when they felt safely protected by modern engineering and opulent furnishings. The Titanic had sunk the previous month, and journalists were still reporting the news of what had gone wrong on that April night in the North Atlantic . . . In choosing to write about the vulnerability of an exceptionally large object devoted to housing people in transit and in which lives are suddenly and sensationally consumed, Cather seems to have been remarkably prescient. Although Leonardo DiCaprio is unlikely to star in a multimillion dollar production of ‘Behind the Singer Tower’, Cather’s ‘night to remember’ can,

124 Christoph Lindner like the sinking of the Titanic, help us to better understand the cultural anxieties running beneath the surface of the century we have so recently left behind. (Miller 2000: 75) While Miller is probably right about the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, he is not entirely accurate in saying that ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ is unlikely to become a Hollywood blockbuster. For in many ways it already did with the 1974 sensation The Towering Inferno, starring Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Like Cather’s story, the film features a massive skyscraper fire caused by faulty cabling and costcutting construction. More to the point, however, the resonance between Cather’s towering inferno and the sinking of the Titanic hinges on the way both disasters involve misplaced confidence in modern technology and engineering, resulting in

Figure 10.1 Singer Tower, New York, 1908 (courtesy of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Design School)

The New York skyscraper 125 the destruction of two prominent icons of modernity: the skyscraper and the ocean liner. As Miller’s comments suggest, the poignancy of ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ lies in the way Cather brings the cultural anxieties surrounding the Titanic much closer to home. Her disaster occurs not in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean but in the dead centre of the modern city – in the shadow, as the story’s title specifies, of one of the tallest buildings in the world at that time. As it happens, the Singer Tower itself has since succumbed to Manhattan’s relentless process of creative destruction. In 1968 this early New York skyscraper was demolished to make way for the US Steel Building, an imposing black monolith known today as One Liberty Plaza. The plot of ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ centres on a group of male professionals who take a nocturnal boat ride around New York Bay in order to observe the effect of the skyscraper fire on the urban landscape. Significantly, Cather uses the occasion of the boat ride to offer a gendered critique of post-disaster spectatorship. In particular, she repeatedly calls attention to the way the men fixate on the size of the skyscrapers: ‘Zablowski pointed with his cigar toward the blurred Babylonian heights crowding each other on the narrow tip of the island . . . among them rose the colossal figure of the Singer Tower’ (Cather 1970: 46). As the phallic imagery of this passage begins to insinuate, Cather’s urban observers exhibit a kind of ‘edifice complex’ in which their concerns about skyscraper safety can be linked in a classic Freudian turn to a more unconscious and distinctly male fear of castration. This idea certainly appears to inform the passage below in which Cather’s description of the skyline not only emphasizes the phallic dimensions of the vertical city but also culminates in an excruciating image of dismemberment: There was a brooding mournfulness over the harbor, as if the ghost of helplessness and terror were abroad in the darkness . . . The city itself, as we looked back at it, seemed enveloped in a tragic self-consciousness. Those incredible towers of stone and steel seemed, in the mist, to be grouped confusedly together, as if they were left after a forest is cut away. One might fancy that the city was protesting, was asserting its helplessness, its irresponsibility for its physical conformation, for the direction it had taken. It was an irregular parallelogram pressed between two hemispheres, and, like any other solid squeezed in a vise, it shot upward. (Cather 1970: 44) Here, the traumatized skyline comes uncannily alive in the imagination of the observer, creating powerful feelings of awe, hysteria, and confusion, and also generating uneasy visions of movement, violence, and eruption. In this respect, Cather’s urban panorama shares the imagery of pain and discomfort that similarly distinguishes Henry James’s infamous portrait of the New York skyline in The American Scene (1907). Returning home to the United States in 1904 after some twenty years spent living in Europe, James finds that the low-rise New York of his childhood has been replaced with a ‘strange vertiginous’ city (James 1994: 61). As he seeks to come to

126 Christoph Lindner terms with this radical transformation, James offers this piercing critique of the vertical city: the multitudinous sky-scrapers standing up to the view, from the water, like extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted, and stuck in as in the dark, anywhere and anyhow, have at least the felicity of carrying out the fairness of tone, of taking the sun and the shade in the manner of towers of marble . . . You see the pin-cushion profile, so to speak, on passing between Jersey City and Twenty-third Street, but you get it broadside on, this loose nosegay of architectural flowers, if you skirt the Battery, well out, and embrace the whole plantation . . . Such growths, you feel, have confessedly arisen but to be ‘picked’, in time, with a shears. (James 1994: 60) Seen here from the same harbour perspective as Cather’s story, Manhattan figures first as an overstuffed pincushion and then as a disorderly bouquet of overgrown flowers waiting to be sliced apart by shears. In addition to the theme of excess, what links the two metaphors is the imagery of discomfort and incision: needle points, sharp edges, and even the threat of decapitation. Moreover, this skyline also suffers from an absence of order. In James’s terms, the constellation of skyscrapers conforms to no visible pattern, suggesting a perceived need for some degree of rationality and restraint to be imposed upon the city’s upward growth. For Henry James, then, the effect of gazing at the skyline after returning home from his extended stay in Europe is to experience both wonder and unease: wonder at the vertical excess and extravagance; unease at the unfamiliarity of this new and animated urban spectacle. The result is a dual sense of excitement and estrangement in which the uncanny dominates over the sublime. One reason is that, as Morton and Lucia White argue in The Intellectual versus the City, James’s response to the modern cityscape is coloured by a Eurocentric nostalgia for pre-vertical New York (White and White 1962: 75). In a letter to Emerson from 1843 Thoreau mentions visiting James’s Father at his home in Washington Square and reports that ‘James has naturalized and humanized New York for me’ (Thoreau 1958: 110). It is ironic that, some sixty years later, the son of the only person capable of making Thoreau feel at ease in New York cannot naturalize and humanize the new face of the city for himself. In his 1919 essay on the uncanny Freud suggests that the uncanny ‘is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old – established in the mind and which has become alienated’ (Freud 1985: 363–4). Building on Freud’s formulation, the architectural historian Anthony Vidler suggests that this ‘propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized’ (Vidler 1999: 6) is a phenomenon connected not only to the interior spaces of the psyche as per Freud, but also to the exterior spaces of the modern city as per Benjamin: ‘the uncanny, as Walter Benjamin noted, was also born out of the rise of the great cities, their disturbingly heterogeneous crowds and newly scaled spaces’ (Vidler 1999: 4). Vidler calls this ‘condition of modern anxiety’ the ‘architectural uncanny’ (Vidler

The New York skyscraper 127 1999: 6–7), and defines it as an aesthetic mode of estrangement endemic to capitalist modernity and closely linked to the spatial formations and social experiences of the city. In such terms, Henry James’s skyline in The American Scene can be understood as a manifestation of the architectural uncanny in the full sense that Vidler gives to the term. For what James ultimately reads into the text of the defamiliarized skyline is, quite literally, the unhomeliness of the modern city. The old and familiar is suddenly rendered new and strange. Cather’s vision of the modern city is similarly distinguished by a manifestation of the architectural uncanny, and even echoes James’s urgent call for urban order. In ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ James’s overstuffed pincushion becomes the emasculated city squeezed in a vice. In Cather’s version of the unhomely metropolis, however, the threat of dismemberment looming over James’s skyscrapers is gruesomely realized with the destruction of the story’s high-rise hotel. The subtle effect is to question the male-inflected aura of power, competition, and achievement hanging over the modern skyline and, in the process, to expose the vulnerability of New York’s vertical project, what Cather describes almost in terms of an erection as a ‘whole scheme of life and progress and profit’ that depends on being ‘perpendicular’ (Cather 1970: 46). Looking beyond Cather’s commentary on modernity and masculinity, however, it is worth calling attention to the way her sombre vision of the early twentiethcentury skyline resonates eerily with the appearance of downtown New York on 11 September 2001 – a day when the city, enveloped in the smoke, dust, and debris of the collapsed WTC towers, experienced the real trauma of a real skyscraper catastrophe. This resonance is further amplified by Cather’s attention to the human dimension of her urban disaster. In the following passage, Cather is writing about the fictional ‘Mont Blanc Hotel’ – an Alpine reference designed to conjure up images of high altitude – yet her words could almost as easily be describing what happened at the Twin Towers: On the night of the fire the hotel was full of people from everywhere, and by morning half a dozen trusts had lost their presidents, two states had lost their governors, and one of the great European powers had lost its ambassador. So many businesses had been disorganized that Wall Street had shut down for the day. They had been snuffed out, these important men, as lightly as the casual guests who had come to town to spend money, or as the pampered opera singers who had returned from an overland tour and were waiting to sail on Saturday. The lists were still vague, for whether the victims had jumped or not, identification was difficult, and, in either case, they had met with obliteration, absolute effacement, as when a drop of water falls into the sea. (Cather 1970: 44) Among the many haunting images that emerged from New York on 9/11, one controversial photograph stood out for the way it so intimately revealed the horror of that day. Taken from street-level by photojournalist Richard Drew only moments before the first skyscraper collapse, the still shot captured the image of an unknown

128 Christoph Lindner man free-falling head first past the straight vertical lines of the Twin Towers. In a recent article in the Los Angles Times, Drew movingly describes the image as ‘a photographic record of someone living the last moments of his life’, adding that ‘every time I look at it, I see him alive’ (Drew 2003: 13). As Drew’s comments suggest, part of what makes the photograph so disturbing to view is the way it raises some very difficult questions about the nature of suicide, death, and human agency. These are the same questions raised by Cather’s story and its own horrific images of high-rise leaping, including one of an opera singer fatally plunging from his hotel window ‘toward the cobwebby life nets stretched five hundred feet below’ (Cather 1970: 45). Such uncanny parallels between Cather’s 1912 story and Drew’s 2001 photograph are more than just a simple case of fiction foreshadowing reality. They reveal deep-rooted cultural anxieties about the fallibility of skyscrapers and the dangers of placing too much trust in technological progress. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, a thought-provoking collection of essays on the events of 9/11, Slavoj Zˇizˇek notes the similarities between the real images of mass destruction in New York and the fantasy disaster spectacles of Hollywood blockbusters like Escape from New York (1981), Independence Day (1996), and The Matrix (1999). Zˇizˇek goes on from this often-made observation to argue that: the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and this was the biggest surprise . . . We should therefore invert the standard reading according to which the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite the reverse . . . It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality. (Zˇizˇek 2002: 16) Zˇizˇek makes a compelling point about the way in which the events of 9/11 inverted our experience of the conventional relationship between the reality of urban disaster and its popular cultural representation. Yet, as Brian Jarvis similarly argues in Chapter 4 of this book, the history of that representation reaches back much further than the action films cited by Zˇizˇek. In ‘Behind the Singer Tower’, Cather’s preoccupation with towering infernos, high-rise leaping, and post-disaster spectatorship shows that the fantasy rehearsal of New York’s architectural destruction has been ongoing ever since the city’s first moments of verticality. In short, Cather’s story illustrates how the image that crashed into and shattered our reality on 9/11 has been in circulation for as long as the form of the skyscraper itself.

LIBESKIND AND THE NEW YORK IDEA In Cather’s vision of the New York skyline, the soaring verticals of the city function primarily as icons of capital – and this symbolism is one source of her anxiety about the skyrocketing development of Manhattan. For Cather, the vertical city is above all a material expression of the capitalist axiom that ‘men are cheaper than machines’ (Cather 1970: 51). This idea is reinforced in her subplot of the immigrant

The New York skyscraper 129 construction workers who are used by the city’s skyscraper developers as ‘waste to clean their engines’ (Cather 1970: 49). Here, Cather emphasizes the role played by immigrant workers in building the skyline. She also underlines the point that the capitalist ideal manifested in the skyline is founded on the reification and exploitation of New York’s immigrant population. Reflecting on the death of an Italian immigrant who is killed while working on the foundations of a skyscraper, the character of Hallet, a steel construction engineer, offers these philosophical musings on urban development: There’s a lot of waste about building a city. Usually the destruction all goes on in the cellar; it’s only when it hits high . . . that it sets us thinking. Wherever there is the greatest output of energy, wherever the blind human race is exerting itself most furiously, there’s bound to be tumult and disaster. Here we are . . . throwing everything we have into that conflagration on Manhattan Island, helping, with every nerve in us, with everything our brain cells can generate, with our very creature heat, to swell its glare, its noise, its luxury and its power. Why do we do it? (Cather 1970: 55) This passage raises several key issues. First, and perhaps most disturbing, it comments on the way the modern city can reduce human life to the category of urban waste. Second, it identifies the inevitability of disaster in an urban space pushed in every dimension to extremes. Finally, and most important, the passage asks why humanity pours its soul into building up the city. Cather’s answer to that question is the inescapable magnetism of ‘the New York idea’, also described in the closing sentences of the story as a ‘new idea of some sort’ and an ‘unborn Idea’ (Cather 1970: 54). Exactly what constitutes this newly evolving idea remains largely unanswered in Cather’s story – beyond the general point that it is somehow embodied by the city’s vertical architecture and involves both a competitive male drive and, as Robert Miller suggests, a ‘blind belief in progress’ (Miller 2000: 80). Marilyn Arnold puts it more emphatically when she argues that Cather’s New York idea ‘reminds us that the cost of a thing can be measured by the amount of human life expended in acquiring it; and by this standard the cost of the New York dream is staggering’ (Arnold 1984: 92). As Arnold’s comments suggest, the New York idea can be understood as both urban dream and urban nightmare. For Cather, however, it is ultimately a source of suffering and a form of mental enslavement: ‘it’s the whip that cracks over us till we drop’ (Cather 1970: 54). As a counterbalance to Cather’s pessimism, I want to conclude this chapter by considering an alternative articulation of the New York idea in which the modern skyline functions not as an oppressive icon of capital but instead as a powerful symbol of social opportunity. This other, more optimistic articulation of the New York idea comes from the contemporary architect Daniel Libeskind, who immigrated to New York from Israel in the late 1950s. Crucially, this experience of immigration is integral to his architectural vision for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site and its monumental centrepiece, the Freedom Tower.

Figure 10.2 Design study for Freedom Tower and World Trade Center site, 2004 (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind and Archimation)

The New York skyscraper 131 In ‘Memory Foundations’, his architect’s statement for the WTC project, Libeskind specifically cites the memory of sailing into New York harbour and seeing the city’s skyline for the first time as a source of inspiration for his skyscraper design: I arrived by ship to New York as a teenager, an immigrant, and like many millions of others before me, my first sight was the Statue of Liberty and the amazing skyline of Manhattan. I have never forgotten that sight or what it stands for. This is what this project is all about . . . Now everyone can see not only Ground Zero but the resurgence of life . . . The sky will be home again to a towering spire of 1776 feet high, the ‘Gardens of the World’. Why gardens? Because gardens are a constant affirmation of life. A skyscraper rises above its predecessors, reasserting the pre-eminence of freedom and beauty, restoring the spiritual peak to the city, creating an icon that speaks of our vitality in the face of danger and our optimism in the aftermath of tragedy. Life victorious. (Libeskind 2004) In contrast to Cather, who sees high-rise New York in terms of congestion and deformity, Libeskind presents the skyline as a space of liberation and renewal. And even though it marks a response to one of the most significant skyscraper disasters in urban history, his vertical vision contains none of the imagery of violence and eruption that comes to dominate Cather’s textual cityscape. Rather, in Libeskind’s vision, the form of the skyscraper emerges from the post-terrorist urban landscape as a natural, regenerative presence in the city, an idea reinforced in his initial highrise design by the incorporation of hanging vertical gardens in the translucent glass spire of the tower. The implication is that, in contemporary global cities like New York, the skyscraper has now become such a domesticated and mentally internalized form that, as in the case of the Twin Towers, its absence can be far more uncanny than its presence. A key point Libeskind makes in his rhetoric of renewal is that what his skyscraper symbolizes is nothing less than the democratic ideal of freedom which he originally read into the skyline as an immigrant arriving in New York. Not only does Libeskind refer to the Freedom Tower as an icon of opportunity and optimism, but he also sees its presence in the cityscape as a reassertion of the American spirit of liberty. Indeed, the idea of freedom is so integral to Libeskind’s design that it has been inscribed into virtually every dimension of the building. Most obviously, there is the building’s name. But there is also the building’s height of 1,776 ft, a number that explicitly references one of the most important dates in American history: the year of the Declaration of Independence. Finally, and perhaps most subtly, there is the building’s form. The asymmetrical tower and soaring offset spire are deliberately designed to evoke the gently twisting profile of the Statue of Liberty, thereby setting the skyscraper into dialogue with the city and its immigrant history. Coming as they do from the deeply philosophical and politically attuned architect of such difficult memorial projects as the Jewish Museum in Berlin (discussed in the next chapter by Julia Ng) and the Imperial War Museum in northern England,

132 Christoph Lindner Libeskind’s sweeping symbolic claims for the Freedom Tower may seem a little oversimplified. In particular, his architect’s statement completely elides the sinuous and contentious history of ‘freedom’ as a concept in multicultural America, including immigrant New York. It also remains to be seen whether the Freedom Tower can be sustained as the city’s ‘spiritual peak’ over the long term. These equivocations aside, however, it is at least fair to say that Libeskind’s design does succeed in ‘recapturing the skyline’ – to cite a loaded phrase often used by the New York press and, in a more proprietorial capacity, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Jean Baudrillard argued in The Spirit of Terrorism that, in their uncanny doubleness, the Twin Towers put a halt to New York’s ‘competitive verticality’ (Baudrillard 2002: 42). With the Freedom Tower design, Libeskind has restarted the city’s race for the sky on the very site where it was temporarily suspended. Libeskind even acknowledges the building’s competitive vertical function in his architect’s statement when he stresses that the tower rises triumphantly above its predecessors, including the Twin Towers it replaces. In this respect, what Libeskind’s design registers is the tenuous yet deeply embedded ideological connection in the American public mind between democracy and the vertical form of the skyscraper, a connection that the urban planner Thomas Adams already identified back in 1931 when he wrote that, for many people, ‘New York is America, and its skyscraper a symbol of the spirit of America’ (Adams 1931: 576).

THE UNFINISHED CITY In The Unfinished City Thomas Bender suggests that New York’s ‘very essence is to be continually in the making, never to be completely resolved’ (Bender 2002: xi). Though Cather and Libeskind have sharply contrasting views about vertical New York, both understand and acknowledge that, like the character of the city itself, the urban landscape is shaped by a process of continual invention and change that can never be complete. Even the soaring construction of the Freedom Tower on Ground Zero evokes the incompleteness of New York, since the very existence of this monument to urban renewal recalls the radical impermanence of the city. For Cather, whose critique of the cityscape coincides with New York’s early experiments with verticality, the creative destruction of Manhattan becomes a source of anxiety about the volatile future of capitalist urbanization. The result is a vision of the rising skyscraper city dominated by images of disorder and destruction that uncannily prefigure the high-rise horrors of 9/11. For Libeskind, whose perspective on New York comes in the immediate aftermath of those horrors, the unfinished city becomes a space of creative possibility and social opportunity. As New York awaits completion of the Freedom Tower and the rest of the redevelopment of the WTC site, it remains to be seen whether this latest reshaping of the urban landscape will be perceived in the public imagination as predominantly belonging to the urban nightmare projected by Cather or to the urban dream envisioned by Libeskind.

The New York skyscraper 133

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This chapter draws on research carried out while on a British Academy grant at the New York Historical Society. I would like to thank the British Academy and the library staff at the NYHS for their support.

Part III Form

11 The museum, the street, and the virtual landscape of Berlin Julia Ng

The problem of placing the Jewish Museum within the landscape of Berlin is a nonarchitectural one that extends beyond the limits of the building. Generally speaking, a museum resists being treated as an individual building isolated from its environment: it functions as a container in which information about a past – and about how the future is to relate to this past – is collected and organized as singular, irreproducible artefacts. If the container’s structure coincides with its function, the museum can take on the form of a monument, a place generating for humanity its collective conscience. Perhaps it is for this reason that Daniel Libeskind’s museum has been called an ‘architecture of memory’ (Huyssen 2003: 66). Since its inception in 1988, when Libeskind was invited by the Berlin Senate to participate in the competition for the Erweiterung des Berlin Museums mit Abteilung Jüdisches Museum (Extension of the Berlin Museum with Jewish Museum Department), Libeskind (1992a, 1999) has invoked personal biography and civic cultural history as construction guidelines for a museum that literally incorporated Jewish history into its structure. But the building of memory is never fully open; it must also contain. The eventual assertion of autonomy, symbolically realized by the change of name to ‘The Jewish Museum’ and financially as an autonomous Stiftung des öffentlichen Rechts in 1999, was prefigured by the design of the museum’s access points. The fact that memory’s accessibility can be limited by design, however, remains in tension with the idea that the building of memory depends on the readiness of a generation to construct an enduring edifice to house its memory work – in other words, the readiness of the context to accept its architecture. The terms of the building’s acceptance thus underlie not only the relation of the German people to the Jewish Museum, as Jacques Derrida rightly pointed out in response to Libeskind in 1992, but also that of the architect to the city of Berlin. Generated from but also leading towards the problem of placing design in relation to the act of construction, both of these nonarchitectural questions clearly can, indeed must, be answered by architecture itself. In his ‘Response’ to Libeskind and the ensuing round-table ‘Discussion’, both published in a special edition of Research in Phenomenology in 1992, Derrida raises the following point: in order to be built, the Jewish Museum needed to win a competition. To win a competition, he continues, Libeskind would have needed to

138 Julia Ng convince, or ‘negotiate’ with politicians, embedding in the architecture an unavoidable rhetoric (Derrida 1992b: 100). The importance of this point lies in the relation of the architect’s ‘negotiation’ with two interrelated questions about the logic of this rhetoric. What, Derrida asks, is the museum for if not to transmit tradition, history, and memory through a collection of examples – in short, to obey a metonymic rule of historiography and referentiality? Yet how does the architect reconcile that duty with his responsibility, and risk, of being avant-garde? For only by not reproducing structures of the old can one give uniqueness and singularity to the past. Derrida suspects a ‘logic of exemplarity’ to be the source of the problem, which extends beyond architecture to the political landscape. As an internally divided city, he explains, Berlin was exemplary of the divided world, and of all divided cities in the world. Berlin’s exemplarity was, at the same time, itself exemplary of the logic by which every people and every nation justify their avant-garde structure by claiming to be the avant-garde, a claim made on the grounds that, in their singularity, they ‘are witnessing universality, and . . . bear the responsibility for the universal, for humanity as such’ (Derrida 1992a: 91). The logic of this claim, Derrida points out with the Holocaust in mind, circumscribes a nationalist and theological space and thereby reconstitutes a discourse that, by virtue of its intent to establish continuity, comes into conflict with the discontinuity of the events that the museum is archiving. Yet Berlin’s exemplarity is also what gives the stranger access to an experience or memory: the access, for instance, given to Derrida when he lectured on Paul Celan’s Berlin experience in a hotel facing the Berlin Wall (Derrida 1992a: 89), or the access given to the museum-goer by an artefact, a shoe, a passport, or perhaps a blazer with the yellow star stitched on to its lapel. Would Derrida have been denied access to Celan’s poetically encrypted memory had the Wall already been torn down by the time of his lecture? Is a landscape of exemplarity, that of a divided Berlin, necessary for the experience sealed in an artefact to be accessible to those who never did and never will ‘belong’ to the artefact in the same way that a Berlin Jew who was deported to Auschwitz ‘belonged’ to the artefact? Derrida’s questions about the museum thus extend to the tense relationship of memorial architecture to landscape, which, if not ‘exemplary’ for the Jewish Museum, seems to threaten the museum’s architecture with everything that is not architecture, including ruin in time. Occupying a place at the intersection between artefact and artifice, past and future, memorial architecture necessarily zigzags along a path that crosses several other languages ‘beyond’ architecture – for instance, history, ideology, and philosophy – and in these crossings architecture risks ruination by coming, so to speak, to an ‘end’. As a response to this risk, the Jewish Museum literalizes the struggle of architecture to survive beyond itself. The museum tries to stop ruination in time by circumscribing landscape with construction: the museum’s floors (Figure 11.1) zigzag across a ‘void-line’ (Schneider 1999: 21) that serves as the organizational principle of the plan. The ‘void-line’ is, however, articulated by the zigzag, demonstrating an implicit understanding of ‘landscape’ as a post-apocalyptic void, a ‘void’ not only emptied of objects in the process of some past obliteration, but by extension also in need of reconstruction. As such, the ‘void’ is spatially described as the unbuilt and the non-architecture that

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Figure 11.1 Jewish Museum Berlin: floor plan and vertical section through void bridges (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind)

is ‘already there’ (Libeskind 1992b: 102). But what is already there is also discontinuous. The landscape incorporated is, in Libeskind’s words, ‘the nexus of lines connecting invisibles that are not patterned on the cityscape’ of Berlin (Libeskind 1992a: 84). These invisibles – forming the lines of an ‘irrational invisible matrix’ (Libeskind 1992a: 83) connecting the Berlin addresses of Rahel Varnhagen, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Heinrich von Kleist, Heinrich Heine, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and Arnold Schönberg – plot the footprint of the museum on to a cityscape regulated not by the grid but rather by names and addresses that remain anonymous for the grid. By extension, the landscape,

140 Julia Ng understood as a matrix of exemplary figures who either left or resided near someone who left his or her Berlin address behind, is also exemplary of discontinuity. The general structure of the museum thus repeats the logic of exemplarity, building itself around six so-called ‘voids’ in a line left ‘undesigned’ (Libeskind 1992b: 102) but none the less historically determined by and to that extent representative of the event remembered by us as the Holocaust. This exemplary structure, however, undoes itself. The struggle of Libeskind’s architecture with its nemesis culminates in a second type of void, the tautologically ‘voided void’, which is the name given to a concrete tower specifically dedicated to the sealed memory of the Holocaust yet constructed in a way that literally invites entry and solicits ‘response’. The Holocaust tower is the trapezium seen at the bottom left of the floor plan in the upper half of Figure 11.1. Made of concrete, it is entered through a doorway at the end of one of the three subterranean passages accessed from the Berlin Museum. In this second void, the memorial’s attempt to represent wholesale destruction by fire fails, though not because of the impropriety of representation. Representation fails because it has reached the end – by which I mean both purpose and limit – of Libeskind’s architecture in a concept of ‘void’ paradoxically double in valence. The ‘voided void’ is, in fact, not a void at all, but rather a place built to generate meaning, even if that meaning takes place negatively, that is, in a place de-void of signification that could be attached to the sealed experience of the Holocaust. It is, therefore, also a place that ‘voids’ all attempts at representation, including its own attempt to represent non-representability. The dilemma of the museum as a whole, its sense of inescapable self-destruction, is thus constructed upon the ruins of representation. This in turn explains why the museum’s explicitly memorial element is necessarily externalized from the straightforward logic of the discontinuous ‘void-line’ mirroring the exemplary landscape of Berlin and constituting the general spacing of the memorial structure. This ‘necessary’ and expressive externalization – and with the word ‘externalization’ I allude to the German translation that Libeskind employs for the Holocaust Tower, the entäußerte Leere – this necessary externalization paradoxically exiles the memory and experience of the Holocaust from understanding, while encouraging ‘experience’ and participation. By undoubtedly taking place as a constructed artifice, and by possibly taking place as a building that is representative, the concept of the ‘voided void’ is undercut by what Derrida (1992a) calls the logic of the Platonic khôra. In responding to Libeskind, Derrida raises the khôra as a concept that came up against the concept of ‘void’ during his collaboration with Peter Eisenman on the Choral Works project initiated in 1985. Khôra, he explains, is a place – and the Greek name for ‘place’ – in the Timaeus that cannot be defined as the mere absence of presence as Eisenman’s ‘void’ was, but rather as the possibility of taking place: it makes it possible for everything that may be given form to be given place, and in turn receives determinations. Khôra’s giving of place would include giving place to history, even to history conceived of as a void or end of historical understanding. The logic of the khôra thus challenges the very use of the word ‘void’: khôra precedes the notion of ‘void’ that is conceived of as negated presence by virtue of being its condition

The virtual landscape of Berlin 141 of possibly taking place. As such, khôra posits an other origin at the ‘origin’ of history, a place absolutely exterior to that which it founds. Thus, if it is understood as an example of post-apocalyptic non-architecture and ontologically determined absence, the term ‘void’ cannot adequately describe the place in which the memory of the Holocaust takes its place (Derrida 1992b: 100), for the place where this happens – the memorial, Libeskind’s architecture of memory – is fundamentally ambivalent. Being both accessible and contained, inviting both participation and exclusion, the ambivalent place of memory that the Jewish Museum forms is founded upon a possibility of taking place that opposes the logic of noncontradiction upon which the ontological concept of ‘void’, and what Derrida has criticized since his earliest works as the metaphysics of presence, are constructed. ‘In order to think khôra’, Derrida writes in his essay ‘Khôra’, ‘it is necessary to go back to a beginning that is older than the beginning’ (Derrida 1995: 126). We must go back behind and below the origin, or also the birth, toward a necessity which is neither generative nor engendered and which carries philosophy, ‘precedes’ (prior to the time that passes or the eternal time before history) and ‘receives’ the effect, here the image of oppositions (intelligible and sensible): philosophy. (Derrida 1995: 126) Ultimately, the logic of the khôra in Derrida’s question challenges one to rethink (i.e. philosophize) the way memorial architecture, and we as its spectators, relate to the ‘preceding’ conditions – the non-being, the non-present, yet nonanthropo-theological conditions – of its own construction. The most immediate consequence of this rethinking is that memorial architecture can no longer relate innocently to a linear and chronological ordering of time. That khôra gives place to a bifurcation of the ‘origin’ of memory opens up another paradox in the Jewish Museum. If, architecturally, the singular memory of the Holocaust is representable only in the form of a spectacularly monumental void that voids its own representational legitimacy, then one wonders how the so-called ‘voided void’, represented by the trapezoid on the bottom right in the model of the underground level of the museum (Figure 11.2), could be accessed at all. In the general structure, the zigzagging path of spectatorship through the rooms exhibiting the artefacts of German-Jewish history articulates the void in its discontinuity; that is, the lack of exchange between Jewish Berlin and civic Berlin that, as Derrida points out, Gershom Scholem believed wrote off the notion of ‘German Jewishness’ or ‘Jewish Germanness’ as a myth. As a consequence of the rift between the Germans and the Jews, the ‘return’ of Jewish memory to Berlin is a belated Gastgeschenk that spectres of a past that never was rather than spectators could logically receive (Derrida 1992a: 91). How, then, is it possible that spectators from the continuous line of the living can access the realm of the spectral? Architecturally, the solution is literal. The problem of access, and the politics of participation by the living, is solved by conducting the living through an underground street connecting the otherwise autonomous elements above ground.

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Figure 11.2 Jewish Museum Berlin: wooden model showing the three underground streets connecting the Berlin Museum (bottom left) and the Jewish Museum (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind, photo by Udo Hesse)

As we can see in the three vertical sections through the entryway to the museum (Figure 11.3), the Jewish Museum was conceived of less emphatically as an ‘extension’ of the Berlin Museum (bottom left in Figure 11.3) than as a separate building with an ornamentally autonomous elevation and floor plan, and joined at its origin by a passage hidden from sight at the ground level. But there are troublesome implications in the fact that, even when the landscape above ground changes, that is, even after the Wall fell during the planning of the project, access to a mythical autonomous Jewish Berlin was still to be mediated by a stygian street of forgetfulness leading from the familiar history of the polis directly into the spectral memorial. For the Wall itself was a memorial of the events leading up to 1945 and to Germany’s defeat. The division of the city was in this sense a reminder of the political conditions of the Germans’ relation to their past. The fall of the Wall not only removed this memorial, the reunification it instigated also effectively

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Figure 11.3 Jewish Museum Berlin: three vertical sections showing underground street connecting the autonomous elements above ground, and extending into the zigzag (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind)

restored Berlin to its borders during its time as the capital city of the Third Reich, inverting relations such that those who could ‘relate’ at all to the murdered Jews of Europe would necessarily have to be Germans from a Germany where the past had never happened. Derrida alludes to as much when he asks Libeskind how the coming down of the Berlin Wall affected his project (Derrida 1992a: 90). The plans of the museum, however, had not undergone any fundamental changes. Instead, the connective element between the Germans and an isolated museum for the Jews is an underground street. Crucial to the paradoxical preservation of Jewish German memory, and crucially figured in this street, is a processual forgetting of the political conditions of the construction. This structurally enacted depoliticization can be understood in two senses. Most immediately, the subterranean link structurally enacts a transformation of the political into the post-political, which is to say that the museum for the Jews of Berlin partakes in a ‘politics’ no longer organized by the social space of the ‘polis’, and no longer informed by immediate interaction with the city above ground. However, the obliteration of the Graeco-Western polis from the cityscape is, as we have seen before, structurally implied or incorporated by the zigzag of the Jewish Museum. Especially in the city crucial to the construction of the building, this obliteration none the less preserves the conceptual markings of the city street – the political ‘planning’ that underlies today’s necessity for the Jewish Museum to be erected. This not only shows that the genesis of a building is always a highly political process. By asserting its autonomy from ‘politics’ and political change, the museum’s architecture also reconfirms none other than its dependence on the political for its origination, and by extension the

144 Julia Ng indelibility of these political conditions. The builtness of the architecture, or the fact that architecture takes place only after being submitted to a competition and being selected, this builtness, and the fact that architecture’s form is thereby subject to terms of acceptance beyond architecture proper, betrays a dimension of complicity in the Jewish Museum with the immediate landscape that the museum insistently displays its independence from. Isolating the Jewish Museum politically in the reunified Berlin repeats, in fact, the historical isolation – and eventually the obliteration – of the ‘German’ Jews. The traces of the political do remain. ‘In the unerasable city,’ Libeskind says at one point, perhaps despite himself, the impression one gets when looking at photographs of a bombed Berlin . . . is that the one thing that was not erased in all the bombings – and almost everything was – were the streets: the markings of the streets, the curb, only a few centimetres high. (Libeskind 1992b: 97) In built architecture’s end (and beginning), in what is conceived of as the postapocalyptic void, or, put another way, from the point of view of architecture’s future destruction, what is preserved beyond ruination are the underground and the ghostly traces of streets and connections from a landscape beyond the memory of architecture. This is the point to which the choratic rethinking of our relationship to time leads: to the insight that traces bring architecture to its end and fill the landscape after the end of architecture. But the critique of politics generated from this choratic rethinking or avoiding of the concept of ‘void’ depends upon the expectation that architecture will be built, since the negotiations between architecture and its landscape derive from this expectation. Can the politics of ‘unbuilt’ architecture, which actually comprises most of what can be termed architecture and, indeed, all of that which becomes or takes its place virtually as architecture, then be understood by inference as the condition of the possibility of politics, even, indeed, as a pure politics? One can formulate this question in another way. What is the nature of the politics involved in the singular speculation of an architect, who is unconstrained by negotiations necessitated by builtness in his interaction with time and the changing landscape?

Figure 11.4 Über den Linden: elevation and plan (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind, photo by Uwe Dettmar)

The virtual landscape of Berlin 145 When called upon to respond to the reunification of Berlin, Libeskind remarkably also imagines a street. Unlike the Jewish Museum, which structurally reflects upon its surroundings only in spite of itself, the project Über den Linden, paradoxically, reflects its surroundings consciously although it had no need to negotiate for its construction. Über den Linden, the elevation and plan of which can be seen in Figure 11.4, is a ‘non-building’ Libeskind conceived of in 1991, while the design process for what would become the Jewish Museum was still taking place. It was a contribution to an exhibition at the Frankfurt Deutsches Architektur-Museum entitled Berlin Morgen (Berlin Tomorrow), whose organizers Vittorio Lampugnani and Michael Mönninger invited a group of seventeen internationally renowned architects to propose both virtual and actual solutions for the problem of redefining what had been the periphery of two cities as the metropolitan centre of a newly reunified capital. The striking element of the project is its scale, which produces the visual effect of seemingly looking through the reverse end of a telescope. The elevation shows how much Über den Linden towers above the landscape, and at what great distance the viewer must stand in order to take in the entire structure. Bernhard Schneider has pointed out that the project could be read as a theoretical problematization of scale and a reading of ‘cityscape’ against the grain of conventions of harmony in urban planning (Schneider 1997: 124). From the sketch of the elevation, however, the only point that can justifiably be made is that the structure appears close to the viewer even at a distance measurable by the scale of the trees and the few buildings scattered about it. Moreover, the composition of the plan emphasizes that the scale was less to be measured than to be experienced from its elevation, and that the structure’s negotiation with the landscape is experiential. The contextualization of the structure appears in the upper half of the drawing, where the elevation is illustrated as it would have been seen in its natural surroundings, and not in the lower half, where the footprint is laid out. What could be termed ‘reverse telescopy’ not only brings the object visually close to the viewer though it is quantitatively distant; this closeness also has an affective dimension. In fact, bringing out the affective quality of the structure’s scale seems to be the primary motive of the plan’s recreation of this visual experience. Significantly, this affect derives from associations evoked by Über den Linden’s site. This site, like the ‘invisible matrix’ guiding the construction of the Jewish Museum, is composed of names. The elevation not only appears like a wall

146 Julia Ng that recalls the other famous Wall, this wall also extends along Unter den Linden, the most recognizable street in Berlin and, as the east–west axis running from beyond the Siegessäule (Victory Column) to the former site of the palace, the street most symbolic of the old Königliche Residenzstadt (Royal City of Residence) of Prussia. It was the immensity and directional quality of this grand boulevard leading to the palace that, generations later, Albert Speer would emulate and rotate in his plan for a superhuman-scaled north–south axis leading to a new palace he had designed for Hitler’s planned political manifestations. The same positive correlation of scale and historical significance of site motivates Über den Linden; it explicates the affective dimension of these sinister associations by literalizing the play on words in its name at a scale undoing the scales of all the previous attempts at utopianizing scale. By implication, the same pathos evoked by Speer’s literal translation from meaning to form – he made 1:1 models of his buildings in order that Hitler could experience them in the manner of a film set (see Speer 1969: 160–1) – is produced from Über den Linden’s own process of translation. Moreover, Über den Linden’s name inverts the street name Unter den Linden, or ‘under and among the lime trees’, into trajectories – outlined in the footprint of the structure – occupying the space between the kerbs of the street and vertically hyperbolized. The line that constructs streets and walls on diagrams has, in effect, been used to trace movement in two dimensions and subsequently raised off the ground at a perpendicular to produce an affective structure of three-dimensional lines (Figure 11.5). At the basis of the project is therefore the design of movement, the political conditions of which are problematic at the very least. That Libeskind should be concerned with recreating this particular affective experience derived from designing movement along a symbolically charged street in the year 1991 leads back to reflections on the Jewish Museum, in which access is also structured by a highly problematic street. This link suggests, in fact, that in the museum space, the display of actual objects was subservient to the design of the trajectory through which the history contained in the museum was to be experienced. The link is reflected in the similarity of the construction of the lines composing Über den Linden’s footprint, to the architectural alphabet composing the zigzag of the Jewish Museum, seen in Figure 11.6. More specifically, the experience of the visitor was to be reversely telescopic. As the museum-goer moves – or rather, is moved – through the museum space, he or she encounters artefacts that contain affective significance because of the vast quantitative distances in time between the viewer and the viewed that, none the less, are closed by what seems to be the immediacy of the object. The museum-goer is, in fact, being moved both by the design and by the artefact. This particular relation between the visual experience, the experience of being doubly ‘moved’, and the memory work that grounds the function of the museum, can be best explained if we ourselves move to the paradigm of cinema. It has been argued that cinema is a spatial art – the art and film historian Élie Faure (1953) coined the term cinéplastique – and Anthony Vidler (1993) has traced the long tradition in which film and architecture have informed each other’s development. Conversely, architecture, too, can be considered a fundamentally cinematic art when seen from

Figure 11.5 Über den Linden: scale model, 300 cm ⫻ 50 cm ⫻ 10 cm (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind)

Figure 11.6 Jewish Museum Berlin: the ‘architectural alphabet’ (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind)

The virtual landscape of Berlin 149 the point of view of walking. Sergei Eisenstein, for instance, likened film to architecture by defining both of them by the virtual movement of diverse impressions that pass in front of the eyes of a spectator who is, in the case of film, immobile and, in the case of architecture, mobile (see Vidler 1993: 56). In the same vein, Le Corbusier uses Auguste Choisy’s concept of a view that is mouvementée because it comprises a condensation of a sequence of perspectives into a single image, in order to illustrate his own notion of a promenade architecturale in Vers une architecture (see Vidler 1993: 59). Libeskind’s own favoured rendering technique, axonometry, might offer various moments of composition up to such a cinematic understanding. The cinematic concept most approximating the visual experience of moving through space to memory work, however, is Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the ‘timeimage’. The time-image captures the moment of remembrance at issue in the Jewish Museum: a Proustian moment in which virtual continuity – a cinematic effect – between the here and now of the spectator and the pastness of that which is to be memorialized is experienced. In Cinema 2 Deleuze emphasizes that the time-image is a new kind of image generated from what he calls a ‘pure optical situation’, a situation in which the image is allowed to break out of the sensory-motor automatism of habit that dictated the stimulus-and-response-driven logic of the old ‘action image’ (Deleuze 1989: 3). In the context of Deleuze’s reading of the process of signification in Proust et les signes, the new situation in which this image finds itself could be interpreted as a perverse spectatorship, a telescopic voyeurism that paralyses the spectator at a distance from which to await the unfolding of a series of signs in ‘everyday banality’ as ‘essence’ and significance (Deleuze 1989: 3, also see Deleuze 1998). This ‘everyday banality’ would denote for Deleuze what involuntarily traverses the realms of time and embarks on the impossible journey from the distant past to the present in the mémoire involontaire: an artefact. In Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu, such an artefact is invariably the scrap of nature or corner of a garden that was unconscious, at the time when it was but environment to the apparition of the extraordinary, of the possibility that it would ever be endowed with significance; in Deleuzian terms, that it would become sign (see Proust 1987: 298). This sign, however, appears in such a way that the place in which the telescopic voyeur finds himself looking at it is undeterminable by any action that might disclose it according to the expectations arising from the ‘sensory-motor schema’ of knowing (Deleuze 1989: 3). Since the sensory-motor schema can, to Deleuze, arise only from the point of view of a subject, this place is as ‘depoliticized’ and devoid of the possibility of significant action as the ‘any-space-whatever’ (Deleuze 1989: 8), a disconnected space in which the time-image and the signification of the artefact can be established, but from which the point of view of a character has ‘passed into the void’ (Deleuze 1989: 8). In this sense the telescopic voyeur is not even a living subject – he is a ghost of himself in the landscape and at the end of built space. The time-image relates therefore to landscape in a way similar to the way a museum-goer relates to the ‘voids’ organizing and articulated by the Jewish Museum. The museum’s zigzag continually crosses the ‘void-line’, making

150 Julia Ng the absence of presence discontinuous by its crossings, but it also determines the continuation of meaning of another, sealed ‘void’, the hidden experience of the Holocaust, by articulating it. The zigzag achieves the experience of these paradoxes by guiding the strolling spectator along a path of his or her own meandering memories, bringing the spectator necessarily to an encounter with a ‘void’ of experience, for the very reason that he or she cannot access a ‘void’. Furthermore, the spectator’s encounter with the ‘void’ articulated by the zigzag is by necessity mediated by the sealed ‘void’, past which he must walk in the order prescribed – that is how Libeskind designed the access points. The landscape-cum-void, to paraphrase Deleuze, is in this way post-apocalyptic, always already lacking in possible content, and at the ‘end’ of khôra, the spatial condition of future possibility. That is why it is so important to the re-evaluation of the ‘subject’ in cinema (Deleuze 1989: 16). The time-image relates to landscape through the telescopy of a singular spectator who engages in the remembrance of a lost past, to which he never ‘belonged’ as subject, whether, as in the case of Proust’s narrator in the Recherche, the actuality of the landscape is as dead as the people and memories of the people who once inhabited it – ‘Tout cela était en réalité mort pour moi. Mort à jamais? C’était possible’ (Proust 1987: 141) – or, as in the case of Libeskind’s ideal spectator, whether the actuality of the landscape has altered. In other words, what the time-image adds to the ‘depoliticization’ that the Jewish Museum effects is the dimension of loss that the spectator of artefacts from the Holocaust and subsequently defined Jewish history undergoes: the loss of subjecthood. Looking back at the project Über den Linden, one now understands why the trajectories – first staticized in two dimensions, then hyperbolized on monumental scale in three dimensions – evoke such pathos. Emptied of living subjects, the landscape Deleuze calls ‘any-space-whatever’ can hold only post-apocalyptic remains – street markings, for instance – among which time can no longer be subordinated as the measure of action, but rather action, or movement, can be seen only from the perspective of time (Deleuze 1989: 22). The structure of Über den Linden is composed of this type of movement, which never moves across space but stays essentially two-dimensional. Movement remains a diagram of itself, and emptied of subjects, when visualized by time or, to quote Deleuze, by an ‘unalterable form filled by change’ (Deleuze 1989: 17). From the perspective of the time-image, movement itself becomes the invariable object, a condition of the possibility of itself. Thus not only do we see that the unchanging form of the movement of spectres – and of spectators of the anterior-future – literally obstructs the view of the metropolitan centre, but also telescopically minimizes the Brandenburg Gate at such a superhuman scale that, already in 1991, the gateway through the wall and symbol of freedom virtually disappears into microscopic exemplarity (Figure. 11.7). What can be made visible only through the lenses of a microscope or macro zoom lens is no longer exemplary. Freedom, but also the political conditions of the era that preceded and necessitated its symbolization in the gate, have become a counter-example to exemplarity, a piece of everyday banality and habitual detail breaking out of repetition only through differential repetition.

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Figure 11.7 Über den Linden: detail of model (300 cm ⫻ 60 cm ⫻ 10 cm) showing the scale as compared with the Brandenburg Gate (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind, photo by Udo Hesse)

There are, finally, two breaks in the cumulative new ‘wall’ of Über den Linden, both of which frame what appear to be still images of green, unbuilt spaces (see Figure 11.4). These ‘any-spaces-whatever’ are the remains of the centre of reunified Berlin, whose axes have been rotated to the east–west orientation of the street Unter den Linden, and which have been transformed into a landscape unfinished and unfilled by any anthropomorphic structure. Standing before the wall of static motion it is impossible to focus on anything panoramically except the wall itself. In the Jewish Museum, too, a panoramic, as well as panoptic, view is impossible except through the virtual continuity of spectral and cinematic movement. (See, for example, the ‘void-line’ interrupting the zigzag in Figures 11.1 and 11.3.) The movement of the spectator, as seen from the perspective of time, connects timeimages across irrational jump cuts between details of everyday banality that are

152 Julia Ng essentially unrelated and separated by ‘voids’ of meaning. These details force their way into signification with what Deleuze describes as a violence of the unconscious, which forces thought into existence a posteriori by interrupting habit with fragments of associations (Deleuze 1989: 116–20). In the museum space, the violence of the ‘unconscious’ could come only from structures: the opaque structural elements framing the movement of the museum-goer. Landscape, in both Über den Linden and the Jewish Museum, has in effect been framed by ‘panoramic’ opacity into an anti-panorama, emptying the political of content and rendering political action spectral and even discontinuous. The question with which Derrida began can now be rephrased to ask whether Libeskind’s emphasis on ‘street’ in the Jewish Museum privileges an ideal spectatorship at the expense of the past. With the importance of the aspect of design from the project Über den Linden in mind, this question could be reformulated once again to ask whether the privileging of an ideal spectator is in fact a foil for the master planner of the museum. In most books on Libeskind, where it is reproduced as a model for Über den Linden, the landscape model shown in Figure 11.8 is captioned ‘A Machine for Producing Gods’ – a name borrowed from the last line of Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion and, incidentally, taken up by Derrida in his discussion of the structural interdependence of religion and technoscience in ‘Faith and Knowledge’ (Derrida 2002: 77). In one publication collecting Libeskind’s writings on Berlin, however, the image is curiously reproduced as a model for the Jewish Museum, and mistakenly assigned the name ‘Die Namen, Modell (Detail)’ (Names Model) (Libeskind 1995: 86). With names, addresses, and the general invocation of the dead occupying such an exemplary place in mapping the Jewish Museum on to Libeskind’s ‘Berlin’, this particular misnomer and misplacement occasion some provisory concluding remarks on the architect’s position, actual and virtual, in relation to the cityscape. I have suggested that the critique of politics associated with the logic of exemplarity depends upon an understanding of architecture as decidedly built, and the trajectory of such an analysis ends with the non-human, non-theological possibility of building to take place. Next, I have argued that the dimension of time, of time that is not merely a measure of movement but rather a dimension generative of a post-apocalyptic perspective, is equally indispensable when one regards time as the condition of the possibility of built space, that is, of space having taken place. ‘A Machine for Producing Gods’ reveals that the post-apocalyptic perspective is a property of the Architect’s authority. Central to the composition is a black-andwhite aerial photograph of Berlin’s central district, rotated 90° anticlockwise and reproduced at a scale that recalls the view from a bomber aircraft. The riveting on the metal panels framing the photograph, as well as the blood-red typeface of the words printed on the photograph, contribute to evoking the physical and economic machinery of war. Foregrounded, however, is not the illuminated moment of the snapshot but rather the lines intersecting and cutting through the entire image, raising the photograph and the metal plates on to the same plane. The extension of the lines beyond the limits of the frame indicates that they were not created when

Figure 11.8 Über den Linden: ‘A Machine for Producing Gods’, landscape model; ‘YHVH’ on the metal plate, bottom left; ‘DEADLines’ in red lettering running vertically down the centre (courtesy of Studio Daniel Libeskind, photo by Udo Hesse)

154 Julia Ng the photograph – Berlin’s cityscape – was fragmented and then pieced together again, bombed and then rebuilt; rather, they create of the image a directional map or plan – for reconnaissance, for precision bombing, for reconstructing the city in accord with a particular affect (income, crime, industry) invisible to the naked lens. The ‘Berlin’ shown here, doubly located and doubly named, is both the spectral, exemplary Berlin incorporated by the Jewish Museum and the changing, postapocalyptic Berlin miniaturized by Über den Linden. This ‘planned’ Berlin is a city to come, morgen: a city as a writing machine, with the infinite possibility to produce, out of the recombinant letters of the alphabet, the name of a divinity, YHVH, the God of Wrath. Doubtless, there is infinitely more that can be said on the relation between geopolitics, the production of ‘religion’ in the media, and the divine properties of the Architect. One thing, however, is certain: the ‘promised’ city remains virtual. In actuality, landscape threatens built architecture less with examples than with counter-examples, which interrupt a building process with microscopic, everyday banalities: ‘deadlines’, for instance, as in the deadline of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

12 The reversible city Exhibition(ism), chorality, and tenderness in Manhattan and Venice Teresa Stoppani THE ANTI-MODERN METROPOLIS AND URBAN PERFORMANCE Manhattan and Venice have always represented unsolved complexities for the modernist discourse in architecture. Anti-modern (Manhattan) and pre-modern (Venice), the two islands resist the separations and classifications that the language of the modernist discourse in architecture imposes on urban space. Manhattan and Venice remain incomprehensible to the modernist project because they both are, in different ways, internally and intrinsically indivisible. As it attempts to divide and to compartmentalize them and to superimpose its own categories, the modern project fails to comprehend their complexities, and can only partly and partially address them, without fully understanding their structures, which remain for it other. Modernist planning that operates through divisions, zoning, and separation of functions finds itself at odds with the organizational structure of these metropolises, failing to grasp the interplay of tensions and contradictions that they hold together – unresolved. Modernism fails to recognize that the perimetered orthogonal grid of Manhattan and the paratactic canal-and-island system of Venice are not planned figures but performative diagrams: operational spatial instructions for a performance rather than definitions and drawings of a form. This chapter tries to identify some alternative categories to read these two urban spaces as per-forming – rather than shaped – in their physical making as well as in their narratives and myths of selfrepresentation. In particular, it sees Manhattan and Venice as ideal ‘paradigm islands’ for a reading of urban space as an ‘interior’.

MANHATTAN: EXHIBITIONISM AND ARTIFICIAL CHORALITY The Manhattan Grid, established in 1811 by the Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan, outlines a ‘definitive’ subdivision of the island in 2,028 blocks by tracing a system of twelve north–south avenues and 155 east–west streets (see Koolhaas 1994; Stokes 1915–28; Augustyn and Cohen 1997). Operating between normative rule and outlined figure, between performance and representation, the Grid imposes an outer order that is both replicated and transgressed in Manhattan’s interiors.

156 Teresa Stoppani An emblematic example of these transgressions is the Rockefeller Center, the monumental complex built in the heart of Manhattan on a group of blocks comprised between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and 48th and 52nd Streets, which follows and at the same time defies the equalizing order of the orthogonal grid (see Koolhaas 1994: 178–207). Sedimented in time through a series of consecutive projects, the Rockefeller Center is organized within the Grid’s order and its suggested vertical repetitions, but in its interiors it defines spatial hierarchies, axial systems, and physical connections that are alien to the Grid. The Rockefeller Center is an architectural ‘solo’ within the Grid not only because of its sheer scale – what Koolhaas (1997) calls its ‘bigness’ – but because it superimposes on the Grid’s planned uniformity some elements of exception which break and orientate the theoretical isotropy of the system. The Rockefeller Center is also a collective project, not only because its design derives from a complex system of architectural collaborations, but because it is the result of a summation and an accumulation – rather than a composition – of different projects. The Center becomes a stratified vertical catalogue of tensions, negations, and confirmations of the Grid, a compound building that stands in the Grid as an island of rules and exceptions. Above and below the ground level, the large interiors of the Center include spaces which, circumscribed by but liberated from the striation of the Grid, produce an in-built criticism of the Grid from within. A freedom of composition unfolds which only in part respects the stratification of identical floors. The Rockefeller Center’s transgressions from the Grid are manifested in different ways. Corbett’s early project for the Metropolitan Opera, which then becomes the Rockefeller Center, proposes an articulation and fluidity alternative to the Grid through a series of ‘Venetian’ bridges that connect the blocks of the complex. The underground concourse, even in its final version, develops into a pseudoarchaeological quotation of a Beaux Arts axial structure. And the interior of one of the blocks allows an escape into the oneiric performance space of the Radio City Music Hall. The large scale of the complex allows for the separation of the overall outer envelope from it contents – what Rem Koolhaas calls ‘lobotomy’ (Koolhaas 1994: 100) – and for the development of internal articulations and interconnections that defy the Grid. The superficial striation operated by the Grid is not capable of exerting total control on the space it delimits. Its order is escaped by individualistic issues, which, once encased by it, can manifest themselves more explicitly or more efficiently inside its interiors. Within the outer striated order of the Manhattan Grid and behind the appearance of a world of private transgression, different inner orders can be established. The never accomplished equalizing attempt of the Grid seems to materialize itself only in the oneiric interior of the scenic space, where, thanks to the artifice and the conventions of representation, an artificial chorality can be produced. Within the Rockefeller Center, the entrepreneur Samuel Lionel Rothafel creates Radio City Music Hall: ‘a self-contained cosmos on the allotment of his block’ (Koolhaas 1994: 219). Radio City is a huge theatrical device that is a spectacle in

Figure 12.1 Manhattan, Rockefeller Center: Arata Matsumoto, ‘Attainable’, 1992 (courtesy of Arata Matsumoto)

158 Teresa Stoppani itself, even before containing any show: a gigantic sunset of concentric semicircles of gilded plaster frames the stage and telescopes out to enwrap the whole theatre. As wide as a city block, this large interior upsets the conventional canons of performance: the spectacle here is offered by the space, which reproduces the metropolitan dimension inside a uterine cavity of a scale where the human body and acting voice become ridiculously inadequate. The only relevant and comprehensible human presence here can be that of the organized crowd of undistinguished and apparently identical individuals: on the floor, the metropolitan audience arrayed in seating rows; on the stage, the chorus line of artificially identical performers. Separated by the proscenium, the two arrangements are mirror images of each other: the metropolis here represents itself to itself as a chorus line that displays an ‘inhuman coordination that relies on frenzied synchronization, an exhilarating surrender of individuality to the automatism’ (Koolhaas 1994: 214). The act on stage is a synchronized routine more than a ritual of participation. In Radio City Music Hall, within the outer order of the Grid and behind the neutral envelope of its block, Rothafel can carry out a collective urbanistic operation: the shows that he produces are the staging of a grid made of neutralized human bodies, a homogenizing mechanism of potentially endless repetition (routine), much more powerful than the urban Grid, because it is prescriptive of a spatial performance rather than of an outer envelope.

Figure 12.2 Manhattan, Rockefeller Center: Radio City Music Hall (photo by Teresa Stoppani)

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MANHATTAN: CHORALITY AS CHORUS LINE In The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Manfredo Tafuri (1990) discusses the European and American scenic space of the 1930s. For Tafuri, the Hollywood musical of the 1930s realizes the visions of the European historical avant-gardes by producing a ‘collective celebration’ of the metropolis in a perfect machine in which everything converges in a ‘montage of the attractions and symbolic universe, artifice and narration, instruments of information and technological knowledge’ (Tafuri 1990: 111). He goes on: ‘In the musicals of Busby Berkeley the “chorality” of the dance is the absolute protagonist and is enriched with symbolic values’ (Tafuri 1990: 111). In Tafuri’s thinking, Busby Berkeley’s musical film 42nd Street (1933) produces an explicit allegory that literally puts New York on stage, with a chorus of dancers dressed up as skyscrapers performing a collective celebration as an antidote to the crisis of the Depression. Berkeley deprives the buildings of their individual identity, and ‘the “chorality” of the dance [becomes] the absolute protagonist’, in a performance that is ‘not mere escapism [but] a synthesis of precision and bodily liberation, of the surreal and of kitsch’ (Tafuri 1990: 111). The scenic device, whether it is staged in an urban interior or on film, surpasses reality in producing an artificial metropolitan chorality. But when it is the architects

Figure 12.3 Lisette Model, ‘Reflection’, New York City, 1940 (courtesy of the Ikona Gallery and Ziva Kraus)

160 Teresa Stoppani or their architectures that go on stage, they cannot help displaying an ostentatious individuality. In 1931, at the New York Beaux Arts costume ball (‘Fête moderne: a Fantasie in Flame and Silver’), the architects of the city’s most famous skyscrapers stage the ballet Skyline of New York, a performance which has been analyzed by both Koolhaas (1994) and Tafuri (1990), and has now become part of architecture’s iconography of display and self-celebration. In the performance, the architects ‘play’ their own buildings: each of them wears a costume whose headpiece represents his most famous skyscraper, but, like their towers, the costumes that they wear are essentially similar. This pathetic performance, in which the architects are forced to expose the limits of their works, reveals that, behind the apparent collective choreography of the Grid, the real Manhattan continues to express ambitions of unrestrained individualism. ‘Lobotomized’, as Koolhaas would say, its skyscrapers display all-identical hollow envelopes that do not represent anything any more, and show off their headpieces as cardboard personalities. On this episode Koolhaas concludes: ‘The costume ball is the one formal convention in which the desire for individuality and extreme originality does not endanger collective performance, but is actually a condition for it’ (Koolhaas 1994: 130). The artificial chorality of the metropolitan beings that Rothafel engineered in the Radio City Music Hall shows finds no correspondence either in the real city or in its architecture. The skyscraper loses the connotation of structure and becomes a scenic toy. Tafuri writes: ‘Being neither able nor willing to offer themselves as complete “syntheses”, the skyscrapers of the “new” Manhattan pose as spectators at a gigantic collective ballet’ (Tafuri 1990: 186) – unable to participate. Subjectivity is recuperated ‘in a sort of propitiatory rite . . . [on] the stage of the metropolis transformed into a music hall. The ludic installs itself in the metropolis with masks that lack thickness’ (Tafuri 1990: 186). Manhattan seems paralysed but also thriving in this impossibility of being, between a horizontal law of homogeneity – the Grid – and its non-coherent threedimensional developments that try to escape its rules. But this tension – the paralysis is only an appearance – is also the force that allows Manhattan to implicate itself within the orthogonal order, growing inside it in the only way that is there possible: by self-destruction and re-making.

MANHATTAN: EXHIBITIONISM AND THE ARCHI-STAR Seventy years later, in the aftermath of the World Trade Center tragedy, in the summer of 2002, a group of renowned New York architects perform once again a collective routine, this time off-stage and outside the boundaries of the 1811 Commissioners’ Grid. Their collaborative effort, staged and featured by The New York Times (Muschamp 2002: 45–58), proposes a series of projects for the areas surrounding Ground Zero, and is a response to the commercial parcel-and-infill plan proposed by the New York developers working for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. This time the chorus line is made of actual architectural proposals, although still on the drawing boards: from Battery Park to Harrison Street, the projects line up along the redesigned West Street, in ‘adoration’ of the

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Figure 12.4 Lisette Model, ‘Reflection’, New York City, 1950 (courtesy of the Ikona Gallery and Ziva Kraus)

yet unidentified substitute twin towers, which are shifted in their footprint from their original position but equally large and imposing. The parade of architectural egos here becomes explicit: outside the modular orthogonal grid the skyscrapers can at last be entirely different. No longer reduced to cardboard headpieces mounted on identical costumes, these projects can display their authors’ unrestrained architectural egos in a parody of their signature languages. These projects offer also a reading of Manhattan’s urban space from the outside: developed outside the Grid,

Figure 12.5 Evsa Model, ‘New York City IV’, 1942/43 (courtesy of the Ikona Gallery and Ziva Kraus)

The reversible city 163 they are free from its three-dimensional orders; but without the Grid and the high density it imposes, they fail to produce the close-knit juxtapositions that make Manhattan an ‘interior’. And the two faceless towers around which these projects revolve confirm what they are as what they were: an out-of-scale non-Manhattan. The two faceless towers find a prompt architectural definition a few months later, in February 2003, when Daniel Libeskind unveils his ‘Innovative Design Study’ competition-winning master plan for Ground Zero, which envisions a very tall tower – the Freedom Tower – and preserves the World Trade Center crater as a memorial site. One of the two finalists in the selection process for the towers’ site, even before becoming the final winner, Libeskind’s project makes the news in a sophisticated election-like media campaign. Unveiling his project at the press conference, Libeskind states: ‘From now on architecture will never be the same. There will never be a building without people talking about what is happening and what it’s going to look like. From now on architecture will be as interesting for people to talk about as the taste of wine’ (cited in Younge 2003: 21). While the Grid imposes an artificial chorality that remains only superficial (defined by the all-wrapping theoretical envelope of the zoning regulations), and can be transgressed but also perfected only in its interiors (both in the form of spatial organization and in the enactment of the city-in-performance in cinema and stage metaphors, or in the representation of architecture as masquerade), it is outside the homogenizing prescriptions of the Grid that the manifestations of individuality can be unleashed and find explicit expression in the urban space. The search for identity of the recent projects for the World Trade Center area becomes, with Libeskind’s proposal, a celebration of the exception, and in it the role of the architect reaches its paroxysm: from exhibition to exhibitionism, from spectacle to gossip. These events trigger the inflamed reactions of the world architecture culture. Voices such as Peter Eisenman, Cynthia Davidson, Winy Maas, Anthony Vidler – to name but a few – denounce and analyze the post-9/11 World Trade Center events and their repercussions on architecture. On the pages of Hunch, Eisenman and Davidson warn against the danger of an exhibitionist architecture that might lose – or has already lost – its critical role: While mass media has raised public awareness of architecture, particularly regarding the rebuilding of ground zero, it has at the same time reduced architecture’s ideological content to a matter of style . . . Media has made style itself an ideology. A mediated ideology appeals to the lowest common denominator – popular taste. This threatens the ideological possibilities of architecture, especially with respect to its role as a critical cultural practice . . . When architecture becomes image rather than symbol, or proffers a style rather than an ideology, it no longer has the capacity to be critical; it too becomes a form of entertainment, in other words, a spectacle. (Eisenman and Davidson 2003: 167–9) While Davidson (2003) continues the attack in her editorial in the inaugural issue of Log, on the pages of the same journal Alicia Imperiale (2003) proposes a different

Figure 12.6 Evsa Model, ‘New York City V’, 1942/43 (courtesy of the Ikona Gallery and Ziva Kraus)

The reversible city 165 and more optimistic (or at least constructive) reading of Libeskind’s project, as an attempt to define a new role for architecture and for the architect today. For Imperiale, Libeskind’s project discovers a social and political dimension of architecture that goes beyond the scale of the city or the metropolis. The issues at stake in this project – in its scale and its social dimension – are global and internationally mediated; and architecture, rather than focusing on static and representational form, can be deployed as a strategy – a trigger: Daniel Libeskind may have won the design competition for the World Trade Center site not by designing a (questionably symbolic) 1,776-foot-high tower, but by leaving the memorial space empty. Libeskind’s project could be thought of as a political agent of emergent systems because it doesn’t have to do with form, but with the promise of form. The scheme could be phased over many years and never be fully completed. This in itself could be read as a subversive political act – architect as unbuilder. (Imperiale 2003: 43) Thus read, as a trigger and political agent of change rather than as a producer of fixed forms, Libeskind’s proposal seems to operate in keeping with the ‘finally unfinished’ nature of Manhattan and its grid system. While the original Twin Towers had superimposed on (or next to) the system of Manhattan another order – complete, self-sufficient, made of ‘duplication’, ‘compatibility’, and ‘correlations’ rather than of ‘competitive verticality’ and ‘attack’ (Baudrillard 1983: 136) – Daniel Libeskind’s project returns the World Trade Center site to Manhattan and to its rules of operation, of which both the voided footprints of the former towers and the new proposed soaring tower are representative, playing in their unfinishedness according to the rules of ‘Manhattanism’ (Koolhaas 1994: 9). Exhibitionism, incompleteness, and competition seem to be the ‘chorality’ of Manhattan.

VENICE: CONNECTIVE ORDER AND NORMATIVE CHORALITY In Venice chorality is constitutive: it does not derive from a predefined and superimposed urban structure, but lies in the com-participation of her components. It is embedded in the very structure of the city and her making. Venice is made of the tensions that with-hold (hold together) her elements. A tension rather than a form, her connective order is flexible and able to produce different configurations, in which cohesion and formative process prevail over the form itself. The nature of Venice appears in the physical datum of her building, manifested, step by step, by the necessity first to make land: cohesion is the constitutive principle for the definition of the ground, which is literally built by compacting mud and slime with very dense timber piling, holding together nothing upon nothing until it solidifies. The materialization of the idea of Venice corresponds to her way of physically making land: like the physical city it represents and celebrates, the myth of the origins of Venice is carefully constructed – pieced together – with different

166 Teresa Stoppani

Figure 12.7 Kazuhiro Murayama, ‘Glass Venice’, 2001: model produced for the Enter: Venice project at the Architectural Association, London, unit master Teresa Stoppani (photo by Kazuhiro Murayama)

elements. In her myth, the city prescribes to herself the representation of her necessary chorality, which becomes the stage for her democracy. The myth and the rules of the physical construction of the city are used as a metaphor of the political structure and of the social cohesion, and they express a faithfulness to the origins as a method of self-preservation. The definition of a mythical origin is thus superimposed on to the physical origin of the city, but rather than competing with each other, the two co-operate in representing the operations of the physical, political, and cultural structures of Venice as a whole. The mythical definition of the origins condenses in itself such a multiplicity of meanings that it produces chronological exactness and unrepeatable specificity, together with an inborn plurality of times and ways, all held together paratactically. In De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae (1439) Marin Sanudo the Young writes: The construction [of Venice] was started in the year 421 on the 25th of March, the day of Venus, of beauty and of Venice, in which day, as testified by the Scriptures . . . the first man Adam was shaped in the beginning of the world by hand of God, and also in the above-mentioned day the Virgin Mary was announced by the angel Gabriel, and according to theological opinion (Jesus) was crucified by the Jews on that very day . . . (Cited in Tafuri 2003: 14; my translation)

The reversible city 167 On this topic Tafuri glosses: The civitas Rivoalti was born on the 25th of March and is not placed in the earthly time but in the providential one . . . Venice does not identify itself with Venus only, but with the Virgin as well, she being divine, impregnable and unique, with no walls the same way as the Platonic utopia, rescued from modern time and free of the sin of Cain and Romulus. (Cacciari et al. 1985: 7–9; my translation) Pagan mythology and Christian identification, chronological specificity and inborn plurality, everything precipitates on and in the origins of Venice, and it is the celebration of this plurality that makes Venice possible and regulates her material construction as well. Venice concentrates and condenses complexities without ever reducing them to one. In Dell’origine de’ barbari che distrussero per tutto l’mondo l’imperio di Roma, onde hebbe principio la città di Venetia libri undici (1539) Nicolò Zen discusses the mythical origins of Venice on the island of Rialto, attributing to architecture a sacred and fundamental role. Zen quotes the text of the first law passed by the Venetian government, named after a Bill by Zeno Daulo. The ‘Daula Law’ prescribes ‘for greater equality and similarity . . . to leave the palaces and magnificent residences in order for the one to not overcome the other; fixing by law, that all residences should be equal, alike, of similar size and ornamentation’

Figure 12.8 Venice: La Serenata, Grand Canal (collection of the author)

168 Teresa Stoppani (cited in Tafuri 1995: 3). In the collective of Venice, houses and palaces are asked to renounce their individual prerogatives in order to construct the body of the city. Buildings are required to display a chorality of intents that manifests itself in the urban interior of the public space as continuous collective representation. The Venetian private buildings are subjected to the precepts of a collective ethics that celebrates communal values and expresses the social cohesion of the republican state. Family palaces are required to renounce their individuality and to conform to the chorality of the urban fabric, which constitutes not only the physical body of the city but – most important – her imago urbis. The Daula Law defines the structures of the city in a normative way, by prescribing a basic structure for the noble palaces as well, with a central through-salon and private rooms on either side. But this structure is a normative prescription more than a defined figure, and it can take different shapes and languages.

VENICE: THE PERMEABLE MASK The normative chorality of Venice is reflected also in the various laws that, through the centuries, regulated all the elements that in different ways and forms mark and shape the boundaries between private and public spaces: not only in buildings, but also in the design and decoration of Venetian boats, and in the dressing and display of the human body. The spirit of the Daula Law and the republican values it stands for inspired a series of sumptuary laws that controlled luxury and regulated costumes, from the clothes worn by the ruling aristocracy in both private life and public political functions to the attire of noble women, courtesans, prostitutes, and ethnic minorities, to the design, fittings, and decoration of the gondola (see Brusatin 1985). Like the prescriptions for buildings to be ‘all the same’ and yet all different, a series of sumptuary laws in Renaissance Venice prescribed the appearance of different social groups. Among these, black is the prescribed colour for the men of the aristocracy: nobility and common people are required to look alike. The nobles preserve their political prerogatives and privileged status, but in the city they are all equal – the same among themselves and the same as the people. Of course, as Georg Simmel (1983) points out in ‘Die Mode’, this homogenizes, blurs differences, but also multiplies the presence of the aristocracy by making it undetectable. In the body of the city the normative prescription of collective behaviour regulates the buildings’ structure more than it does their final image. The facades of the Venetian palaces line up along the internal water space of the Grand Canal as choral variations of the same normative precept, all different but all similar, articulated in endless variations on the themes of power, political affiliation, opulence, luxury, but all organized around the centrepiece of the large mullioned windows. For Georg Simmel this sequence of facades is ‘a precious game, whose uniformity masks the individual characters, a veil whose folds follow only the laws of its own beauty and let life show through because they hide it’ (Simmel 1973: 195; my emphasis). The Venetian facade is a mask that hides and reveals; it is other than that on which it is superimposed, but it shows a correspondence with what it conceals. The facade

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Figure 12.9 Venice: Ca’ d’Oro, Grand Canal (courtesy of Mariapia Bellis)

as mask/face redefines the notion of ‘private’ in a ‘Venetian’ way. Exposed through the mullioned window and opened on to the public water space, the through-salon of the palace – the central space of the home – becomes a permeable space of social relations and belongs both visually and ideally to the public space of the city. Private and public, this space participates in the collective urban discourse constructed by the sequence of facades along the interior water of the Grand Canal. In the salon, the public water space visually floods into the central space of the home, as if absorbed into the residential space. This movement opens the private nucleus of the dwelling to the public gaze, turning its centre into a permeable space, which, repeated in a linear sequence along the water space, constitutes a parallel and a visual extension to it. Repeated in formal variations on the same theme, the palace facades line the interior of the Grand Canal like a series of historiated urban-scale wall coverings. Venice questions and redefines the notions of public and private, collective and individual, interior and exterior. It exhibits to the public the core of its private

170 Teresa Stoppani space. It colonizes the collective with the private in order to exhibit its workings. Here limits are endlessly multiplied and renegotiated: inside the palace domestic life is played on an ambiguity that exhibits a ‘public private’ while concealing a ‘personal private’ in the rooms on either side of the main salon. As a mask, the Venetian facade represents and conceals: it is physically and structurally detached from the building and from the life that takes place behind it. As a face, the facade visually extends inside the private/public space of the palace, folding into the paintings, stuccoes, ceilings that line the salon, providing an equally historiated backdrop for the private–collective life of the citizen and the family inside the palace. Venice constantly questions and redefines the notions of public and private, shifting and multiplying boundaries: in the house, the private intestines develop on the sides and around the main public salon; domestic life is played on an ambiguity that shows a public private while it conceals a personal private that remains mysterious. The same combination of display and secrecy occurs in the organization of domestic life inside the city: private life pours outwards to physically occupy public outdoor spaces in corti (courts), campi (squares), calli (alleys), fondamente (quays), within the domestic residential fabric but also in the representative city of St Mark’s Square, which is inhabited as an urban living room (parlour). The consonance of the Venetian structure lies in its vagueness, the precision of a principle accompanied by its formal indefinition. Like the concretion and articulation of the myth in a multiple origin, the refusal of a prescriptive figure allows the principle to be declined in different ways, from the popular residential to the patrician palaces and their repetition along the Grand Canal, to the greatest public space (St Mark’s) in which the city identifies, celebrates, and represents herself. The chorality of the Venetian facades is produced by the continuous redefinition of their figures around an unsteady equilibrium that offers itself to different simultaneous interpretations: what results is the dissolution of the object in favour of the ensemble, or ‘concert’ (concertum). In architecture, this becomes important in the postmodernist discourse, in its attempt to define a non-compositive way of producing form. Peter Eisenman (1984) analyses some Venetian facades in his study on decomposition and processes of differentiation. Eisenman writes that the facades of Venetian palaces not only present a sort of ‘contradiction’ of a classical unity, or a mere ‘complexity’ . . . but rather that [they] propose another, latent and alternative sensibility, which suggest[s] a realm of potential rupture . . . Incoherent, shifted axes, in themselves, are a straightforward definition of the idea of difference, they signal the impossibility of a return to the type form. They represent the division of an object from itself. (Eisenman 1984: 65; my emphasis) In particular, Eisenman analyzes the facade of Palazzo Minelli as an example of pre-composition. The asymmetrical position of the main entrance allows the reconstruction of four different possible conditions of axial symmetry, to which

Figure 12.10 Venice: Palazzo Pisani, Grand Canal (photo by Teresa Stoppani)

172 Teresa Stoppani elements are either added or subtracted in order to produce what looks like an unfinished building. Based on this compositive impasse Eisenman formulates the hypothesis that the ideal condition of classical unity that one tends to reconstruct never existed in the first place in this case. The facade of Palazzo Surian is analyzed as an example of ‘composite’. Here the central element of the facade is placed asymmetrically, and three possible reconstructions by addition or by subtraction read the complexity of the facade as an irregular declension of a classical type. In this case, Eisenman formulates the hypothesis of a ‘non-composition’ of two wholes as a superimposition without transformation of two simple original types. What emerges from these analyses is the non-objectuality of the construction of the Venetian facades – ‘non-compositive’ – as a participation in a collective order which prevails on the object’s individuality. For Eisenman, the organization of the Venetian facades is neither classical nor modern: it does not proceed from an ideal form-type or from an origin through composition or transformation, but it represents a process of decomposition or anti-composition. Through variations of symmetry, superpositions, additions, and succession of serial units, these facades do not express an order as much as a process. They are not constructed on the dialectics between form-type and physical object, nor are they exceptions from a specific type, but operate with oscillations around a formless prescription that becomes object only in its making. And the making is collective: each facade is not one but multiple, it displays partial traces of possible, alternative, contradictory orders. Thus placed beyond the classic and beyond the modern, the Venetian facade becomes the antecedent of the decompositive process of the postmodern condition: Venice, as it were, as an a-classical, a-modern, a-dialectic space. The Venetian facades mask and con-fuse (fuse together): each facade is not one but multiple, ambiguous, showing incomplete traces of possible orders – alternative or in contradiction to each other. Venice, in its uniqueness, does not choose, and it does so by operating through non-composition or anti-composition. There is not a ‘before’ to which these faces/masks refer, there is not a one to which they aspire. The face detaches itself from the building to which it is applied, and by separating and by folding it contains a multiplicity of explicit or indecipherable messages. The choral unity to which these faces/facades belong is that of urban space and its theatrical unity: a living, dynamic representation of the myth, the image and the institutions of La Serenissima.

VENICE: CONSTITUTIVE TENDERNESS In refusing dichotomies and explicit contrapositions, Venice establishes limits that do not coincide with her walls. The mutual relationships of her spaces are suspended in ambiguity. Venice builds a physical city which is the metaphor of her natural condition and the expression of her political nature. The chorality that the facades enact is not only that of a theatrical unity but a living representation of the myth and the institutions of La Serenissima. They are mask and face of the reality: both dissidium (disagreement) of singularities and concertum (agreement) of elements held together by a tension of collective collaboration.

The reversible city 173

Figure 12.11 Venice: Palazzo Surian-Bellotto (courtesy of Mariapia Bellis)

Venice builds on earth and water, with a public space that flows through the private space of its homes, a private space that flows out in the calli and occupies its public campi, and a secret space that remains screened behind the openness of its facades. Behind the all identical and yet all different facades, as Tafuri points out: The palaces remain always identical in their structure; what changes is the skin, because Venice, the holy city, does not have a language of her own; she cannot have one, she speaks the language of Babel. She can take on all the languages, because . . . what is preserved and concealed is the ‘Venetian structure’. (Tafuri 2003: 31; my translation) And the structure is flexible, not outlined – formed – a priori, but defined by operational rules that prescribe an inner structural homogeneity while allowing surface linguistic differences.

Figure 12.12 Venice: St Mark’s Square (photo by Teresa Stoppani)

The reversible city 175 Whereas in New York the exterior order of the Manhattan Grid imposes a series of linear definitions by means of surfaces and envelopes, setting free endless interior possibilities within a rule imposed from the outside, Venice possesses an order that comes from within, an intrinsic structure that realizes itself – adjusting, adapting, and juxtaposing – in the making of the city. The parade of different ‘masks’ along the Grand Canal hides faces whose features belong to the same family, minds that think differently but in concertum (agreement). While the many different worlds of Manhattan coexist because they are separated and con-tained (held together and held inside) by the Grid, Venice is regulated in her structure but is never contained inside a defined envelope. The interior of Venice flows, overruns, changes, constantly redefines its boundaries. The chorality of Venice is a collective and constitutive process. Here even the voice of modernism capitulates. In Sur les quatre routes Le Corbusier acknowledges, ‘Venice is a totality. It is a unique phenomenon . . . of total harmony, integral purity and unity of civilization’ (Le Corbusier 1970: 216). He adds: ‘Here everything is measure, proportion and human presence. Go into the city, in its most hidden corners: you will realize that in this urban enterprise one finds, everywhere, tenderness [tendresse]’ (Le Corbusier 1970: 221). But is Venetian tenderness produced by ‘total harmony’, ‘integral purity’, ‘unity’, ‘measure’, and ‘proportion’? Venetian architectural tenderness – Venice making as a process – seems to be more attuned to the fluidity of current post-compositional trends in architecture. In 2004 Asymptote – Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture – designed the installation of Metamorph, the ninth architecture exhibition of the Biennale of Venice. In the Corderie building at the Arsenale, Asymptote devised a fluid installation that dilates and contracts along the length of its container, playing against the modular linearity of the Corderie with gently curving walls and ‘the flowing rhythms of gondola-like trays’ (Forster 2004: 6). In Venice, in the former place of industrial production, inside a space which is an exception in the city for its scale and for its rectilinearity, Asymptote reintroduced Venice herself, i.e. the process of her making by continuous smooth adjustments. The performative nature of this operation goes beyond the form itself, beyond the sequence of all different gondola-like structures orderly floating within the ship-hull envelope of the generative wire-frame modulations. More than just an obvious reference to the naval history of its immediate surroundings, the installation becomes – in the designers’ words – ‘a simulacrum environment’ of the city out there, a ‘model of urban space, a surrogate for a new architecture’, an interior intervention that ‘act[s] as proxy architectural construct, utilizing the almost controlled environment of an existing structure to enact an architectural experiment at scale’ (Asymptote 2004: 8–13). Beyond the obvious metaphor of the gondola-like display platforms, what is ‘Venetian’ in Asymptote’s installation is the transformation of perspectival geometry and the morphing of the space of the Corderie through computergenerated animation sequences. Asymptote’s project does not represent Venice, it ‘plays’ Venice by exploring and reactivating her spatial processes. How can we be ‘tender’ if we do not change?

176 Teresa Stoppani If the perspective of the Corderie suggests a world of firmly held views, the multiple curvatures of the installation open up a more animate and moving experience of distance and time, in which . . . the models float on an invisible plane of inspection. This plane of discourse takes the place of the artificial horizon on board a plane: between the arduous developments on the ground and the serene constellations in the sky, the artificial horizon provides a datum of reference for all movements in flight. (Forster 2004: 6) Asymptote’s artificial horizon of simulation and movement is the same which in the year 1500 allowed Jacopo De’ Barbari to construct his bird’s-eye view of Venice: more than a static representation of the city, De’ Barbari’s view is a true re-construction (per-formance) of the Venetian multiplicity of spaces and times through a dynamic montage of multiple broken and distorted perspectives, and still remains the canonical image that best grasps and re-presents Venice as an organic – choral, tender – whole.

PARADIGM ISLANDS Per-forming rather than shaped, Manhattan and Venice offer new paradigms not only for the reading but also for the making of urban space. Exposing the complexities of Manhattan and Venice from within, exhibitionism, chorality, and tenderness are some of the possible modes of relation that overcome the impasse of the rigidly defined categories of modernism. Manhattan and Venice resist the separations and classifications of modernism because they operate not through forms but by constantly renegotiating the interplay of their tensions and contradictions. The many configurations assumed by these cities are not fixed by the drawing of a form but produced by the operational spatial instructions of their performative diagrams. It is the performative aspect and diagrammatic nature of their pliable structures that make them relevant in current architectural and urban discourse, where emphasis is placed not on the predefinition of a static and resolved configuration, but on the adjustable accommodation of constantly mutating situations and social dynamics. Exhibitionism, chorality, and tenderness as they are performed by Manhattan and Venice can then become modes for a new way to look at urbanism as the production of the space of relation.

13 Australia’s Gold Coast A city producing itself Patricia Wise

The City of the Gold Coast is largely a product of the second half of the twentieth century, continually remaking itself physically, and refusing to settle as an idea. It thus accommodates a particularly volatile assemblage of urban practices. Minimally regulated until quite recently, the city is currently subject to a comprehensive local government ‘knowledge economy’ plan. Policy makers recognize a need to be as entrepreneurial in their thinking as the city is in its perpetual development. But the question is: how can planning adequately anticipate shifting imperatives when policy relies on an analytics that assumes a degree of coherence largely incompatible with how the Gold Coast is producing itself? Centrifugal models based in conventional urban formations are inappropriate, so policy has embraced cluster strategies and notions of creative networks. But the city tends to fly off in other directions, revealing unforeseen manifestations. This chapter takes its cue from Deleuze and Guattari to suggest how we might work more effectively with the disorderly real of such a city through an awareness of rhizomatics and spatiality, of mixtures and flows, of intensities and movements, of how multiplicities can plug into each other, of what the actualities are and what the pragmatics of dealing with them might be. The Gold Coast started slowly enough, as a timber and sugar-cane port and turn-of-the-twentieth-century seaside resort. Steady expansion was overtaken by rapid growth from the 1960s. Spurred by the tourism potential of a booming national economy, developers built many of the country’s first high-rises along the beachfront. Considerable numbers of these have since been demolished to make way for higher high-rises. Behind the beachside strip, the Nerang river and its wetlands were transformed into a network of islands and canals to appeal to those who prefer low-rise water-frontage with private jetties. Beyond the canals, characteristically Australian low and medium-density suburban development rolls out till it meets the hinterland. Here, among rainforest national parks, the mountaintops host several towns where the views are spectacular and eco-tourism, commuter living, craft outlets, health resorts, and artists’ retreats thrive. The Gold Coast can therefore be understood as operating in several bands, roughly parallel with the ocean, along a corridor some 75 km long and 50 km wide interspersed with waterways, country clubs and native bushland. This is both an edge city and an ‘exopolis’ (Soja 1996). The conspicuous edge is the Pacific Ocean, but there is also an inland edge marked by the great escarpments where the mountains drop away to the west. None of the sedimented or concentric

178 Patricia Wise

Figure 13.1 Gold Coast, Australia: Biarritz Apartments (photographer/artist Kathryn Mackey)

ring arrangements of familiar urban formations is present. The Gold Coast does not have a ‘downtown’ financial district or hub of government, law, and cultural institutions, which are dispersed outside the dominant skyline of Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach.

Australia’s Gold Coast 179

Figure 13.2 Gold Coast, Australia: Phoenician Spa Resort (photographer/artist Kathryn Mackey)

In the early 1990s, hoping to integrate the ‘tourist strip’ more into local life and to provide something of what a conventional city ‘should’ offer its residents, the Gold Coast City Council dotted small red heart signs around Surfers Paradise declaring it ‘The Heart of the City’, but it has never been that. Most locals visit

180 Patricia Wise Surfers Paradise only to undertake occasional leisure. Although the Gold Coast has a greater proportion of its population living in high-rises than any other Australian city, many more reside, study, work, and shop in and among the low-rise suburbs. Suburbs are planned and built on a huge scale. In the 1990s a moonscape of cleared terrain that was to become the suburb of Robina featured the billboard ‘Future City Here’. Another close by announced the showpiece shopping mall: ‘Robina Town Centre Now Open’. The extensive ‘Centre’ that was there before the ‘Town’ evokes ‘community’ through a simulacrum of a Tuscan bell tower in a simulacrum of a ‘Town Square’ that is really a food court. Robina’s lakes, canals, streets, and housing appeared along with a range of public and private schools. Strategic funding was injected into a high-technology precinct near the private Bond University. Next to the Town Centre that is really a shopping mall the City Council established a library, gallery, and meeting rooms in the ‘Robina Community Centre’. But conventional notions of community and neighbourhood do not sit well on the Gold Coast. They are largely real-estate ideas manufactured through the entrepreneurial development of new suburbs and of gated ‘communities’ adjacent to country clubs and marine precincts. Communities – in the sense of affinity groups – appear and disappear, depending on how committed people are to particular interests and regional issues; how long a locale remains physically intact; and whether residents stay in an area or see themselves as ‘passing through’ as they exchange one property upgrade for another. The city has been subject to extraordinary development. Its annual population growth has been at least 3.5 per cent since the early 1990s (KPMG and University of Queensland 2002: 4). The City Council understands growth as being in itself the engine of future growth: ‘Gold Coast City . . . is located within the fastest growing region of Queensland, the fastest growing state of Australia, and part of the fastest growing region of the world, the Asia-Pacific’ (Gold Coast City Council 2002: 8). However, when Australians and international tourists think of the Gold Coast they are unlikely to have in mind its half a million residents or the economic potential of its accelerated growth. Rather they will think of the great sweep of its famous beaches, its unrestrained emphasis on play, its ‘state of the art’ theme parks catering for every family taste, its reputation for sun tans and sex, celebrities and sleaze, for glittering surfaces and shady undersides, and how it has regularly provided refuge to millionaire scamsters. The city has scores of golf courses, a huge casino now accompanied by a convention centre, and several themed shopping malls. Palazzo Versace’s five stars have joined Hilton, Sheridan, Radisson, and a plethora of other tourist complexes, restaurants, night clubs, and gaming venues which entertain over 10 million visitors per year (Gold Coast City Council 2003b). While a tourist might visit London, Paris, New York, or Sydney hoping to experience how it is to be a temporary Londoner, Parisian, New Yorker, or Sydneysider, the Gold Coast offers itself purely as a space of leisure consumption, as if Club Med, Disneyland, and Las Vegas had disseminated themselves simultaneously across the whole city. There is a local fascination with the larger-than-life figures of the pioneering speculators and developers who created the Gold Coast, buying and selling not only

Australia’s Gold Coast 181 space itself but notions of spatiality that became and remain the mode by which the city produces itself. Little is embedded in this space – narratives play across its surfaces like multiple reflections from the sparkling towers, the ocean, the glare of white sand and blue skies that characterize the place in its iconic representations. In this economy of light everything is refracted, multiply fragmented and dispersed. The Gold Coast understands that the practices of leisure are about fluid engagements, present enjoyment, and temporary anonymity. Throughout its spectacular expansion, and its many physical reconfigurations conducted through a constant exchange with new ideas and representations of itself, the Gold Coast’s project has been to produce for visitors a sense of dislocation from ‘normal life’, where one takes ‘time out from responsibilities’, from the geographies of work and family usually connected though social and personal histories. So the city tends to operate as dehistoricized space: With Hollywood as its superintendent, the Gold Coast has never understood the notion of restraint. It has exploded into hyperactive trails sparked by notions of dispersion, Pacific, voyeur, celluloid, virtual, speculative, high life, life-onhigh and sprawl, refusing the models of density, trans-Atlantic, flaneur, sanctioned, centre, modernist and foundation. It named itself during its first boom in terms of popular cultural representations evoking glamorous leisure – Surfers Paradise, Isle of Capri, Florida Keys, Mermaid Beach, Miami, Palm Beach, Sorrento, Sunrise Boulevard, and so on. Now it names its newest highrises and residential enclaves in terms of self-aware postmodern globalism which the development industry appropriately terms ‘new millennium architecture’ – Q1, Circle on Cavill, Nexus, Zen, Windsong, Aria, The Pinnacle, Marquis on Main and Lumière. This acquired and simulated relationship with history and the future, written across a constantly re-engineered space, results in an accelerated process of identification and placement. A sense of belonging is not imparted over time but injected suddenly; nothing is constant. Perpetual change causes dramatic shifts in the perception and usage of urban territories. (Wise and Breen 2004: 164) In such a place history is a play of popular cultural memories. Cultural heritage is addressed through the preservation of surfing memorabilia, celluloid histories, neon signs, photographs of meter maids and lifesavers, transformations in the bikini. Built heritage is read through the history of the motel and the high-rise. Cultural tourism slides in as a variant of leisure. Cultural theorists frequently interpret the Gold Coast as a supreme example of the postmodern interplay of surfaces. In popular discourse, the equivalent effect is produced by a preposition: things are built, events happen, and people live ‘on the Gold Coast’, not ‘in the Gold Coast’. Engagements with the Gold Coast in terms of postmodernity are not inappropriate but they tend to produce the kinds of deficit readings Rem Koolhaas caricatured: ‘according to Derrida we cannot be Whole, according to Baudrillard we cannot be Real, according to Virilio we cannot be There’ (Koolhaas 1997: 327). In fact, most Gold Coast citizens do not express nostalgia for wholeness because they inhabit

182 Patricia Wise routine fragmentation and partiality. Their real is simulacral and they are there in such a real, even as they habitually take the city elsewhere and at speed. I am interested in how we can more adequately understand a moving target – in trying to tease out how we might do more than ‘watch this space’. Deleuze and Guattari’s analytics offer practical approaches to working with such a city because they assume the multiple coexistence of continuity and discontinuity, presence and immanence. The Gold Coast previously relied predominantly on the economics of tourism and real-estate development. Current local government policy has plugged that familiar assemblage directly into a new identity as ‘Innovation City’, located at the heart of a ‘Pacific Innovation Corridor’. Associated strategies concentrate on the things the Gold Coast already does well: leisure and marine industries; media and entertainment. Bypassing a modernist stage and recognizing affinities with southern California, during the 1990s the city geared itself specifically to encourage creative economy activities in ICT, media and new media ‘clusters’, and established the high-speed optical fibre infrastructure upon which such an economic plan depends. The sprawling exopolitan growth – characteristic of ‘Silicon Valley’ types of regional economic development (Soja 1996) – already existed, fuelled by the tourism/leisure/development assemblage which had produced hyperreality and started to bring new economy players. The conditions of a free-flowing, constantly redeveloping, open city had always attracted high-risk ventures. Policy makers simply identified how such conditions would attract even more players if appropriate circumstances were established. Some strategies are working well, but implementation of knowledge economy planning has also encountered a reality that can resist organized and organizing frameworks. Precincts, clusters, and industry networks are strategies of accretion and are expected to drive new productivity in targeted sectors – an approach to economic and cultural planning that relies on identifying and nurturing existing geographic and/or sectoral relationships to encourage co-location of allied activities. The ‘clusters’ model is as popular in Australia as it is in other settings where there is a need to reposition parts of traditional cities for a post-industrial, creative economy and/or to promote the efflorescence of new economy regions. However, the Gold Coast’s cultural and economic life exhibits more temporary affinities, ruptures and re-emergences than it does continuities and alliances. What takes place cannot be adequately represented through coherent connections traced out as linked networks around certain nodes, whether spatial, conceptual or both. In this sense the Gold Coast is more usefully understood as rhizomatic in its processes. For Deleuze and Guattari, tree models – thinking in terms of trunks and branches, roots and radicles – encourage dualisms and ‘biunivocalism’, processes of ‘exclusive disjunction’ that discursively hinder productive relations between people and the social and material spaces they inhabit. The rhizome, by contrast, ‘assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7). Even when plants have roots ‘there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else – with the wind, an animal, human beings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 11). The refusal of any dualism and of simple oppositions/syntheses underpins their principle of

Australia’s Gold Coast 183 inclusive disjunction which undoes the either/or of exclusive disjunction with ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’, the formula of the rhizome. Rhizomes will assemble into networks and nodes because ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7). However, they will also undergo ‘asignifying rupture’: A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines . . . Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy . . . (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9) Thinking through rhizomatics we can consider the Gold Coast not so much in terms of how we might expect one cultural and/or economic activity to form an ongoing relationship with another but rather in terms of what specificities might temporarily or occasionally connect, then impel, new specificities, thus producing multiplicity out of multiplicity. What we encounter may not fit the model anticipated by a ‘cluster’ but may be usefully thought as an assemblage: An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections . . . The point is that a rhizome or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines . . . Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 8–9) Cluster strategies on the Gold Coast seek to overcode multiplicities. This is why the unexpected frequently unsettles them: a new post-production facility does not colocate with the major international film studio; a cultural precinct does not develop around an Arts Centre; some interactive games developers occupy the designated ICT precinct but the rest disperse across the region. As an urban formation the Gold Coast operates largely as what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘smooth space’ – it follows no pre-given pattern or rules but produces these through its movements. No space, however, is ever completely smooth because all spaces will be reterritorialized by various organizing procedures, becoming ‘striated’ in varying degrees and intensities. ‘In striated space, one closes off a surface and “allocates” it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one “distributes” oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one’s crossings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 480–1). Read

184 Patricia Wise purely through its ‘postmodern characteristics’, the Gold Coast presents itself, misleadingly, as a hyper-smooth space in contrast to the heavily striated space of more conventional cities. But any ‘simple opposition’ between smooth and striated ‘gives rise to far more difficult complications, alternations, and superpositions’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 481). Interventions aiming to encourage striations akin to those of less radical urban settings have appeared post facto on the Gold Coast. A recursive movement of this kind can be seen in the City Council’s recognition of the importance of intellectual capital for its Innovation City strategy, hence its response to the rapid growth of Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus. With one eye on California, and the other on the role of universities in traditional cities, the council has declared a 200 hectare area around the university to be ‘The Griffith Knowledge Precinct’: The precinct will be an integrated centre of knowledge creation, learning and commercialisation that will be created through a cooperative partnership of all tiers of government, the education community, private sector operators and the general public of the City. The University will be the engine/catalyst for the growth in creation, learning and the initial stages of commercialisation of new knowledge while the private sector is invited to co-locate to the precinct to create wealth and jobs for the community. The precinct will adopt an integrated multi-use approach to master planning with a view to creating a vibrant sense of place with liveability and workability high on the agenda. (Gold Coast City Council 2004) Here policy overtly acknowledges new economy discourses familiar from Richard Florida and others – particularly in the number of times the word ‘create’ is used. Of course, in a more conventional urban setting the relations between a large public university and its city would have grown through use. But Griffith’s Gold Coast campus is located in a largely suburban area well away from what looks like a city centre, so the city considers it necessary to produce other arrangements to take advantage of the university. The ‘Technology Park’ aspect of the Knowledge Precinct cannot be developed until a racecourse, showground, and exhibition buildings are moved, doubtless to a newly declared recreational precinct. Meanwhile, the university has established medical and dentistry schools some kilometres away in a new high-rise building beside the Gold Coast Hospital – and thus a rhizome spreads from the Griffith Knowledge Precinct before the precinct even arrives. The city is subject to governance as well as open to entrepreneurial development and creative dispersal. Inevitably, the striated colonizes and stratifies the smooth, but the smooth also opposes and undoes the striated. Smooth and striated space ‘in fact exist only in mixture’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 474), and their relationship makes them an assemblage, maintaining the necessity of both, in their difference, their contact, and the movements between them. ‘Nothing is ever done with: a smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space re-imparts a smooth space, with potentially very different values, scope, and signs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 486). In global terms, the Gold Coast is marked by significantly

Australia’s Gold Coast 185 fewer ‘rigid segments’ (Rajchman 2000: 99) than generally characterize urban agglomerations. It is therefore more likely to produce what Rajchman describes as ‘other complicating relations, capable of combining with others in another looser non-segmented plan allowing for “in-between spaces”, disparities, becomings’ (Rajchman 2000: 99). Many of its economic and cultural effects consequently require reading less through institutional, governmental, commercial, and social nodes and networks, and more through disparities, specificities and the production of multiplicities – that is, in terms of momentary eruptions of striations into an otherwise smooth space. These throw up rhizomic relations not necessarily anticipated by the strategies of policy and planning. The Gold Coast understands that it operates spatially because it depends on radical entrepreneurial activity and therefore on modes of representation. But it also resists spatial categorizations because the spaces of ‘lifestyle’ override, dominate, or dissolve all other spaces. One searches in vain for cultural precincts, culture in its familiar aspects, areas where creative people gather. The only major government-funded cultural institution, the Arts Centre, is across the river from the tourist strip, next to local government offices in parkland abutting a low-rise commercial area. People attend events and exhibitions, then leave that part of the city. Vibrant creative activity exists, as do many arts and cultural organizations, creative artists, and audiences, but the production and consumption of culture are as dissipated and volatile as the Coast’s geography, economy, and self-identity. People plug into culture, move across it, produce and consume it in temporary affinity groups, then it moves or they do. But they know how to find it, how to produce it, where it might next be fostered. None the less, the city continues to be characterized in the national media as a ‘cultural desert’. Its neighbour, the state capital Brisbane, is represented as having ‘matured’ into a ‘metropolitan centre’ with a ‘vital arts life’ and definable ‘cultural precincts’, like Sydney and Melbourne. But in the Australian cultural imaginary the Gold Coast’s total identification with leisure, popular cultural excess, and dispersion is taken to signify a sort of perpetual adolescence. There is no expectation that it will ‘grow up’ into ‘a real city’ where ‘culture’ occurs. Yet, in terms of national employment in the creative industries as a proportion of employment in all industries, the Gold Coast is second only to Sydney (Queensland State Development 2004: 17), and the proportion of people working in the creative industries sector is almost double the state’s proportion overall: currently representing 11 per cent of Queensland’s population, the Gold Coast makes up over 20 per cent of the total state work force in the fields of cultural and recreational services (Gold Coast City Council 2003a). This is explained by the core business of tourism and live entertainment, but also by film and media production (including Warner Brothers studios), and content provision for the burgeoning interactive technology sector. A growing number of prominent creative practitioners have simply chosen the region for its environment and lifestyle, even if their work runs through Sydney, Berlin, Tokyo, or Los Angeles. That significant cultural figures should choose to live in the home of theme parks is unexpected, but unexpected phenomena are precisely characteristic of the region.

186 Patricia Wise In a project to map creative industry activity on the Gold Coast,1 my team kept in mind Deleuze and Guattari’s observation that, in working with multiplicities, it is necessary to ‘make a map, not a tracing’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 12). Cultural and economic ‘mapping’ is most often a ‘tracing’. It reproduces in tabulated, graphic, and geographic representations what is present in the real, which in turn forms the basis of analysis that ‘matches’ one tracing (e.g. ‘the industry picture’) to another (e.g. a policy model), overcoding the real with a planning moment aimed at particular outcomes. The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of signifiance and subjectification belonging to it. It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 13) The convergence of notions of creativity with knowledge economy strategies and a new managerialism has involved inter-implications of cultural and economic policy development that urge ‘whole of industry’ approaches. However, the component parts of the ‘whole industry’ now contained under the terms ‘arts’ and ‘creative industries’ are too disparate in their practices, products, patterns of distribution, and consumption to offer themselves for anything other than sectoral study. Cluster strategies based in sub-sectoral analyses seem to present a solution to this problem, bringing sectors back into relation with each other after they have been ‘traced’. But on the Gold Coast such an approach is likely to be overtaken by other becomings of the city itself before the strategies have produced their objectives. The real confounds the planning at many turns, so a new tracing is commissioned and the cycle continues to chase its tail in policy terms. We need another approach: What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real . . . It is itself part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification . . . A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 12–13) Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that their ‘map, not tracing’ double risks reversion to a ‘simple dualism’ in which the tracing is the lesser term. ‘It is,’ they observe, ‘a question of method: the tracing should always be put back on the map’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 99–100; italics in original). In the context of the Gold Coast, this means noticing that we must trace not only sites or sectors, but movements and encounters, emergent rhizomes that might be

Australia’s Gold Coast 187 taking place in parts of the real that sectoral or ideological assumptions do not anticipate. It also means noticing where blockages, categories, oppositions have traced themselves into industry analysis and policy frameworks. All of this must become part of the map, along with the complexities of the social in which it is taking place. To make multiplicities is to disturb our own thinking, so that reflexive moments are always part of the mapping, and we are able to undertake ‘experimentation in contact with the real’, to notice what the real is suggesting to policy. As Rajchman puts it: If . . . segmentation of social space permits a geometry of horizontals and verticals within which to chart or locate all social ‘movement’, minorities and becomings work instead with ‘diagonals’ or ‘transversals’, which suggest other spaces, other movements. To ‘diagram’ a space is to expose such diagonal lines and the possibilities they open up, making a carte that is not a calque – a map that is not a tracing of anything prior, but which serves instead to indicate ‘zones of indistinction’ from which becomings may arise, if they are not already imperceptibly in the making. (Rajchman 2000: 99–100) For example, commercial galleries have been opening at a remarkable rate on the Gold Coast. There are now ninety-eight, or close to one for every 5,000 residents. If this observation remains a tracing matched to a policy assumption, it could be taken simply as evidence of a burgeoning conventional arts sector driven by imaginative cultural development strategies. However, when it is ‘put back on the map’ it emerges, more strikingly, as a rhizome in an assemblage that also engages developers, architects, designers, exhibition companies, model makers, photographers, multimedia developers, and printers, connected through the presale of high-rise real estate. Project-specific displays established prior to the commencement of a major development have become spectacular sites of consumption. Temporary display buildings feature extraordinarily detailed scale models of the development, plus partial or half-scale demonstration apartments. A full-size display apartment is often incorporated in the first few floors well before a new high-rise is complete. Remote customers are catered for through Web sites featuring virtual tours and aerial panoramas with the yet-to-be-there building and its landscaping positioned in the cityscape. Customers pre-order individualized decorating, including original paintings, sculptures, and ceramics. This has encouraged the rapid increase in commercial galleries. The connections galleries make with clients through real-estate development can translate into longer-term relationships based on the more familiar business of visual art as cultural commodity concerned with aesthetics and investment. The conspicuous presence of galleries, alongside the ubiquitous sales vehicles of the developers, becomes a signifier of interest in original artworks by the fashionable residents of the most desirable ‘new millennium’ buildings, in turn encouraging greater consumption of art in the canal estates and low-rise suburbs. Since the developers also stress the ‘uniqueness’ of the Gold Coast’s environment and lifestyle,

188 Patricia Wise there is increased sale of work by regional artists. A rhizome moves away from the specific sites of development into the broader socio-cultural imaginary as ‘high’ cultural values are transferred into what are understood as ‘lifestyle’ choices.2 This loops back into a trend for developers to conceive of their sites in terms of culture as a desirable public amenity. Several high-rise residential developments incorporate expansive space at ground level for the free cultural use of ‘the whole community’. Circle on Cavill, which covers an entire city block in Surfers Paradise, will feature, according to its developer’s brochure, a ‘grassed public piazza with park benches and shady trees’, for ‘picnics, public gatherings, art, street theatre, entertainment and sporting events on a huge plasma screen’, and aims to become a ‘focal point of the city – a place for relaxation, enjoyment and entertainment’. The same Sunland Group is constructing in Surfers Paradise what will be (doubtless briefly) the world’s tallest residential tower, the eighty-storey Q1. This also incorporates spaces that reach into the streets surrounding it, marketing notions of culture for the community by providing an amphitheatre and extensive multipurpose areas for arts, entertainment, and leisure. Property developers are thus employing and invoking a wide range of creative workers to sell a future in which huge residential developments donate public spaces

Figure 13.3 Gold Coast, Australia: Q1 residential tower, digital placement of building under construction (courtesy of Sunland Group Ltd)

Australia’s Gold Coast 189 for creative activity. While recently implemented public art policy requires developers to spend a small percentage of overall costs on cultural projects, Q1 and Circle pre-date and go well beyond policy obligations. In effect, ‘art’ has been overlaid on ‘entertainment’ and ‘leisure’, so that the consumption of culture becomes pluralized in ways not anticipated by the economic or cultural development strategies of the City Council. In this example of development-driven cultural provision, the city is ‘making multiplicities’, producing an assemblage – an inclusive disjunction – that replaces ‘either/or’ (in this case public or private property) with ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ (property for public and private and commercial and community and local and visitor and arts and entertainment uses). The Gold Coast’s familiar imperatives of real estate and tourism have not somehow been replaced by notions of art and public culture, but nor has there been a simple addition of art and public culture to investment. The rhizome is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency and from which the One is always subtracted (n – 1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 21) Any characteristic of the city, or the policies that serve it, is itself made up of numbers of aspects, issues, imperatives, ideologies, processes, vectors, and speeds; and the relationships between these cannot be fixed and determined with any finality using one dimension as a measure for the various others. Any element of a map can be read as ‘One’, but until such a tracing is ‘put back on the map’, we cannot appreciate how either that element or the ‘whole’ is working. While policy analysts know that the field of urban culture cannot and should not be settled, it is a significant challenge to undertake planning for a city constantly shifting in its multiplicities. The Gold Coast Economic Development Strategy acknowledges this: As the economic planning for the Gold Coast is being undertaken at a time of unprecedented economic and social change, maximum flexibility must be retained within the planning and implementation of the strategy to deal with opportunities that will arise in the future, but are not foreseeable at this stage. It is intended that the Strategy be updated annually, but some of the proposed actions may become redundant before the end of each year. However, planning is critically important, even if there is a recognition that plans may change quite quickly. (Gold Coast City Council 2002: 3)

190 Patricia Wise I suspect this is why the temptation has been to deal in cultural and economic categories, and policy positions, marked by an uncomfortable combination of integrative and differential analytics. Sectoral analysis seeks to abstract from part or all of the ‘urban picture’ a set of observations or principles which can give policy points of intersection with ‘what is really going on out there’ while facilitating growth, diversity, excellence, participation, sustainability, and so on. Abstraction, however, invites synthesizing or opposing strategies, so that what is being facilitated tends to drive what is abstracted. This carries with it the problems of organizing principles leading to organized outcomes which are likely to have more to say about their own frameworks than about the actual domains and people they are designed to assist or affect. The kind of ‘flexibility’ that is based in planning for planning redundancy can be avoided by developing approaches that are geared to the city as a rhizomic assemblage. It is not that we should take Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking to offer a template according to which it becomes possible to interpret urban culture and policy. Rather, we should introduce certain ‘Deleuzian’ concepts into the vicinity of policy making as a way of identifying and understanding particular relationships and the possibility of rethinking them. On the Gold Coast, the predominantly smooth space of a hyper-commercial urban setting is increasingly throwing up assemblages which invite procedures that will striate it. For example, the developers of Circle and Q1 are unconcerned with the future management of the cultural content of the sites they are providing, but the City Council and the creative community have yet to establish processes for their utilization. This will require stakeholders – cultural producers, managers and administrators, policy makers, and cultural planners – to develop strategies, broker arrangements, organize management structures, and co-ordinate programmes. If regional cultural activity territorializes the tourist strip, it could acquire a ‘creative milieu’ (Landry 2000). Other players such as advertising, design, and new media companies could relocate from their dispersed regional sites; and lawyers, accountants, and financial institutions could follow. Thus, encouraged by the activities of real estate developers, Surfers Paradise may after all produce itself as a cultural, corporate, and financial ‘heart of the city’. Then again, the creative sector might simply ad hoc plug in and out of the developer-provided sites and simultaneously continue to inhabit the largely nomadic creative milieux they currently enjoy. Remembering that it is the mixture of smooth and striated that matters, the likelihood is that both will occur. Such a city urges us to think in terms of policy and planning based in procedurally driven frameworks. That is, policy itself should invite rhizomic relationships with its constituencies if it is to accommodate complex and apparently disparate processes and practices under a framework that can operate effectively for the city. Given that the project of industry and policy analysis is usually to make coherences in order to identify areas that might be acted on so as to effect changes in the whole, whereas the most obvious characteristic of the Gold Coast is that it ‘makes multiplicities’, the policy maker, the entrepreneur, and the cultural producer occupy terrains at odd angles to each other. There is little chance of sustaining rectilinear

Australia’s Gold Coast 191 opposition or of flattening one on to the other. Industry and policy analysts must therefore recognize their ‘in-between’ role, adopting analytics that assume ruptures, discontinuities, realignments, deterritorializations, and reterritorializations. They should work with inclusive disjunctions because they must respond to a range of specificities and multiplicities without being trapped in or by the city’s own representations of itself to itself, whether through the policy it produces or through the popular cultural images it promulgates. For Deleuze and Guattari, multiplicity is ‘a practical matter, a pragmatic matter – something we must make or do, and learn by doing’ (Rajchman 2000: 80). The Gold Coast needs policy frameworks that facilitate the noticing of ‘“diagonals” . . . which suggest other spaces, other movements’ (Rajchman 2000: 99). We should trace a high degree of detail (i.e. ‘breadth’ and ‘depth’ of data) but it should be put back on a map that assumes that the specificities traced are highly likely to have the effect of making multiplicities. Mappings can themselves generate zones of indistinction and the resultant policy framework will apprehend becomings that are ‘already . . . in the making’ (Rajchman 2000: 100). This assumes that zones of indistinction would not be a sign of policy failure, or of incoherence in mapping processes, but would be understood as a procedure to identify the sites within which experiments can suggest themselves. Such a pragmatic approach, in which policy plugs into production and production into policy, would be bureaucratically and politically unsettling and seen as highrisk: it will not only apprehend the probability of ‘opportunities that are unforeseen’, but simultaneously anticipate the movements of the city and accept that policy outcomes are experimental and unpredictable. We need risky policy for a rapidly changing city poised to develop potentials. The precise nature of this policy will depend on how the city produces itself as much as on how we produce it.

NOTES 1 2

Patricia Wise, Tom O’Regan and Sally Breen, ‘Mapping Gold Coast Creative Industries’, a research project funded by Griffith University. For a variant on art and real estate interactions in a more conventional urban context see Barnabel (2004).

14 Cognitive mapping the dispersed city Stephen Cairns

MIDDLING THEORY Kevin Lynch’s influential prescription for the amelioration of anxiety, fear, and even terror in the ‘vast metropolitan areas’ of post-war North America lay with what he called imageability. ‘We are not accustomed,’ he argued in his seminal book The Image of the City, ‘to organizing and imaging an artificial environment on such a large scale.’ And yet, he adds, ‘our activities are pushing us toward that end’ (Lynch 1960: 12). The ‘spatial organization of contemporary life, the speed of movement, and the speed and scale of new construction’ (Lynch 1960: 119) make it necessary to consciously reflect on the question of representation for this enlarged scale and in this expanded and accelerated urban context. ‘We must learn,’ he suggested, ‘to see the hidden forms in the vast sprawl of our cities’ (Lynch 1960: 12). For Lynch this meant attending to urban imageability or the ‘“legibility” of the cityscape’ (Lynch 1960: 2). These were preconditions for the development of what he famously called ‘cognitive maps’, that is, memorable representations of the city that enabled its inhabitants to mentally grasp the form of the city and so orientate themselves within it. Lynch’s project sits in the middle ground of the post-war urban design discourse that, in one way or another, sought to bring social, subjective, and psychological themes to bear on more technical or formal conceptions of the city. Lynch’s concern for socio-psychological consequences of urban infrastructures and forms suggests certain affinities with Situationist psycho-geographics of the 1950s. But his restrained academic approach eschews the radical aura and alter-potentialities of that project. In terms of his contemporaries, Lynch might, on the one hand, be contrasted with a figure such as Aldo van Eyck who – drawing inspiration directly from the Situationist avant-garde – formulated a theory of interrelated sociopsychological ‘forms’ and architectural ‘counter-forms’. On the other hand, he might be aligned with someone like Gordon Cullen, who promulgated the notion of townscape as an ‘art of relationship’ activated by the peripatetic gaze of urban subjects. Lynch (like Cullen) pitched his work as moderate, reasonable, and systematic. His openly determinist attitudes towards architectural and urban research gave his work a strong programmatic and operational thrust. This moderate programmatic character – as distinct from the avant-garde and assertively contestatory urban speculations of Guy Debord, Asger Jorn, Constant,

Cognitive mapping the dispersed city 193 and others – made Lynch’s work attractive to a mainstream planning, urban design, and architecture discourse that sought guidance and inspiration in the aftermath of the discrediting of CIAM-endorsed modernism. This facilitated the wide circulation and acceptance of the idea that rapidly changing urban conditions demand the invention of new representational strategies and, furthermore, that socio-psychological dimensions of urban life were integral to this. Evidence for this might be sought in the now orthodox status of subject-centred urban design and planning processes that attempt to operationalize design through the deployment of user studies, social surveys, focus groups, and a host of community participation techniques. My interest is in the way in which Lynch’s cognitive mapping idea might continue to inform the inventive aims of such a project without necessarily reinstalling the subject, in the guise of such ossified categories as ‘the user’, ‘the community’, or ‘the people’, at its centre. This is not, as I hope will become clear, an attempt to somehow update or reactivate the Lynchian project per se, but to explore certain possibilities that lie latent within it. Such possibilities are activated at the confluence of material conceptions of the city and socio-psychologically inflected, cartographic representational strategies that in some way retain a programmatic or operational ambition. The urban peripheries of the city of Jakarta at the western end of the island of Java in Indonesia serves as setting for this more general theoretical exploration. As I will suggest, of the many urbanisms that make up Jakarta’s patchy urban fabric, the range of landscape, dispersed or extended urbanisms that constitute its vast peripheries simultaneously offers a serious challenge to conventional conceptions of the urban and heralds a compelling image of what many future cities may be like.

THE URBAN IMAGE Throughout his book Lynch positions cognitive mapping within the realm of what he calls ‘the art of urban design’. This phrase infuses cognitive mapping and its associated concepts of urban imageability and legibility with palpable aesthetic overtones. So much so that he suggests the viability of a cognitive map can be measured by ‘the ease with which [a city’s] parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern’, the ‘vividness and coherence’ of its form, and ultimately its ‘sense of beauty’ (Lynch 1960: 2, 3, 199). Lynch’s urban imageability and legibility are compositional conditions conceived as a set of formal, selfconsistent criteria for aesthetic judgement. The aesthetic character of Lynch’s project is also given an empirical and social scientific dimension. Lynch gathered data from field observation and interviews with inhabitants, commuters, and shoppers in the central districts of three North American cities: Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles. The field data were then cross-referenced with urban morphological information derived from conventional street maps and aerial photographs, and street-level information through photographs of specified urban scenes and views. This diverse material was the basis for the development of ‘diagrammatic representations’ (Lynch 1960: 16) for each city. These diagrams, in turn, gave rise to a notational system that focused on

194 Stephen Cairns a limited range of urban features such as ‘paths’, ‘edges’, ‘nodes’, ‘districts’, and ‘landmarks’. This notational system was to be the basis of a general cognitive cartography. Significantly, Lynch did not conceive cognitive maps as simply the graphic tracings of pre-existing and static urban forms, but foresaw the possibility of shaping those forms to render them amenable to being mapped cognitively. ‘Our thesis,’ Lynch insisted, ‘is that we are now able to develop our image of the environment by operation on the external physical shape as well as by an internal learning process’ (Lynch 1960: 12). Lynch’s maps (his diagrammatic representations), then, were tools with which to diagnose existing urban ills and to prescribe better – coherent, legible, navigable, beautiful – urban forms. Cognitive mapping, as a practice and theory of urban design, rests on two foundational assumptions. First, the city, philosophically speaking has distinct phenomenal and noumenal registers, that is, the city as it is perceived through images, maps, and other representations, and the city as a set of material conditions manifest in its infrastructures, buildings, streets, and pavements. Second, ideal urban forms require these phenomenal and noumenal registers to be aligned through some process of reciprocal adaptation. This means making better representations of city forms, and forming the city such that it gives rise to better representations. We might read in this reciprocal adaptation a form of simulacrum in which material and representational dimensions of the city are no longer ordered hierarchically but begin to entangle themselves. But Lynch saw his cartographic representations as retaining a referential detachment – a point I will return to below – from the material conditions of the city. This principle of a phenomenal/noumenal alignment is demonstrated more directly in Lynch’s arrangement of visual material in his book. Each of the cities he studies is illustrated by some combination of aerial photographs, street maps, and the diagrams consisting of his urban notations embodying qualitative data derived from interviews and street-level observation. Each of these images communicates different kinds of information at different orders of abstraction in different mediums. None the less they share enough features – such as scale, form, orientation – to allow the different orders of information to be cross-tabulated. They are ordered and formatted in such a way that we are encouraged to shuttle between the images, to locate cognitive cues within the aerial photograph, to import topographical features into our reading of the street map, and on into the cognitive map, and so on. Lynch’s argument for cognitive mapping, and a phenomenal/noumenal alignment more generally, does not rest, as we might expect, on the principles of European urbanism as exemplified by the historical quarters of such cities as Venice, Florence, or Sienna (although Lynch does refer to these). It relies more fundamentally on a range of anthropological examples in which architectural and urban forms were of marginal importance. These examples, from such remote settings as the Pacific Ocean, the African jungle, and the Sahara desert, are set out in an appendix to his The Image of the City. In one instance Lynch cites the case of ‘a famous Arab guide in the Sahara, who could follow the faintest trail, and for whom the entire desert was a network of paths’ (Lynch 1960: 130). Lynch recounts

Cognitive mapping the dispersed city 195 an instance in which the guide ‘followed painstakingly the continuous twists of the scarcely-marked way, even while his destination was clearly visible to him across the open desert’ (Lynch 1960: 130). This disregard of the clearly visible cultural landmarks of his destination and the meticulous attention to the natural but more changeable markings – that include subtle variations in the colour of the sand, dune formations, star and wind patterns – was necessary, according to Lynch’s source, precisely because ‘storms and mirages often made distant landmarks unreliable’ (Lynch 1960: 130). The fixed built forms that constitute the distant landmarks are seen to be unreliable in this context such that navigation occurs in direct communion with bare nature – the desert. Yet Lynch implies that even in such contexts, no matter how featureless, raw, or disorganized an environment might appear from the perspective of an urban subject, it could sustain rich and meaningful patterns of association and suggest clear ‘lines of movement’ for human subjects. The value such examples have for Lynch’s wider argument about cognitive maps and their relation to material conditions of the city lies, in the first instance, in the discounted status of landmarks such as buildings, towns, and cities. It is the bareness of nature that counts here. Bare nature, stripped of most cultural and technological supplements, serves as a kind of sensitive canvas on which the kernel potentialities of human life can be delineated. Here on this expansive surface – differentiated only according to the clichéd geographical categories of ocean, jungle, and desert – humankind’s physical capacities for survival and cognitive capacities for orientation are clearly set out as nascent conditions for human settlement and culture. This kind of argument resonates with long-standing Arcadian and primitivist narratives in Western art, philosophy, and social science. The bare landscapes of nature that Lynch invokes here, for instance, have something of the benign Arcadian ambience that was so important for the invention of the figure of the noble savage in the eighteenth century. The noble savage figures in Marc-Antoine Laugier’s reworking of this theme in his account of the origins of architecture. In the opening lines of his Essay on Architecture, Laugier begins by entreating his readers to ‘look at man in his primitive state without any aid or guidance than his natural instincts’ (Laugier 1977: 11). As Wolfgang Herrmann shows, Laugier’s primitive man was gleaned from classical sources ‘such as Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Vitruvius, Tacitus and others’, and was also supplemented by contemporaneous ‘accounts given by missionaries and travellers about the life of modern savages in North America and elsewhere’ (Herrmann 1962: 46). This figure, so deduced, is innocently attuned to a benign nature, and is, in Laugier’s text, the originator of the first and proper architecture, and so served as a critical counterpoint for the social ills of eighteenthcentury urban life. Lynch’s contemporary anthropological examples, resonate with this older Arcadian tradition. As such, they crystallize the theoretical foundation of his project: human orientation, navigation, and settlement take place through the alignment of raw matter and cognitive power. This tradition delivers to Lynch’s argument a narrative in which conscious human agency marshals, subdues, and organizes a passive and inert material realm. The city, in which matter is marshalled, subdued,

196 Stephen Cairns and organized on a large scale, should be a compelling expression of this agency. The feelings of anxiety, fear, and even terror that Lynch invokes at the beginning of his book are symptoms of a misalignment of phenomenal and noumenal registers, and of a failure of human agency in relation to the city. Cognitive mapping techniques are intended to overcome these feelings by orchestrating a realignment of urban representation and sprawling urban conditions. They are designed to stem emergent disorder and to reassure us that a sense of urban coherence, order, and beauty remains within our grasp.

THE DESERT OF THE REAL These days, some forty-five years since The Image of the City was first published, it has become difficult to sustain, either intellectually or programmatically, the optimism of Lynch’s project. The speed and scale of urban growth and decay, the transnationalization, deterritorialization, and virtualization of urban space have rendered the disturbances in the North American cityscapes that he diagnosed in the 1950s minor by comparison. But it would be wrong to suggest that, by extension, the difficulties we might have in imaging cities now was merely a consequence of the failure of representation, a case of the complex material transformations of the city outpacing the available means for representing them. Today’s cities are, in the West at least, more thoroughly represented than ever before. For example, cities now come into view at a planetary scale through satellite-based remote sensing technologies (see Mesey 2003). Such technologies generate detailed digital geodata that can, through the application of geographic information systems (GIS), be endlessly cross-referenced with social and economic data to produce minutely specified bodies of information on the city tailored to the needs of individual design, planning, or management agencies. Remote sensing is, for all its aesthetic connotations, a technique that aims to generate and visualize quantifiable data and scientific knowledge of the earth’s surfaces and the agricultural, horticultural, forested, wooded, urban, suburban, exurban forms, shapes and patterns that are etched, impressed, and embossed upon it. Governed by logics of verisimilitude ever finer-grained-resolution images seek to visually fix this shifting and restless terrain – even the most formally indeterminate conditions are incorporated within the visual field through the application of so-called ‘decrisping’ geometries (Burrough and Frank 1996). Such digital and remotely sensed modes of representation seem uniquely suited to the demands of imaging contemporary urbanism. Yet as David Harvey (2000), Jean Baudrillard (1994), and before them Guy Debord (1967) have argued, the convolution of representational and material dimensions of contemporary urban life has the capacity to permanently postpone any possibility that they might somehow be realigned and reciprocally accommodated. The convolution undermines the possibility that the urban image, in a Lynchian sense, might elegantly encapsulate a city’s manifold dimensions and sustain a referential detachment. The heightened representational capacities of digital imaging cannot deliver, finally and conclusively, a mimetically adequate system of urban representation. The excess of both image and material has produced a turbulent

Cognitive mapping the dispersed city 197 overspilling and interpenetration that throws up still more blatant, intractable, and novel misalignment effects. On the ground this generates conditions that mingle hyperreal zones of spectacle, surveillance, and control with the left-over, derelict, fallow spaces of material and economic entropy that are found in the wake of capital’s evacuation from one place and its concentration in another – what in architectural discourse have been variously called ‘terrain vague’ (Sola-Morales Rubio 1995) or ‘dross’ (Lerup 2000). Rem Koolhaas has dubbed this mingling of the wild, the domesticated, and the inert, ‘junkspace’ (Koolhaas 2002). Junkspace is ‘what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout . . . a low-grade purgatory’ (Koolhaas 2002: 408). It is the generic essence of contemporary urbanism, driven by economic expediency and pragmatism, characterized by spaces (malls, airports, hotels, casinos) in perpetual expansion, and supported by technologies (escalators and air conditioning) of continuity and seamlessness. This urbanism is ‘beyond measure, beyond code’, it ‘cannot be grasped’, so ‘cannot be remembered’. ‘Its geometries are unimaginable, only makeable’ (Koolhaas 2002: 409). Negotiating representational strategies in such a context, where any sense of a stable alignment and reciprocal adaptation of representational to material registers seems out of reach, cannot be a matter of simply updating or improving Lynch’s model. The ubiquitous, low-level, persistent misalignments of material and representation in junkspace, and the impossibility of imagining their realignment, is dramatically encapsulated in the Wachowski brothers’ hit film The Matrix (1999). The film is premised on the dominance of a computer-generated virtual urban environment that substitutes almost completely for all material conditions. All human subjects, save a small dissident community, are literally plugged into to the mega-computer that supports this virtual world and so experience life as a kind of permanent dream. In one significant scene in the film the veil of the computer-generated dream is pulled aside and we confront the (‘real’) reality of the city as it is: a devastated, burnt out, and abandoned high-rise downtown. Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne), leader of the dissident community, and Neo (Keanu Reeves), his recruit, are seated somewhat incongruously in armchairs within the remains of this old reality. Morpheus acquaints Neo with the world he never knew with the words ‘Welcome to the desert of the real’. The ‘desert of the real’ phrase is taken from Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ in Simulacra and Simulation. For him it describes the remnants of a material territory that is overtaken by its cartographic representations, a context in which images are so ubiquitous, comprehensive, and compelling that they no longer follow but precede the territories they were supposed to subserviently represent. In the hyperreality that results, material conditions are degraded and remain only as desert-like ‘vestiges’ that ‘persist here and there’, as ‘shreds’ that ‘slowly rot’ (Baudrillard 1994: 1). Slavoj Zˇizˇek (2002) adopts this phrase in a reflection on The Matrix in the course of his analysis of the destruction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. In this context, the desert of the real signifies the profound disturbance caused by the eruption of those material shreds back into the smooth spaces of hyperreality. Drawing on Lacan’s account of the Real (that material stuff

198 Stephen Cairns which motivates and grounds the world we access through language but which ‘resists symbolization absolutely’) Zˇizˇek reads in The Matrix the troubling bare materiality of the desert – brutal, disorganized, terrifying. Clearly this image of the desert is not the one Lynch activated in relation to his urban research. For Lynch, the Arab guide in the Sahara desert exemplified a primordial human capacity for wayfinding and orientation. The desert affirmed his diagnoses of post-war American urban design and the wider cognitive mapping thesis. Where Lynch activates bare nature in order to pose the sovereignty of human cognitive powers, Zˇizˇek demonstrates the irreconcilability of the two. It is the impossibility of an ultimate alignment and reconciliation of material and representation that is laid bare. (At the same time, we can recognize in Morpheus, Neo, and the other dissidents in The Matrix, an explicit humanism that commits them, much like Lynch’s Arab guide in the Sahara desert, to cultivate their long-forgotten instincts so that they might see through to the (real) reality, and so overcome the computer-generated urban reality of the Matrix.) Where does this leave a project such as Lynch’s? Is it of historical interest only? Does this mean, then, that any project that seeks to craft a clear programme of action on the basis of determinate knowledge (cartographic, social scientific) of the city has become impossible? Does this imply that determinate knowledge is always relativized? Does it simply float – Baudrillard (1994) suggests that in hyperreality all referentials are ‘liquidated’ – as another image constellation alongside those that are aesthetically, fictionally, or imaginatively motivated? As Zˇizˇek puts it: ‘science does “touch the Real”, its knowledge is “knowledge in the Real”’, it is just that ‘scientific knowledge cannot serve as the symbolic “big Other”’ (Zˇizˇek 1999). The determinate knowledge that science seeks to deliver cannot, in other words, guarantee access through commonsense everyday language to some reliable sense of a ‘real’ reality. While material (‘real’) and phenomenal (‘fictional’) dimensions of reality must be negotiated and some form of alignment between them must be sustained, the point Zˇizˇek makes (via Lacan) is that the acquiescence of bare nature to the will-to-power of human knowledge cannot be taken for granted. The task of negotiating some representational strategy that sustains a kind of explanatory, let alone programmatic, power is all the more challenging within the overspilling, turbulent milieu of contemporary extended urban regions. As I have suggested, such a negotiation cannot be conducted within an updated or improved Lynchian framework. And yet the questions Lynch raises in relation to urban orientation and the proposals he makes for inventing new representational strategies remain compelling and important. This is evidenced by the significant after-life his ideas have had in relation to urbanism and broader questions of cultural production. I want to examine three destinies of cognitive mapping as a means of exploring the issue of representation and contemporary urbanism.

COGNITIVE MAPPING LATE CAPITALISM Perhaps the best-known academic deployment of Lynch’s cognitive map concept was in a wider debate on a cultural politics of postmodernism. Fredric Jameson’s

Cognitive mapping the dispersed city 199 essay on the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ (first published in 1984) is credited with triggering that debate and exploring many of its problematics. In that essay he activates Lynch’s notion of cognitive mapping in relation to one such problematic: the difficulty of representing and comprehending the manifold transnational spaces of late capitalism, famously emblematized by the John Portman-designed Bonaventure Hotel. Cognitive mapping, he suggests, is a mode of representation that might be adopted and elaborated for those ends. Cognitive mapping, in Jameson’s hands, represents a cultural form that recovers an older pedagogical function for art, a function that had been forgotten in the high modernist drive for aesthetic autonomy, and in this capacity might serve as a ‘new political art’, a ‘new radical cultural politics’ and found a critical ‘pedagogical political culture’ (Jameson 1995: 54). Jameson suggests that Lynch’s notational system might be ‘projected outward on to some of the larger national and global spaces’ of late capitalism with the aim of endowing ‘the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system’ (Jameson 1995: 54). This would not, Jameson insists, be a matter of reviving or adapting traditional mimetic or perspectival modes of representation, nor even would it ‘involve anything so easy as a map’ (Jameson 1995: 409), but would require some kind of inventive ‘breakthrough’ to radically new and as yet unimaginable forms of representation that do justice to the ‘world space of multinational capital’ (Jameson 1995: 54). A cognitive map of this kind would allow us to: begin to grasp our position as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale. (Jameson 1995: 54) The cognitive map concept operates as a spatial analogue, Jameson suggests, of Althusser’s notion of ideology as ‘the presentation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’ (cited in Jameson 1995: 51). Althusser’s definition, in turn, relies on Lacan’s account of the tripartite (Real–Imaginary–Symbolic) structure of the psyche. Jameson argues that Lynch’s cognitive maps operate as a kind of Imaginary, a pre-cartographic state in which existential data in the form of individualized cognitive urban itineraries are yet to be transposed into abstracted and properly cartographic systems of representation. Jameson calls for a full-blown Symbolic social cartography that would enable individual subjects entry into, orientation within, and active appropriation of alienating late capitalist spaces as fully fledged social agents. Yet precisely how the project of extending and elaborating cognitive mapping might impart a sense of agency and orientation to individual subjects in the spaces of late capitalism is difficult to demonstrate in concrete terms. Two further destinies of the cognitive mapping idea, discussed below, demonstrate its relative impotence in such contexts.

200 Stephen Cairns A second, lesser known, destiny for the cognitive map idea is in the field of graphic design, information design, and ‘wayfinding’ (Passini 1999: 244) – a term first used by Lynch. The renewed energy attributed to the question of urban wayfinding relates to what Marc Augé, in his suggestive contribution to the discussion of simulacral hyperreality and the spaces of late capitalism, has called the ‘invasion of space by text’ (Augé 1995: 99). Augé argues that individual subjects find their place in and navigate through the late capitalist city primarily through textual mediation. Spaces such as supermarkets, airports, motorways – which he calls ‘nonplaces’ – are distinctive, he suggests, because they are partly defined by the textual and graphic ‘instructions for use’ as found on the road markings, public signage, maps, and tourist guides that populate them. These ‘may be prescriptive (“Take right-hand lane”), prohibitive (“No smoking”) or informative (“You are now entering the Beaujolais region”)’ (Augé 1995: 96). In these circumstances Lynch’s ‘paths’, ‘edges’, ‘nodes’, ‘districts’, and ‘landmarks’ are not embodied within the morphology of the city but come to be expressed as a fragmentary cartographics that is written (painted, etched, engraved, cut, stuck) directly on to the city’s surfaces (asphalt, paving, grass, tiling, stone, glass, plasterboard). This cartographics – a useful example of which is the Bristol Legible City project, awarded a Royal Town Planning Institute award for innovation in 2002 – is also a social choreographics that functions to orientate, guide, or more forcefully direct citizens and tourists alike within and around the urban terrain. For Augé, the emergence of such informational strategies is symptomatic, not of an urban environment that is stabilized by legibility, but of a set of accelerated and paradoxical excesses: first, an excess of events that simultaneously multiplies and flattens meaning effects; second, an excess of space associated with radical changes in scale in which enhanced capacities of transport and communication technologies simultaneously interconnect and shrink larger global territories; and third, an excess of identity effects in which individuals are simultaneously offered ever more refined means of differentiating themselves and are subjected to generic systems of identification that are increasingly universal in their application (Augé 1995: 29–41). To understand the concatenation of non-places that emerges within such matrices of excess in Lynchian terms would be to project a hyperlegible cityscape in which its occupants’ desire for meaning, information, security, and convenience is met with a suite of tailored orientational and informational systems. The paradox of this scenario is that while such systems extend the capacities of individuals to operate in the world, it is a world that not only appears to be shrinking but one in which the possibilities for experience are sharply attenuating. This image of the city is one in which the cognitive map aspires to be a total work of art, a carto/choreographics in which information and meaning seek to saturate its every corner. A third destiny of the cognitive mapping concept can be found in the new urbanism movement. The Image of the City has consistently been a bestseller in the field of urban design and planning since it was first published, and now finds its place alongside Leon Krier’s Architecture: Choice or Fate, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck’s Smart Growth Manual, and Peter Calthorpe’s The Regional City as one of the founding texts of the new urbanism

Cognitive mapping the dispersed city 201 movement. In this context, built manifestations of Lynch’s project survive (and some say flourish) in a modestly hyperreal form. Small pockets of new urbanist development, epitomized most famously by the towns of Celebration and Seaside in Florida but now found all over the world, are like microcosmic intensifications of Lynch’s beautiful urbanism. Here, the lessons of The Image of the City have been learned, absorbed, and implemented dogmatically. The programme for imaging the city has become foundational, and is implemented consistently and thoroughly, regulating the ornamental details, colours, and material finishes of individual buildings, the grain, density, and functional mix of the town, its traffic organization and its morphology. Imageability functions not only in the management of the town, but also as a central plank in its real-estate marketing strategy, thereby positing Lynch’s art of urban design not so much as the seed of a ‘new political art’ or a ‘new radical cultural politics’ as another consumerist tool of late capitalist urban development. The image is a brand. The cityscape is a brandscape suggesting that the lessons of imageability have been learnt only too well. This inclination of imageability to become a function of marketability under new urbanist planning and design principles has leant towns like Seaside to easy satirization. Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show (1998) is set in the new urbanist Duany and Plater-Zyberk designed (1979–82) town of Seaside. The film’s main protagonist, Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), lives out an apparently idyllic life within what transpires to be a 24/7 reality television show. Weir exploits the architecture of Seaside to accentuate the sense of creeping paranoia and ultimate horror we witness in Truman as he comes to realize the thoroughness with which his life is mediated – much like Neo’s, albeit more heroic, epiphany in The Matrix. In this regard The Truman Show might be read as a kind of architectural critique in which the constrained, groomed, orderly, and imageable architectural forms are themselves revealed to us as sham secondary or tertiary manifestations of a messy real world we know to exist all around us. In taking these observations to the concerns of this chapter, we might note the architecture and urban fabric of Seaside itself as being another medium in which the doubly coded film/television show is itself embedded. Indeed, setting The Truman Show within imageable Seaside establishes a set of interpenetrating material and representational realities whose complexity often eclipses that of the special-effects-heavy world of The Matrix – much of which was shot in relatively generic sites around downtown Sydney. Seaside’s heightened imageability allows the town to be solicited into this inter-medium visual order, rather than serving as a more orthodox setting for the narrative. In this context, the conditions of the town’s imageability begin to warp and strain. This is not the literal, computer-generated ‘liquidation’ of the urban images we see in Matrix, but one that arises from the difficulty of locating the real and the image and distinguishing between them. Jameson’s reading of Lynch’s cognitive mapping manages to retain the optimism of the original – he wants us to orientate ourselves and find our way in late capitalist space. Despite occasional caveats and qualifications, Jameson makes the radical shift in scale, time, and method from three North American cities of the late 1950s to a map of world space of multinational capital relatively smoothly, freely

202 Stephen Cairns admitting that his project attempts to resist the ‘blind fatalities’ of the here-and-now and seeks totalizing perspectives via strategies of defamiliarization, abstraction, and critical distance (Jameson 1995: 400). This optimism relies on seeing in cognitive mapping a basis for new and as yet unimaginable forms of representation. In Jameson’s hands, Lynch’s work is retro-fitted with avant-garde intent. Jolted out of its accessible academic moderation, cognitive mapping comes to herald the possibility of a radical and inventive ‘breakthrough’ in the cartography of global urban space. Yet, as the examples of non-place and new urbanism suggest, cognitive mapping is all too easily put to work in the machineries of late capitalist urban development. Jameson’s argument for a figurative cultural politics of late capitalism based on the critical potential of cognitive mapping rests heavily on the promise of this radical breakthrough. This raises the question precisely what might constitute such a breakthrough? How might the nascent forms of such a breakthrough be diagnosed?

JAKARTA AND THE KRONOLOGI OF DESAKOTA Jameson’s own answers to these questions are suggestive and rhetorical. He fleetingly cites the published outputs of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in the 1960s (a workers’ movement seeded in Detroit that developed strong transnational dimensions) and hints at a kind of ‘incommensurability-vision’ (Jameson 1995: 372) as exemplified by everyday practices of television channel surfing, but does not suggest how these things might constitute anything so systematic as a cognitive map. This difficulty hinges on the status of the cartographic in Jameson’s argument. The compelling power of Lynch’s project lay, to a large degree, in the programmatic potential of mapping, yet Jameson discards mapping as being too ‘easy’, too ‘accessible’, and excessively tainted with the totalizing will-to-power of colonialism. In doing so he is left with the cognitive. The optimistic aura that pervades his project for a Symbolic language that might resist the seductive and intoxicating effects of late capitalist space is sustained abstractly through the workings of human cognition. Yet, for those whose focus of concern is urbanism, urban design, and the fate of cities more specifically, the question of the cartographic cannot be simply left behind as a metaphorical step on the way towards some more radical mode of figuration. Indeed, from this perspective there is a suspicion that it is the cognitive, and not the mapping, that is the stumbling block for such a project. This conception of the subject, defined in relation to a fixed set of cognitive powers, leads us back to none other than Lynch’s Arab guide in the desert. Jameson could not, of course, be accused of such blatant primitivism. But, as Homi Bhabha notes, his project ‘steadfastly maintains the “frame”, if not the face, of the subject-centred perceptual apparatus’ (Bhabha 1994: 219). The concept of cognition, and the sovereign subjectivity it authorizes, overdetermine Jameson’s argument in other words; the urban subject is characterized as both frail and powerful, susceptible to being overwhelmed by late capitalist space yet possessing the cognitive powers to overcome it. It is the agency imbued to this sovereign subject that gives cartography

Cognitive mapping the dispersed city 203 its colonialist connotations, not the other way round. The enabling aims of such an inventive representational breakthrough would be more usefully sought through a weaker conception of the subject. Such a conception would admit to the locatedness of the subject in the confluence of material and representational worlds. It would trade the confidence of the theoretical trajectory that Jameson traces for the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ (Jameson 1995: 400) of the contingent, to postpone the systematic picture and investigate, however, risky, the ‘blind fatalities’ of the hereand-now. This ethnographically inflected commitment would involve exploring the Symbolic and synthetic promise that Jameson saw in cognitive mapping in the first place, only now in the name of a weaker subject and a conception of the cartographic that credits it with greater power. This would seek to identify a more complex relationship between the agency of the urban subject and what James Corner has called the ‘agency of mapping’ (Corner 1999). To this end, I want to explore a further possible destiny for the cognitive mapping idea in the city of Jakarta. Such a destiny would see the idea transported to (and transformed by) a site of globalization that specifies Jameson’s analysis in unlikely ways. Jakarta, this other site of globalization, has all the emblematic and generic characteristics of a global city – its new urbanist gated suburbs, mall and supermarket non-places, its junkspaces, and even its share of Portmanesque hotels – but, crucially, also contains rural and agricultural conditions that are imagined to be pre-modern residues lying outside the global. The city of Jakarta, at the western end of the island of Java, might be posited as a limit case for conventional conceptions of the urban. In recent years, through the work of urban geographer Terry McGee (1991), parts of this city have come to stand as exemplars of a new peripheral and extended urbanism. This urbanism is characterized by an unprecedented and un- or quasi-planned mixing of the ephemeral and informal conditions usually associated with rural settlement patterns and with more or less stable and fixed urban infrastructures. These zones experience ecological, social, and economic difficulties, and yet they sustain relatively successful communities – through various legal, illegal, and quasi-legal means. McGee coined the term desakota (Indonesian for village-city) to account for the complex mixtures of urban and rural conditions that are found throughout Jakarta’s peripheries. In these zones, ephemeral or seasonal elements, such as rice agriculture, squatter housing, and spontaneous markets exist in relations of co-dependence alongside the more fixed elements of the city, such as industrial infrastructure, business parks, freeways, golf courses, malls, gated housing, and theme parks. Such desakota zones consist of an extended and refined spectrum between social space and architectural space such that conventional representational logics simply cannot register them. These rural/urban conditions present as ‘blind spots’ in official representations of the city. Such blind spots become immediately evident when leafing through Jakarta’s street directory, one such official representation. The serendipity by which Jakarta, one of the world’s most unmappable cities, comes to have one of the world’s most lavish street directories is not something I can elaborate now. But the street directory does demonstrate my point succinctly. Compare, for instance, the street directories

204 Stephen Cairns of Jakarta and Melbourne, both of which have equivalent production values and employ very similar cartographic technologies and graphic conventions. In the Melbourne street directory, where every street, bicycle track, scout hall, sports field, phone booth and public barbecue is carefully indexed, the close alignment between map and ground reality is graphically evident. While in the Jakarta street directory the hard infrastructures of the city, such as freeways, asphalted streets, and gated suburbs are evident, we gain, by contrast, little sense of other, more predominant settlement forms such as housing. The graphic sparseness of the Jakarta street directory belies the large numbers and densities of population that reside in that city. The reverse is true of the Melbourne street directory. Jakarta’s street directory enables navigation of the city for those with cars, but more interestingly for our purposes, it represents a city whose form is radically misaligned with the means of representing it. The street directory format serves in this context as evidence of the demand for new forms of representation. In recent years one representational form has emerged on the cusp of Jakarta’s cartographic blind spots. Its manifestations are not straightforwardly cartographic, although they do incorporate aspects of the street directory I have been discussing. These are the so-called kronologi that have become a popular feature in the Warta Kota (City News) newspaper, one of the many Jakarta dailies that emerged following the downfall of President Suharto in 1998, Indonesia’s authoritarian ruler who had been in power since 1967. The kronologi are cartoon-like representations of petty and serious crime, misdemeanours, accidents, and mishaps that occur in the city, and each daily edition of the Warta Kota features two of them (see Figures 14.1 and 14.2). The graphic artists responsible for producing them work from short crime reports, as delivered by journalists or members of the public, translating them into a sequence of narratively coherent graphic frames. These frames, composed in Adobe Illustrator, are characterized by flat blocks of colour, vector lines and a range of other standard screen and texture effects. Over the past four or five years the graphic artists have generated a comprehensive library of graphic elements that includes a refined collection of cars, motor bikes, trucks, and buses, as well as stock characters such as the suicide, the thief, the car-jacker, the con artist, and so on, drawing on these as the occasion requires.

Figure 14.1 Kronologi, Gamel Fauzi is heading to his office . . . (courtesy of Warta Kota)

Cognitive mapping the dispersed city 205

Figure 14.2 Kronologi, Hendrik Silalahi and Rudi Tinambungan are operating inside the bus . . . (courtesy of Warta Kota)

When the daily kronologi are distributed geographically, they begin to suggest a kind of socio-psychological cartography, not in the form of a wholly new map but as a series of seams within the existing city map. So arranged, the kronologi do not deliver a coherent city image, or a properly cognitive map, but delineate seams of emergent and shifting meaning and can be understood as a popular form of imagining of the city – something that was not possible under older, authoritarian regimes of power in which the circulation of information (including statistics on crime) in the public realm was carefully controlled. These representational seams come to be inserted between harder and more evident urban forms and infrastructures of gated housing enclaves, golf courses, and freeways, and the sparsely represented, usually rural, forms of rice fields, irrigation channels, fish ponds, scrub, fallow land, and villages. Such an interstitial terrain is poised between the contrasting conceptions of the desert that Lynch and Baudrillard (and Zˇizˇek) propose, neither a benign canvas on which human culture might be eloquently and beautifully drawn, nor a degraded and vestigial relic of an urban real. It would be difficult to claim any operational status for such representations, or to imagine that they might somehow find their way into the official planning and urban design discourses for the city. However, they do represent a breakthrough of sorts in which emergent urban conditions are visualized for the first time. These are complex, pressurized, quasi-urban terrains that sustain subjects who are negotiating a new relationship between themselves, a specific set of material and representational conditions, and the flows of global capital as they are configured in and through their city.

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Index

AI (2001) 41 Abbas, Ackbar 72 Abrahams, Peter 102 Accra 101, 102, 104 Adams, Thomas 132 Adebayo, Diran 10, 89, 91–2, 93–4, 96, 97–100 Adorno, Theodor 41 Africa 10–11, 101, 103 African city, and apartheid 102–3; challenges of 111; colonial influence on 101, 111; cosmopolitanism of 109–10; decline/transformation of inner city in 108; First World/Third World juxtaposition in 103; HIV/AIDS in 108–11; hybrid spaces in 103, 111; impact of modernism/modernity on 102; landmarks in 107–8; literary depictions of 101–11; morphology of urban space 101–2; new bourgeoisie in 103–4; post-apartheid regime 106; South African experience 104–11; and township tourism 107 Alexander’s Bridge (Cather) 123 Allen, Roberta 51 Althusser, Louis 199 America (Baudrillard) 49–50, 54 The American Scene (James) 125–6 Anderson, N. 19, 29, 31, 33 Andreotti, L. 81 Appadurai, Arjun 67 Appelbaum, S. 32 Architecture: Choice or Fate (Krier) 200 architecture, as built 144, 152; as cinematic art 146, 149; cinematic link 159–60; display/self-celebration 160; exhibitionist 163; future destruction of 144; Ground Zero areas 160–1, 163; landscape as threat to 154; of memory

137, 141; and movement 149; political nature of 165; and politics 144, 152; as unbuilt 165, see also Jewish Museum (Berlin); skyscrapers; Über den Linden (Berlin) Armageddon (1998) 38, 51 Arroyo, Eduardo 77 Asymptote 175, 175–6 attention see structures of attention Augé, M. 200 Augustus, Patrick 89 Augustyn, R.T. 155 Auster, Paul 112 Awakening Spring (2003) 64, 73 Awoonor, Kofi 103–4 Babyfather novels (Augustus) 89 Baer, Ulrich 51, 54, 58 Banako 102 Bancroft, Hubert Howe 25 Barnabel, J. 191 Barthes, Roland 21 Baudelaire, Charles 80 Baudrillard, Jean 10, 49–50, 51, 54, 57–8, 60, 62, 86, 165, 197, 198, 205 Baum, Lucille 83 ‘Behind the Singer Tower’ (Cather) 123–5, 127–9, 131 Belau, L. 59 Bender, Thomas 132 Benjamin, Walter 20, 49, 60, 86, 126, 139 Bennett, A. 57 Bergson, Henri 152 Berkeley, Busby 159 Berlin, aerial photograph of 152–4; filmic representations of 45–7, see also Jewish Museum; Über den Linden Bernstein, Michèle 78, 86 Bhabha, Homi K. 202

218 Index Blade Runner (1982) 42 Blame Me on History (Modisane) 103 Blanchot, M. 56 Bloom, Sol 23, 24 Blum, A. 69 Borradori, G. 56 Boyle, Danny 45 Breen, S. 181 Bridge, Gary 2, 88 Bruno, Giuliana 40 Buckingham Palace: District Six (Rive) 102 Burke, Edmund 54 Burnham, Clara Louise 31 Burnham, Daniel 22–3, 26–7 Burrough, P. 196 Cabiria (1913) 38 Cacciari, M. et al. 167 Cairns, Stephen 110 Calthorpe, Jeff 200 Cape Town 101 Carpenter, John 51–2 Carrey, Jim 201 Carter, Angela 112 Caruth, Cathy 59 Çatalhöyük mural, as creative representation of cityspace 1; depiction of volcanic eruption 2–3; link with modernist representations 1–2; as register of difference 2; significance of 1; symbolic aspects 3; violence–city link 3 Cather, Willa 11, 122–9, 132 Celan, Paul 138, 139 Celluloid Skyline (Sanders) 49 The Century World’s Fair Book for Boys and Girls (Jenks) 26 Chan, Fruit 70, 71 Chan, Jackie 69, 70 Chan, Peter 63–4, 72 Chevalier, L. 86 Chicago, economy of 33–4; Exposition in 8–9, 21–33; known as the ‘porkopolis’ of America 34; stockyards of 34–6 Chicago Daily Tribune 24–5 Chicago the Magnificent (Ryan) 26–7 Chlcheglov, I. 81–2 Choisy, August 149 Chow, B. 71 Chretien, Henri 51 Cinema 2 (Deleuze) 149 cinema, apocalyptic urban vision 9, 38–9; and architecture 146, 149; and the city

49–50, 69–72; and disaster movies 52; and everyday life 71; fantasy films 45, 47; history of 49; Hollywood musical 159; and location 69; mythological/ imaginary power of US cities 69; proto-cinematic forms 9; and tourism 9–10, 63–4; and urban mythology 72, see also named films e.g. Wings of Desire city, abjection of 41–2; aerial views of 19, 20, 21; alienating 115; and the architectural uncanny 126–7; as battleground between actors/spectators 82; and building up of 129; as catastrophe 42–3; cinematic representation 49–50, 69–72; as concept-city 40, 41, 42, 43; deceptive transparency of 44; dehumanization of 41; destruction of 3, 9, 38–9, 41, 47; development/maintenance of urban identity 69; fears/anxieties concerning 43–4; as frozen urban sea 39–40, 41; functional totalitarianism in 45, 47–8; geometric imaginings of 41; graffiti in 42; as home of reason 2; ideal 85; inevitability of disaster in 129; inhuman character of 20; interrelation with public space 5, 7–8; mental image of 112; as petrified/deadened 40–1; phenomenal/noumenal registers 194; and play 44–5, 47–8; and reduction of human life to urban waste 129; and rhetoric of renewal 131; Situationist 83–6; surveillance in 43; texturology of 123; unstoppable movement of life in 83–4; utopian dimension 44; violent politicization of 3; walkers of 41, 42, 45, 46, 117, see also named cities e.g. London city–migrant relationship, and Black British urbanites 91–3; local allegiances/cultural difference 93–5; and naming the space 97–8; positive potential of 100; in postcolonial narratives 88–100; second-generational points of view 95, 99; spatialized resistance in the city 95–7; urban coalitions/generational diference 89–91 city–war relationship 50–1 cityscape 3; and atmosphere of enchantment 19; and erasure of ‘lived city’ 114; and erotics of knowledge 11, 114; ideal 72; legibility of 192; paying

Index 219 attention to 72–3; as shapeshifting 11, 19, 29–30, 116–18, 120–1 Clair, René 45 cognitive mapping 12, 192–3; Arcadian ambience of 195–6; and art of urban design 193; based on anthropological examples 194–5; and city of Jakarta 203–5; concept of 202; development of 193–4; and discounted status of landmarks 195; empirical/social scientific dimension 193; extending/ elaborating 199; and graphic design, information design, wayfinding 200; Jameson’s reading of 201–2; of late capitalism 198–202; and new urbanism movement 200–1; as practice/theory 194; and principle of phenomenal/ noumenal alignment 194; as spatial analogue 199; technique of 196; urban assumptions 194 Cohen, P.E. 155 Colomb, C. 72 Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893) 8–9, 21–32; anthropological sequence 23–4; commercial conditions 22–3; Ferris wheel at 21, 24–32; importance of local/international context 21; Midway Plaisance 23–4, 32; White City area 22–3 The Condition of Postmodernity (Harvey) 119 Conley, V.A. 41 Constant, Benjamin 192 Corner, James 83, 203 Couture, Lise Anne 175 Craik, J. 63 Crary, Jonathan 10, 29, 30, 66, 67, 70 The Creative Destruction of Manhattan (Page) 122 The Critique of Judgement (Kant) 55 Cronon, W. 34 Cross, M. 101 Cruise, Tom 52 Cruising (1980) 43 Cry the Beloved Country (Paton) 102 Cullen, Gordon 192 Currey, J.S. 30 Daguerre, Louis 29 Danielewski, Mark 57 Dante’s Peak (1997) 52 Dar es Salaam 101 Dark, Alice Eliot 55–6 Darkness and Dawn (England) 53

Daula, Zeno 167 Davidson, Cynthia 163 Davies, R. 101 Davis, W.A. 55 The Day After Tomorrow (2004) 9, 41, 52, 55 De’ Barbari, Jacopo 176 de Certeau, Michel 9, 38–48, 59, 61, 62, 83, 114, 117, 123 De Chirico, Giorgio 80 De origine, situ et magistratibus urbis Venetae (Sanudo the Young) 166 Debord, Guy 10, 78, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 118, 180, 192, 196 Deep Impact (1998) 9, 38, 51 Delany, Samuel 11, 112, 113–19, 120–1 Deleuze, Gilles 11, 12, 56, 149, 150, 152, 182–4, 186, 189–91 DeLillo, Don 60, 61 Dell’origine de’ barbari che distrussero per tutto l’mondo l’imperio di Roma . . . (Zen) 167 DeMille, Cecil B. 50 D’Eramo, M. 34 dérive (drift) 118–19 Derrida, Jacques 11, 137–8, 140–1, 143, 181 Dhalgren (Delany) 11, 113–18, 120–1; and concept of thirdspace 120; as elliptical/fragmentary novel 113, 115; legibility of image in 113, 121; link with Situationist theory 118–19; metamorphic transformations in 113–14; post-apocalyptic terrain in 113; race/sexuality in 115–16; schizophrenic spaces/subjects in 115, 117–18; scopic regime of 117; shape-shifting space in 116–18, 120; social realities of urban African-American communities in 114–15; and view from above 120 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 41 DiCaprio, Leonardo 124 Dickinson, E. 59 Diderot, Denis 17, 19 dioramas 29–30, 32 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 43 Dodgson, Charles 83 Dolar, Mladen 59 Donald, J. 63 Drew, Richard 127–8 Driver, Felix 98 Duany, Andres 200, 201

220 Index Earthquake (1974) 51 Eiffel Tower 21, 25, 77 Eisenman, Peter 163, 170, 172 Eisenstein, Sergei 149 Elsken, Ed vand er 81 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 126 The Emigrants (Lamming) 88, 90 Emmerich, Roland 38, 41, 52 The Emperor’s Babe (Evaristo) 89 England, George 53 Enticknap, L. 69 Epps, Bradley C. 78, 79 erotics of knowledge 11, 114 Escape from New York (1981) 51–2, 128 Essay on Architecture (Laugier) 195 Evaristo, Bernadine 89 Every Light in the House Burnin’ (Levy) 89 Faure, Élie 146 Felman, Shoshana 59 Ferris, George 9, 21, 29, 33, 34, 37 Ferris wheel 8–9; at Columbian Exposition 21–32; compared with the Eiffel Tower 25, 27; comparison with Chicago stockyards 34–6; and detachment from the ground 20; development of 21; effects produced by 9; elevated/aerial view from 19, 20, 26–8; as entertainment 18; equivocal status of 19–20; experience of 28–32; as hybrid cultural phenomenon 19, 28–9; impressions of 24–5; likened to a diorama 29–30; as a monster 25–6; monumental aspect 19; mythical origin of 33; origins of 19; and panoramic painting 20; and the past 20; relationship with the city 18, 20–1; and role of aerial view 9; as skyscraper that moved 25, 27; as specifically urban form 19; in The Third Man 17–18; as vantage point, kinaesthetic device, optical entertainment 19, 28–32; visual dynamism of 25, 29–32 Fight Club (1999) 52 Fincher, David 52 Fishburne, Lawrence 197 Fitzpatrick, Joseph 39 Flanagan, M. 34 Fleischer, Richard 42 Forbidden Territory (Goytisolo) 78 form 8, 11–13 Forster, K. 175–6 Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981) 43

Forty-second Street (1933) 159 Foucault, Michel 43 Fox, Robert Elliot 114 Frank, A. 196 Freedom Tower 122–3, 129–32, 132, 163 Fresh Kills 7–8 Freud, Sigmund 49, 61, 126 Friedkin, William 43 Frizot, M. 21 Fruit of the Lemon (Levy) 89 Furie, Sidney J. 43 Gates, Henry Louis Jr 92, 99 Genet, Jean 85 Germania anno zero (1940) 45 Gernsheim, A. 29 Gernsheim, H. 29 Gibson, William 114, 120 Giedion, Siegfried 34–6 Gilbert, David 98 Gilbert, James 21, 24, 26, 32 Gilroy, Paul 89, 94 Glass, Philip 54 Godzilla (1998) 51 Gold Coast (Australia), cluster strategies in 182, 183; commercial galleries in 187; community/neighbourhood notion 180; cultural projects in 185; cultural/ economic mapping of 186–90; as dehistoricized space 181; development of 177; Economic Development Strategy 189; as edge city 177–8; governance of 184–5; growth/ expansion of 180–1; as Innovation City 182; Knowledge Precinct area 184; lack of familiar urban formation 178; multiplicities of 190–1; new economy discourse in 184; policy/planning in 190–1; as postmodern interplay of surfaces 12, 181–2, 184; and property development 187, 188–9; reliance on tourism/real-estate development 182, 185, 190; resistance to spatial categorization 185; rhizomatic process of 182–3, 185, 188, 189, 190; as smooth space 183–5, 190; as space of leisure consumption 180–1, 185; suburbs of 180; Surfers’ Paradise as heart of the City 179–80, 190; and the unexpected 185 Gordimer, Nadine 104–5, 107 Govan, S. 116 Goytisolo, Juan 10, 77–86; construction/deconstruction of Parisian

Index 221 city-space 84–5; and displacement of cultural/geographical identity 78; distance from postmodernism 79; as follower of Debord 78–9, 86; imagined view of Paris 77–8; and notion of betrayal 85; psychogeographical method 80; and society of the spectacle 86; and terrorism 85–6; understanding of/identification with world of Islam 85; and use of plaques tournantes 82–4; as writer of provocation and effect 79 Graburn, N. 63 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) 50, 112 Gronlau, William 29, 30–1 Ground Zero 12, 57, 60, 122–3, 160–1, 163, 165 Ground Zero (Virilio) 53 Groundswell exhibition (MoMA, 2005) 3–5, 7–8 Guattari, Felix 12, 182–4, 186, 189–91 Guazzoni, Enrico 38 Guiliani, Rudolph 50 Gwala, Mafika 105 Haas, R.B. 36 Hagedorn, Jessica 54, 55, 58 Hall, Stuart 92, 99 Hambourg, M. 21 Handy Guide to Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition (McNally) 21 Haraway, Donna 120 Harrison, J. 63 Harvey, David 114, 119, 196 Häussermann, H. 72 Hawthorne, Julian 25 Hazan, E. 86 The Heart of Redness (Mda) 106 Heathcote, E. 44 Heine, Heinrich 139 Heinemann, L. 57 Hill, Walter 42 Hillbrow (Johannesburg) 107–11 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 139 Homes, A.M. 51, 55 Hong Kong 9–10, 63; branding campaign for 72; as City of Life 64, 73; colonial aspects 70, 71; cultural history of 73; distracted attention to 72; emotional attachment to 65–6; film–tourism link 63–5, 69–72; idea of 64, 67–8, 69–72, 73; memories of 70; professional response to 64–5; SARS epidemic in 63; Tourism Commission 9

Horkheimer, Max 41 House of Leaves (Danielewski) 57 Howe, Darcus 95 Hui, Ann 65, 70, 71 Hunch journal 163 Hussey, Andrew 86 image 8–10 The Image of the City (Lynch) 112, 118, 192–6, 200–1 Imperial War Museum 131 Imperiale, Alicia 163, 165 Independence Day (1996) 38, 51, 128 The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Carter) 112, 113 The Intellectual versus the City (White) 126 invisible cities 53–5, 114 Jackson, Mick 38 Jackson, Peter 52 Jacobs, J.M. 101 Jakarta 13; cartographic blind spots in 203, 204; desakota zones 203; kronologi 204–5; street directories 203–4 James, Henry 125–6, 127 Jameson, Fredric 115, 118, 198–9, 201–3 Jenks, Tudor 25–6 Jewish Museum (Berlin) 11–12, 131; as architecture of memory 137, 141; autonomy from politics/political change 143–4; as avant-garde 138; built as result of competition 137–8; and continuity/discontinuity 138; and fall of the Berlin Wall 142–3; Holocaust Tower in 140; and the ideal spectator 152; and the khôra concept 140–1; landscape/location of 138–40; and loss of subjecthood 150; and obliteration of Graeco-Western polis 143; and post-apocalyptic void 138–40; and problem of access 141–2, 146; and time–image concept 149, 151–2; and voided void concept 140–1 Johannesburg 101, 103, 105, 107–11 Johnson, E.K. 55 Jones, P.S. 50 Jorn, Asger 192 Kant, Immanuel 54 Kar, Law 70 Katz, Eliot 55 Keil, R. 90

222 Index Keith, M. 101 Kellner, Douglas 60 King, G. 38 King Kong (1976) 51 Kleist, Heinrich 139 Koolhaas, Rem 155, 156, 158, 160, 165, 181, 197 Kouwenhoven, J.A. 21, 25 Koyaanisqatsi (1983) 54 Krier, Leon 200 Kristeva, Julia 41–2, 57 Krutch, J. 53 Kureishi, Hanif 89 Kurtz, Roger 101–2 La Société du spectacle (Debord) 78 Lacan, Jacques 197–8, 199 Lagos 102 Lamming, George 88 Landscapes after the Battle (Goytisolo) 77–80, 83–6 Langford, B. 38 Lanzmann, Dunn, 58 Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) 73 Lara (Evaristo) 89 Larson, E. 25, 27 Laughland, J. 86 Laugier, Marc-Antoine 195 Le Corbusier 1, 12, 149, 175 League of Black Revolutionary Workers 202 Leder, Mimi 38 Lee, Mabel 70 Lefebvre, Henri 123 legibility 11, 112–21, 192 LePla, F.J. 72 Letter on the Blind (Diderot) 17 Lettristes 81, 83, 86 Leung, Tony 64 Levi, P. 58 Levy, Andrea 89 Libeskind, Daniel 11, 122, 129–32, 137, 139–41, 143–6, 150, 152, 165 Lifescape project 7–8 Linstrum, Carl 123 Log journal 163 London, economic difference in 93–4; enclaves in 90; fictional naming/knowledge of 96–8; generational tensions in 90–1, 92–3; hybridity in 92; as imperial city 90; and local alliances 93–5, 100; and postcolonial fiction 10; postcolonial

representations of 88–100; as racially divided 89–90; and second-generation Black British 93, 94–6, 99; and sense of inclusion in 98; tribal affiliation in 94–5; and urban black identity 91–3, 94 London Eye 19 The Lonely Londoners (Selvon) 88, 96–7, 99 Lorrain, Claude 80 Lumière brothers 49 Lynch, Kevin 11, 12, 63, 98, 112, 118, 205 Lyotard, Jean-François 13, 18, 55 Maas, Winy 163 McDonough, Thomas F. 82, 118–19 McGee, Terry 203 McKercher, B. 71 Mcnally, Rand 21, 23, 32 McQueen, Steve 51, 124 Mailer, Norman 52, 53 Maimane, Arthur 105 Manchester 5, 7, 8 Mandela, Nelson 107, 109 Manhattan 12, 175; as anti-modern metropolis 155; chorality as chorus line in 159–60, 165; exhibitionism and the archi-star 160–1, 163, 165; exhibitionism/artificial chorality of 155–6, 158; Ground Zero site 160–1, 163, 165; multiple configurations of 176; Radio City 156, 158; Rockefeller Center 156–8; transgressions in 156, 158 Marcuse, Peter 90 Marey, Etienne-Jules 51 Marie, L. 44 Mars Attacks (1996) 51 The Matrix (1999) 128, 197–8, 201 Mda, Zakes 106–7 Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Giedion) 34 Mellaart, James 1, 3 memorial architecture see Jewish Museum (Berlin) Mendieta, E. 50 Mension, Jean-Michel 86 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 41 Mesey, V. 196 The Millennium (Sinclair) 53 Miller, Robert 27, 123–4, 125 Mine Boy (Abrahams) 102 Miniature Guide Map (Mcnally) 32

Index 223 Mitshali, Oswald 105 modernism 20, 77, 78, 102, 155 Mon Oncle (1958) 44 Morris, M. 41 Motsisi, Casey 105 Mpe, Phaswane 108–10 Mphahlele, Esk’ia 105 Mtshali, Oswald 105 Murphy, John 123 Muschamp, H. 160 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 3–5, 7–8 Muybridge, Eadweard 32, 36 My Once upon a Time (Adebayo) 89, 94 9/11 3, 7–8, 49; as act of war 50, 51; architecture on site of 160–1, 163; as awesome beauty of destruction 54; endless repetition of 56; and Hollywood fantasy disasters 128; hyperreal mediation of 9; literary responses to 59–60; nuclear symbolism of 56–7; parallels with Cather’s story 127, 128; and photograph of falling man 127–8; and post-9/11 images of New York 52; and terrorist aesthetic 61–2; and trauma 58–9; and the uncanny 57–8 Nadar, F. 21 Naipul, V.S. 89 Nairobi 101, 102 Nakasa, Nat 105 Neutres, Jérôme 87 Never Far from Nowhere (Levy) 89 New York 175; as America 132; anthropomorphism of 55–6; as apocalyptic/alchemical 112; as capital of cinécities 49–50; compared to disaster movie 52; as futuristic American city 123; physical/psychical rebuilding of 54; post-9/11 images of 52; as uncanny capital 59–62 New York Times 160 The New York Trilogy (Auster) 112 Newman, Paul 124 Niekerk, Marlene van 103 Nye, David 54 O Pioneers! (Cather) 123 Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types (Puttnam) 27 Page, Max 11, 122 Palahniuk, 52, 53

Paris, Arab/West African quarters of 10; as city of imagination 77; comic version of 77–80, 85; constructed ‘situations’ in 81; construction/deconstruction of 84–5; as corpse of an old whore 77; Haussmannization of 20; Lettristes in 81; and the métro 82–3; practice of dérives (drift) in 81–2; reconfiguration of 10; as spectacular matrix of signs/symbols 84; subjective mapping of 80–1, 82, 84–5, 86; unsettling/disturbing images of 77–8 Paris International Exposition (1889) 21 Paris qui dort (1928) 45 Park, Benjamin 53 Parker, L. 72 Parkinson-Bailey, J. 7 Passini, R. 200 The Passion of New Eve (Carter) 112, 113 The Passion (Winterson) 112 Pastrone, Giovanni 38 Paton, Alan 102 Pearl Harbour (2001) 51 Phillips, M. 88, 94, 95–6 Phillips, T. 88, 94, 95–6 The Pianist (2001) 47 Piccadilly Gardens (Manchester) 5, 7, 8 Pile, Steve 10, 88 Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette 28 The Plainsmen (1937) 50 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 200, 201 Playtime (1967) 9, 44 Polanski, Roman 47 The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (White) 32 Polito, Robert 51 The Poseidon Adventure (1972) 51 postcolonial narrative 10; city/migrant relationship 88–9 Postmetropolis (Soja) 1, 13 postmodern city, as illegible/shapeshifting 112–21, see also Dhalgren postmodernism 198–9; fiction 11; and the Gold Coast 181–2 Postmodernism (Jameson) 115 The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau) 39, 114 Prater wheel (Vienna) 17–18, 20 Prendergast, C. 86 Procter, James 92, 95, 96–7, 100 Prodger, P. 20 Proust et les signes (Deleuze) 149 Proust, Marcel 149–50 psychogeography 79–80, 81–2, 84

224 Index public space, interrelation with the city 5, 7–8 Puttnam, F.W. 23, 27–8 Pynchon, Thomas 9, 50, 112 Quo Vadis? (1912) 38 racism see city–migrant relationship; London Rajchman, J. 185, 187 Rashid, Hani 175 Reason in the City of Difference (Bridge) 2 Recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 149 Reed, Carol 17–19 Reed, Peter 4, 5, 8 Reeves, Keanu 197 Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag) 60–1 Reggio, Godfrey 9, 54 The Regional City (Calthorpe) 200–1 The Restless Supermarket (Valdislavic) 110 Reynolds, Bryan 39 Rios, Julián 78 Rive, Richard 102 Robins, K. 63 Rockefeller Center 12 Root, John Wellborn 26–7 Rossellini, Roberto 45 Rothafel, Samuel Lionel 156, 158 Rotterdam 5, 8 Royle, N. 57 Rumney, R. 86 Rushdie, Salman 10, 88–91, 92–3, 96, 97–100 Ryan, Carroll 26–7 Rydell, R.W. 24 Sadler, S. 84 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine 20 Sanders, J. 49 Sandhu, S. 89, 90, 97, 100 Santos-Dumont, Alberto 21 Sanudo the Young, Marin 166 SARS 9–10, 63 Sartre, Jean-Paul 53 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 88, 89–91, 92, 97 Savran, David 52 Scannell, Paddy 67 Schiller, J.C.F. von 54 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 139 Schneider, B. 138, 145 Schönberg, Arnold 139

Schouwburgplein (Theatre Square) (Rotterdam) 5, 8 Schwarz, L.S. 58 Scott, Ridley 42 Seltzer, Mark 60 Selvon, Sam 10, 88 Sepamla, Sipho 105 Serote, Mongane Wally 105 Sheringham, M. 86 Shute, Jenefer 58 Significant Violence (Epps) 78 Silverstone, R. 67 Simmel, Georg 168 Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard) 197 Sinclair, Kevin 67 Sinclair, Upton 9, 53 Situationists 78, 79, 82, 83–6, 118–19 skyscrapers 11; and 9/11 127–8; ballet 160; building of 125–6; fictional destruction of 123–5; as icons of capital 128–9; and images of disorder/ destruction 132; link with democracy 132; modernity/masculinity of 127; pessimistic outlook on 129, 131; as symbol of social opportunity 129, 131–2; wonder/unease of 126 Smart Growth Manual (Duany, Plater-Zyberk, Speck) 200 Smith, Paul Julian 78, 87 Smith, Zadie 10, 89, 91–3, 95, 96, 97–100 Snyder, C. 25 Soja, Edward 1, 10, 11, 13, 43, 88, 119–20, 177, 182 Sola-Morales Rubio, 197 Sollers, Philippe 86 Solnit, R. 33 Some Kind of Black (Adebayo) 89, 91–3, 96, 98, 99 Sontag, Susan 41, 61 South Africa 102, 103, 104–11 South China Morning Post 67 Soweto 103, 104–5 Soylent Green (1973) 42 Space, Time and Architecture (Giedion) 34 Speck, Jeff 200 Speer, Albert 146 The Sphere and the Labyrinth (Tafuri) 159 Spider Man (2002) 52 Spielberg, Steven 41 The Spirit of Terrorism (Baudrillard) 57–8 Stallybrass, Peter 32 Stevens, W. 57 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 54

Index 225 Stokes, I.N. 155 structures of attention, and aspiration 10, 67, 68, 71, 72; cinema/tourism link 63–4; and the cityscape 72–3; and emotional attachment to place 65–6; and everyday life 67, 68, 71; and inattention 66; and modernity 66, 70; and nostalgia 67–8, 70, 71, 72; professional responses 65; research methodology 64–5; and urban identity 69–72 structures of feeling 10, 66 the sublime 54; dynamic 54–5; mathematical 54; pathetic 55; as spectator sport 55; and violence of feeling 55 Sullivan, Louis 34 Sweet Clover (Burnham) 31 28 Days Later (2002) 45 Tafuri, Manfredo 159, 160, 166, 168, 173 Tati, Jacques 9, 44–5 Techniques of the Observer (Crary) 30 terrorism 60–2 text 8, 10–11 Thackeray, William Makepeace 19 Themba, Can 105 The Third Man (1949) 17–19, 20 Thirdspace (Soja) 119–20 This Earth, My Brother (Awoonor) 103–4 Thoreau, Henry David 126 THX 1138 (1970) 45 time-image 11, 149, 151–2 Titanic (ship) 123, 124, 125 Tong, Jacqueline 65 Tornado (1996) 52 tourism 63; and cinema 9–10, 63–4 The Towering Inferno (1974) 51, 124 Trachtenberg, A. 22, 23, 28 Triomf (Niekerk) 103 The Truman Show (1998) 201 Tucker, J. 114, 116 Tutu, Archbishop 107 Twin Towers see 9/11; Ground Zero; World Trade Center Twister (1996) 52 Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson) 152 Über den Linden (Berlin) 11–12; aerial photograph of 152–4; ‘any-spaces-whatever’ landscape 150, 151; and the khôra 150; movement along 146, 149–50; post-apocalyptic

link 150; as response to reunification of Berlin 145; scale/elevation of 145–6; telescopic nature of 150 The Unfinished City (Bender) 132 unreal cities 50–3 urban disaster 9–10, 38–9 urban image 193–6; and desert of the real 197–8; digital/remotely sensed modes of representation 196–7; as function of marketability 201; as terrain vague/junkspace 197 Urban Obsessions, Urban Fears (Kurtz) 101–2 urban space, constructed landscapes of 3–5, 7–8; post-disaster images 9–10; versatility of 8 urban subject 202–3 urban trauma, and language 59; and pain 59; as privileged discourse 59; radical negativity of 58 urban uncanny, doublings in 57, 58; etymology of 57; and Ground Zero 57; and implosion of meaning into nothingness 57–8; New York as 59–62; and silence 58; and terrorism 60–2 Valdislavic, Ivan 110 Vanilla Sky (2001) 52 Varnhagen, Rahel 139 Venice 12; agreement/disagreement of elements in 172–3; Asymptote installation in 175–6; Biennale (2004) 175; connective order/normative chorality of 165–8; constitutive tenderness of 172–3, 175–6; and the Daula Law 167–8; facades of 168–72, 173; interior of 175; laws regulating 168; multiple configurations of 176; myth of 165–7, 172; and notion of public/private 169–70, 173; permeable mask of 168–70, 172; as pre-modern metropolis 155; tension/cohesion of 165 Vidler, Anthony 126–7, 146, 163 Vienna 17–19 Virilio, Paul 20, 51, 53, 54, 61, 181 Voices in the Dark (Kibera) 102 Volcano (1997) 52 Wachowski brothers 197 The War in the Air (Wells) 53 The War of the Worlds (Wells/Welles) 53 The Warriors (1979) 42 Warta Kota newspaper 204

226 Index Watson, Sophie 10, 88 Ways of Dying (Mda) 106–7 Weir, Peter 201 Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Zˇizˇek) 53, 128 Welcome to our Hillbrow (Mpe) 108–11 Welles, Orson 9, 53 Wenders, Wim 9, 46 Wheeler, Susan 51 White, Alan 32 White, Lucia 126 White, M. 126 White Teeth (Smith) 89, 91–3, 95–6, 98–9 Williams, Raymond 10, 66, 105 Wings of Desire (1987) 9, 46–7 Winterson, Jeanette 112

Wise, P. 181 Wister, Owen 28 Wohl, R. 21 Wolman, G. 81 Woods, A. 86 Wordsworth, William 19 World Trade Center 7–8, 9, 47, 49, 51, 61, 127–8, 129, 160, 163, 165 wounded cities 55–7 The Writing of the Disaster (Blanchot) 56 Yee, Derek 70 Younge, G. 163 Yuval-Davis, Anthias 88 Zen, Nicolò 167 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj 53, 60, 128, 198, 205

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