URBAN SPACE AND CITYSCAPES (Questioning Cities)

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