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DOI: 10.1177/14730952030022003

2003 2: 125Planning TheoryJames A. Throgmorton

Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in a Global-Scale Web of Relationships

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P L A N N I N G A S P E R S U A S I V E

S T O R Y T E L L I N G I N A G L O B A L - S C A L E

W E B O F R E L A T I O N S H I P S

James A. Throgmorton

The University of Iowa, USA

125

Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

Vol 2(2): 125–151

[1473-0952(200307)2:2;125–151;035448]

www.sagepublications.com

Art i cle

Abstract This article revisits Throgmorton’s 1996 claim that planning

can be thought of as a form of persuasive storytelling about the future.

It responds to three broad lines of critique, connects the claim to

contemporary scholarship about ‘transnational urbanism’ and the

‘network society,’ and revises the author’s initial claim. This revision

suggests that planners should tell future-oriented stories that help

people imagine and create sustainable places. It further argues that,

to be persuasive to a wide range of readers, planners’ stories will have

to make narrative and physical space for diverse locally-grounded

common urban narratives. It recognizes that powerful actors will

strive to eliminate or marginalize competing stories.

Keywords persuasiveness, planning, power, spatialization, story-

telling, sustainability

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You are troubled by the course your life has taken. Seeking to turn it in a better

direction, you join seven other people in an innovative personal and group

therapy session. Meeting in an isolated but beautiful place, and guided by a

trained facilitator, you participate in several exercises over a four-day period.

One of the exercises involves telling your life story to the other people. The

facilitator divides the group into four pairs. You sit facing your first partner, and

the two of you condense your stories into tight three-minute tales. Having done

so, you move to a new partner and share stories with her. You then turn to a

third partner and share stories with him. Having told your story three times,

you observe that, although the basic story has not changed, the detailed telling

of it has; you recalled other key events and changed the emphasis on particular

moments. But then the facilitator instructs you to narrate your story in such a

way as to intentionally evoke a strong and important feeling (joy, grief, anger)

in the listener without telling the listener what that feeling is supposed to be.

You choose to convey sadness to your new partner. As you do so, you realize

that your story is changing significantly. Then the facilitator says, tell your story

in a way that evokes the opposite feeling. Now driven by joy, your story changes

dramatically. Then the facilitator instructs you to omit a key event or person

from your story. It changes once again. Finally, you tell your story as if your big

dream – that which you’ve always wanted to do – has already become part of

your life. After telling this version, you feel exhilarated and charged with

energy. At the end of the day, you realize that you have just experienced

something quite moving. A transformative experience.

This vignette suggests that no one true story about the past (even our very

personal one) can be told; rather, there are only constructions of it. Further-

more, the content of a story depends on one’s purpose in telling it. And

lastly, our choice about which story to tell has profound implications for

how we feel about ourselves and others and about the stories we choose to

live in the future.

But what does this have to do with planning and cities? In brief, it

suggests that stories and storytelling might be an extremely important but

largely undervalued part of planning. At a minimum, it suggests that good

planning might include collecting and telling stories about both the past and

the future. It also raises the possibility that good planning might, in itself,

be a matter of persuasive storytelling about the future. But the tale also

implies that more than one story can be told about the future of cities and

regions, and hence that we must ask how one can compare differing stories

and choose among them. But it also raises the possibility that good planning

should enable diverse stories to inform and potentially transform one

another.

I first made this set of claims in my 1996 book, Planning as Persuasive

Storytelling.1 In brief, I argued that planning can usefully be construed as

persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future. Three broad lines

of critique have been directed against that claim. One argues that to think

of planning as storytelling is to open the floodgates to fabrications; truth,

Planning Theory 2(2)126




not stories, is what matters. The second essentially argues that power has a

rationality that rationality does not know; power, not stories, is what

matters (Flyvbjerg, 1998). And the third suggests that there is more to story-

telling than first meets the eye. Furthermore, my claim was not well

connected to contemporary scholarship about economic restructuring and

the emergence of a globalized ‘network society’ and the postmodern, global,

or transnational city (Castells, 1996; Dear, 2000; Friedmann, 1995; Harvey,

2000; Sassen, 1991; Smith, 2001; Soja, 2000).

This article will revise my earlier argument in light of these three broad

lines of critique and the work of these urban theorists. It will argue that

planners’ stories about the future will necessarily have to begin from a

normative position, but, to be persuasive to a wide range of readers, they

will also have to make narrative and physical space for diverse locally

grounded common urban narratives (Finnegan, 1998), juxtapose those

narratives against one another, and enable the actual geohistorical readers

of transnational places to engage in fruitful dialogue with their fellow

strangers (Eckstein, 2003). Powerful actors will strive to eliminate or

marginalize competing stories, and hence will induce some planners to

devise plans (stories about the future) that are designed to persuade only

the audiences that most matter to them.

The claim restated

Let me begin by briefly restating my original claim in somewhat greater

detail. If we understand planning to be an exercise in persuasive storytelling,

or at least to incorporate and be influenced by stories and storytelling, then

it might be helpful to begin by thinking of planners (and others involved in

planning) as authors who write texts (plans, analyses, articles) that can be

read (constructed and interpreted) in diverse and often conflicting ways.

Such planner–authors have to write texts that emplot (or arrange and shape,

or at a minimum seek to turn) the flow of future action. To do it well, these

planner–authors have to fill that flow of action with interesting and believ-

able characters (for example, planners, developers, neighbors, elected

officials) who act in settings (for example, in older inner-city neighborhoods,

in suburbanizing landscapes, in public hearings). These planner–authors

have to build conflict, crisis, and resolution into their narratives, such that

key antagonists are somehow changed or moved significantly. They have to

adopt distinct points of view and draw upon the imagery and rhythm of

language (including statistical models, forecasts, GIS-based maps, three-

dimensional architectural renderings and virtual reality models, surveys,

advisory committees, and other persuasive figures of speech and argument,

or tropes) to express a preferred attitude toward the situation and its char-

acters. Through emplotment, characterizations, descriptions of settings, and

rhythm and imagery of language, such ‘planning stories’ unavoidably shape

the readers’ attention, turning it this way instead of that.

Throgmorton Planning as persuasive storytelling 127




The raw material of planning stories emerges from the practical world of

day-to-day life, but stories cannot tell themselves. Rather, they must be

transformed into narratives and then be told.2 That act of construction is

necessarily selective and purposeful. One chooses to include this but

exclude that, to start (and end) a story this way rather than that, to use these

words rather than those, to configure the events of the story this way rather

than that. As the opening vignette suggests, these purposes in turn are

tightly connected to emotion. We choose to tell certain stories because they

matter to us, and we tell them in certain ways because those ways of telling

feel right (often for reasons we are not fully conscious of). Thus planning

stories are often about (or are inspired by) powerful memories, deep fears,

passionate hopes, intense angers, and visionary dreams, and it is these

emotions that give good stories their power. In the end, such stories shape

meaning and tell readers (and listeners) what is important and what is not,

what counts and what does not, what matters and what does not. Such

future-oriented stories guide readers’ sense of what is possible and desir-

able. If told well, they enable readers to envision desirable transformations

in their cities, long for the transformations, feel inspired to act, and believe

that their actions will actually have an effect.

To suggest that planning can be thought of as a form of storytelling runs

against the grain of conventional planning practice, which is deeply imbued

with the ethics, ambitions, and sometimes the obfuscations of science. Still

focused on trying to control the future of territorially bounded representa-

tive democracies though the application of technical expertise, most prac-

ticing planners want to believe that they can be neutral, objective, rational

adjudicators of the public interest, and that their texts have a single literal

meaning (the one planners intend) that any intelligent person can grasp.3

For example, planning scholars E .J. Kaiser and D.R. Godschalk (2000) say,

‘Development planning can be thought of as a serious community game in

which the values and interests of many players are at stake. All players seek

to achieve the future land use pattern that best suits their needs. Govern-

ment planners work to facilitate an efficient and equitable development

process that balances stakeholder interests and results in a desirable land

use pattern’ (p. 152). Recognizing that all players, including planners, are

interdependent, these planners ‘facilitate cooperation to achieve win–win

outcomes’ (p. 153). Kaiser and Godschalk’s formulation notwithstanding,

all planners also know that context (political pressures, funding constraints,

and the like) shapes their work and that other people often respond to the

planners’ texts in antagonistic ways. So planners are caught in a bind

between what they want to believe and what they know is true, between

espoused theory and actual practice. This often leads to much confusion,

most importantly to the idea that planning is purely a technical activity and

politics is something that takes place downstream from the technical work

and can only muck it up.4 Contrary to this literal view, a persuasive story-

telling perspective implies that the meaning(s) of the planners’ texts





depend(s) on their contexts; that is, their meaning(s) depend(s) on the story

or stories of which they are a part.5

Not all planners’ texts explicitly or intentionally engage in persuasive

storytelling. In many cases, their texts act as part of some larger story. Often

this larger story is presented only in cursory fashion; readers have to infer

it or unearth it from other sources. In this context, the planners’ texts act as

tropes that seek to turn the larger implicit story in a preferred direction.

DeLeon (1992) offers a good example in his analysis of how professional

planners advanced the ‘progrowth regime’s’ story in San Francisco from the

early 1960s to the mid-1980s. He claims that the regime ‘brought order out

of hyperpluralistic chaos’ and that the progrowth regime ‘became the

author of the city’s vision, architect of its plans, and source of its power to

get things done’ (p. 40). Those who conceptualized the progrowth regime

envisaged downtown San Francisco as a commercial, financial, and admin-

istrative headquarters that would link the USA to an emerging transpacific

urban community. To achieve that vision, blighted areas near the downtown

would have to be cleared, undesirable populations would have to be

removed, the regional transportation system would have to be improved,

and high-rise office buildings would have to be put in place. Moreover,

achieving that vision required construction of a political coalition that

would supply the strategic leadership, mobilize the resources, and coordi-

nate actors in such a way as to guide and empower the city’s transformation.

So the progrowth coalition created a series of organizations designed to

articulate strategic visions, offer detailed plans and proposals, and carry out

specific projects. According to DeLeon, this progrowth regime ‘paved a

smooth road that led to a new San Francisco . . . a West Coast Manhattan,

a gleaming global gateway to the Pacific Rim’ (p. 43).

If we treat planning as a process of constructing persuasive stories about

the future of cities, where meaning depends on context, then much can be

learned from the practice of literary criticism. Reader-response theory tells

us that the meaning of the planners’ texts lies not just in the authors’ intent

or the written documents themselves but also, as suggested above, in what

the various readers bring to the texts. This notion has important impli-

cations for planning: planners cannot assume that any audience will receive

the same message that elected officials or planners intend to convey. Neither

can planners assume that their texts will evoke a single desired response if

‘read correctly’. The meaning of the text is contestable and negotiated

between the author and its many readers.

As if reader-response theory did not complicate matters enough, there is

another complication to consider: in our contemporary world, multiple

stories are being told simultaneously. Said differently, readers of one story

frequently are also the authors of their own stories, and their stories often

differ from the planners’. These diverse stories generate differing sets of

argumentative claims and evaluative criteria, with judgements of quality (is

this a good plan?) being dependent on who makes the judgements.





Moreover, both planners and readers are characters in each other’s stories,

often in ways that they can scarcely recognize. Lastly, since the meaning of

a statement, trend or action depends on its context, the simultaneous exist-

ence of multiple stories means that any one trend, action, or place – even

specific words, concepts, and statues – can have multiple and contestable

meanings. (What did the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center

mean?) This means that planners act in a contextual web of relationships

and partial, contestable truths.

Furthermore, future-oriented storytelling is not simply persuasive. It is

also constitutive. The way in which planners – and others involved in the

process of planning – write and talk shapes community, character, and

culture. How planners (as authors) choose to characterize (name and

describe) the people who inhabit and activate their stories shapes how those

characters are expected to act and relate to one another. And how planners

write and talk shapes who ‘we’ (as a temporary community of authors and

readers) are and can become.

Lastly, cities and their planning-related organizations can be thought of as

nodes in a global-scale web, a web that consists of a highly fluid and constantly

(albeit subtly) changing set of relationships. These relationships can in turn

be defined as links between nodes, as paths through which goods, services,

energy, capital, information, and other social exchanges flow. This global-

scale web can be likened to a text that can be constructed and read in multiple

ways. Plans, in turn, can be understood as persuasive stories about how

particular nodes or links in the web should or will change in the future. When

one plans, one plans as part of a web of relationships. However, the point of

view from which one plans varies with one’s location in the web. To plan

effectively, planners (and others) have to recognize that they are embedded

in an intricate web of relationships, that they have to construct understand-

ings of that web, and that they then have to persuade others to accept their

constructions. But they also have to accept the fact that people tell diverse

and often conflicting stories. That means planners must also find ways to set

these alternate stories side by side, let them interact with one another, and

thereby let them influence judgements about how particular nodes and links

in the web should change, are likely to change, and why. In the end, the chal-

lenge for planners is ‘to begin planning based on the imagery of webs, nodes,

and links; to find ways to construct stories that reconfigure the web in per-

suasive and compelling ways; and to construct new forums which enable

public and democratic argumentation’ (Throgmorton, 1996: 257).

Critical responses to the claim

Four broad lines of critique have been directed against this basic claim. One

argues that to think of planning as storytelling is to open the floodgates to

fabrications; truth, not stories, is what matters. The second essentially





argues that power has a rationality that rationality does not know; power,

not stories, is what matters. The third is implicit. By not directly engaging

the work of urban theorists such as Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Saskia

Sassen, Michael Dear, John Friedmann, Edward Soja, and others, my claim

appears irrelevant to major contemporary arguments about the importance

and power of economic globalization. And the fourth critically analyzes the

concepts of author, story, and audience in relationship to the idea of

planning as persuasive storytelling. Let me address each of these broad lines

of critique.

To tell a story is to lie

Perhaps the most fundamental objection claims that telling a story means

making something up, writing fiction, telling lies. Why would planners want

to associate themselves with such fabrications? The most direct response is

to repeat that we (planners and others) tell stories all the time. It is unavoid-

able, for events cannot tell themselves. Events have to be configured in

relationship to one another and then narrated in order to be told. But ques-

tioning the possible falsehood of stories raises a more important question:

How can one tell whether one story is truer than another? And what should

one do in the face of lies or errors of fact? I think the questions miss the

point. It is completely appropriate to insist that planners and others tell the

truth about the facts of a matter, while simultaneously being aware that they

do not always do so. But I would suggest that, in most planning-related

cases, the facts matter far less than their interpretation. It is how facts are

configured relative to one another, how they are interpreted, or, in a word,

what they mean that matters. (Did President Clinton have a particular

sexual encounter with a young woman staff member? Evidently he did. The

more important question is what did that encounter mean?) So more fruitful

questions would be: How can one determine which story is more per-

suasive? More persuasive to whom? And why? To ask about meaning and

persuasiveness rather than truth is to shift attention from technical accuracy

to a combination of accuracy and normative evaluation. It is not to deny the

persuasive power of Web-based technologies and 3-D simulations that Brail

and Klosterman (2001) describe so well, but it is to place planning in a tech-

nical–political realm rather than an idealized world of pure technique. So

let me now turn to the political critique.

It is power, not storytelling, that matters

A related objection has been that, like other ‘communicative theories’ of

planning, persuasive storytelling privileges process over substantive issues

that are grounded in actual contexts (Lauria and Whelan, 1995; Yiftachel,

1999), and gives too much attention to action by planners and too little to

structural features that shape and limit those actions (Campbell and





Fainstein, 1996). And in his recent case study of planning in Aalborg,

Denmark, Bent Flyvbjerg (1998) has argued that power is always present

and cannot be done away with by a communicatively rational process.

Power creates the knowledge that is then used to determine reality; or, as

he puts it in a felicitous turn of phrase, ‘power has a rationality that ration-

ality does not know’ (p. 234).

Although some of the ‘communicative’ literature does indeed pay too

little attention to political context, this criticism misses the mark for my

book. As Patsy Healey (1997) and Vanessa Watson (2002) both note, I

clearly presented a nested set of stories about electric power planning in the

Chicago area, with each story being placed in a progressively larger context.

Moreover, stories cannot tell themselves; they must be transformed into

narratives and then be told. That act of construction is necessarily selective

and purposeful: that is, necessarily political. As Michael P. Smith (2001: 43)

argues, this means it is important to focus attention on ‘representational

power’ and to ask, ‘Who has the power to give meaning to things, to name

others, to construct the character of collective identities, to shape the

discussion of urban politics [and to ask]. . .what are the appropriate bound-

aries of urban politics?’ In this context, I see more similarity than difference

between my work and Flyvbjerg’s. He narrates a fascinating story about

planning and development, he immerses readers in the flow of action by

writing in the present tense, he fills the story with interesting and believable

characters, he places the action in the real-life settings of Aalborg, he

persuades his readers by relying heavily on the trope of irony, and he draws

on interviews and his own observations to characterize the key actors.

Flyvbjerg has told a persuasive story that (necessarily) has a political

purpose: to convince its readers that planning is political and that planners

must learn to be more effective in the political arena.

What counts is good theorizing about the network society or the

global city, not (mere) storytelling

These comments about context point to a third line of critique. In a 1997

review of my book, planning scholar Jeanne Wolfe suggested that the

Chicago electric power case could have been more fruitfully analyzed from

a neo-Marxist, post-Fordist, or postmodernist perspective. In effect, she was

saying that I could have interpreted the Chicago case in the context of a

better, more fruitful, theoretical perspective. Her criticism can be restated:

Why would a scholar want to focus on (mere) storytelling? Do not real

scholars develop and test theories, especially ones that are deeply rooted in

the neo-Marxian critique of capitalist-led globalization and urbanization?

In general, Wolfe’s comments reflect the perspective of the urban

theorists mentioned previously. While these theorists differ from one

another in many important ways, they collectively argue that several

important trends or processes (for example, economic globalization, global





communication systems, transnational migrations, complex environmental

flows and cycles, and exurbanization of development in the regions of ‘the

North’) have been producing the ‘global,’ ‘postmodern,’ or ‘transnational’

city, and that these trends/processes have been transgressing, undermining,

and reshaping the conventional technical, political, and epistemological

boundaries that have shaped planners’ work.

I think these urban theorists are right in drawing attention to these factors;

they create the context that shapes local stories. But why should one embrace

a neo-Marxian construction/interpretation of this context rather than, say,

one that celebrates a right-wing populist nationalism or the now-dominant

free market neo-liberalism? The answer cannot be derived solely by

comparing the theories’ explanatory or predictive power, or by testing the

accuracy of their factual claims. The global-scale web is awash with theories,

each of which purposefully constructs understandings of the web, restricts

attention to a few phenomena, and typically ignores other theories.6 Given

that, I would, like Ruth Finnegan (1998: 14–23), argue that urban theories

can usefully be characterized as stories: they postulate some temporal

ordering of events and emplot those events as historical change, they typi-

cally use basic narrative plots to provide coherent explanation, they position

scholars as the tellers of abstract and generalizable tales, and they draw upon

expected patterns of form, context, and delivery. Michael P. Smith (2001)

likewise argues, quite persuasively in my view, that ‘contemporary theories

of political economy and globalization are themselves situated systems of

representation, contested readings that give alternative meaning to the “out

there” of political economy and global restructuring’ (p. 31). To interpret

these theoretical constructs as persuasive stories is not to deride their value.

Neither is it to suggest that one should not pay attention to them. It is merely

to suggest that they can be made more or less persuasive to pertinent audi-

ences by attending to the basic principles of good storytelling.

Jeanne Wolfe also said that the case I chose to analyze was not an appro-

priate one for ‘city and regional planning as we understand it’ (Wolfe, 1997:

527, emphasis added). Perhaps. But note that she constructs the community

of planners in a particular way. Others might – in fact do – construct it differ-

ently. So I would reply that electric power planning is still planning, and that

to find such a scientific and technical form of planning being practiced as a

form of persuasive storytelling is not trivial. More important, I would argue

that the case I studied took place in one of the nodes (Chicago) and

pertained to one of the links (electric power) of a global-scale web of

relationships.

Geography-planning scholar Edward Soja (2003) has recently offered a

critique of the storytelling claim, which I find to be quite constructive. In his

view, the narrative mode typically ignores space. Accordingly he warns, ‘the

practice of persuasive storytelling must be approached with caution, not

because storytelling and the narrative form more generally are not attract-

ive and powerful ways of understanding the world, but because they may





be too powerful and compelling, silencing alternative modes of critical

thinking and interpretation, especially with regard to the spatiality of time’

(p. 207). Quoting art theorist John Berger, he emphasizes, ‘It is scarcely any

longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And

this is because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the story

line laterally’ (p. 208). On this point, I would agree with Soja. Economic

globalization, transnational migrations, and global environmental systems

have radically transformed the context of local action. Local planning takes

place in the context of a global-scale web of relationships. To be viable and

legitimate in present circumstances, persuasive storytelling must take into

account the diverse ways in which stories spatialize that web. We must

spatialize the storytelling imagination.

There is more to storytelling than first meets the eye

The last critique I would like to address comes from a scholar of English

and American Studies, Barbara Eckstein (2003). Focusing her attention on

authors, stories, and audiences, she basically makes three claims: first, it is

not clear why readers should trust any planner’s claim to have converted

‘community stories’ into a single persuasive story; second, the best stories –

ones that produce a will to change – are ones that disrupt habits of thought

and ‘defamiliarize’ the familiar; and third, the best stories ‘conscript’

readers who are willing to engage strangers (‘geohistorical readers’) in

dialogue. She substantiates these claims by focusing on three important

concepts: authors, stories, and audience.

With regard to authorship, Eckstein rightly observes that it is usually

quite difficult to determine who the authors of plans really are. ‘Community

storytellers’ construct and tell contending community stories, but these

people typically disappear in plans and in planning theories about story-

telling; the planner supplants them as the storyteller, usually in ways that

cannot be discerned. As a reader, she wants to know what authorizes the

way planners transform those community stories into authoritative plans.

In order for readers to assess and trust the planners’ claims to authority, she

advises planners to think of themselves as ones who ‘make space’ for stories

to be heard. As she puts it, ‘It is their knowledge of traditional stories and

local conventions; it is their skill as narrators, as “hosts”, for stories they

hear and retell; it is their demeanor, their voice, their ordering, their

shaping, their ability – literally – to create an amiable narrative and physical

space, that allow their telling, retelling, and thus transformation of the

community’s stories to be heard’ (Eckstein, 2003: 21).

With regard to stories, Eckstein observes that most people think of

stories as a means of bringing order to the chaos of events. Reversing that

expectation, she suggests that stories can ‘quite usefully disrupt the habits

of thought and action that control everyday life’ (Eckstein, 2003: 25). ‘The

will to change’, she claims,





has to come from an ability – a planner’s ability, an urban user’s ability – to

imagine one’s self in a different skin, a different story, and a different place and

then desire this new self and place that one sees. It has to come from a

storyteller’s ability to make a narrative and physical space in which to juxtapose

multiple, traditional stories so that they enrich, renarrate, and transform that

space rather than compete for ultimate control of a single, linear, temporal

history of a impermeably bounded geopolitical place. (Eckstein, 2003: 24)

In this context, she draws attention to the use and importance of duration

(the amount of story time) and frequency (the number of times a theme is

advanced) in storytelling. Skill with duration provides the storyteller an

opportunity to rivet the readers’ attention on events and occasions that best

serve the storyteller’s intentions, whereas skill with frequency focuses

readers’ attention on patterns of significance. And drawing upon Soja’s

work, Eckstein observes that both the spaces made for storytelling and the

spaces stories make figure in the production and apprehension of meaning.

Since stories deploy different geographic scales and since their interpre-

tation depends upon careful reading of those scales, stories that ‘defamil-

iarize’ can compel audiences to shift their usual interpretive scale or spatial

perspective.

With regard to audience, Eckstein considers the importance of thinking

about the ‘conscripted reader.’ This notion refers to the way in which a text

drafts readers, however voluntarily, to play particular roles and to embrace

particular beliefs and values. But actual readers, she calls them ‘geohis-

torical readers’, negotiate with the conscription in accordance with their

interpretive communities (groups determined by cultural/professional

training or practice); the formative experiences of their geohistorically

situated, individual lives; and their dispositions. Sometimes geohistorical

readers blatantly resist being conscripted the way planner–authors desire.7

In the end, Eckstein concludes:

The storyteller is the one who actively makes space for the story(s) to be heard.

An effective story is that narrative which stands the habits of everyday life on

their heads so that blood fills those brainy cavities with light. Such a story fully

exploits the materials of time (duration, frequency of repetition), time-space

(chronotope), and space (scale, perspective, remoteness) deliberately arranging

them in unfamiliar ways so that they conscript readers who are willing to

suspend their habits of being and come out in the open to engage in dialogue

with strangers. (Eckstein, 2003: 35–6)

The claim revised

These four broad lines of critique provide fruitful material upon which to

revise my initial claim. Knowing that the content of a story depends on its





purpose, I would begin by claiming that planners must be clear about their

purpose. I believe that contemporary planning stories must be inspired by

a normative vision. (As David Harvey [2000] puts it, ‘without a vision of

Utopia, there is no way to define that port to which we might want to sail’

[p. 189].) But which purpose, which vision? The answer is, of course,

contestable and therefore political. In the remainder of this article, I want

to suggest how planners could help imagine and create sustainable places

by making space for diverse locally grounded common urban narratives (or

community stories).

Planning stories should be inspired by the vision of sustainable

places

In the view of many people around the world, planning stories should be

inspired by the normative vision of the sustainable place; that is, by the

vision of creating city-regions that are ecologically healthy, economically

vital, socially just, and guided by richly democratic practices (see Beaure-

gard, 2003a; Throgmorton, 2003). According to this vision, planners should

be advocates for the sustainable city; they have to tell persuasive stories

about how sustainable places can and should be created.8 But it is also

important to recognize that, in the words of planning scholar Scott

Campbell (1996), ‘our sustainable future does not yet exist, either in reality

or even in strategy. We do not yet know what it will look like; it is being

socially constructed through a sustained period of conflict negotiation and

resolution. This is a process of innovation, not of discovery and converting

the nonbelievers’ (p. 302).

Places should be understood as multidimensional

One cannot make a ‘place’ more sustainable without having some sense of

what ‘place’ means, and it turns out that, as literary critic Lawrence Buell

(2001) puts it, ‘[a] place may seem quite simple until you start noticing

things’ (p. 62). Consider Louisville (Kentucky), Berlin (Germany), or any

urban place you know well. What does it mean to be connected to that

place? Surely it means, in part, thinking of it as home. It means feeling an

emotional attachment to the house in which you live, to the familiar

surroundings of your neighborhood, and – with decreasing intimacy – to

your city, your region, and perhaps even larger areas. But as Buell observes,

there are at least four other ways of being connected to a place (see Figure

1). Each of them provides, along with the first, ‘subject positions’ (Laclau

and Mouffe, 1985) from which stories about a place can be authored and

narrated.

One type of connection might be thought of as a scattergram or archi-

pelago of locales, some quite remote from one another. ‘Tenticular radia-

tions’ connect your home to those other locales. Think, for example, of the






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electric power transmission lines that lead away from your home, of the

carbon dioxide that billows from your car’s tail pipe, of products you use

that are fabricated in distant places, or of goods produced in your area and

transported to other parts of the world.

Places also have histories and are constantly changing. These changes

superimpose upon the visible surface an unseen layer of usage, memory, and

significance. As historian Brian Ladd (1997) writes about Berlin, ‘Memories

often cleave to the physical settings of events. That is why buildings and

places have so many stories to tell. They give form to a city’s history and

identity’ (p. 1). In almost every place, some people display an acute aware-

ness of this invisible layer. But whose unseen layer should be remembered,

and how should that memory be embodied in the built environment?

A fourth type of connection derives from the fact that people are

constantly moving into or departing from places. Thus any one place

contains its residents’ accumulated or composite memories of all places that

have been significant to them over time. When Muslim Turks move to

Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, or when migrants from Central

America move to Louisville, they bring with them memories of those other

places and the pathways leading away from them.

Lastly, fictive or virtual places can also matter. Past imagined places such

as Ludwig Hilberseimer’s 1924 Hochhausstadt (Skyscraper City), Albert

Speer’s Germania, Harland Bartholomew’s 1929 plan for Louisville, the

cacatopian cityscape of the film Bladerunner, Kim Stanley Robinson’s

trilogy about the colonization of Mars, and many others have influenced

thought and action, for good and for bad. Advocates of contemporary free

market neo-liberalism have been arguing that we have come to ‘the end of

history’, that there is no alternative to their vision of capitalist democracy,

and that there is no need to imagine better places. Both Buell and David

Harvey (2000) observe, however, that the contemporary scholarly and

literary worlds are full of explorations of ‘the imaginary’ and of utopian

possibilities. We need alternative visions now, Harvey says, and those

visions should emerge out of ‘critical and practical engagement with the

institutions, personal behaviors, and practices that now exist’ (p. 186).

These five dimensions combine to form complex places. To a point, their

complexity can be can be witnessed by observing ‘everyday life’ from

Michel De Certeau’s (1984) street level perspective.9 Consider Berlin,

Germany. The capital of a reunited Germany, the center of an increasingly

integrated Europe, and a major site of global capital investment, this city of

4.2m people has been described as ‘a palimpsest of past desires’ (Balfour,

1990: 249) and a city of ‘unintended ugly beauty’ (Richie, 1998: xvi).

Walking amid the ghosts in Hackesche Markt, in the Tiergarten, along

Oranienburger Strasse, in Potsdamer Platz, and along Karl-Marx-Allee one

continually encounters juxtapositions of the old and the new, the renovat-

ing and the deteriorating, the ugly and the beautiful, the joyous and the

horrific. One can see Ossis and Wessis (former east and west Berliners),





Muslim Turks, foreign tourists, migrants from the former Soviet Union,

global investors, and a range of familiar and unfamiliar strangers mixing

with one another, with varying degrees of comfort and security.

Places should also be understood as nodes in a global-scale web of

relationships

If we think of each place as being a node in the global-scale web, with each

place being linked to all other places through a highly-fluid and continually-

changing set of relationships, then we can connect Buell’s conception of

place to the urban theorists’ research concerning the space of flows, the

global city, the postmodern city, and the transnational city (see Figure 2).

As Michael P. Smith argues,

there is no solid object known as the ‘global city’ appropriate for grounding

urban research, only an endless interplay of differently articulated networks,

practices, and power relations best deciphered by studying the agency of local,

regional, national, and transnational actors that discursively and historically

construct understandings of ‘locality,’ ‘transnationality,’ and ‘globalization’ in

different urban settings. (Smith, 2001: 49)

This means that multiple and contestable stories can be told from the

subject positions provided by these nodes and links.10 These stories often

follow the general contours of what Ruth Finnegan (1998) calls ‘common

urban narratives’.

Common urban narratives emerge from subject positions provided

by the web’s nodes and links

Finnegan claims that common urban narratives (often expressed abstractly

as urban theories) are told about cities in general, but that such narratives

become locally anchored in specific urban places. Exemplifying these

common urban narratives would be the oft-told story about how industri-

alization, urbanization, and the artificial culture of the city destroy rural and

communal nature. In one variant, this story emphasizes the movement from

misery to happiness, while acknowledging that losses occur along the way.

In another, it focuses on the losses. In still another, it focuses on locally

based social movements’ heroic efforts to resist destruction. When told by

urban theorists and other scholars, these common urban narratives often

seem to express a point of view (or subject position) that stands outside or

above the web, construct understandings of the web that privilege class over

all other relationships and identities, and tend to treat ‘the global’ as the site

of history’s dynamic flows and driving forces and ‘the local’ as the site at

which cultural meanings are produced and social movements of reaction or






F I G U R E 2

Place-connectedness in a global-scale web of relationships




resistance are formed (Smith, 2001). They are, of course, irretrievably

immersed in the web.

Once locally grounded in specific places, these common urban narratives

contain their own unique details and community stories. Focusing on the

new town of Milton Keynes in England, Finnegan finds four locally

anchored stories. According to one of them – the planners’ tale – planners

develop and successfully carry out their ‘master plan’. Although not without

its twists and turns, the planners’ story has a clear beginning and end, a clear

plot (destiny fulfilled), and an evident hero (the Development Corpora-

tion), and it is disseminated through many media.

This tale is consistent with planning scholar Leonie Sandercock’s (1998)

claim that modernist planning historians tell a heroic, progressive narrative,

an ‘official story’, in which planning is the hero, ‘slaying the dragons of greed

and irrationality and, if not always triumphing, at least always noble, on the

side of angels’ (p. 35). In her view, this ‘official story’ is deeply flawed. As

she puts it,

The boundaries of planning history are not a given. These boundaries shift in

relation to the definition of planning . . . and in relation to the historian’s

purpose . . . The writing of histories is not simply a matter of holding a mirror

up to the past and reporting on what is reflected back. It is always a

representation, a textual reconstruction of the past rather than a direct

reflection of it. (Sandercock, 1998: 36–7)

In her view, this has produced an absence of diversity and of any critical/

theoretical perspective in planning history. ‘Perhaps the most glaring

omission from the saga of the rise of planning’, she claims,

is the absence of all but white, professional, males as the actors on the historical

stage. Were there no women? No African Americans, Mexican Americans,

Japanese and Chinese Americans? Were there no gays and lesbians? Where are

they, both as subjects . . . and as objects, victims, of planners’ neglect of or

desire to regulate these groups’ particular existence, concerns, and needs in

cities? (Sandercock, 1998: 37)

In Sandercock’s view, planning historians need to begin telling a more

inclusive history of cities, one that includes what she calls ‘insurgent

planning histories’. To do that, planners will have to develop a new kind of

‘multicultural literacy’, which will require familiarity with the multiple

histories of urban communities. To use Eckstein’s (2003) language, the chal-

lenge is to make space for these diverse community stories and to juxtapose

them in a way that transforms understandings and transforms relationships

among diverse geohistorical readers.

Finnegan then collects and narrates ‘storied lives’; that is, personal stories

that are pinned to Milton Keynes and that are narrated with the specificities





of time, place, and person. These storied lives are similar to the ‘practice

stories’ that John Forester has been writing about professional planners. His

stories help us understand how planners construct their understandings of

their subject positions within the global-scale web of relationships. In his

1999 book, The Deliberative Practitioner, Forester claims that the stories

planners tell one another about their work (their ‘practice stories’) matter.

From these stories, planners learn how to be planners and how to work with

others in the messy world of planning practice. But he also describes a second

type of practice story. These are ‘profiles’ of practitioners’ work. After

recounting ‘Kirstin’s’ story, Forester concludes that planners are ‘reflective

practitioners’ who, pressed by the real-time demands of work, learn through

stories about ‘the fluid and conflictual, deeply political and always surprising

world they are in’ (Forester, 1999: 26). From another story (the planners’

staff meeting), Forester concludes that planners are also ‘deliberative prac-

titioners’ who learn through engagement with others.

Forester (1999) further argues that these practice stories ‘do work by

organizing attention, practically and politically, not only to the facts at hand

but to why the facts at hand matter’ (p. 29). Planners do not simply present

facts and express opinions and emotions; they also ‘reconstruct selectively

what the problems at hand really are’ (Forester, 1999: 30). Such planners do

not have time to learn through sustained research, and they have to make

value judgements and set priorities, so they must learn not just from scien-

tific inquiry but also through a process that is akin to learning from friends.

In Forester’s view, we learn from stories like we learn from friends; they

speak in ways that are appropriate to the planner’s situation, they help the

planner deliberate, and they help the planner see his (or her) own interests,

cares and commitments in new ways. They help the planner understand not

just how the world works, but how the planner works, who the planner is,

and what sorts of things matter to him (or her). They typically try to do

justice to the complexities the planner faces rather than offering simplistic

cure-alls or technical fixes. Lastly, practice stories help the planner learn by

presenting him (or her) with a world of experience and passion, of affect

and emotion. They allow the planner to talk about fear, courage, outrage,

resolve, hope, cynicism, and all the other political passions of planning.

Persuasive stories about creating sustainable places have to make

space for diverse locally anchored common urban narratives

There is much value in Finnegan’s treatment of locally anchored common

urban narratives and of storied lives, especially when juxtaposed against

Sandercock’s and Forester’s use of stories. But much more can be done with

it, especially in terms of relating it to Buell’s five dimensions of place-

connectedness and my earlier arguments about planning as persuasive

storytelling in a global-scale web of relationships. I would suggest that at

least five broad narratives are commonly told about urban areas in America





in addition to the urban theorists’ abstract story about global capital and the

planners’ ‘official story’ about fulfilling destiny. To imagine and create

sustainable places, planners have to make space for these and other locally

grounded common urban narratives.

One constructs the city as a site of opportunity and excitement, a center

for artists and other creative people. If you want to be somebody, you must

– this story claims – go to the bright lights and big city. If you do not believe

me, just watch the urban imaginary proffered by Home Box Office’s wildly

successful cable television show, Sex and the City.

A lthough this story has many tellers, members of locally rooted ‘growth

machines’ (Logan and Molotch, 1996) tell it with the greatest enthusiasm.

They assert that ‘growth strengthens the local tax base, creates jobs,

provides resources to solve existing problems, meets the housing needs

caused by natural population growth, and allows the market to serve public

tastes in housing, neighborhoods, and commercial development’, and that

growth and its effects are aligned with ‘the collective good’ (Logan and

Molotch, 1996: 318). In Logan and Molotch’s view, growth machine advo-

cates want to ensure a good business climate; that is, a place in which there

is no violent class or ethnic conflict, the work force is sufficiently quiescent

and healthy, and – most important – local publics favor growth and support

the ideology of value-free development. According to Logan and Molotch,

growth advocates use that presumed consensus and insistence on the need

for a good business climate to eliminate any alternative vision for the

purpose of local government or the meaning of community; that is, to elim-

inate or marginalize competing stories that might threaten growth.

A second common urban narrative constructs the city as a nightmare:

cities losing population, seething with drug-related criminal activity, experi-

encing riots like that of Miami’s Liberty City in 1980 and Los Angeles in

1992, suffering diminished employment, facing a shrinking tax base, losing

the white middle class, and watching housing and infrastructure deteriorate

and be abandoned. (Flee! Flee! Migrate out! Move to another place!) This

story of the city as nightmare has become deeply rooted in American

culture (see Beauregard, 2003b). Just think of the movies Bladerunner and

Escape from New York . Better yet, walk through the heart of Detroit or St

Louis and experience the combined effects of slum clearance, urban

renewal, high-rise public housing, interstate highway construction, immi-

gration, segregation, abject poverty, business disinvestment, and the

abandonment and torching of buildings.

A third common urban narrative – which often emerges from the black

urban experience – constructs the city as a site of injustice, oppression, and

exclusion (but also hope). Drawing heavily on her knowledge of Detroit, for

example, June Manning Thomas (1994, 1997) argues that one cannot

comprehensively understand the history of American cities, and their

planning, without understanding the African-Americans’ experience. That

experience began when hundreds of thousands of southern black workers





migrated northwards between the First and Second World Wars, seeking

opportunity and fleeing oppression, only to be met by racially restrictive

zoning ordinances and covenants and by white riots against blacks. The

black urban experience then involved having public housing, urban renewal,

and interstate highway projects confine blacks within existing ghettos or

displace them from land that the local growth machine wanted for other

uses. Confined to ghettos and alienated by decades of racially insensitive

policies, black neighborhoods exploded in violence during the 1960s

decade of ‘civil rebellion’. And now blacks find themselves in a racially

divided metropolis, living in the heart of the city as nightmare, which for

them often feels like a city of oppression. According to this story, when

African-Americans try to escape the city of oppression by moving to the

suburbs, they are greeted with exclusionary zoning policies. As Kirp et al.

(1995) put it, when the residents of middle-class suburban neighborhoods

hear the phrase ‘affordable housing’ they think: ‘lots of very poor and black

outsiders on welfare are coming to Mount L aurel from places like Camden,

and they will bring violence and drugs, and they will wreck our schools. They

will destroy our way of life’ (p. 47). Though awash in a tide of urban decline,

Thomas says, many black politicians and communities strive heroically to

preserve and improve their neighborhoods. Thus the city of despair and

oppression can also become a city of empowerment and action.

A fourth story offers the environmentalists’ interpretation. According to

it, the city is a site of activities that are rapidly eroding the ecological base

upon which those activities are founded. Cities, human progress, and all they

entail are rapidly destroying or taming wild nature. I think of it as the city of

boiling frogs. In this tale, the people of a city are like the frog that has been

tossed into a pot of temperate water. The frog never notices that the water

is gradually heating up, eventually to the boiling point and to the frog’s death.

Like the boiling frog, the people of a city gradually over-consume resources

and pollute their environment until the city (and the global-scale web of life,

or ‘organic machine’, in which it is embedded) becomes no longer livable.

And a fifth story might be called the city of ghosts. This offers a narrative

of memory, of loss, of small towns drying up and blowing away, of farmland

disappearing from the urban fringe, of neighborhoods being destroyed by

urban renewal and interstate highway construction, of other neighborhoods

being eviscerated by deindustrialization.11 In these cities of ghosts, people

recall how lively and hopeful their older towns and neighborhoods used to

be, and they seek to preserve what remains from any further demographic,

economic, and environmental change. But the preservationists’ story is

often complicated by the fact that their towns and neighborhoods have

already changed. Howell Baum (1997) provides an example with his story

about the effort of the people of South-east Baltimore to develop a neigh-

borhood plan. According to Baum, those neighbors believed quite strongly

in one straightforward ethical principle: that all community members should

have an opportunity to help envision the neighborhood’s future. But in





practice they were not able to adhere to that principle. Renters, poor

people, and blacks that had moved into the neighborhood over the previous

20 years either did not participate or else were not thought of as part of the

community. Instead, white professional middle-class people who thought of

themselves as being ‘goodhearted homeowners’ dominated the process.

The result was a conflict between the long-time residents’ ‘community of

memory’ and the actual, diverse residents’ potential ‘community of hope’.

Thus conflicted, the neighbors were not able to think seriously about their

present and anticipated problems.

Persuasive stories about creating sustainable places have to

negotiate emotional conflicts

How can planners and others make space for these and other locally

grounded common urban narratives, and how can they do so in a way that

enriches and transforms them without imposing uniformity upon them?

This is a difficult question. Sociologist Joseph E . Davis (2002) points to the

nub of the difficulty when he observes that stories call participants ‘not so

much to reflect on the merits of coherent arguments or self-consciously

adopt an interpretive scheme . . . but to identify with real protagonists, to

be repelled by antagonists, to enter into and feel morally involved in

configurations of events that specify injustice and prefigure change’ (p. 25).

In other words, by dealing with emotion as well as intellect, stories question

their senses of identity and community. This can frighten many people. But

from a narrative point of view, it is precisely that conflict and emotional

resonance that potentially gives storytelling such importance and power. As

John Kotre (1984/1996) observes in his study of narrative psychology,

stories can be generative: ‘If a new culture is coming into existence, that

story will emerge as a prototype that establishes a myth capable of ener-

gizing future adherents’ (Kotre, 1984/1996: 224). We choose to tell certain

stories because they matter to us, and we tell them in certain ways because

those ways of telling feel right. Good planner–storytellers will tap those

emotions (joy, sadness, hope, anger, fear), drawing upon the visual arts,

music, poetry, and street theater to construct and tell stories that help the

people of specific places imagine desirable transformations, long for the

transformations, feel inspired to act, believe that their actions will prove

effective, and create a ‘sustainable economy of spirit’ (LeBaron, 2002;

Throgmorton, 2000). Planners should tell these stories on their own auth-

ority, but the only way they can gain their diverse readers’ trust, the only

way the planners’ stories can be considered legitimate, is by making space

for their readers’ diverse understandings and contextualizations.





Conclusion

On the whole, the preceding critiques and perspectives reinforce the claim

that planning is a form of persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the

future. But they also suggest ways in which the initial claim should be

revised. Let me conclude by summarizing those revisions.

Planners’ stories about the future will necessarily have to begin from a

contestable normative position. To be persuasive to a wide range of

readers, however, the planners’ stories will have to make narrative and

physical space for diverse locally grounded common urban narratives.

They will have to recognize that planners and other geohistorical readers

spatialize their stories in diverse ways. They will have to juxtapose those

narratives against one another in a way that defamiliarizes the place. And

they will have to enable the actual geohistorical readers of transnational

places to engage in fruitful dialogue with their fellow strangers. This

revised argument acknowledges, indeed presumes, that powerful actors

will strive to eliminate or marginalize competing stories, and that those

powerful actors will induce some planners to devise plans (stories about

the future) that are designed to persuade only a very narrow range of

potential audiences.

None of this will be simple. Moreover, it is not possible to know in

advance where the interaction of these stories will lead. So we need the

courage to act, and we need to be inspired by the hope that our actions will

prove fruitful.

You are troubled by the course your city-region has taken. Seeking to turn it in

a better direction, you join several other people in an innovative planning

forum. Meeting in a beautiful but accessible spot, and guided by a trained

facilitator/mediator, you participate in several exercises over a four-day period.

One of the exercises involves telling your version of the city-region’s story to

the other people. The facilitator divides the group into four pairs. You sit

facing your first partner, and the two of you condense your stories into tight

three-minute tales. Having done so, you move to a new partner and share

stories with her. You then turn to a third partner and share stories with him.

Having told your story three times, you observe that, although your basic story

has not changed, the detailed telling of it has; you recalled other key events

and changed the emphasis on particular moments. But then the facilitator

instructs you to narrate your story in such a way as to intentionally evoke a

strong and important feeling (joy, grief, anger) in the listener without telling

the listener what that feeling is supposed to be. As you do so, you realize that

your story is changing significantly. Then the facilitator says, tell your story in a

way that evokes the opposite feeling. Now inspired by a different emotion,

your story changes dramatically. Then the facilitator instructs you to omit a

key event or person from your story. It changes once again. Finally, you tell

your story as if your big dream – that which you’ve always hoped your





city-region could be – has already become part of regional life. After telling

this version, you feel exhilarated and charged with energy. A t the end of the

day, you realize that you have just experienced something quite moving.

A transformative experience.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Barbara Eckstein, John Forester, John Friedmann,

Seymour Mandelbaum, Leonie Sandercock, Huw Thomas, and two anony-

mous reviewers for offering their comments on an earlier draft of this

article. I would also like to thank Ben Davy and Walter Grunzweig at

Dortmund University, and Linda Chapin of the Orange County, Florida,

Board of Supervisors for inviting me to present much earlier versions of it.

Notes

1. For other good recent treatments of storytelling in planning, see Croucher

(1997), Forsyth (1999), and Hamin (forthcoming). For additional insight into

the role of narrative in the social sciences, especially with regard to how

narratives construct memory, identity, and community, see Hinchman and

Hinchman (1997). For the role of narrative in social movements, see Davis

(2002).

2. Finnegan (1998) considers a story to be ‘essentially a presentation of events or

experiences which is told, typically through written or spoken words’ (p. 9).

3. As Denis Wood (1992) shows, even the most ‘objective’ maps are constructed

with purposes in mind. And as James C. Scott (1998) argues so persuasively,

many ‘facts’ are socially constructed, primarily through the creation of

categories that are subsequently used to guide the collection of facts.

4. For a good contemporary example, see Hopkins (2001).

5. Surely we could all agree that July is a hot month. Well, not if you live in

Melbourne, Australia. Context matters.

6. Dear (2000) characterizes it as ‘a pluralistic pastiche of plausible alternative

theoretical visions’ (p. 32) and ‘a Babel of incommensurable narratives’ (p. 53).

7. You, the actual geohistorical readers, might, for example, resist being

conscripted as the ‘you’ referred to in the opening vignette of this essay.

(There’s no way I would be caught dead telling my life story to total strangers!

Who can afford to spend time away from work and family to do something as

indulgent as this!)

8. Gare (1995) argues it is necessary to create an image of the future that enables

individuals to ‘relate their own lives to a new grand narrative, the global

struggle for an environmentally sustainable civilization’ (p. 160). Following

Mikhail Bakhtin, he suggests that the new narrative should be a ‘polyphonic,

dialogical narrative in which a multiplicity of perspectives are represented,

where through dialogue the narrative reflects on its own development’ (Gare,





1995: 140). While there are similarities between Gare’s argument and mine, I

want to distance myself from the claim that we should impose a new ‘grand

narrative’ on others.

9. According to De Certeau (1984), urban users tell stories that ‘carry out a labor

that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places’ (p. 116).

10. According to Bruno Latour, these subject positions provide ‘oligopticons’ that

enable people to gaze in some directions but not in others, to experience

localized totalities and partial orders (see Amin and Thrift, 2002: 92). There

are also distinct similarities between this and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of

habitus: ‘Each field’, he says, ‘. . . involves its own agents in its own stakes,

which, from another point of view, the point of view of another game, become

invisible or at least insignificant or even illusory’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 97). ‘The

agent engaged in practice knows the world’, he claims, ‘but . . . [h]e knows it, in

a sense, too well, without objectifying distance, takes it for granted, precisely

because he is caught up in it, bound up with it; he inhabits it like a garment [un

habit] or a familiar habitat. He feels at home in the world because the world is

also in him, in the form of a habitus’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 142–3).

11. See Rotella (2003) for an analysis of nostalgic stories about ‘the old

neighborhood’ of Chicago’s South Side. These stories are closely connected to

‘the politics of return’, wherein some people seek to recapture or

reterritorialize a lost or threatened ‘homeland’ (Smith, 2001: 152).

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James Throgmorton has been teaching urban and regional planning at the

University of Iowa since 1986. He is the author of Planning as Persuasive

Storytelling (University of Chicago Press, 1996), co-editor (with Barbara

Eckstein) of Story and Sustainability (The MIT Press, 2003), and author of

numerous articles. In the mid-1990s, he served as an elected member of the

City Council of Iowa City, Iowa.

A ddress: Graduate Program in Urban and Regional Planning, The

University of Iowa, 347 Jessup Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242–1316, USA. [email:

[email protected]]




Chapter 2

From the Campfire to the Computer:

An Epistemology of Multiplicity and the Story

Turn in Planning

Leonie Sandercock

2.1 Introduction

Not long after joining my present university in 2001, I was shocked to hear that a

Native woman who proposed to do her Masters thesis by focusing on the stories

of her people had been told that that was not an appropriate topic or methodol-

ogy. For the longest time, ‘story’ was thought of in the social sciences (though not

in the humanities) as ‘soft,’ inferior, lacking in rigor, or, worst insult of all, as a

‘woman/native/other’ way of knowing.1 There was even a time, in the academic dis-

cipline of history (my own starting point as an undergraduate), in which story was

demoted and more ‘analytical’ and quantitative approaches were sought. In response

to this kind of marginalizing of story, feminists, historians, and workers in the cul-

tural studies field, not to mention anthropologists, have reasserted its importance,

both as epistemology and as methodology (Kelly, 1984; Lerner, 1997; Rabinow &

Sullivan, 1987; Geertz, 1988; Trinh, 1989). Yet the struggle to create a legitimate

space for the use of stories in planning curricula and scholarship as well as in plan-

ning’s diverse practices is ongoing, because of the privileging of what are seen as

more scientific and technical ways of knowing. (We shouldn’t be forced to choose

between stories and the so-called more rigorous, typically quantitative research, sto-

ries and census data, stories and modeling, because all three ‘alternatives’ to story

are actually each imbued with story). Nevertheless, a ‘story turn’ is well under way

in planning.

Accompanying a broader post-positivist movement in the social sciences

(Stretton, 1969; Geertz, 1988; Rabinow & Sullivan, 1987; Bourdieu, 1990;

Flyvbjerg, 2002), pushed further along by feminist and postcolonial critiques (see

Said, 1979; Hooks, 1984; Trinh, 1989; Sandercock, 1998), planning scholars have

begun to see the need both for an expanded language for planning and for ways

of expanding the creative capacities of planners (Landry, 2000, 2006; Sandercock,

L. Sandercock (B)

School of Community and Regional Planning, The University of British Columbia,

Vancouver, BC, Canada

e-mail: [email protected]

17L. Sandercock, G. Attili (eds.), Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and

Planning, Urban and Landscape Perspectives 7, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3209-6_2,C© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

18 L. Sandercock

2005a, 2005b; Sarkissian & Hurford, 2010) by acknowledging and using the many

other ways of knowing that exist: experiential, intuitive, and somatic knowledge;

local knowledge; knowledge based on the practices of talking and listening, seeing,

contemplating, and sharing; and knowledge expressed in visual, symbolic, ritual,

and other artistic ways.

The ‘story turn’ in planning has been one response to this epistemological crisis.

In the past two decades, a growing number of planning scholars have been investi-

gating the relationship between story and planning and consciously trying to create

the space for this other ‘language’ (Forester, 1989; Mandelbaum, 1991; Marris,

1997; Sandercock, 1998, 2003; Eckstein & Throgmorton, 2003; Attili, 2007). These

investigations highlight how planning is performed through stories, how rhetoric

and poetics are crucial in interactive processes, how the communicative dimension

is central to planning practices, and how story can awaken energies and imagina-

tions, becoming a catalyst for involving urban conversations, for deep community

dialogues.

Fig. 2.1 A planning imagination for the 21st century. Photo by Maurizio Monaci. Graphic

elaboration by Giovanni Attili

In order to imagine the ultimately unrepresentable spaces, lives, and languages

of the city, to make them legible, we translate them into narratives. The way we

narrate the city becomes constitutive of urban reality, affecting the choices we make

and the ways we then might act. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it: ‘I can only answer

the question “What am I to do” if I can answer the prior question, “of what story or

stories do I find myself a part?” ’ (quoted in Flyvbjerg, 2002, p. 137).

My argument in this chapter will be deceptively simple. Stories are central to

planning practice: to the knowledge it draws on from the social sciences and human-

ities; to the knowledge it produces about the city; and to ways of acting in the city.

Planning is performed through story, in a myriad of ways. And since storytelling

has evolved from oral tales around a campfire to the technologically sophisticated

2 From the Campfire to the Computer 19

forms of multimedia available in the early 21st century, it is surely time for the

urban professions to appreciate the multifarious potential of these new media. All

the more so since the planning and design fields have been forced by the demands

of civil society to be more engaged with communities, and thus necessarily to be

more communicative.

In this chapter I perform two tasks. First, I unpack the many ways in which

we use stories in planning and design: in process, as a catalyst for change, as a

foundation, in policy, in pedagogy, in critique, as justification of the status quo, as

identity, and as experience. Second, I trace the evolution of storytelling techniques

‘from the campfire to the computer,’ leading to the suggestion that multimedia is

fast becoming the 21st century’s favored form of storytelling and to illustrate its

many applications to the planning field.

My approach is not uncritical. Despite increasing attention to and use of story

in some of the newer academic fields (feminist and cultural studies, for example), I

don’t see it as the new religion, and I take to heart Eckstein’s caution that stories’

ability ‘to act as transformative agents depends on a disciplined scrutiny of their

forms and uses’ (Eckstein, 2003, p. 13). We still need to question the truth of our

own and others’ stories. We need to be attentive to how power shapes which stories

get told, get heard, carry weight. We need to understand the work that stories do, or

rather that we ask them to do, in deploying them and to recognize the moral order-

ing involved in the conscious and unconscious use of certain plots and character

Fig. 2.2 A planning imagination for the 21st century. Video stills from the multimedia production

‘A planning imagination for the 21st century’ by Giovanni Attili

20 L. Sandercock

types. A better understanding of the role of stories can make us more effective as

planning practitioners, irrespective of the substantive field of planning. Story and

storytelling are at work in conflict resolution, in community development, in par-

ticipatory action research, in resource management, in policy and data analysis, in

transportation planning, and so on. A better understanding of the role of stories can

also be an aid to critical thinking, to deconstructing the arguments of others. Stories

can sometimes provide a far richer understanding of the human condition, and thus

of the urban condition, than traditional social science, and for that reason alone,

deserve more attention.

Story is an all-pervasive, yet largely unrecognized force in planning practice. We

don’t talk about it, and we don’t teach it. Let’s get this out of the closet. Let’s liberate

and celebrate and think critically about the power of story and appreciate why there

is a ‘story turn’ underway in the planning field.

2.2 Planning as Performed Story

I turn first to the ways in which I see planning as performed story: in process,

in foundational stories, in stories as catalysts for change, in policy, and finally, in

academic stories, as method, as explanation, and as critique.

2.2.1 Story and Process

For many planning practitioners, the role of story is central, although not always

consciously so. Those who do consciously make use of story do so in diverse, and

often imaginative and inspiring, ways. The best way to demonstrate this is by using

some examples – of story as process and of story being used to facilitate process.

These examples are so varied that I’ll use subheadings as guides.

2.2.1.1 Community Participation Processes

In community or public participation processes, planners orchestrate an event in

such a way as to allow everybody, or as many people as possible, to tell their story

about their community, neighborhood, school, or street. We tend to refer to this as

drawing on local knowledge, and there are various techniques for eliciting people’s

stories, such as small group work with a facilitator for each group or doing commu-

nity mapping exercises.2 What is not always clear is how these collected stories will

be used in the subsequent process, but the belief operating here is that it is impor-

tant for everybody to have a chance to speak and to have their stories heard. This is

linked with an argument about the political and practical benefits of democratizing

planning.

When a participatory event is a way of starting a planning process, its purpose

is most often about getting views and opinions, so the story gathering is likely to be


followed by an attempt to find common threads that will help to draw up priorities.

But when the participatory event is a response to a preexisting conflict that needs

to be addressed before planning can move ahead, then the gathering of rival stories

takes on more import. In such a situation, practitioners will usually meet separately

with each involved person or group and listen to their stories of what the problem

is before making a judgment about when and how to bring the conflicting parties

together to hear each other’s stories. In extreme cases, where the conflict is long-

standing, relating to generations or even centuries of oppression or marginalization,

this is very difficult work, but when done well can be therapeutic, cathartic, even

healing.

2.2.1.2 Mediation, Negotiation, and Conflict Resolution

In one growing branch of planning practice – mediation, negotiation, and conflict

resolution – there is a raft of techniques and procedures for facilitating storytelling,

and the hearing of stories, in conflict situations.3 In this kind of work, the ability of

a practitioner to make the space for stories to be heard is more important than the

ability to tell stories. And it is here that the importance of listening to others’ stories,

and the skills of listening in cross-cultural contexts, is at a premium:4

In telling stories, parties tell who they are, what they care about, and what deeper concerns

they may have that underlie the issues at hand (Forester, 2000, p. 166).

Forester describes a case in Washington State, where the mediator, Shirley

Solomon, brought together Native Americans and non-Native county officials to set-

tle land disputes. A critical stage in that mediation was the creating of a safe space

in which people could come together and ‘just talk about things without it being

product-driven’ (Solomon, quoted in Forester, 2000, p. 152). Solomon ceremonial-

ized this safe space by creating a talking circle and asking people to talk about what

this place meant to them. Everyone was encouraged to tell their story, of the mean-

ing of the land, the place, to them and their families, past, present, and future – the

land whose multiple and conflicting uses they were ultimately to resolve. It was

this story-ing that got people past ‘my needs versus your needs’ and on to some

‘higher ground,’ moving toward some common purpose. Solomon describes this

stepping aside to discuss personal histories as both simple and powerful, as a way

of opening surprising connections between conflicting parties. Or as Forester has

it, storytelling is essential in situations where deep histories of threatened cultural

identity and domination are the context through which a present dispute is viewed.

Stories have to be told for reconciliation to happen (Forester, 2000, p. 157). In terms

of process, too, the design of spaces for telling stories makes participants from dif-

ferent cultures and class backgrounds more comfortable about speaking and more

confident about the relevance of the whole procedure. A tribal elder who was present

at Solomon’s mediation said to her: ‘In those meetings where it’s Roberts Rules of

Order, I know that I either have nothing to say, or what I have to say counts for

nothing’ (quoted in Forester, 2000, p. 154).

22 L. Sandercock



2.2.1.3 Core Story

Another interesting development of the use of story in practice is what Dunstan and

Sarkissian (1994) call ‘core story.’ The idea of core story as methodology draws

on work in psychology, which suggests that each of us has a core story: that we do

not merely tell stories but are active in creating them with our lives. We become

our stories. When we tell stories about ourselves, we draw on past behavior and

on others’ comments about us in characterizing ourselves as, say, adventurous, or

victims, or afraid of change, or selfish, or heroic. But in telling and re-telling the

story, we are also reproducing ourselves and our behaviors. Social psychologists

argue that communities, and possibly nations, have such core stories that give

meaning to collective life (see Houston, 1982, 1987). Culture is the creation and

expression and sharing of stories that bond us with common language, imagery,

metaphors, all of which create shared meaning. Such stories might be victim sto-

ries, warrior stories, fatal flaw stories, stories of peace-making, of generosity, of

abandonment, of expectations betrayed.

In their work in evaluating the success of community development on a new

outer suburban estate developed by a public agency in an Australian city, Dunstan

and Sarkissian (1994) used an array of research tools: attitude and satisfaction sur-

veys, interviews, focus groups, as well as census and other ‘hard’ data. When they

came to analyze this material, they found contradictions that were not likely to be

resolved by collecting more details. In order to go beyond the details and the quan-

titative scores on ‘satisfaction,’ they explored the notion of core story, drawing on




heroic, mythic, and meta-poetic language. They scripted such a story of heroic set-

tlers, of expectation and betrayal, of abandonment, and took the story back to the

community, saying ‘this is what we’ve heard.’ The response was overwhelming, and

cathartic. ‘Yes, you’ve understood. That’s our story.’ The task then, as the social

planners defined it, was to help the community to turn this doomed and pessimistic

story around. They asked them how they thought their story might/could/should be

changed. Underlying this was a belief that core stories can be guides to how com-

munities will respond to crisis or to public intervention. As with individuals, some

tragic core stories need to be transformed by an explicit healing process or else the

core story will be enacted again and again. Renewal and redemption are possible,

Dunstan and Sarkissian believe. New ‘chapters’ can be written if there is the collec-

tive will to do so. They suggest four steps toward renewal. The first is a public telling

of the story in a way that accepts its truth and acknowledges its power and pain. The

second is some kind of atonement, in which there is an exchange that settles the

differences. The third is a ceremony or ritual emerging out of local involvement and

commitment by government (in this case municipal and provincial) that publicly

acknowledges the new beginning. The fourth is an ongoing commitment and trust

that a new approach is possible and will be acted on Dunstan & Sarkissian (1994,

pp. 75–91).

This fascinating case study offers some illumination to a more general puzzle in

participatory planning: how to turn a raft of community stories into a trustworthy

24 L. Sandercock

plan, one that is faithful to community desires. To turn the light on inside the black

box of that conversion surely requires planners to take their plan back to the commu-

nity and say, ‘this is how we converted your stories into a plan. Did we understand

you correctly?’ In a community or constituency where there is only one core story,

this is a more straightforward process than in a situation where what the planners

have heard is two or more conflicting stories. In the latter situation there is far more

working through to do, in order to prioritize and to reach some consensus about

priorities.

2.2.1.4 Non-verbal Stories

Less ‘verbal’ storytelling approaches have been developed using people with com-

munity arts experience to be part of a community development project that creates

the opportunity for residents to express their feelings and tell their story vividly

and powerfully. The Seattle Arts Commission matches artists with communities to

engage in just such projects. At their best, they can create a new sense of cohesion

and identity among residents, a healing of past wrongs, and a collective optimism

about the future.

A community quilt, and quilting process, has proved to be a successful way to

bring people together and for a group to tell their story. Depending on the commu-

nity involved in an issue, video or music, or other art forms, may be more powerful

forms of storytelling. In his violence-prevention work with youth in the Rock Solid

Foundation in Victoria, British Columbia, Constable Tom Woods initiated a project

to create an outdoor youth art gallery and park site along a 500-m stretch of railway

right-of-way between two rows of warehouses. This area, which had a long history

as a crime corridor, is now home to the Trackside Art Gallery, where local youths

practice their graffiti on the warehouse walls. Woods realized that these teenagers

needed a safe site for their graffiti. More profoundly, he realized that they needed a

space to express themselves through nonviolent means and that graffiti is a commu-

nicative art form, a form of storytelling (McNaughton, 2001, p. 5). The potential of

planners working with artists in processes like these that encourage storytelling has

only just begun to be tapped (Sarkissian & Hurford, 2010).

2.2.1.5 Future Stories

Peter Ellyard is another consultant who uses story in an imaginative way in his

‘preferred futures process.’ Working with an array of clients, from institutions and

corporations to place and interest-based communities, he helps them to develop their

own ‘future myth,’ a preferred future scenario; he then takes them through a process

of ‘backcasting’ or reverse history, as they unfold the steps from the future back

to the present, which got them to where they want to be. On the way, there are

missions, heritages, disasters, triumphs, and pitfalls. He consciously employs these

narrative devices as an aid to imagination. Once the future myth task is complete,

they proceed to SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analyses and

to the development of capacity-building strategies and action plans (Ellyard, 2001).


What is emerging then is the use of story in both obvious and imaginative ways

in planning processes: an ability to tell, listen to, and invent stories is being nurtured

as well as the equally important ability to make the space for stories to be heard.

Part II of this book illustrates an explosion of interest in the role of new media in

story gathering and storytelling.

2.2.2 Story as Foundation, Origin, Identity

I’ve already discussed the notion of core story and how it might be used by plan-

ners. There’s a related notion of foundational story, a mytho-poetic story of origins,

a story that cities and nations tell about themselves. This is particularly relevant

to planning in multiethnic, multicultural contexts in which conflicting notions of

identity are at play. In the winter of 2002 I was working in Birmingham at the invi-

tation of the consulting firm Comedia (Charles Landry and Phil Wood), who had

been hired by the City Council. Partly in response to race riots in other northern

British cities in the preceding summer, Birmingham’s politicians were concerned

about ‘getting it right’ in relation to ‘managing’ ethnic diversity. As we met with

various groups in the city, from the city planning staff to workers in a variety of

community development programs, to young black men and Muslim women, we

began to hear very different versions of Birmingham’s identity. There was a fairly

widely accepted founding story on the part of some Anglo residents (who referred

to themselves as the ‘indigenous’ population) that Birmingham was an English city

(not a multicultural city) and that those who were there first had greater rights to

the city than the relative newcomers from the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean,

and so on. This profoundly political question of the city’s changing identity clearly

needed the widest possible public debate. I suggested that at some point the city was

going to have to rewrite its foundational story, to make it more inclusive and open

to change. The city’s planners were very much implicated in this debate. At the

community coalface, and especially in non-Anglo neighborhoods, these predomi-

nantly Anglo-Celtic planners were either reproducing the founding story of ‘British

Birmingham’ or helping to change that story by making their policies and programs

reflect and respect the diversity of the ‘new city.’

This is not an isolated example anymore, but a situation increasingly common

across Europe in this age of migrations. The need to collectively change (and rep-

resent in the built environment itself) these old foundational stories is one of the

contemporary challenges facing planners.

2.2.3 Story as Catalyst for Change

Stories and storytelling can be powerful agents or aids in the service of change, as

shapers of a new imagination of alternatives. Stories of success, or of exemplary

actions, serve as inspirations when they are retold. I’ve lost count of the number

26 L. Sandercock

of times I have told ‘the Rosa Parks story,’5 either in class or in a community

or activist meeting, when the mood suddenly (or over time) gets pessimistic and

people feel that the odds are too great, the structures of power too oppressive and all-

encompassing. When Ken Reardon tells or writes his East St. Louis story (Reardon,

2003), he is among other things conveying a message of hope in the face of incred-

ible odds. This ‘organizing of hope’ is one of our fundamental tasks as planners,

and one of our weapons in that battle is the use of success stories, and the ability

to tell those stories well, meaningfully, in a way that does indeed inspire others to

act. My chapter in Part II of this book describes how I have been using the docu-

mentary, ‘Where Strangers Become Neighbours’ (Attili & Sandercock, 2007), as an

inspirational catalyst in community development workshops in different Canadian

cities.

Depending on the context, though, success stories may not be enough to disrupt

existing habits of thought and bring about profound change, as we’ve seen in the

last two examples. We may need different kinds of stories: stories that frighten,

stories that shock, embarrass, defamiliarize (Eckstein, 2003). Giovanni Attili and I

are currently making just such a film, about race relations in two small communities

in northern British Columbia, Canada (Sandercock & Attili, 2010).

Deciding what stories to tell in what circumstances is part of the planner’s art.

The puzzle of how to change the stories that people tell themselves everyday, often

repeating familiar stories from the media, absorbing and internalizing the messages




of the dominant culture or class, is an old one. Faced with a situation where people

appear to be telling themselves ‘the wrong stories,’ there are two things that planners

can do. One is, in good conscience and with humility, to suggest alternative stories.

The second is to build ‘education for a critical consciousness’ into their participatory

approaches. Planners are, after all, just one of the actors in the force field of public

conversation.

I have one more example of the use of story in planning practices – in the process

of policy analysis, formulation, and implementation – before I turn to academic

storytelling about planning.

2.2.4 Story and Policy

Here I am aided by two scholars, James Throgmorton and Peter Marris, each of

whom has done a lot of thinking about the connections between story and pol-

icy. In Witnesses, Engineers and Storytellers: Using Research for Social Policy

and Community Action (1997), Peter Marris argues that the relationship between

knowledge and action is not straightforward and that knowledge itself cannot, has

not ever, determined policy. In analyzing various types of and approaches to social

policy research, Marris asks why so little of the research produced on poverty, for

example, has affected policy. His answers are several. One is that academics are

powerful critics but weak storytellers. That is, they fail to communicate their find-

ings in a form that is not only plausible but persuasive. (By contrast, he notes that

community actors have great stories to tell, but no means of telling them, except

to each other. So the wrong stories win the debates.) Storytelling, he says, is the

natural language of persuasion, because any story has to involve both a sequence of

events and the interpretation of their meaning. A story integrates knowledge of what

happened with an understanding of why it happened and a sense of what it means

to us. (If it fails to do all this, we say things like ‘but I still don’t understand why he

did that’ or ‘why are you telling me this?’) Stories organize knowledge around our

need to act and our moral concerns. The stories don’t have to be original, but they

must be authoritative (that is, provide reliable evidence marshaled into a convincing

argument). The best are both original and authoritative.6

To be persuasive, the stories we tell must fit the need as well as the situation.

Policy researchers compete with everyone else who has a story to tell, and their

special claim on public attention lies in the quality of their observation as well

as the sophistication of the accumulated understanding through which they inter-

pret their data. But this truthfulness is not, in itself, necessarily persuasive. Good

stories have qualities such as dramatic timing, humor, irony, evocativeness, and sus-

pense, in which social researchers are untrained. ‘Worse,’ says Marris, ‘they have

taught themselves that to be entertaining compromises the integrity of scientific

work’ (Marris, 1997, p. 58). Writing up policy research is hard work: it’s hard to

tell a good story while simultaneously displaying conscientiously the evidence on

which it is based. But, Marris insists, the more social researchers attend to the story-

teller’s craft, and honor it in the work of colleagues and students, the more influential

28 L. Sandercock



they can be. We have to be able to tell our stories skillfully enough to capture the

imagination of a broader and more political audience than our colleagues alone.

There are two notions of story at work here. One is functional/instrumental:

bringing the findings of social research to life through weaving them into a good

story. The other is more profound: storytelling, in the fullest sense, is not merely

recounting events, but endowing them with meaning by commentary, interpretation,

and dramatic structure.

While Marris confines his advocacy of storytelling to the publishing of research

results, James Throgmorton’s work addresses the next step: the arts of rhetoric in

the public domain of speech and debate. The lesson he wants to impart is that if we

want to be effective policy advocates, then we need to become not only good story

creators but also good storytellers, in the more performative sense. In Planning as

Persuasive Storytelling (1996), Throgmorton suggests that we can think of planning

as an enacted and future-oriented narrative in which participants are both characters

and joint authors. And we can think of storytelling as being an appropriate style for

conveying the truth of planning action.

Throgmorton (1996, p. 48) draws on the concept of ‘narrative rationality’ in

claiming that humans are storytellers who have a natural capacity to recognize the

fidelity of stories they tell and experience. We test stories in terms of the extent to

which they hang together (coherence) and in terms of their truthfulness and reliabil-

ity (fidelity). But Throgmorton is unhappy with this, reminding us of situations in


which two planning stories, both of which are coherent and truthful on their own

terms, compete for attention. What then makes one more worthy than another?

Throgmorton suggests that the answer to this question lies in part at least in the

persuasiveness with which we tell our stories. Planning is a form of persuasive sto-

rytelling, and planners are both authors who write texts (plans, analyses, articles)

and characters whose forecasts, surveys, models, maps, and so on act as tropes (fig-

ures of speech and argument) in their own and others’ persuasive stories. A crucial

part of Throgmorton’s argument is that this future-oriented storytelling is never sim-

ply persuasive. It is also constitutive. The ways in which planners write and talk

help to shape community, character, and culture. So a critical question for planners

is what ethical principles should guide and constrain their efforts to persuade their

audiences.

Marris’s and Throgmorton’s work has very important implications for policy

research. If planners want to be more effective in translating knowledge to action,

they argue, then we had better pay more attention to the craft of storytelling in both

its written and oral forms. That means literally expanding the language of planning,

to become more expressive, evocative, engaging, and to include the language of the

emotions. New digital languages give us this capacity, as Attili’s chapter in Part I

argues, and as all of the chapters in Part II demonstrate.

‘Academic story telling,’ writes Finnegan, ‘is ugly in its stark, clichéd monotone

manner. We tell the dullest stories in the most dreary ways, and usually deliberately,

for this is the mantle of scientific storytelling: it is supposed to be dull’ (Finnegan,

1998, p. 21). What Finnegan alleges of academic storytelling is equally true of

bureaucratic storytelling. Policy reports produced by government planning agen-

cies, and also by consultants for those agencies, are cut from the same clichéd cloth.

They are dry as dust. Life’s juices have been squeezed from them. Emotion has been

rigorously purged as if there were no such things as joy, tranquility, anger, resent-

ment, fear, hope, memory, and forgetting, at stake in these analyses. What purposes,

whose purposes, do these bloodless stories serve? For one thing, they serve to per-

petuate a myth of the objectivity and technical expertise of planners. And in doing

so, these documents are nothing short of misleading at best, dishonest at worst,

about the kinds of problems and choices we face in cities.

To influence policy, then, as well as to be effective in planning processes,

planners need to learn story, or rather an array of storytelling modes.

2.2.5 Story as Critique and/or Explanation

There is a false binary in our heads that separates planning documents, social scien-

tific research, and theorizing from storytelling, rather than allowing us to appreciate

the ways in which each of these employs story. Planning documents, from maps,

to models, to GIS, to plans themselves, do in fact all tell a story. Sometimes the

story is descriptive, or poses as descriptive – ‘this is how things are,’ ‘these are

the facts.’ But there is no such thing as mere description, or pure facts. There is

always an author who is choosing which facts are relevant, what to describe, what

30 L. Sandercock

to count, and in the assembling of these facts a story is shaped, an interpretation,

either consciously or unconsciously, emerges. Facts are usually marshaled to explain

something and to draw some conclusions for action.

Scholars also use story in their critical writings about cities and planning, some-

times consciously, but usually not. As with planning documents, the more alert we

can be to the underlying story or stories, the better we are able to evaluate them. We

need to understand the mechanisms of story (structure, plot, characters), in order to

tell good stories ourselves, to be more critical of the stories we have to listen to, and

to be able to resist persuasive stories as well as create them. How to do this?



Eckstein (2003) explains that stories do their work, make themselves compelling,

by manipulating time, voice, and space. So we need to attend to all three when

hearing or constructing stories. Time is ‘manipulated’ through the device of dura-

tion. How much story ‘space’ is given to specific time intervals or periods of time?

Which parts of a chronological story are collapsed into relatively few sentences,

pages, or minutes, compared with other parts of the story that are given extended

treatment? Paying attention to this issue of duration can allow the listener/reader to

hear what matters most to the teller, as can listening for repetition, which produces

patterns of significance. Space ranks with time as a component of and in story,

and is critically important for urban scholars and practitioners. We must be able to

‘ “see” time in space’ (Balzac, quoted in Eckstein, 2003, p. 28). Geographic scale is

an important factor in the production of meaning. Stories operate at different geo-

graphic scales, sometimes metaphorical, and interpretation requires careful attention


to those scales. The most obvious example would be whether one is viewing the

city from the windows of a plane or skyscraper (the bird’s eye view) or from the

street. Stories also sometimes ask us to adopt a different spatial perspective than the

one we’re most comfortable with. For example, residents and local activists may

be most familiar with looking at issues from the local or neighborhood perspective.

Some stories ask us to take a regional or even global perspective. If this is beyond

our familiarity, the storyteller will have to be very skillful in helping us to do this.

Voice is also central to storytelling. Is the story being told in first person, third

person, or first or third person plural (I, she/he, we, they, ‘those people’), and what

does that signify about who is speaking on behalf of whom? Whose voices are

given prominence, whose are repressed? As with the myths of other cultures, our

planning and academic stories function not only as sanction and justification for

the current order, but also as launching pads for counter-versions. Academic stories

about planning usually take sides, although not always overtly. Sometimes this is

revealed by asking, of any narrative, what voices are missing here? In other words,

a critical perspective on the workings of story is as important as a critical perspective

on the workings of power and influence in land-use planning.

2.3 From the Campfire to the Computer: Storytelling

in a Digital Age

Getting inside the mechanisms of a story, as outlined above, is rather like getting

inside the workings of a fine old clock or an electric motor, in so far as it is a way

of understanding what makes it tick, what gives it power. But stories have fuelled

human connection, teaching and understanding, and social organization since long

before the invention of writing, let alone critical exegesis. The oral traditions of

storytelling around a campfire or under the shade of a tree, at the river’s edge or

inside a cave, were extensions of, or complemented visual representations of, stories

that were expressed on the walls of caves or in more ephemeral sand and chalk

drawings and bark paintings. The visual element of or approach to storytelling has

its stand-alone forms, which include the evolution from sand drawings to narrative

paintings, as well as its complementary forms, supporting the verbal, such as the

use of ‘scenery’ in theater and opera. Dance, puppetry, drumming, many genres of

music, as well as cartoons and graffiti, are also vehicles for story that find their own

audiences and tell us that, for many people, words are not the ultimate conveyors of

meaning.

All of these storytelling forms still thrive in their different contexts for particu-

lar audiences. But arguably the most potent form of all emerged and evolved in the

first half of the 20th century in the shape of ‘moving pictures,’ from the first black

and white, silent films to present-day cinema with its apparently endless possibili-

ties of technological invention, including animation, special effects, even 3-D. Still,

filmmaking was, up until the digital revolution, a very expensive business requir-

ing ‘specialists’ (producers) who knew how to raise large amounts of money, heavy

32 L. Sandercock

equipment which was difficult and expensive to transport, and still more ‘special-

ists’ who knew how to distribute the ‘product’ to paying audiences, along with fixed

capital investment in ‘movie houses’ or cinemas. These cinemas and, for a time,

drive-in movie theaters became a hugely important part of the physical and social

landscape of 20th century cities and towns, from the 1920s to the 1980s, when movie

viewing was a more or less collective and social experience. Then, with increasing

affluence and technological advances, all of that changed. Home entertainment sys-

tems started to replace moviegoing, but continued to propel an insatiable appetite

for films, while the miniaturizing and digitalizing of cameras as well as advances

in editing software and the spread of home computers quite suddenly made it

possible and affordable for seemingly everyone to be making videos. And simul-

taneously the Internet has given people a ‘movie house’ in which to screen their

efforts.

This rapid democratizing of filmmaking technologies offers enormous commu-

nicative possibilities to ordinary citizens as well as to planners and designers, for

expressing opinions, for making advocacy films, and for providing means of visu-

alizing alternative urban design and planning scenarios, possibilities ranging from

full-blown long-form documentaries distributed as DVDs to 30-s raves posted on

YouTube, intentionally more ephemeral but not necessarily any less influential.

What Part II of this book demonstrates is a burgeoning of invention among urban-

ist filmmakers over the past decade in how video technologies might be applied to

a range of urban interventions and policy discussions. And given what we know

about the power of story, and particularly of the power of story expressed through

the medium of film, it is important to develop a critical reflexivity about these uses

(see Banks, 2001; Back, 2007).

Documentary filmmaking has an almost century-long history now and has

evolved with and taken advantage of technological advances in mainstream

moviemaking. As Ciacci has shown in Chapter 1, there is a specific history of the use

of documentaries in planning and design practice, which he has called ‘town plan-

ners’ cinema.’ While potentially or theoretically the tools of cinema could extend

participation in the project for urban change to the largest possible number of peo-

ple, Ciacci’s deconstruction of their actual use delivers a sobering message. By and

large, town planning films have been primarily made for ‘propaganda value,’ that is,

to explain and persuade an audience of choices already made by the expert urban-

ists (architects, designers, and planners). This raises profound questions about the

purposes of and possible audiences for documentaries and other video interventions

in the urban arena.

Within the world of documentarians, a counter-trend developed in reaction to

such ‘official uses.’ What has become known as ‘participatory video’ (PV) emerged

in Latin America, inspired partly by Paolo Freire’s thinking (Freire, 1970), and

Canada in the 1970s. In Canada, the Fogo Process was part of a 1970s initiative

called Challenge for Change, which created a series of films ‘that intended to raise

public consciousness about the rights and needs of disenfranchised and disadvan-

taged groups’ (Weisner, 1992, p. 68). Challenge for Change did not set out to make

progressive films about social issues but instead to use the filmmaking process as a




form of social change. The intent was to use film production and distribution as a

means of empowering politically and socially disenfranchised people.

Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, was a community of 5.000

people who, by the late 1960s, were facing the collapse of their local fishing econ-

omy (leaving 60% of the population on social assistance), public infrastructure

was in a state of disrepair, 50% of islanders were functionally illiterate, and dif-

ferences in religion and tradition socially divided the community. To address the

problems Fogo Island was facing, the government at the time proposed to relocate

the entire community to a nearby ‘development town.’ Colin Low, a filmmaker, and

Don Snowdon, an academic, came up with the idea of using video as a mecha-

nism to facilitate dialogue between residents and government officials. In doing so,

they invented a revolutionary filmmaking process centered on some key community-

based concepts. They required every subject to have full editorial rights over their

appearance and every effort was made to ensure that the government would respond

to the community-produced video (Frantz, 2007, p. 104).

While there was never any formal evaluation of the Fogo project, shortly after

the films were produced, a fishing cooperative and a school were established on

Fogo Island and the community was not relocated. The question is whether projects

like Fogo could work in urban areas if properly designed, and if so, to what ends?

(Weisner, 1992, p. 71). Participatory video is an evolving action research method-

ology and will be discussed further in Part II, as well as in the Conclusions to this

book.

34 L. Sandercock

The only unchanging thing about documentary over the past 100 years is that it

is a form that makes assertions or ‘truth claims’ about the real world and/or people

in that world (including the real world of history). How it does that is something

that is subject to change and to ongoing debate (Ward, 2005, p. 8). Here I men-

tion just four debates that have particular relevance to the chapters in Part II, which

dwell on the use of documentary and video experiments in planning and other urban

interventions. Perhaps the most consistent and enduring debate within the world

of documentaries concerns the tension between, on the one hand, capturing some

aspect of the real world or the people who inhabit it and, on the other hand, the

inevitable use of aesthetic and representational devices to achieve that aim. A sec-

ond hugely interesting area of debate is the way in which the subjects of and in

documentary can be said to be ‘performing for the cameras’: in some instances

this means behaving in ways that are a little larger than life, but in other instances

can mean that interviewees tell the interviewer/filmmaker what they would like to

hear (or perhaps what the interviewee would like to believe) rather than what actu-

ally is. A related issue is the way in which being in front of a camera intimidates

some potential ‘subjects’ to the point of depriving them of voice, while apparently

liberating others. A third debate is the issue of interpretation versus actuality: the

notion that a documentary filmmaker is never simply a scientific or detached or bal-

anced observer but is always, constantly, interpreting what she/he sees, imposing

her/his own coherence as well as her/his own value system on the subject matter.

And finally, there is the question of audience. To the extent that documentary film-

makers are conscious of a specific audience, their film will be shaped to speak to

the particular interests of that audience (developers, investors, politicians, for exam-

ple), thus necessarily omitting aspects of a topic deemed less relevant (social and

environmental impacts on residents, for example). Documentaries can be designed

to educate, to explain, to provoke, to shock, and to mobilize. Their purpose and

intended audience determine how their story will be told.

Within the last decade we’ve seen a rapid ‘democratizing’ of film/video making,

along with many other important tools of the digital revolution, all of which amount

to technological developments that offer enormous communicative and activist pos-

sibilities for planning and policy, if only we can grasp the centrality of storytelling

to our mission and envision equally democratic ways of harnessing this potential.

Part II of this book provides an introduction to this potential, while our concluding

chapter injects some critical reflexivity into this new frontier of the urban profes-

sions (Nichols, 1991, 1994).

My purpose in this chapter has been to establish the power and centrality of

story in the planning field. Multimedia offers the latest technologies in the service

of the oldest of human devices for understanding and inspiring: that is, stories. The

rest of this book is an exploration of the ways in which multimedia can enhance

and expand on the wide range of applications of story and storytelling in planning

processes, practices, pedagogy, and research.

As cities become undeniably multiethnic and multicultural, the need to engage

in dialogue with strangers must become an urban art and not just a planner’s art, if

we are concerned about how we can coexist with each other, in all our difference.


This most ancient of arts begins with the sharing of stories and moves toward the

shaping of new collective stories. ‘The storyteller, besides being a great mother, a

teacher, a poetess, a warrior, a musician, a historian, a fairy, and a witch, is a healer

and a protectress. Her chanting or telling of stories . . . has the power of bringing us

together’ (Trinh, 1989, p. 140).

Notes

1. Here I’m alluding to the title of Trinh’s book, Woman Native Other (1989). Trinh is a writer,

composer, and filmmaker.

2. Doug Aberley is a Vancouver-based practitioner who uses elaborate community mapping tech-

niques in his work with indigenous communities. Maeve Lydon is the founder and director of

Common Ground Community Mapping Project, a nonprofit organization in Victoria, BC, that

provides mapping and learning resources for schools, neighborhoods, and communities who

want to undertake sustainable community development and planning projects.

3. See Susskind, McKearnan, and Thomas-Larmer (1999), LeBaron (2002), Fowler and Mumford

(1999), and Thiagarajan and Parker (1999).

4. Eckstein’s advice is invaluable: ‘if one listens to others’ stories with ears tuned to how their

stories will serve one’s own storytelling, how they will fit in one’s grander narrative, then one

risks not hearing them at all’ (Eckstein, 2003).

5. Rosa Parks was the African American woman who, in Alabama in 1955, refused to move to the

back of the bus when white folks boarded. This act of civil disobedience turned into a year-long

boycott of the bus service by Blacks, and gave birth to the civil rights movement.

6. Marris cites Herbert Gans’ The Urban Villagers and Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s

Family and Kinship in East London as good examples.

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DOI: 10.1177/1473095212440425

2012 11: 299 originally published online 23 March 2012Planning TheoryMerlijn van Hulst

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Merlijn van Hulst, Tilburg School of Politics and Public Administration, Warandelaan 2, PO Box 90153, 5000

LE Tilburg, The Netherlands

Email: [email protected]

Storytelling, a model of and a model for planning

Merlijn van HulstTilburg School of Politics and Public Administration, The Netherlands

AbstractInterest in storytelling in planning has grown over the last two decades. In this article two strands

of research are identified: research that looks at storytelling as a model of the way planning is

done and research that looks at storytelling as a model for the way planning could or should be

done. Recently, the second strand has received the most attention. This article builds on theories

of storytelling as an important aspect of everyday planning practice. It draws on an ethnographic

case in which a range of actors struggled with the meaning of what was going on, (re)framing the

past, present and future with the help of stories. The case illustrates how new stories are built

on top of older ones and new understandings emerge along the way. The article also looks into

the relationship between storytelling and other planning activities. The article ends with a plea for

ethnographic fieldwork to further develop ideas on storytelling in planning practice.

Keywords

storytelling, ethnography, politics, sense-making

Introduction

Many inhabitants thought the new town centre in the Dutch Heart-less Town would

never materialize.1 For more than 20 years the centre had been fought over in the politi-

cal arena. Political parties, aldermen, mayors, residents, local entrepreneurs, planners

and project developers all had strong ideas about it. In 2002, a new alderman restarted

the planning process. In just a few years’ time he and his compatriots were able to make

more progress than any of their predecessors. Now, how had they been able to do that?

How did planning the centre finally become a successful enterprise? These kinds of

questions fit many cases. But this case is a critical one in the sense that what we are deal-

ing with here is a ‘small miracle’. Failure followed failure for a long time. Cynicism

grew among those directly involved and among the members of the general public. In

Article




300 Planning Theory 11(3)

these types of cases the hope of turning things around often slowly dies. If things do

work out well in the end, we ask ourselves what ‘strategies of convergence’ (Mandelbaum,

1991) the actors used.

What we see in such situations is that actors together had to make sense of what had

been going on, what was going on and what should, or at least could, be done. A useful

way to look at these cases is in terms of storytelling.2 Since much has been written about

stories over the last two decades, we should be clear about the concept from the start.

Although storytelling can be found everywhere, not everything is a story (Riessman,

2008).3 Here, I adopt the idea that stories depict what has happened to actors in a certain

setting (Chatman, 1978). For something to be a story it should be built from events

involving actors who are placed in a temporal and spatial setting. Telling stories is not

just listing events. Through the specific way in which stories represent that what has hap-

pened, they emplot the past. That is, they connect story elements in such a way that they

form a coherent whole.

Through telling and listening to stories, actors in the present not only make sense of the

past, but also prepare for the future. This ‘future-directedness’, the imagination that is part

of or that is enabled by stories, is especially relevant for practices such as planning.

Although planning involves dealing with what the past had on offer, planning processes

are of course always to a large extent about the future, as actors can imagine it. Stories that

can be found in planning processes will, therefore, often contain explicit ideas about

future events and the role of various actors (human and non-human) in bringing them

about. To draw on the language of problem-setting, stories will ‘[set] out a view of what

is wrong and what needs fixing’ (Schön, 1993: 144). Stories in themselves have the ability

not just to talk about what is, but also about what ought to be (Rein and Schön, 1977).

A reflective storytelling session is just what seems needed when planning efforts

result in nothing tangible over time. A consultant might add that when all hope seems

lost, communities are in need of a strong leader with a good story who helps them see

what is possible and believe in a happy ending again. But it is not that simple. In cases

like the one introduced above, there is not just one storyteller, there typically are count-

less storytellers competing for attention. And they strongly disagree and are willing to

fight for their vision, as long as it takes. In addition, stories are just a part of what plan-

ning is about. That is why, as analysts, we should first want to know more about the

political process through which some stories about the past and the present become dom-

inant guidelines for the future while others fail to play that role.

Although the interest in storytelling in planning has grown over the last two decades

(Mandelbaum, 1991; Forester, 1993, 1999; Throgmorton, 1992, 1996, 2003, 2007; Van

Eeten, 1999; Eckstein and Throgmorton, 2003; Uprichard and Byrne, 2006; Jensen,

2007; Childs, 2008; Hajer et al., 2010; Van Dijk, 2011) and storytelling is seen as an

important ‘tool’ in planning practice (Myers and Kitsuse, 2000; Sandercock, 2003a,

2003b, 2010), the further development of ideas about it depends both on the enrichment

of its theoretical foundation, for example through the application of a narrative lens in

the analysis of more cases and through an investigation into the connection between

storytelling and other planning activities. Both routes are taken here. This article offers

an in-depth analysis of a case in which a range of actors with diverse ideas and interests

were engaged in a struggle over meaning.




van Hulst 301

Using narrative analysis to look at such cases has been done before (e.g. Throgmorton,

1996), but it has not been done often. Jensen’s (2007) recent article on cultural urban

branding in Aalborg, for example, did offer a thorough analysis of opposing stories, but

failed to show the actors’ ‘moves’ in the struggle. Other contributions that have laid the

foundation on which this article builds have mainly focused on what individual stories

do (Forester, 1993) and more theoretically on what storytelling as an activity could or

should contribute to planning (Mandelbaum, 1991; Sandercock, 2003a; Throgmorton,

2003). Empirical (micro)studies of storytelling in practice allow us to zoom in on the

political process that is inherent in storytelling and between storytelling and other

planning activities.

The outline of this article is as follows. The article will first review various ideas on

storytelling in planning. The case introduced at the beginning will then be described,

analysed and used as an illustration of what more we might learn about planning pro-

cesses from looking at storytelling. In particular, the case being examined will help us to

understand more of the political work that stories do, which manifests itself in the way

stories are related to one another and the way in which storytelling is related to other

planning activities that surround it.

Storytelling in planning

The importance of storytelling in planning is not new. Various researchers have argued

that it is crucial. The work of James Throgmorton, John Forester and Leonie Sandercock

is used here to sketch the main ideas. According to Throgmorton (1992, 1996, 2003,

2007), planning is constitutive and persuasive storytelling about the future. If they do it

well, planners try to shape the ‘flow of future action’ when they tell stories about ‘interest-

ing and believable’ characters who act in specific settings.4 In the course of these stories,

which run from conflict through crisis to resolution, the main characters change or are

significantly ‘moved’. Stories that are told also adopt certain points of view. They draw

upon imagery and rhythm of language to express a certain attitude towards the situation at

hand. Finally, Throgmorton (2007: 250) has argued that ‘it is not merely the individual

stories that count, but storytelling and the complex social networks, physical settings, and

institutional processes in which those stories are told’ (italics in the original).5

Forester (1993, 1999, 2006, 2009) gives importance to the analysis of what he has called

practice stories. In 1993 (p.195) he wrote that these stories

…do particular kinds of work: descriptive work of reportage; moral work of constructing

character and reputation (of oneself and others); political work of identifying friends and foes,

interests and needs, and the play of power in support and opposition; and, most important […],

deliberative work of considering ends and means, values and options, what is relevant and

significant, what is possible and what matters, all together.

During various kinds of encounters, actors construct practice stories together.

Problems actors are facing and their relationships with other actors are deliberated in

the storytelling. And stories do not only tell us much about the world the planners are

dealing with, they also tell us a lot about the planners themselves (Forester, 1999: 78).





By organizing our attention, they give us the details, messiness and particulars that mat-

ter to the storyteller(s) (Forester, 1993: 201). They also show the moral stance of the

teller. In general, listening to and telling stories are fundamental activities in everyday

planning practice.

A third well-known researcher, Sandercock (2003a, 2003b, 2010; Sandercock and

Attili, 2010), has written about the various applications of storytelling. According to

Sandercock (2003a: 12), ‘[p]lanning is performed through storytelling, in a myriad of

ways. [...] in process, as a catalyst for change, as a foundation, in policy, in pedagogy, in

explanation and critique as well as justification of the status quo, and as moral exem-

plars’ (italics in original).6 Sandercock has pointed out that storytelling is often an impor-

tant part of, if not central to, community participation processes and in those branches of

planning practice that deal with conflict situations.7 In these processes, storytelling has

to be facilitated, has to offer people the opportunity to tell and listen to each other. The

act of storytelling is not just nice, it is necessary (cf. Ortony, 1975, on metaphors).

Through telling and re-telling, actors shape their identities. Stories told might reflect

some core of a community and at the same time limit or facilitate the ways in which com-

munities can change (cf. Eckstein and Throgmorton, 2003).8

Model of and model for

The three authors references above all pointed to many possibilities of a narrative

approach. They have told us that stories are about the things that matter to people. In their

work they stressed the social nature of storytelling when they pointed to the importance

of audiences, and the way stories construct and carry the identities of groups. At the same

time, politics are never far removed from their writings.9 All three authors made us aware

of the presence of conflicting stories in the many communities (cf. Mandelbaum, 1991)

and argued for the need to create space for stories, and the emotions that speak through

them. They have warned us about the way in which power can shape how stories ‘get

told, get heard and get weight’ (Sandercock, 2003a: 26), while at the same time advocat-

ing for hope for the future when they told us what stories could do (Forester, 1999;

Sandercock, 2003a; Throgmorton, 2003: 136, 2007: 249–253).

If we compare the authors with each other and early publications with later ones, an

interesting difference can be found between the ways in which storytelling can be

approached in research. This can be seen in the way storytelling as an activity is framed,

but also in the way storytelling has been researched. To see this, we need to look at the

idea of models of action and models for action that the anthropologist Geertz (1993: 93)

used to talk about culture.10 The system of symbols we call culture, Geertz said, can be

seen as a model of how people behave but is also used by these people as a model to

guide their future behaviour. For analytical purposes, the two positions on storytelling

are interesting to distinguish:

1. Storytelling as a model of planning. Looking at planning processes, Throgmorton

(1992, 1996: xv; cf. Sandercock, 2003a: 26) argued that planning practice is

much like telling stories. Storytelling is fundamental to planning. Planning docu-

ments and the plans themselves also tell stories. Weaker versions of this position




van Hulst 303

would claim that actors in practice tell stories and that this activity is an important

aspect of planning (Forester, 1993).

2. Storytelling as a model for planning. Sandercock (2003a; see also, Forester,

1999: Chapter 2; Throgmorton, 2003), for example, did not just claim that plan-

ning is done through storytelling, but that storytelling should be used explicitly in

order to improve planning practice. Ideas on what good storytelling is should be

applied to planning. Here, storytelling is used as a ‘tool.’ Stories are used ‘in the

service of change, as shapers of a new imagination of alternatives’ (Sandercock,

2003a: 9).

Taking storytelling as a model of (or metaphor for) what planners do is of course central

to what one would call a narrative approach. Throgmorton’s early work is the clearest

example of this. What the researcher does is reconstruct stories from practice. Forester

also empirically showed the work individual stories do. His views regarding stories are

not as radical as Throgmorton’s, since he did not suggest planning to be in the first place

about storytelling. Where Throgmorton saw storytelling as a model, Forester put an

emphasis on storytelling as a way to learn from each other (see also Forester, 2006).11

Forester’s later work (e.g. 1999: chapters 3–8, 2009) built on his initial observations,

stressing the importance of listening to stories in the field and from the field. This is

where a more normative approach becomes visible. Forester tells us stories might remind

audiences of what is important and allow all to see options they had not thought of

before. Telling stories and listening to them might be a way to (slowly) reach mutual

recognition or reconciliation of deep conflict, or a way to recover from trauma. Ritualized

storytelling processes can offer hope where hope had seemed lost (Forester, 1999: 78,

136). Recently, Forester (2009) has shown how storytelling can make an important con-

tribution to the way communities and groups in conflict with each other can ‘deal with

differences.’

In a similar vein, Sandercock (2003a) advocates for storytelling explicitly as a way to

be doing planning. Stories, she said, can be catalysts for change. Thinking through story-

telling as a model for planning makes us aware of the ways in which planning could be

more inclusive, more democratic, if citizens are offered space to tell their stories. It

encourages us to imagine how we can go from a shared community (core) story or a set

of rival community stories to a credible plan (2003a). In Sandercock’s recent work

(Sandercock and Attili, 2010), she used film in order to simultaneously research and

develop a community’s narrative. This shows how storytelling as a model for is not

merely about reconstructing stories, but rather about co-constructing stories.12

Studies using model of and studies using model for are not to be seen as accounts from

different worlds. This would mean underestimating the way capable practitioners reflect

on their own work. Practitioners, tacitly or not, know much about planning as storytell-

ing and use that knowledge in their work (see, for instance, Forester, 1999). Also, aca-

demic ideas about storytelling have found their way back into practice (e.g. Hemel,

2010) and their influence makes a rigid separation between a model of and a model for

problematic.

Academic researchers working on storytelling actually aim at influencing planning

practice, rather than ‘just’ describing or explaining it. Throgmorton (1992, 1996), for





instance, illustrated that showing how storytelling is done can go hand-in-hand with

offering a critique. Although he stayed a distance from the developments he studied, his

arguments about storytelling went beyond the mere observation that planning is like

storytelling. After showing why the actors in the case Throgmorton studied failed to

persuade their audiences, he advised planners to become better storytellers. In order to

persuade their audiences, he argued, planners have to take the points of view of their

audiences into account. Texts that planners produce do not just mean what planners and

those who hire them want them to mean. Because multiple readings are possible, plan-

ners might want to create some congruence between the stories they tell about them-

selves in public and the acts they perform (cf. Argyris and Schön, 1974). In addition, they

should recognize that they are, at best, co-authors of their own stories, while being char-

acters in someone else’s story (Throgmorton, 1996).

Nevertheless, the empirical phenomenon in studies in which storytelling as an explicit

activity is researched will very often be different from studies in which it is not. The

reason for this is that the use of storytelling as a tool would normally reveal a commit-

ment to more inclusive, community-focused forms of planning and less to bureaucratic,

hierarchical forms that probably still form the bulk of instances of planning. Model for

studies also entail a particular kind of storytelling. During exchanges that are focused on

bringing stakeholders together to help them understand each other (which would be typi-

cal for storytelling as model for way of working), one would instead give plenty of time

to various storytellers in order for a dialogue between them and their audiences to

develop. Storytelling, then, is made central and treated as special. During storytelling as

it takes place all of the time, without actors paying much attention to it as storytelling, it

is not to be expected that the full rendering, exchange and co-construction of stories get

priority. In most public meetings of politicians and administrators, for instance, a project

is often only one item on a full agenda and speakers’ time is limited.

All and all, if storytelling as a model of (aspect of) planning represents all cases of

planning, storytelling is only seen as an explicit model for in a small subclass of these

cases. At the same time, we could say that storytelling as a model for planning has been

getting more academic attention lately than everyday storytelling. It is not just Sandercock’s

and Forester’s later work that take this direction; Throgmorton’s (2003) later work also

fits this strand of research. Another example is a recent book on ‘strong stories’ in Dutch

planning practice (Hajer et al., 2010). The book explains what strong stories could bring

to practice and how they could be built. In an article by Childs (2008), we can read about

the ways in which storytelling might play a central role in urban design. Van Dijk (2011:

18) recently said that regions ‘need stories that can unify seemingly disjointed perspec-

tives.’ And finally, in studies of conflict and negotiation, Cobb (2010) argued that public

officials could mediate urban conflicts. She promoted an interesting practice called ‘nar-

rative braiding’, in which officials work at the interconnection of different, limited views

of a conflict with one another in order to develop a more complex, inclusive story that

does justice to differences. All these authors seem to suggest that stories and storytelling,

if taken seriously, are powerful tools of a democratic, progressive planning practice.

There is much to say in favour of the more explicit use of storytelling in planning, but

there are some risks of too narrow a focus. First, one might start to think that storytelling

is something positive in itself. Much of the literature on storytelling in the social sciences

starts from a positive attitude towards storytelling, intending, for instance, to (re)claim its




van Hulst 305

value compared to other forms of knowing (cf. Bruner, 1986). But that does not mean

that storytelling in planning, as it takes place all of the time (in boardrooms, in meetings

of civil servants, in meetings of citizens, etc.) always contributes to an inclusive, com-

munity-focused planning practice. It is only a particular kind of storytelling which is

likely to have this characteristic; one in which many actors with different backgrounds,

perspectives, values and interests come together and respectfully engage one another in

the search for a way to deal with differences or even to live together in harmony.

Secondly, when actors take the metaphor ‘planning is storytelling’ for a statement of

fact and forget to see how planning is not storytelling, they might overestimate the impact

of facilitated storytelling sessions on the rest of the planning process. This is not to say

that storytelling cannot be a powerful way to bring about change or that stories cannot

empower people. However, although one could create separate spaces in which old sto-

ries could be shared and new stories could be constructed, those activities do not anchor

their stories to the planning practice, yet. Storytelling sessions might remain uncou-

pled from other activities like formal decision-making, investigation or the making of

concrete plans.

To enrich the theory of storytelling in planning, it is therefore of importance that cases

of storytelling, in which storytelling remains largely implicit, are looked into, highlight-

ing 1) the way in which storytelling is part of a political process in which various stories

compete for attention and that most of the time has winners and losers, and 2) the way in

which storytelling relates to other activities that do political work. Up until now, these

issues have hardly been discussed explicitly in the literature. In order to study these

issues, a close look at the interactions in the planning process and an investigation of its

day-to-day dynamics on the ground are needed.

Storytelling about a new centre in Heart-less Town

During a period of seven months, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Heart-less Town

(Van Hulst, 2008a).13 The focus of the fieldwork was on the planning of a new location

for a town centre. The fieldwork entailed semi-participant observation in meetings of the

Board of the mayor and aldermen, and meetings of civil servants (all closed to the pub-

lic); meetings in town between aldermen, citizens, members of the civil society and oth-

ers. Relevant documents were studied and interviews were conducted with about 50

actors. The case description below presents the planning process, including the various

stories that circulated in Heart-less Town at the time of the study. Stories were defined as

concrete representations of what happens to actors in a certain setting. This narrow way

of defining stories means that, for example, a plan can tell an explicit story (that a

researcher can reconstruct), but the plan as a whole is itself not a story.14 In addition, the

claim worked with here is not that planning is storytelling (the strongest claim), but that

stories are used to talk about what is going on and what should be done with public

spaces (the weaker claim). The stories for this case were reconstructed from conversa-

tions, interviews, documents and observation notes.

Actors did not tell the exact same stories all of the time, nor could I have expected that

to happen as storytellers adjust their stories to specific audiences and the context of their

telling (George, 1969). But from stories told in particular instances, the researcher can

draw storylines, the basic plots of which can be condensed (Stone, 2002). In the case at





hand, there was a limited set of storylines in use. They are presented in Table 2.

Ethnographic fieldwork and a narrative approach in general go well together (Gubrium

and Holstein, 2009). It can help the researcher to look beyond story-texts themselves, to

investigate storytelling and the context in which storytelling takes place. In this particu-

lar research project, observation, conversations and interviewing – while the planning

process was in motion – made it possible to see how new storylines developed and

gained momentum and to understand how storytelling related to other planning activities

(Van Hulst, 2008b).

The missing heart

Heart-less Town is a town with approximately 25,000 inhabitants in the middle of the

Netherlands. The story about the town, told to me in various, slightly different manners,

could be summarized as follows: ‘In the 1960s our town was a small town, but since then

it has grown rapidly. Our town has a shopping centre, but it lacks a heart. For 25 years

we have been planning a centre. Some were in favour of Location 1, others in favour of

Location 2. Up until now, however, none of the plans has materialized.’ This Missing-

heart-story seems to be the ‘core story’ (Sandercock, 2003a) in place. Everybody in the

community seemed to agree on the need of a heart. A more elaborated, official (hi)story – as

was found in local and regional newspaper articles at the time of the planning process – can

be summarized as follows:

Halfway through the 1970s a small shopping centre was built in the town. From the second half

of the following decennium, a discussion developed about the expansion of this centre. A

period followed in which one plan after another was proposed. Most actors were in favour of

some version of an expansion of the present centre at Location 1, while others were in favour

of building a new centre at Location 2 – a spot that hosted some sporting facilities and a park.

During the 1990s and the first year of the new millennium, the local authority twice came close

to actually building a centre. Most notably, from 1999 onwards, a plan was made that was a lot

bigger than what was envisioned beforehand. It was called the Centre Vision and it was aimed

at realizing ‘a complete centre’ at Location 1, not just a shopping centre. In 2001, a large

majority in the council supported the plan. Nevertheless, due to a conflict with the project

developer about the cost of the new centre, two ‘independent scientists of fame’ came to what

the local media called ‘a devastating conclusion’: the design of the new centre was not feasible

for both financial and legal reasons. Soon after, in March 2002, the alderman in charge of the

planning lost the municipal elections and the planning process came to a hold.

All and all, much of the centre planning had been a discussion over the right location.

Location 1 had dominated the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium. Local

government, however, had failed to realize the new centre there.

A new period

Now came a critical moment in time. At least this is how it was framed by the new, domi-

nant protagonist, Mr Koehoorn. A short time before the elections (which the previously

mentioned alderman failed to win), some citizens had organized a small campaign to




van Hulst 307

promote the candidacy of their fellow citizen Koehoorn on the municipal council. He

was said to be knowledgeable about local issues and had the capacity and administrative

experience to deal with complicated planning matters. Within a week after the elections,

the new coalition appointed him the new alderman in charge of planning a new centre.

This was the issue that was granted the highest priority in the coalition agreement. The

new alderman, allegedly a long-time supporter of Location 2, energetically started to

develop a new plan for the new centre. In the regional newspaper, he said:

In the past, ambition has prevailed over feasibility. There was a lack of expertise that is again

the result of the size of the municipality. My starting point is: with both feet firmly on the

ground. We are here to build a centre that suits [Heart-less Town], not to realize daydreams.

For the new alderman, the story about the town without a heart had actually turned

into a story about problematic planning and about administrators who have been too

ambitious. The solution that the Alderman introduced to deal with the planning problem

could be called ‘going back to basics.’ Arguing it was now or never, Alderman Koehoorn

created a sense of urgency. In his Back-to-Basics Story, the town and its governors had a

final opportunity to make things right. What we should do now, he announced, is look

ahead to the future (the coming 30 years) and not back at the past (25 years of failed

planning). The way out, therefore, was presented in the form of oppositions. The past

was framed as ambitious, emotional and daydreaming; the future would be filled with

feasibility, reason and realism.

The Back-to-Basics Story dominated the planning for quite a while. No alternative

story reached public debate until the final decision was about to be made. But, how did

the Alderman create opposition between the past and the present? How did he bring the

Back-to-Basics Story to life? In 2002, the Alderman first ‘unravelled the legal spaghetti,’

as he called it, that was left after the previous planning effort failed. At the same time, he

made sure he had the project developer on his side. He also hired consultants to work

with the local bureaucracy. The following year, a viability study on the size of the new

centre was undertaken. The report, which was ready in November 2003, described calcu-

lations for the ‘critical mass’ necessary to attract retailers who operate at the national

level, customer needs, the proportion of food and non-food outlets, but also acknowl-

edged the wish in Heart-less Town to build a centre that was more than ‘just shops, [a]

centre that will become the ‘sparkling heart’ of the municipality.’

After this report, not just Locations 1 and 2, but in total five possible building sites

were investigated for their suitability as a centre. One of Koehoorn’s colleagues explained

to me that looking at five locations instead of two was meant to remove attention from

the everlasting battle between Locations 1 and 2. Koehoorn himself talked about ‘deter-

mining the DNA’ of the five selected locations.

While the civil servants were busy gathering facts, the Alderman chaired 10 meetings

with representatives of various segments of society (groups in civil society and busi-

ness), and four meetings with the residents who lived in the vicinity of the locations

under investigation. During these meetings, which were structured mostly as one-way

communications, Alderman Koehoorn told his audience about the why, what and how of

planning the new centre. He talked about the need for a new centre and painted a history





of problematic planning. The Alderman illustrated the situation with small stories, for

example, about a shop that had to close down because there were not enough customers

coming to the shopping centre. Admitting that local government had failed up until that

moment, he emphasized that planning would be different this time (for an overview of

the planning process, see Table 1).

A final decision

In March 2004, investigation of the locations was finished. Suitability scores for the vari-

ous locations were tallied on a scale of 1.0 to 100.0. Location 2 was the best location

(with 81.6 points), followed at quite a distance by Location 3 (68.4). Surprisingly enough

for the actors involved, Location 1 was third (66.2). Selected twice in the past, Location

1 had always been one of the two top contenders. The Board members doubted, however,

whether simply choosing Location 2 was what they wanted, and what their political par-

ties would find credible.15 They knew Location 1 was still very popular with council

members. Moreover, everybody wanted the centre to be a ‘heart’, and this is exactly the

connotation that had been linked with Location 1 in the previous plan. Therefore, some-

thing had to be done to satisfy those who were still in favour of that location. Halfway

through April the Board decided to choose Location 2, after adding that an ‘organic link’

between Locations 1 and 2 had to be created. This organic link was defined as an area to

be developed between the two that would connect the locations to each other.

The Board presented its decision as a proposal to choose Location 2. The council then

had to make the final, authoritative decision. At this point, the process became more

hectic. The actors in and around politics were debating the Location Report and the

Board’s proposal. The political parties in particular did not accept the proposal they

were confronted with, which could be concluded from the 150 written questions about

the Report and proposal. The Board organized three public sessions to which they invited

residents living in the area surrounding Location 2, the inhabitants of Heart-less Town

more generally, and representatives of the social sectors. Various council committee

members were dissatisfied with the poor results shown for Location 1 and asked for

additional calculations. The heated fights of the past between supporters of Location 1

and supporters of Location 2 seemed to be repeating themselves.

On the second evening of the special meeting of the council committee, Mr Termaat,

spokesman on the council committee for the coalition party Christian Democrats, put

forward a new option. Termaat had been critical of the centre planning during the ‘new’

period, and his own alternative plan came to many as a surprise. In a speech, he argued

that the decision for the centre was not a decision to be made just for 30 years to come,

Table 1. Overview of new period.

April 2002 Start new planning period

June 2003–February 2004 Investigations

March–May 2004 Political debate

May 2004 Council decision




van Hulst 309

as Alderman Koehoorn had argued, but for the coming 100 years. According to Termaat,

Location 3 was better suited for a centre, mainly because the town would grow in the

direction of Location 3. Termaat, in this way, used the result of the planning process to

tell a story about a more distant future. This can be called the Future Story.

In spite of all the effort the Board and those working for it put into defending their

choice, the vote in the council promised to be a close call. Some members of the Board

tried to influence their party’s vote. On the evening of the council meeting, Labor and the

Christian Democrats – two coalition parties! – proposed to build on Location 3. After the

Board twice threatened to resign and had even bargained backstage with their party

leader, three out of four Christian Democrats took the side of the Board. The final vote,

made at the end of an evening filled with tension, resulted in a victory of 13 votes over

seven in favour of the Board’s proposal. The centre would be built at Location 2.

Those in town who had been in favour of Location 1 or 3 had a very bad night.

Meanwhile, the Alderman and his team celebrated the victory. But, we should ask, what

about the rest of the people in Heart-less Town? Among the many more stories that can

be told about this case, there is one that begs to be told. In the public meetings, some citi-

zens suggested that a new centre was not necessary. In one of the interviews, a high-

ranking civil servant in the Planning Department said that the current small centre could

easily be renewed with a few investments. And, in a survey about the cost reductions the

municipality could realize, a large group of citizens – unsolicited – expressed the idea of

stopping the centre planning as a way to cut costs. All this suggests that some people had

become rather cynical about the centre planning after all the failures leading up to the

decision. They did not want a centre any longer and argued that it was the politicians who

held onto ‘the dream.’ Nevertheless, this story remained largely under the surface of

public life in Heart-less Town.

Relating stories and related activities

In the previous section, the case and the stories told (see Table 2) were presented. Now,

what have we learned about storytelling as a political aspect of planning? More specifi-

cally, what can we tell about the way in which stories relate to each other and the way

storytelling is related to other activities that surround it? The case suggests some answers

to these questions. What should be noted first is that actors tell different stories, not only

in the obvious sense that they present clearly conflicting views of the world, but in a

more subtle sense that narrators comment, build or elaborate on the stories that are circu-

lating. Although there might certainly be opposing stories, an obvious clash is not appar-

ent. Let us look more closely at how this works.

In this specific case, the basic story about the missing heart was presented as the start-

ing point, the unquestioned framing of the problem. Although the main storyteller,

Alderman Koehoorn, argued that the new planning period would be the opposite of pre-

vious efforts, he used the basic story to give his project credibility. His story built on the

idea of a missing heart, adding to it a strong interpretation of what the problem with

the problem was; that is, why the missing heart problem remained a problem for so long.

The way the Alderman talked about it in his speeches, what was wrong with the present

centre strongly resembled Stone’s archetypical story of decline (Stone, 2002: 138):





‘In the beginning things were pretty good. But they got worse. In fact, right now, they

are nearly intolerable. Something must be done.’ In planning, like in politics, if you

want to persuade actors of the necessity of change, it seems that you first have to tell a

story about decline.

Opposition to the previous planning was used in order to explain why this time the

story would have a happy ending. The story of decline was followed by a story of hope

(Stone, 2002). The storyteller tried to show his audience how and why things could be

different. At the same time, the Alderman gave little attention to the political feud

(between supporters of Locations 1 and 2) that he could have included in his version of

the heart story. The reasons for this seem to be that many actors knew the Alderman as a

supporter of Location 2 and those references would have damaged his position as an

authoritative storyteller. In addition, he did not want emotions to dominate the process.

In order to please his audience and build consensus, the Alderman and the Board

offered a more complex and meaningful (in the sense of filled with more meaning) story

when they argued for an organic link between Locations 1 and 2. It was not the ‘truth’ of

this story enhancement that made a difference. There was not a single fact added. Rather,

he conjured up the scene of a happy ending that hadn’t been part of the previous tellings.

He connected previously contending options and designed a new, collective story with

the help of a metaphor (the ‘organic link’). The Alderman and Board used a ‘synthesiz-

ing strategy’ (Mandelbaum, 1991). But some residents still doubted the sincerity

behind all that the Alderman said because they knew him as a smart administrator who

had always been in favour of Location 2. Thus, the story about going back to basics

and even the additional metaphorical gesture were read as suspicious texts.16 And, we

know that only ‘trusted storytellers endow the stories they tell with credibility’

(Mandelbaum, 1991: 210).

The Alderman and the Board had introduced three new locations in an effort to get

beyond the battle between the two options that had been fought over at various times

Table 2. Practice stories in Heart-less Town.

Title Content

Missing Heart Story Our town has a shopping centre, but it lacks a heart. For 25 years we have been planning. Some were in favour of Location 1, others in favour of Location 2. Up until now, however, none of the plans has materialized.

Back-to-Basics Story For 25 years ambition, emotions and daydreaming have ruled the planning of the centre. The centre is dying and there is no more time to waste. Now it is time to realize a feasible, realistic centre. We have to forget about the past, go back to basics and focus on the future.

Future Story We have been focusing on two locations for the new centre, but our thinking about the centre has been too limited. Our town will change over the coming decades. We should not look at the coming 30 years, but at the coming 100 years. Let us build on a new site.

Cynical Story We have only seen failures in the centre’s planning. Now we don’t want a new centre anymore. Only the politicians are still interested in it.




van Hulst 311

in the past. The new possible building sites served as window-dressing that would

focus attention on the process and on various alternative possibilities. However, that

one of the new locations became a serious competitor was an unintended consequence.

The popularity of alternative location number 3 came as a surprise to the Alderman and

his colleagues. Moreover, the story that accompanied this development did not try to

counter previous stories, but built another story on top of it. The new narrator drew

attention to expectations about the future that had not become part of the planning yet.

The reasonable expectation that the town is going to grow in a different direction asked

that attention be given to something that had been left out of the picture. The storyteller

pointed to this future event saying: ‘Look, this matters much to what we should be

doing!’ And, stretching the setting in terms of time meant that a different story could

be told, one that reframed the problem and led to a different solution as well. Some

council members were, all of a sudden, able to ‘forget’ (Baum, 1999) about their past

preferences.

Finally, it should be noted that while the debate over the choice of location filled the

headlines, the Cynical Story could be heard in public only occasionally, and did not reach

the political agenda at all. This is understandable if we consider that the opportunity to

publicly tell a story was unevenly accessible. This was the result of the traditional insti-

tutional structure of the planning process. Communication with citizens was typically a

one-way communication. The politicians were telling their stories and hardly solicited

stories from the citizens. The idea that a centre would perhaps no longer be desirable was

ignored. As often happens, whether most citizens agreed, felt powerless or a bit of both

never became clear. But if one wants to create a heart for a city, a place that becomes

more than a shopping centre, finding out whether a new centre is what many citizens still

want seems crucial.

That, in the end, the new story about a more distant future did not lead to a different

location choice and that the Cynical Story was hardly heard can also be seen as the result

of the activities that accompanied the storytelling. Let us now focus on this. Deciding

where a centre of a town could be called a ‘big decision’ (Krieger, 1986). A centre shapes

the identity of a town and thus deciding where a centre will be built has a big impact on

the lives of many people living in a town. Such a decision can hardly be taken without a

persuasive story that supports the choice. But, as the case illustrates, storytelling itself

should not be seen as something isolated. Storytelling is important, but not everything

that is important is reached through storytelling. Stories do part of the work. They mostly

work at the level of sense or meaning-making. That is, they help actors to formulate what

is important to them, what they value. They help put issues on the agenda, legitimize

what is put on the agenda and reason towards a plausible, credible decision regarding

those issues. At the same time, stories can be used to comment on or make use of what

is on the agenda and the decision-making that develops. At this point, if a storyteller is

working closely with other central actors such as investigators and decision-makers,

various activities can be coupled and reinforce one another, and the story told can easily

become dominant. This is what happened in the case under study. The story about the

need to go back to basics came to dominate – not only or at least not necessarily because

it was believed, but also because it was forcefully enacted in activities like investigat-

ing, decision-making in the Board and council, and in backstage bargaining.





The path towards the final big decision was paved with various little decisions which

in themselves could be regarded as technical but helped to order the options according to

their measurable suitability as a centre. For quite a while, investigations could be used to

replace political debate and the storytelling that went with it. Facts stood in for emotions

and imagination (referred to as ‘daydreaming’). The concept of determining the ‘DNA’

of the locations invoked the idea that the locations had some hidden but objectively

measurable and inescapable essence that could be uncovered by specialists. It also down-

played the particular historical meaning of the locations to the actors within the munici-

pality. Even though the DNA analogy draws on the idea of a human body, it does not

have the same feel as metaphors like the ‘heart of town’ or an ‘organic link’. The richness

of the different locations was reduced to numbers that put them in a ranking order. One

might also say that it was not just other activities but the whole institutional design of the

process that prevented some stories from becoming dominant or even heard.

This, then, seems to be the secret of the success of the planning process. All this does

not mean that storytelling itself could have been replaced by other activities. Storytelling

became especially important at the moment that the process reached the (formal) deci-

sion-making stage. This was also the moment that emotions came back into play: the

Alderman and the Board tried to come up with a master story that was supposed to unite

everybody. It was also the moment that an alternative story could be envisioned, one that

made much sense to a group of council members. But it was too late to turn the tide. In

the end, treats and backstage bargaining led to enough support for the Alderman’s story

to triumph.

Towards an ethnography of storytelling

Researchers like Forester, Throgmorton and Sandercock have done an excellent job in

‘translating’ the concepts and ideas of story and storytelling into the planning domain

and ‘to render them accessible and useful for planning and its practices’ (Friedmann,

2008: 248). They have taught us to see both the importance of storytelling in everyday

planning and the possibilities of storytelling in future planning processes. Seeing story-

telling as an important, everyday activity that takes place in all kinds of formal and

informal social interactions and that slowly but steadily finds its way into plans equals

accepting storytelling as a model of (or aspect of) planning. Focusing on its possibilities

helps us to see storytelling as a model for planning, emphasizing the use of storytelling

as a democratic, inclusive activity; one that offers space to a variety of actors, all with

their own lived experiences and their emotions; one that enables actors to co-construct

shared understandings of what their situation is and what can be done. Now, what can we

learn from the preceding case about these two ways of looking at storytelling that is of

relevance to planning theory and practice?

We already knew that actors involved in a planning process tell different and often

conflicting stories about the situation they confront. Storytellers who are offered the

opportunity to address the general public (often administrators, politicians or planners)

normally try to select those elements from reality that make for a coherent and consistent

narrative – something that makes sense and that allows for future action. But their stories,




van Hulst 313

even the most detailed ones, do not anticipate how others will themselves interpret and

evaluate a situation. There always remain sets of untold or unheard stories; hidden stories

that could have become important but were ignored (like the Cynical Story in the case).

Cases like the one described here remind us that, although storytelling can be used

explicitly to make planning more democratic, it is already in use politically to persuade

decision-makers and audiences and simultaneously draw the attention away from alter-

natives. Therefore, we need to be critical of storytelling as it takes place in everyday

planning. As Sandercock (2003a: 22) told us: ‘We need to understand the mechanisms of

story, both in order to tell good stories ourselves, and to be more critical of the stories we

have to listen to.’ As critical researchers, administrators, politicians, planners and citi-

zens involved in planning, we should always ask for more than a single story. And

regarding the dominant stories, we should ask ourselves, ‘who wants this story to be true

or come true, and why?’

But there is more. Stories often get told after actors are confronted with or stumble

upon new social and physical realities. Actors in planning practice are caught by sur-

prises (small and/or big) on a daily basis. What we can find in planning processes are

not just the hidden but also the emergent understandings of what is credible, beautiful,

legitimate or feasible in the situation at hand. Storytellers do not necessarily come up

with something totally new; rather, they comment, build or elaborate on the stories that

are circulating. Stories and storytellers can suddenly enter the stage and gain momen-

tum or lose their appeal because of the activities or events that interfere, or because of

the reactions of important stakeholders or the general public. That is why it is useful for

both practitioners and researchers to focus on the ongoing storytelling and not just try

to reconstruct ‘the’ (conflicting) stories of a case as if they have been there all along.

Using storytelling as a model for planning can, in principle, both enable less powerful

actors to be heard and new shared understandings to emerge through dialogue between

previously contending groups. When one explicitly uses storytelling in a planning pro-

cess, it should, however, be connected to and have an impact on other activities for it

to make a difference. And that is why we should see storytelling as a politically rele-

vant planning activity only when the institutional design is flexible enough to really

accommodate it.

There is more fieldwork needed to lay bare the broad range of examples of storytelling

activities in planning processes. What is important is that what we do not expect a compe-

tition between two or more alternative stories that give distinctive and clearly opposing

meaning to what is going on. The sense-making process is more complicated than that.

Activities that are not designed as instances of collective storytelling, but that turn out to

involve narrative sense-making anyhow, should be of special interest to researchers

because they risk being forgotten as storytelling events. Think of all those meetings

between politicians, citizens and planners that are hardly recognized occasions for story-

telling and are, therefore, not treated as such by either practitioners or researchers. It is the

way in which stories are related and how storytelling relates to other activities that help us

to understand the actual role of storytelling in planning practice and the value of the con-

cept for planning. After all, planning processes contain elements of political games and

rational calculation, mixed with the emotions, imagination and improvisation.





We should envision new research in this direction as an ethnographic project. For fur-

ther research into storytelling as it takes place all of the time, it seems most appropriate to

combine theoretical work on storytelling in context with (ethnographic) fieldwork (Van

Hulst, 2008b). That is to say, if we want to build a stronger theory of storytelling in plan-

ning, we should develop our theory in the context of the actual activities that make up

planning as a practice and observe storytelling in situ. To see the work of producing sto-

ries and not just the products of storytelling (the stories themselves), we should not isolate

stories but study storytelling as an aspect of the messy, everyday action (Forester, 1992).17

This way it can also become clearer what mechanisms obscure some stories and strengthen

others and under what conditions communities themselves can benefit from storytelling.

Notes

1. I thank John Forester for his comments and encouragement.

2. Narrative approaches fit in larger paradigms. Epistemologically and ontologically, they are

most often connected to interpretive and social-constructivist ideas. These ideas are included

in both critical-discursive and hermeneutic-phenomenological approaches (see e.g. Howarth,

2000; Yanow, 2000; Wagenaar, 2011). In planning, central ideas were formulated in volumes

like the collection of essays edited by Fischer and Forester (1993), with contributions from

people such as Healey (1993) and others. Central to the interpretive paradigm is the concept

of meaning, or to use a more active phrase, sense or meaning-making. Sense-making is about

the way ‘[s]ituations, organizations and environments are talked into existence’ (Weick et al.,

2005: 409). When human actors make sense of the situations they find themselves in, they

are (implicitly or explicitly) concerned with two questions: What is going on here? and What

should we do? To answer these seemingly simple questions, actors have to give meaning

to the situation they are in. Although it is typically the second question that occupies those

actors who are part of a practice like that of planning (Van Hulst 2008a), the answer to the

first question sets the stage. Moreover, if actors want to be able to answer the second question,

they will have to be able, to so some degree, to understand the answer to the first question.

Put differently, actors cannot solve a problem unless they have some understanding (clarity is

not necessary) of what the problem is. This is where storytelling comes in. The two questions

of sense-making posed above have also been posed in a different but similar fashion when it

comes to storytelling. The philosopher Macintyre stated: ‘I can only ask the question, “What

am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a

part?”’ (Macintyre, 1985: 216). Weick, Sutcliffe and Obstfeld (2005: 410) tell us that in

the context of everyday life people confronted with something unintelligible first ask ‘what’s the

story here?’ and then ask ‘now what should I do?’ The argument is that sense-making takes the

form of storytelling because actors in social life understand their lives in the form of stories. To

put it differently, issues actors deal with in practice become meaningful because of their place-

ment in a story (cf. Riessman, 1993: 18). As Schön (1993) said, ‘[e]ach story conveys a very

different view of reality and represents a special way of seeing. From a situation that is vague,

ambiguous, and indeterminate (or rich and complex, depending on one’s frame of mind),

each story selects and names different features and relations which become the “things” of

the story – what the story is about.’

3. Following Riessman (2008), no distinction is made here between stories and narratives.

4. See for a similar statement, Barbara Eckstein (2003: 14): ‘[s]tories use language to frame what

has happened to a set of characters in a particular time and place.’ Eckstein also stresses that

stories can make space for people to be heard and can have a defamiliarizing function.




van Hulst 315

5. Throgmorton’s earlier publications (1992, 1996) focused on the storytelling surrounding a

nuclear power plant construction programme in Chicago. In his later work (2003, 2007) he

described a set of urban narratives told about urban areas in the United States.

6. Following Forester’s way of looking at stories, she tells us that stories do a certain kind of

work. She also honours Forester’s contribution to planning, calling it ‘an attempt to reshape

planning as a practice of deliberative democracy’ (Sandercock, 2003a: 23).

7. Forester has also described these applications of storytelling in what he called ‘participatory

rituals’ (1999: 131).

8. Elsewhere, Sandercock (2003b: 154) also made an interesting distinction between micro-

narratives (putting forward lessons learned along the way) and macro-narratives (carrying the

overarching lessons).

9. Power has been an important theme throughout Forester’s work. Throgmorton (2003: 131–132)

engages the claim that his narrative approach would not appreciate matters of power. Revising

the argument he made in his earlier work (1996), he states that ‘powerful actors will induce

some planners to devise plans (stories about the future) that are designed to persuade only a

very narrow range of potential audiences’ (2003: 146; see also 2007: 251–253). Sandercock

(2003a) also deals explicitly with power and the limits of the power of storytelling.

10. Taking about metaphor, Yanow (2008) recently also used the idea of model of and model for.

The echo of her thoughts on metaphor and other interpretive issues can be found in this article

(see also Yanow 1996, 2000).

11. His first lengthy contribution to the approach (Forester, 1993) is especially noteworthy if we

want to have a basic idea of what storytelling-in-practice is about, because there he showed

how storytelling works at the level of conversation. This way of looking brings the approach

close to the everyday experience of practitioners and other readers.

12. Here, research on storytelling and academic storytelling come close. Throgmorton (1996:

53–54), Forester (1999) and Sandercock (2003a) agree about the use(fulness) of storytelling

in academia. Analysts reconstruct practice stories from their encounters with practitioners.

Forester has also written profiles of practitioners who tell their practice stories. To support

the research on practice stories, he and his colleagues also have created a website that shows

the way in which practice stories can be reconstructed: http://courses2.cit.cornell.edu/fit117/

CP.htm. The acts of listening to and telling stories are what all of us (in practice, science or

somewhere in between) have to engage in if we want to learn about practice. In addition, sto-

rytelling contributes to creativity in teaching and in writing about the planning practice. Often,

however, storytelling in academia and in bureaucratic environments does not meet the standards

of good fiction (Sandercock, 2003a: 21). In contrast with what is normal in mainstream science,

Throgmorton (1996) clearly showed his own authorship and the way his research project con-

nected with his personal experiences. In fact, this positioning was in line with the general argu-

ment Throgmorton made about planning. If planning is not ‘detached and purely intellectual

reasoning’ (Throgmorton, 1996: 115), why would the science of planning be like that?

13. I made the name of the town anonymous. I chose the name Heart-less Town in order to refer

to the problem (the town’s lack of a centre/heart) as the locals identified it.

14. Scenarios, as Albrechts (2005) describes the concept, and visioning perhaps come closest to

telling stories about the future. Some authors, however, treat them as separate from stories

(Myers and Kitsuse, 2000). Stories, I would argue, could easily be found in scenarios and

plans, although not all stories in planning are scenarios and plans since some are more focused

on describing the problem at hand or dwell more on the past than they work to delineate a

future course of action. Their future-directedness might remain rather implicit. In the case

under discussion, for instance, setting the problem was a first narrative step, followed by more

explicit talk about the future later on.





15. It should be clear that turning a complex description of the locations into a number between

1.0 and 100.0 (with a symbolic decimal point to indicate precision), helped to make the loca-

tions comparable in a very straightforward manner. All dimensions that could play a role are

brought back to a single dimension (Stone, 2002: 176).

16. What the Alderman did looks a lot like ‘narrative braiding’ (Cobb, 2010), connecting different

narratives in order to include the stories of more groups. But the Alderman’s story was not the

result of a process in which different groups were invited to tell their story themselves, as Cobb

advised.

17. We should ground our analysis in ‘careful accounts of the daily challenges of the actual work

of planners, policy analysts, and public administrators more broadly’ (Forester, 2006: 569).

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Author Biography

Merlijn van Hulst was trained in cultural anthropology at Utrecht University and received his PhD

from Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Currently, he is Assistant Professor at the Tilburg School of

Politics and Public Administration. He is interested in the role of sense-making in planning and

(local) governance and specializes in interpretive methods. Current research includes an ethnog-

raphy of storytelling in police practices, the work of excellent practitioners in neighbourhood

governance and the concept of framing in policy analysis.




appeared in: Britannien und Europa - Studien zur Literatur-, Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte. Festschrift für Jürgen Klein. Ed. Michael Szczekall. Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 2010. 241-255.

Jens Martin Gurr, Duisburg-Essen Urbanity, Urban Culture and the European Metropolis

"Urbanity": 1. The character or quality of being urbane; courtesy, refinement, or elegance of manner etc. […] 3. The state, condition, or character of a town or city; urban life. W. Belsham: "The serenity, the elegance and urbanity of Paris", [Essays, Philosophical, Historical and Literary, 1789–91] R. Capell: "Men from the mountains come down for their first taste of urbanity" [Simio-mata: A Greek Note Book, 1944–1945 1946] Oxford English Dictionary

I. Introduction1

On the occasion of the City of Essen's taking over as European Capital of Cul-ture "Ruhr.2010", Essen-born writer Jürgen Lodemann in January 2010 with a curious if telling statistic opened an essay cautioning the region against exces-sive metropolitan airs and graces: 196 members of the international P.E.N. Club currently reside in Berlin, Munich boasts 56 members, Hamburg 30, Frankfurt 35 and Essen, about the same size as Frankfurt? Not a single one.2 Lodemann does make clear that, among many questionable criteria to assess the metropoli-tan status of a city, the number of P.E.N. members it is home to is hardly the most compelling one. But if the numbers are correct, might they not be indica-tive of the presence or absence of a metropolitan quality that is much harder to quantify and to grasp?

As a city with undoubted metropolitan status and arguably the only European "world city", London has for a number of years now been home to a sub-cultural icon, graffiti artist Banksy, in many ways the Thomas Pynchon of street art, its great unknown celebrity figure.3 His witty and often ingenious defacements of urban surfaces have quickly become commodity products, salvaged and with considerable effort detached from their original surface only to be sold in posh metropolitan art galleries, fetching prices of up to 400,000 Euros.

1 The ideas set out this in essay have been inspired by the research carried out in the Uni-

versity of Duisburg-Essen's Main Research Area "Urban Systems", of which I have the pleasure of being one of two speakers. In interdisciplinary cooperation across virtually all faculties of the university, over 70 scientists and scholars in numerous multi-disciplinary projects here engage with key issues in urban systems. Most of the ideas in this essay have grown out of an ongoing project on the role of urban culture in urban systems, which is part of this larger research context. I am particularly grateful to my colleague Martin Butler; the ideas are ours rather than mine.

2 Jürgen Lodemann, "Kulturhauptstadt Ruhrgebiet: Bloß nicht auf Metropole machen!", Die Welt, 6 January 2010. Cf. www.welt.de/die-welt/kultur/article5745714/Bloss-nicht-auf-Metropole-machen.html [accessed 10.1.2010].

3 For a dazzling display of some of his most spectacular works cf. Banksy, Wall and Piece (London, 2006).

2 Jens Martin Gurr

What, these two observations on culture in European cities invite us to ask, is a metropolis? What does culture contribute to the metropolitan qualities of a city? And what about the connection between culture, urbanity and the city? How do we classify and conceptualize forms of cultural expression in urban contexts? In this essay, I would like to make a few remarks on the terms and concepts of "metropolis", the "city" and "urbanity" and on the connection be-tween them and would like to explore the notion of an unquantifiable and elu-sive specifically "metropolitan" culture, and especially popular culture, which London obviously has and the Ruhr, for instance, is frequently perceived as lacking. Taking my cue from Hubert Zapf's conceptualization of literature as cultural ecology and conceiving of urban environments as complex ecological systems, I will argue that urban culture can be regarded as an 'ecological force-field' within urban systems, in which it fulfils a number of crucial roles that go far beyond its economic importance as a location factor. Using selected exam-ples of contemporary London street art as case studies, I will suggest a model allowing for a systematization in the analysis of urban forms of cultural expres-sion. II. The Metropolis, the (European) City and Urbanity

"Metropolis" and, to a lesser extent, "city", it seems, are not merely descriptive terms, but more or less strongly imply normative elements, even a utopian prom-ise – and this, I would argue, is largely a cultural promise that is difficult to categorize. But the concept of the metropolis of course is not only normative. It does make sense to classify cities according to various criteria, and many at-tempts to define the metropolitan character of cities are very enlightening.4 Thus, the concept of "metropolis" curiously oscillates between designating a status of centrality as a financial centre, a traffic node, a centre of research and education or of the media industry on the one hand, and a far less tangible 'je ne sais quoi', a metropolitan "feel" of cultural promise: Frankfurt may be a finan-cial metropolis, because, second to London, it is the seat of the most important European stock exchange and of several important banks, but a cultural me-tropolis? Berlin, although certainly not a financial centre, is a metropolis, be-cause it is a capital with over 3 million residents, but it also appears to have the intangible cultural "flair" a metropolis in the wider sense also appears to need. Even in scholarly discourse, the descriptive and the normative components of the concept of "metropolis" are not always neatly distinguished.

The cultural promise of an enlightened civic society as well as the concomi-tant notion of "urbanity" frequently associated with the "metropolis" and the "city" is most strongly tied to the European city. In this vein, Walter Siebel

4 For an early influential study cf. Peter Hall, The World Cities (London, 1966); for a

widely debated recent contribution cf. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, Lon-don, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ, 22001); for a survey cf. Dirk Bronger, Metropolen – Megastädte – Global Cities: Die Metropolisierung der Erde (Darmstadt, 2004).

Urbanity, Urban Culture and the European Metropolis 3

writes: "The European city is the place in which the civic society originated … European urban history is a history of emancipation."5 How, then, does one de-fine this quality of "urbanity" that, in addition to size, economic and political importance, qualifies a city as a metropolis?

From the very beginning of the history of the term, "urbanity"6 has had strong evaluative implications. With Cicero in 55 B.C., "urbanitas" was etymologically tied to "urbs", the city, and thus obviously Rome, but from the very beginning was a clearly positive term designating refined manners, intellect, esprit, experi-ence, and thus a refined "urban" lifestyle, which could, however, also be culti-vated in a country residence. There is no space here to retrace the complex his-tory of the term, but as late as 1781, Friedrich Nicolai noted after taking the wa-ters in Pyrmont, even then hardly a metropolis:

[Ich hatte] das Glück, dort in einem kleinen Zirkel von schätzbaren Männern und geist-reichen Frauenzimmern zu leben, deren Kenntnisse, feine Sitten, Anmuth, fröhliche Laune, Witz und Gutmüthigkeit, der Konversation jene Urbanität und Unbefangenheit gaben, die den Geist so sehr aufheitern und erhellen kann.7

At times, the term thus appears to have been largely dissociated from the physi-cal space of the city. Given the question of what makes a "metropolis", one might thus ask more generally to what extent the quality of "urbanity" is tied to the physical space of the city as a densely populated agglomeration. Though one can generally assume an empirical – if not an inherently necessary – connection between "urbanity" and the city (at least since early modern times), a dissocia-tion of urbanity and city is possible under specific historical, socio-cultural and geographical conditions, and an "urban" habitus can to some extent be cultivated in the country.8

The connection between the city and urbanity today needs to be seen in the context of the debate on the potentially decreasing role of cities and metropoli-tan regions in a process of de-spatialization9 in many areas of life, particularly 5 Walter Siebel, "Einleitung: Die europäische Stadt", in: Siebel, ed., Die europäische

Stadt (Frankfurt, 2004), 11-50, 13, my translation. The particular role of the European city has frequently been discussed, in addition to the volume ed. by Siebel, cf. for in-stance the following collections: Dieter Hassenpflug, ed., Die europäische Stadt - My-thos und Wirklichkeit (Münster, 22002); Friedrich Lenger, Klaus Tenfelde, eds., Die europäische Stadt im 20. Jahrhundert: Wahrnehmung - Entwicklung – Erosion (Colog-ne, 2006); Friedrich Lenger, Dieter Schott, eds., Die europäische und die amerikanische Stadt (Berlin, 2007).

6 Cf. for instance Edwin S. Ramage, Urbanitas: Ancient Sophistication and Refinement (Oklahoma, 1973). For a helpful survey of recent theories of urbanity cf. Peter Dirksmeier, Urbanität als Habitus: Zur Sozialgeographie städtischen Lebens auf dem Land (Bielefeld, 2009), 21-81.

7 Qtd. in Reinhold P. Kuhnert, Urbanität auf dem Lande: Badereisen nach Pyrmont im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1984), 12.

8 For this cf. Dirksmeier. 9 It is interesting to observe that this de-spatialization in many areas has coincided with

the rise of "space" as an analytical category in various disciplines. For the "spatial turn" cf. Stephan Günzel, Raumwissenschaften (Frankfurt, 2008), as well as Mike Crang,

4 Jens Martin Gurr

with the idea of the "global village" brought about by technological means of communication which make spatial distance increasingly irrelevant.10 In this vein, it has been argued that cities are losing their privileged role altogether. Siebel, for instance, has argued that, given recent developments in society, the city is no longer the privileged "site of a way of life impossible elsewhere": "In highly urbanised societies such as that of western Europe, the difference be-tween city and country as far as a way of life is concerned has shrunk to a dif-ference of more or less of the same. It no longer designates something qualita-tively different."11 While this may be true for the field of tension between public and private or for forms of work, it seems less applicable to the sphere of cul-ture. Here, too, there is the question to what extent different forms of cultural expression are logically and empirically tied to the physical space of the city. Logically, neither the opera nor graffiti are bound to the city: A number of far-from-urban festivals have shown that world-class classical music is possible in barns; and graffiti, too, is theoretically possible on barn doors, but relies on ur-ban density for the number of potential spectators.12 In practice, both forms are strongly associated with the city.

III. On "Urban Culture"

In a survey essay on "Urban Culture" ["Stadtkultur"], Rolf Lindner13 heuristi-cally distinguishes between at least three major meanings of "urban culture": 1) "Culture of the City" ["Kultur der Stadt"], perceived as an ideal and as the 'cul-tural promise' of a democratic civic society; 2) "Cultures in the City" ["Kulturen in der Stadt"], defined as the diversity of lifestyles and cultures in cities; 3) "The Culture of a City" ["Kultur einer Stadt"], seen as the cultural uniqueness or "style" of a particular city.14 Cutting across these categories, I am here largely concerned with "urban culture" in the sense of artistic, performative, literary or

Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space (London, 2000); Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, Gill Valentine, eds., Key Thinkers on Space and Place (London, 2004). For the origin of the "spatial turn" in urban studies cf. Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorien-tierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek, 2007 [12006]), 290 et passim.

10 Cf. the debate about the role of cities in the global networked economy occasioned not least by Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. I: The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford/Malden, MA, 1996).

11 Siebel, 32. 12 Once more, the exception proves the rule: Norwegian street artists Dolk and Pøbel con-

spired for a project "Desolate Decorations" on the remote Norwegian Lofoten islands and "took street art out of the urban environment and into the desolate places … for a strange exhibition in the country." Cf. Gary Shove, ed., Untitled II: The Beautiful Ren-aissance (Darlington, 2009), 72-81, 74.

13 Rolf Lindner, "Stadtkultur", in: Hartmut Häußermann, ed. Großstadt: Soziologische Stichworte (Opladen, 22000), 258-263.

14 Cf. also the Darmstadt approach to the "intrinsic logic of cities". Cf. the following ex-cellent collection: Helmut Berking, Martina Löw, eds., Eigenlogik der Städte: Neue Wege für die Stadtforschung (Frankfurt/New York, 2008).


medial cultural expression, with a use of semiotic resources in urban contexts as a form of human self-expression. Here, the city is not merely a place of cultural practice, but often also its object: the city frequently thematises itself in its cul-ture. One might even ask whether certain forms of urban self-reflexiveness may not be constitutive of "urbanity" itself. In the course of this essay, I would like to discuss ways in which urban culture can thus be seen to react to key urban chal-lenges but also actively to shape perceptions and thus to be socially productive as well. One function of urban culture thus understood which was long underesti-mated but has recently received wide publicity is its economic importance as a major economic sector and as a location factor to attract economic and cultural 'elites'. One might here think of Richard Florida's widely debated but partly sim-plistic and problematic theses on the "creative class".15 In addition to potentially overstating the contribution of specific forms of culture to an attractive econom-ic milieu – theses which have led a number of cities to strategically target "crea-tive segments" of the population in their urban development strategies –, the concomitant instrumentalization of art and artists has also met with significant resistance with artists refusing to be commodified as mere location factors con-ducive to the 'bohemian index' of a city.16

The significance of urban culture to the city as a whole, however, not only emerges from its instrumental value and its measurable and immediate economic relevance, but also, and perhaps more significantly, from its social and socio-psychological significance as a form of critically negotiating social, political and economic problems and particularly as a medium for critical reflection on pro-cesses of urban development and change as well as on the limitations and re-strictions set by highly technologized and functionalized urban settings. Practic-es and manifestations of urban culture thus also serve as a means of coming to terms with the accelerated pace of life and (extreme) complexity of life in big cities. Finally, urban cultural expression can also serve as a means of articulating and negotiating individual and collective identities, which, particularly in urban agglomerations where cultures and ethnicities constantly mix and mingle, seems to be of vital importance.

15 Cf. for instance Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York, 2005). For

the use of such factors in city marketing cf. for instance John R. Gold, S.V. Ward, eds., Place Promotion: The Use of Publicity and Marketing to Sell Towns and Regions. Chichester, 1994, as well as G. Kearns, C. Philo, eds., Selling Places: The City as Cul-tural Capital, Past and Present (Oxford, 1993).

16 Cf. for instance the much-publicized protest of artists in Hamburg against such endeavours: "Kunst als Protest: Lasst den Scheiß!": "Hamburg nur noch als »Marke«, der wir Aura, Ambiente und Freizeitwert verpassen sollen? Das machen wir nicht mit. Ein Künstler-Manifest gegen die Hamburger Kulturpolitik", www.zeit.de/2009/46/ Kuenstlermanifest [10.1.2010].

6 Jens Martin Gurr

IV. Negotiating Cityscapes: Metropolitan Cultures as Seismo-graphic and Catalytic 'Force-Fields' within Urban Systems

Within the complex system of the metropolis, urban culture thus fulfils im-portant functions, which, though they have already been explored from a multi-tude of different angles17, still deserve particular attention and, against the back-drop of a transdisciplinary perspective, need to be theoretically reconsidered. This paper proposes that the central position of urban culture as an integrating momentum within the dynamics of urban systems is basically due to the seismo-graphic or diagnostic and the catalytic or processing function of cultural forms of expression. In order to give substance to this claim, I will resort to one of the basic assumptions of literary and cultural ecology to conceptualize urban culture as a 'force-field' within urban systems. Combining the central notion of urban 'space' with Michel de Certeau's ideas of 'strategies' and 'tactics', which he, inter-estingly enough, inferred from an analysis of cultural practices in urban environ-ments, I would then like to contribute to a theoretical reconceptualization of ur-ban culture, the analytical surplus value of which will be demonstrated by means of two brief examples from London, which, in turn, serve as a starting point for the delineation of the relational category of 'mediacy' as an additional heuristic tool for the systematization of urban cultural practices.

Cultural forms of expression that originate in urban contexts are by no means detached from their environment, but, in a number of intricate ways, are shaped by and tied to a range of infrastructural, architectural and technological parame-ters that constitute this environment. Against the backdrop of this interplay be-tween urban culture and its environment, it may be fruitful to conceive of urban culture as a quasi-ecological system, which, as a dynamic and cybernetic entity, develops according to its own logic and rules. Such an understanding of urban culture, which takes up central ideas of some of the most recent strands of ecocriticism, 1) makes it possible systematically to conceptualize the dynamic interplay between urban cultures and their environments, (also) because it al-lows for the integration of a number of different disciplinary approaches and 2) thus provides a theoretical framework that can serve as a basis for the develop-ment of a workable methodological toolkit for a more systematic and compre-

17 From among the innumerable contributions cf. for instance Anne Hegerfeld, James

Fanning, Jürgen Klein & Dirk Vanderbeke, eds., "The Mighty Heart" or "The Desert in Disguise": The Metropolis between Realism and the Fantastic (Tübingen, 2007); Re-gina Bittner, ed., Die Stadt als Event: Zur Konstruktion Urbaner Erlebnisräume. Edi-tion Bauhaus, vol. 10 (Frankfurt, 2001); Gary Bridge, Sophie Watson, eds., The Black-well City Reader (Malden, MA, 2002); Richard T. LeGates, Frederic Stout, eds., The City Reader (Abingdon, 42007); Günter Lenz et al., eds., Towards a New Metropolitan-ism: Reconstituting Public Culture, Urban Citizenship, and the Multicultural Imaginary in New York and Berlin (Heidelberg, 2006); Malcolm Miles et al., eds., The City Cul-tures Reader (London, 2000); Manfred Smuda, ed., Die Großstadt als "Text" (Munich, 1992).


hensive exploration, categorization and analysis of different forms and functions of metropolitan cultures.

To begin with, it would seem that, given the strong interest in ecocritical ap-proaches and in urban studies in recent years or even decades, an application of ecocritical paradigms to the study of the metropolis lies close at hand. However, while some forays into this domain have been made,18 most studies in ecocriticism – both classics in the field and more recent work – have remarkably little to say about urban cultures.19 I therefore propose to heed Bennett's still per-tinent warning that "ecocriticism will continue to be a relatively pale and under-theorized field unless and until it more freely ventures into urban environ-ments".20

One approach from this field which particularly lends itself to a conceptu-alization of urban culture as an ecological system is the model of literature as cultural ecology outlined by Hubert Zapf21, which, though it explicitly focusses on literary texts, is particularly useful for the analysis and description of the dia-lectical and quasi-ecological relationship between forms of cultural expression and their specific contexts. I maintain that, by way of a few terminological and conceptual modifications, it is thus also transferable to the realm of urban cul-ture, which may well be conceived of as a dynamic ecological system subject to constant change, too.

18 Cf. especially Michael Bennett, "From Wide Open Spaces to Metropolitan Places: The

Urban Challenge to Ecocriticism", ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and En-vironment 8.1 (Winter 2001), 31-52, and Michael Bennett, David Teague, The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments (Tucson, AZ, 1999).

19 Cf. for instance the special issue on Literature and Ecology of Anglia 124.1 (2006); Cheryll Glotfelty, Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Liter-ary Ecology. Athens, GA and London, 1996; Richard Kerridge, Neil Sammells, eds., Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London and New York, 1998); Greg Garrard's otherwise excellent Ecocriticism (London, 2004); even Armbruster & Wallace's programmatically titled collection, though calling for a turn to "less obviously 'natural' landscapes" (4), contains no contribution which in any sustained way works towards an urban turn in ecocriticism; cf. Karla Armbruster, Kathleen R. Wallace, eds., Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (Charlottesville VA, 2001).

20 Bennett, 304. 21 Cf. especially Hubert Zapf, Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion

imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans (Tübingen, 2002). Cf. also Zapf, "Literature as Cultural Ecology: Notes Towards a Functional Theory of Imaginative Texts with Examples from American Literature". Literary History/Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions. Ed. Herbert Grabes. REAL 17 [Research in Eng-lisch and American Literature] (Tübingen, 2001), 85-99, and Zapf, "Das Funktionsmo-dell der Literatur als kultureller Ökologie: Imaginative Texte im Spannungsfeld von Dekonstruktion und Regeneration", Funktionen von Literatur, Theoretische Grundlagen und Modellinterpretationen, ed. Marion Gymnich and Ansgar Nünning (Trier, 2005), 55-78. Finally, cf. the recent volume Zapf, ed., Kulturökologie und Literatur: Beiträge zu einem transdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft (Heidelberg, 2008).

8 Jens Martin Gurr

In his approach, Zapf outlines a functional theory of literary texts which is based on the assumption that the system of literature in many respects resembles an ecological system.22 Enumerating a number of striking analogies between the two, particularly highlighting their dynamic and complex nature,23 he concludes that "the specific procedures of literature bear some interesting similarities to […] ecological principles […] Indeed, they appear to a significant extent as the transformation into language and symbolic action of some of those characteristic principles".24 Zapf also points out that the similarity between an ecological sys-tem and literature is predominantly due to the specific aesthetic strategies em-ployed by the literary imagination, when he claims that

literature is an ecological force within culture not only or not even primarily because of its content, but because of the specific way in which it has evolved as a unique form of textuality that, in its aesthetic transformation of cultural experience, employs procedures in many ways analogous to ecological principles, restoring complexity, vitality and cre-ativity to the discourses of its cultural world by symbolically reconnecting them with el-emental forces and processes of life – in non-human nature, in the collective and indi-vidual psyche, in the human body.25

Following from this, the symbolic system of literature turns into a socially and culturally productive agent and,

by its aestheticising transgression of immediate referentiality, becomes an ecological force-field within culture, a subversive yet regenerative semiotic energy which, though emerging from and responding to a given sociohistorical situation, still gains relative independence as it unfolds the counter-discursive potential of the imagination in the symbolic act of reconnecting abstract cultural realities to concrete life processes.26

Starting from his notion of literature as an 'ecological force-field within culture,' Zapf then argues that "this cultural-ecological function of literature can be de-scribed as a combination of three main purposes".27 The first purpose, which he describes as "cultural-critical metadiscourse", lies in the "representation and critical balancing of typical deficits, contradictions and deformations in prevail-ing political, economic, ideological and utilitarian systems of civilisatory power".28 The second purpose, or function, labelled "imaginative counter-discourse", is the "confrontation of these systems with a holistic-pluralistic ap-proach that focuses specifically on that which is marginalised, neglected or re-pressed by these systemic realities, and articulates what otherwise remains unar-ticulated in the available categories of cultural self-interpretation".29 The third function – that of a "reintegrative inter-discourse", a concept clearly reminiscent 22 Cf. Zapf, "Literature", 90ff. 23 For a detailed elaboration on these analogies, cf. Zapf, "Literature" 88ff. Cf. also Zapf

"Das Funktionsmodell", 60ff. 24 Zapf, "Literature", 90. 25 Zapf, "Literature", 93. 26 Zapf, "Literature", 88. 27 Zapf, "Literature", 93. 28 Zapf, "Literature", 93. 29 Zapf, "Literature", 93.


of Jürgen Link – is strongly connected to the second and lies in the "feeding back and reintegrating of the repressed into the whole system of cultural dis-courses, by which literature contributes from the margins to the continual re-newal of the cultural centre".30 It can be argued that, as Zapf's metaphor of the 'force-field' may be transferred to culture in general, his triadic typology of func-tions can also be applied to cultural forms of expression apart from the literary text.

As already indicated, this essay proposes to transfer this idea of 'literature as an ecological force-field within culture,' which lies at the heart of Zapf's ap-proach, to another level of metaphorical abstraction and to apply it to an urban context, thus conceiving of 'urban culture as an ecological force-field within ur-ban systems.' In the first place, such an application needs to do justice to the spa-tial dimension of urban culture, which is quintessential for our understanding of urban cultural practices, as they are, with regard to both their various forms and functions, particularly tied to spatial parameters, in other words: characterized by a distinct 'spatiality.'

The notion of "space", which is here used to complement Zapf's functional approach in order to develop a viable framework to conceptualize urban culture, centrally functions as a conceptual and analytical category in urban studies gen-erally and in the analysis of urban cultural practices in particular – in the narrow sense merely as the physical location of such forms of expression, but also as a surface of contact and friction and a projection screen, as a site of interaction for such practices, as psychological, conceptual, represented, contested and negoti-ated "cultural" space.31

Given the observation that it is urban space in particular which functions as an arena of actions and interactions of individuals and collectives, and thus, in a very concrete way, serves as a site for the expansion of the 'force-field' generat-ed by urban cultural practices, what needs to be done is to ask for the various ways in which these individuals and collectives 'make use' of the spaces they are confronted with or exposed to, how they appropriate the spatiality of the city for their very own ends and purposes. In order to further conceptualize this intersec-tion between 'space' and 'practice,' between 'site' and 'action', it is useful to take recourse to Michel de Certeau's ideas concerning the description and analysis of practices of everyday life.32 Generally conceiving of the study of popular culture as being concerned with "the battles or games between the strong and the weak, and with the 'actions' which remain possible for the latter"33, de Certeau sets out 30 Zapf, "Literature", 93. 31 Cf. especially Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991) as arguably still

the foundational text for the "spatial turn" and more recently Brigitta Häuser-Schäublin & Michael Dickhardt, ed., Kulturelle Räume – räumliche Kultur: Zur Neubestimmung des Verhältnisses zweier fundamentaler Kategorien menschlicher Praxis (Münster, 2003).

32 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984 [Arts de faire; Paris, 1980]).

33 De Certeau, 34.

10 Jens Martin Gurr

to describe the nexus between cultural 'output' and cultural 'use' and distin-guishes between "a rationalized, expansionist, centralized [...] production" and a "devious, dispersed [consumption] characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation, its poaching, [which] shows itself not in its own products [...] but in an art of using those imposed on it [by the dominant economic order]".34 Accordingly, he introduces his notion of "strategies", which denote the institutions, rules, re-gimes and physical objects and limitations imposed by those in power as op-posed to "tactics," which he defines as the "ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the 'weak' within the order established by the 'strong,'" as the subversive appro-priation by the weak of what is imposed on them by the strong.35

Though de Certeau's concept indeed bears ideological overtones in its all too binary opposition of the 'weak' and the 'strong'36, his ideas help clarify the pro-cesses of interaction between urban spaces and its human protagonists. In this sense, city dwellers, who are confronted with a specific urban setting limited by infrastructural and technological parameters, in other words: with the spatial pa-rameters of a particular metropolitan environment, which, in turn, work as regu-latory 'strategies', may apply particular devious and dispersed, unintended or even unconscious 'tactics' to come to terms with this pre-structured and highly rationalized setting in a number of individual ways and for a range of different purposes. In other words, in order to cope with what Henri Lefebvre called "rep-resentations of space," i.e. "conceptualized space, the space of scientists, plan-ners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers", the city dweller thus "mak[es] symbolic use of its objects" via forms of performative and/or im-aginary cultural practices.37

Against the backdrop of the ideas and concepts outlined so far, which have been introduced as modifications and extensions necessary to apply the theoreti-cal concept of the 'force-field' to the study of urban culture, we can now propose a (re)conceptualization of urban culture which fruitfully incorporates the ideo-logical impetus of both Zapf's functional model and de Certeau's notions of stra-tegic regulation and of tactical appropriation and does justice to the significance of the spatial dimension (in the analysis) of metropolitan cultures: Accordingly, urban culture can be conceived of as a particular set of cultural practices which are both highly determined by their urban situatedness, i.e. tied to the very spati-ality of a particular cityscape, and contribute to shaping and changing our awareness of this spatiality. In the most active sense of the word, urban cultural forms of expression re-present [sic] urban spaces: They reflect and comment

34 De Certeau, xiif., 31. 35 De Certeau, 35f., 40. 36 For the need to consider not only "the view from below" but also to understand "the

structuring of the city as a whole, the more macro-view of urbanism, the political econ-omy of the urban process" cf. Edward W. Soja, "Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis", rpt in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford, 2002), 188-196, 189f.

37 Lefebvre, 38f.


upon forms and functions of architectural and infrastructural designs and thus may be said to work as a cultural-critical metadiscourse; in processes of constant transgression and subversion, they create alternative spaces and thus function as an imaginary (and, at times, very concrete) counter-discourse; and, subversive as such practices may be, they only exist on, at or in (and thus due to) a specific architecturally or infrastructurally given, i.e. they, by definition, reintegrate the ideologically peripheral with manifestations of hegemonic power in the very moment of their being produced, installed or performed. Consequently, con-sidering the processual and performative nature of urban cultural practices, they may well be characterized both by a 'seismographic momentum' in that they re-act to, or 'track,' urban transformations in a very sensitive way, and a 'catalytic momentum' in that they actively interpret, make sense of, foster and even insti-gate technological, infrastructural and climatic changes and challenges. In other words, they indeed function as constituents of a highly active, quasi-ecological 'force-field', the shifts and movements of which are quintessential for the devel-opment of the metropolis.

V. Street Art and Metropolitan Culture in London: The Case of Banksy and Slinkachu In order to put this model of urban culture as a seismographic and catalytic force-field to the test, i.e. in order to both illustrate its analytical surplus value and to identify further theoretical and methodological modifications and exten-sions, I would now like to focus on two examples of urban cultural practices, as they not only serve to indicate the vast variety of ways of appropriating urban spaces, but – due to an extensive media coverage – also have assumed a promi-nent position within recent discussions of the social, political and economic sig-nificance of urban culture.

A first case illustrating the seismographic and catalytic function of urban cul-tural expression is the work of London-based graffiti artist Banksy. A particular-ly striking example of this artist's ingenious use (or abuse) of urban spaces and surfaces for a subversive "tactical" appropriation of strategically imposed infra-structures is his critical comment on the tendency for total CCTV camera sur-veillance in London in an enormous caption of "One Nation under CCTV" right in the field of vision of a surveillance camera – a truly counterhegemonic state-ment which critically tracks current political developments and tendencies, but which, at the same time, depends on the very infrastructure it attempts to criti-cize, as it materializes on its concrete surface. Equally political, and similarly reintegrating the hegemonic and the subversive, are Banksy's visionary 2005 illustrations of children joyfully playing on a beach or of stretches of blue sky left on the grey concrete surface of the separation wall in Palestine near the Ramallah checkpoint, or his recent spraying spree in New Orleans with works

12 Jens Martin Gurr

referencing the Katrina disaster.38 Paradoxically, however, his defacements of urban spaces and surfaces themselves quickly become commodity products sold in posh art galleries. Urban space, appropriated and re-appropriated by individu-al citydwellers for their very own ends and purposes, thus turns into a site of struggle, a battlefield, so to speak, of contesting ideologies, viewpoints, disposi-tions manifest in cultural practices and forms of expression.

Indeed, Banksy's skillful appropriations of urban spaces walk the thin line be-tween subversion and containment. For several years now, there has literally been a form of Banksy tourism with guided tours to the sites of his nocturnal visitations – including published guidebooks referencing key locations.39

Another case in point is London-based artist Slinkachu, who, for his street art installations Little People in the City40, arranges tiny plastic figures less than an inch in size (but with astonishing attention to detail) in amusing, dramatic, ob-scene or grotesque constellations and places them in various locations in the city – public parks, tube stations, shopping centres, train windows, phone booths or simply in the street. There is, for instance, a tiny figure looking up at a human-sized scaffolding with a minute note warning "Danger – Giants working above", an equestrian sculpture not even rising above the grass placed close to its life-sized "model", G.F. Watts's sculpture Physical Energy in Kensington Gardens, or a man, rifle still pointing at a dead bumble-bee about his size, telling a girl with her teddy bear hiding behind his back that "They're not pets, Susan". The central work of art, though, arguably are not the figures themselves, but the pho-tographs taken of the installations, usually two juxtaposed photographs – a wide-angle shot of the figures barely visible in their larger surroundings and a close-up revealing the details: One of the more astonishing such pairs of photographs are those of a real-life commuter on a London tube, reading a paper, with a mi-nute replica (again, less than an inch in size), reading a miniature copy of the paper including tiny images and captions, arranged to sit on a tiny metal ledge just around a train window. It is only once one has seen the close-up of the tiny figure in the window that one notices what initially seemed a mere speck of dust in the window next to the commuter in the photograph. In all these cases, it is the juxtaposition of the tiny figures with their overwhelmingly large surround-ings which replicates and intensifies the contrast between the human body, its individual actions and maneuvers, and its often overpowering urban surround-ings.

Thus, though frequently striking in themselves, it is, more often than not, only the effect of the mediation by means of photographs and the caption underneath the photograph that gives the installations their full poignancy and their fre-quently subversive energy, as with the group of tiny policemen, police tape and an emergency vehicle to scale, next to a towering pile of dog dirt. What is mere-

38 Cf. "Protest aus der Dose", Der Spiegel 36/2008, 175. 39 Cf. Martin Bull, Banksy Locations & Tours: A Collection of Graffiti Locations and Pho-

tographs in London (London, 32008). 40 Slinkachu, Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu (London, 2008).


ly a striking, amusing or grotesque installation, if photographed and captioned "Terror alert", necessarily suggests political implications at a time when justified fear of terrorism leads to excessive measures of surveillance and control and when every dog turd may be suspicious in what is the world's most closely surveilled city. Finally, it is worth noting that it is only in the mediatized form of photographs that these installations can be turned into a marketable good, while the tiny installations themselves are gifts to be enjoyed and marveled at for free by anyone lucky enough to spot them.

The works of Banksy and Slinkachu thus exemplify most of my central no-tions and ideas outlined above: They subversively engage with the imposed or given surfaces and spaces of the city and by means of sheer size (or minuteness) and the materiality of their inscription onto or integration into these surfaces and spaces draw attention to their dimensions, turn apparently stable environments into fleeting projection screens for visions and revisions of a new urban order, humanize, semanticize and poeticize the forbidden, sterile and disenchanted concrete waste lands, and often playfully reveal an awareness of their own commodity value as fashionably subversive forms of cultural expression adding to the cultural prestige of the British capital and its reputation for chic urbanity.

Urban cultural practices, which are designed to work within the confines im-posed upon the city inhabitant, may thus indeed take very different shapes, as these two examples have only hinted at. Moreover, as the analysis of Slinkachu's tactics of appropriating cityscapes has indicated, it seems that a systematic ex-ploration of 'urban tactics' within the limits and boundaries of a metropolitan topography needs to resort to yet a further heuristic category, which can be de-scribed as the 'mediacy' of the urban cultural practice employed by individual or collective 'urban players' to appropriate and negotiate the spatial dimension of their very specific urban environment. This relational category yields a further specification of the forms and functions of urban cultural expression, as it pro-vides a continuum between more direct and more indirect forms of negotiating urban space.

Among the more direct 'tactics' of appropriating and redefining urban spaces are, e.g., forms of performance art that explore the architectural and technologi-cal constraints and possibilities of urban environments by integrating the human body into the geometrically exact and highly functional shapes of the city. Thus incorporating the living into the allegedly 'dead,'41 the urban space is resemanticized and put into a new perspective. In contrast to performance art, which frequently requires a specific setting and – in spite of its often spontane-ous appearance – is basically a planned and directed action, (ab)using a given architectural and infrastructural cityscape may also happen 'on the spot,' e.g. in

41 For a fascinating history of the connection between the city and the human body from

classical Athens to the present day, cf. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York, 1974); cf. also Elisabeth Grosz, "Bodies – Cities", Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York, 1995), 103-110.

14 Jens Martin Gurr

specifically urban forms of sports such as skateboarding, BMX, or parcouring, which has recently been hyped as a new form of urban sports.

Another form of immediate engagement with pre-structured urban environ-ments may be seen in the use of walls, roofs or streets as 'canvases' for graffiti and murals, which, more often than not, do not only redefine urban spaces by changing the surface structure through coloring and iconic as well as non-referential forms of expression, but may also contribute to establishing feelings of a shared (ethnic) identity among a particular collective, e.g. by deliberately undermining established versions of colonial history, thus re-writing the past and subverting hegemonic ideologies. Streets, or rather the sidewalk and the traffic signs situated there, can also be appropriated subversively, for instance by creatively modifying a stop-sign to articulate protest against war.

These often merely "decorative" – or annoying, as aesthetic preferences vary – but frequently highly political and subversive forms of street art, although they have long had a cult following, have only recently begun to receive serious scholarly attention42 and have also seen a publishing boom as far as anthologies and collections of images are concerned.

The direct ways of coming to terms with urban environments outlined above are, in the admittedly overwhelming realm of urban cultural forms of expres-sion, complemented by more indirect forms of 'dealing with' the city in fictional and non-fictional 'texts' – in the broadest sense –, ranging from literature to city guides, from the daily news on television to the blockbuster about 9/11. Such medial representations, the sheer quantity of which seems to have been increas-ing in recent years, do not only articulate particular perspectives on the metropo-lis and/or give a voice to their inhabitants, but may also render dystopian or uto-pian urban scenarios, 'possible spaces,' so to speak, which make us aware of (hypothetical) consequences of processes of urbanization. Within urban culture, the city is thus frequently not only the site and location, but also the theme of cultural expression. Urban culture thus serves as a crucial medium of urban self-reflexion.

What this short enumeration of some examples once more helps to illustrate is that both the mediate and immediate tactics of appropriating or negotiating the metropolis, the variety of which still needs to be explored in further detail and in a more systematic and comprehensive way, must not be exclusively conceived of as (critical or non-critical) reactions to urban spaces, as seismographs, so to speak, tracking urban developments and changes in a very sensitive manner. On the contrary, assuming that urban cultural forms of expression do indeed consti-tute a 'force-field' within the larger infrastructural, technological and architectur-al framework of the metropolis, these tactics, as a kind of catalyst, also contrib-ute to shaping our view of the city and thus, being socially and culturally pro-

42 Cf. for instance Cedar Lewisohn, Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution (London, 2008);

Julia Reinecke, Street-Art: Eine Subkultur zwischen Kunst und Kommerz (Bielefeld: 2007); or Katrin Klitzke, Christian Schmidt, eds, Street Art: Legenden zur Straße (Ber-lin, 2009).


ductive, potentially have a significant impact on our understanding and percep-tion of the environment most of us live in.43 Moreover, it is not only people's perception of the city that is altered by cultural forms of expression which use or represent urban spaces. It is the actual development of the city itself which is closely tied to medial representations and appropriations of the metropolis, as Faßler points out, going so far as to state that "urban developments are histori-cally inseparable from media evolutions".44

It may well be argued – and Richard Florida and his more uncritical followers have insistently done so – that vibrant urban culture is a significant factor in contributing to the perception of a city as a "metropolis" for the "creative class", though we may be less prone to exaggerate the significance of culture in this re-gard if we see a vibrant scene as indicative of a metropolitan "feel". Nonethe-less, against the backdrop of the observations made in this essay, it seems vital to conceive of urban culture as an active, highly productive and thus socially, economically and politically relevant parameter in the overall dynamics of urban change and development in the European metropolis.

43 For the production of city images and the effects of such fictional and documentary im-

ages of the city and of self-projected images of different types of cities cf. Short's chap-ter "City Images"; John Rennie Short, The Urban Order: An Introduction to Cities, Cul-ture, and Power (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 414-462.

44 Cf. Manfred Faßler, "Vorwort: Umbrüche des Städtischen", in: Faßler, ed., Die Zukunft des Städtischen: Urban Fictions (Munich, 2006), 9-35, 21, my translation. For the close correspondence between views of the city and developments in literature and the arts cf. several of the contributions in Manfred Smuda, ed., Die Großstadt als "Text" (Munich, 1992). For the way in which fictional images of a city – especially filmic images – come to physically shape the real city, cf. Norman Klein, "Die Imaginäre Stadt: Abwesenheit und Scripted Spaces", in: Regina Bittner, ed., Die Stadt als Event: Zur Konstruktion Ur-baner Erlebnisräume. Edition Bauhaus, vol. 10 (Frankfurt, 2001), 225-231.

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�

Jens Martin Gurr and Berit Michel (eds.)

Romantic Cityscapes

Selected Papers

from the Essen Conference

of the German Society for English Romanticism

Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier

Romantic Cityscapes:

Selected Papers from the Essen Conference

of the German Society for English Romanticism /

Jens Martin Gurr, Berit Michel (eds.).-

WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013

(Studien zur Englischen Romantik, 11)

ISBN 978-3-86821-489-5

Cover illustration: "Theatrical Reflection, or a Peep

at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg Theatre."

Ramo Samee, a juggler, magician, and sword swallower,

juggling on stage. Hand-coloured etching. 20. March 1822.

G. Humphrey, 27 St. James's Street, London.

Cover design: Brigitta Disseldorf

© WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2013

ISBN 978-3-86821-489-5

No part of this book, covered by the copyright hereon,

may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means

without prior permission of the publisher.

WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier

Postfach 4005, 54230 Trier

Bergstraße 27, 54295 Trier

Tel. (0651) 41503, Fax 41504

Internet: http://www.wvttrier.de

E-Mail: [email protected]

Contents

Jens Martin Gurr

By Way of Introduction: Towards Urban Romantic Studies 7

Julian Wolfreys

'Otherwise in London' or, the 'Essence of Things':

Modernity and Estrangement in the Romantic Cityscape 19

Ian Duncan

Human Habitats: The City and the Form of Man 33

Tilottama Rajan

"The signs and shocks of a more radical event":

Poetry After Urbanization in Shelley and Keats 43

Torsten Caeners

Romantic Urbanity and Urban Romanticism: The Metropolis as a Place of Roman

tic Imagination and the Case of Mary Robinson's "London's Summer Morning" 53

Mark J. Bruhn

The Suburbs of the Mind:

Wordsworth's Cambridge and the City Within 67

Kiyoshi Nishiyama

A Cityscape 'to One Who Has Been Long in City Pent' 77

Joel Faflak

"one ample cemetery":

De Quincey and the Urban Space of Moral Management 89

Gerold Sedlmayr

The City as "Hot-bed for the Passions":

Romantic Urbanity and the Discourse of Hygiene 101

Christine Lai

Romanticism and the Eclectic City 111

Rolf Lessenich

Charles Lamb's London Wanderlust 127

Markus Poetzsch

Leigh Hunt's Pedestrian 'Townosophy': Reading London on Two Feet 139

Frederick Burwick

Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London:

Urban Representations and Mirror Reflections 147

Angela Esterhammer

Impersonation in Late-Romantic Urban Performance and Print Culture 155

Anthony John Harding

The London Magazine and the Metropolitan Reader in the 1820s 165

Mihaela Irimia

"No chimney half so foul appears, as doth the human heart":

(S)weeping the City Clean from Blake to Popular Culture 175

Katharina Rennhak

The Politics of an Irish Cityscape;

or Romantic Dublin as a Conspicuous Absence 191

Pascal Fischer

The City in the Anti-Jacobin Novel: A Place of Taste and Terror 203

Kate Scarth

From Village to Suburb: Mr. Knightley's Management of Highbury 215

Drummond Bone

Byron and the City: Nature and Art 225

Kevin Gilmartin

Country and City in Romanticism's Evangelical Revival 233

Cian Duffy

"Nothing in the World Can Equal such a Scene":

Istanbul and the 'Romantic' Sublime 249

Michael Gassenmeier and Martin Seletzky

In Memoriam Hermann Fischer (1922-2009) 257

Frederick Burwick (Los Angeles)

Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London:

Urban Representations and Mirror Reflections

House fires, coach mishaps, street fights, suicides, murders, amongst an array of other

spontaneous urban spectacles, were sure to attract huge audiences whenever they oc-

curred. All of these provided incidents for melodramatic performance as well. So, too,

did the popular events that were announced in advance, such as boat races, horse rac-

es, political speeches at election time, public executions, and bare-knuckle boxing in

an open lot. For the urban working-class, a sports event offered cheap and exciting

entertainment. Among those stage performances pretending to present an accurate and

animated picture of popular interests, William Thomas Moncrieff's Tom and Jerry; or,

Life in London (Adelphi, 26 November 1821) was quick to win popularity for its as-

tute depiction of characters and manners of the sporting crowd. The clever replication

of 'flash' language contributed to an on-stage illusion of off-stage manner. Exactly one

month later (Coburg, 26 December 1821), the confounding of on-stage and off-stage

was carried even further. The mirroring of life and art fostered a new mode of meta-

theatricality and impelled the audience into hyperreality.

The materials for Moncrieff's burletta, including the characters and their distinctive

slang, were all provided in the work of London's most popular sports journalist, Pierce

Egan. Egan wrote as well as a crime reporter. He also made an attempt to write about

the popular theatres and players in his The Life of an Actor (1825). But his true gift

was writing about sports and sports fans. On July 15 1821 appeared the first edition of

Life in London or, the day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant

friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and

sprees through the metropolis. Moncrieff worked rapidly to adapt situation and dia-

logue in order to put these characters on stage, but his haste was no match for Charles

Dibdin, whose Life in London; or, The Day and Night Adventures of Logic, Tom and

Jerry (Olympic, 12 November 1821) was performed two weeks ahead of Moncrieff's

version. Dibdin may have had better songs, but Moncrieff was more successful in rep-

resenting the characters and their 'flash' sporty talk. Adaptations of Egan's popular

work were staged the following year, when George MacFarren sent the London cast of

characters across the channel in Tom and Jerry in France (Coburg, 2 December 1822

and 2 June 1823). The French setting allowed for satire over the controversial Mar-

riage Act of 1822, the validity of the marriage between the Marquis and Marchioness

of Donegal, and several notorious elopements (cf. Conolly 128-29). Barbed allusions

also occurred in Green in France; or, Tom and Jerry's Tour (Adelphi, 6 January

1823). Thomas Greenwood burlesqued the continuing popularity of Egan's characters

in The Death of Life in London; or, Tom and Jerry's Funeral (Coburg, 2 June 1823).

Egan's detailed accounts of horse-races and bare-knuckle boxing won him a coun-

trywide reputation for wit and sporting knowledge. His essays were collected in the

four volumes of Boxiana, or, Sketches of Modern Pugilism (1818-1824). Just as Ellis-

ton sought to address the elite patrons in the boxes as well as the crowd in the gallery

and pit, Egan attempted to write for a wealthier clientele, the devotees of the Turf and

Frederick Burwick

148

the Ring who gathered at the London clubs.1 Having established himself as the coun-

try's leading sports journalist, Egan set the standard for savvy discourse of sport enthu-

siasts. The appeal among the lower and middle-classes resulted in widespread imi-

tation. That domestic and social comedies became models and trend-setters may have

been broadly observed in the popular reception of other plays of the period, but it was

especially true of Tom and Jerry (Farina 50-54). The 'flash' slang was heard not just in

London, but it was picked up in the provinces as well by those who wanted to show

themselves smart and trendy.

The extraordinary popularity of Tom and Jerry was thus upheld as enthusiastically

in the provinces as in the metropolis. It was a play which exhibited the phenomenon of

art imitating life, and promptly propagated as life imitating art. Performances succeed-

ed in popularizing and disseminating the very sort of speech and manners it presumed

to represent. The Theatre Royal in Newcastle upon Tyne, a port city famous for glass

manufacturing and coal shipping, benefited from fifteen years of management under

Stephen Kemble, and subsequent to 1818 was again enjoying competent productions

under Vincent De Camp.2 Tom and Jerry, as the playbill announces, opened in New-

castle on Monday, February 17 1823. Because the main interest was in rendering the

'flash' of London, even the playbill adopted the lingo of the play's dialogue and prom-

ised

Fun, Frolic, Fashion, & Flash […] through the Medium of Stage Effect, the correct Por-

traiture of Life, delineating, in TWENTY NEW SCENES, a Variety of Incidents, Acci-

dents, Occurrences, and Acquaintances, liable or likely to intrude themselves upon the

Notice of a STRANGER in LONDON. The whole intended to portray, or rather to ani-

mate some of the most interesting Chapter's in PIERCE EGAN'S highly popular Work.

The Proemium cites Hamlet's advice to the Players (III.ii):

[T]he proper End of the Drama is – 'To hold as 'twere the Mirror up to Nature, to shew

Virtue in her own Feature, Vice [scorn] her own Image, and the very Age and Body of the

Time its Form and Pressure.'

In terms of this purpose, Moncrieff claims for his play "a Place in the very highest

Class of the Drama," for it affords an accurate depiction of "Life in London" without

exposing the viewer to the hazards or the expense of an actual excursion through the

streets of London.

An animated Picture of every Species of Life in London, deprived through the filtering

Stone of the Proprietor's critical Care, of all that might disgust or offend even the most

fastidious Imagination, that Experience of the Economy of Life, and that Knowledge of

1 Egan, Anecdotes (1827). Real Life in London, a more polished version of his Life in Lon-

don, involving higher class counterparts to Tom and Jerry, was presumed to have been

written by a formally schooled author; cf. Ward and Waller 14: 248: it "is a pleasanter

book than its prototype […] the author had a purer style, a cleaner mind and a wider

knowledge of London than Egan."

2 Stephen Kemble managed the Newcastle Theatre Royal from 1790 to 1806, William Mac-

ready from 1806 to 1818, and Vincent De Camp from 1818 to 1824.


149

many of its Stumbling Blocks, which have heretofore only been purchased at the Expense

of many Pounds, much Time, and frequently no small Share of Peace and Health, may

here, in a few Hours, for merely a Playhouse Admission, be effectually and pleasantly ac-

quired and secured.

The Proemium again invokes Hamlet's simile of a play as the mirror of life:

As in a Mirror, Life is, in this piece, shewn in all its Varieties – Virtue sees its own Fea-

ture, Vice its own Image, and the Age and Body of the Time is furnished by the Author,

Artist, and Dress-Maker, with its Form and Pressure.

The reader of the playbill is then given a few hints of what to expect in the actions of

the three male principles – Tom, Jerry, and Logic played by Decamp, Butler, and

Mudie – and the three females – Kate, Jane, and Sue performed by Mrs. Clifford, Mrs.

Garrick, & Miss Turner, each disguising themselves to pretend to be the Honorable

Miss Trifle, then Kate and Jane donning breeches to play Sir Jeremy Bragg and Cap-

tain Swaggery, while Sue stepped forth as Mrs Mummery, the Fortune Teller. And if

three roles apiece were not enough, each appeared respectively as Nan the Match Girl,

Poll the Ballad Singer, and Sal the Pretty Singer.

TOM and JERRY it will be seen, have a moral Purpose and an aim; they are not left on the

Town, but conducted to a final Home. Sue and Kate are proved to be very different Char-

acters from those they have been represented and the Public will be glad to learn how their

old Friend LOGIC was extricated from the disagreeable Situation in which his original

Godfathers left him.

Heavy snow had prevented John Waldie, one of the theatre proprietors, from attending

the opening. Not arriving from Berwick until February 19, Waldie found the perfor-

mance on that evening disrupted by disaster and panic. "Some gas lights exploded,"

Waldie reports, "& seven or 8 people were killed – & others wounded in getting out of

the gallery, tho' the explosion was of no consequence" (Waldie 36: 215). Not until the

following Monday, February 24, was he able to watch the complete performance. "I

never saw it before – it is well done, but very silly, tho' a correct portrait of the scenes

of London life." The acting was good, he conceded, and "some of the scenes are di-

verting, but it is only good as a sketch of London – & is too long" (Waldie 36: 218).

"A sketch of London," however, was precisely what the audience craved, and for

that purpose most would have readily agreed with the playbill that the price of play-

house admission was a cheaper and safer way to learn the 'Ups and Downs' of "Life in

London." If Waldie were to complain of the impact of Tom and Jerry on Life in New-

castle it would have been that the play was far longer than he surmised, for it was still

being played in the echoing of the 'flash' phrases and the singing of the "Rum Glees

and Kiddy Catches" heard in shops and stores all around town.

When Moncrieff held up the mirror that reflected the speech, manners, and habits

of life in London, the consequence was a virulent propagation, a rampant imitation of

the imitation. With this sense of a spectator's eagerness to mimic the roles of the stage

performers, the proprietors of the Royal Coburg invested in the construction of a full

scale mirror that would allow the entire audience to behold themselves on stage (cf.

fig. 1).

Frederick Burwick

150

Fig. 1. "Theatrical Reflection, or a Peep at the Looking Glass Curtain at the Royal Coburg

Theatre." Ramo Samee, a juggler, magician, and sword swallower, juggling on stage.

Hand-coloured etching. 20 March 1822. G. Humphrey, 27 St. James's Street, London.


151

When the crowds gathered at the Coburg on December 26, 1821, they were treated to

a sight beloved by noisy egomaniacs and quiet narcissists: a mirror reflection of them-

selves. The proprietor had installed a "Looking Glass Curtain," a "Splendid Spectacle

[...] Unequalled [...] in any Theatre in the World," reflecting "in one Lucid Sea of

Glass, the Entire Audience." "Extending to the utmost limits of the Proscenium,"

measuring "36 Feet in Height and 32 Feet in Width," this "Looking Glass Curtain"

facilitated the 'seeing and being seen' that was for many a primary reason for attending

the theatre. The five-ton curtain was an extravagant materialization of the operative

metaphor of performance: the purpose of which, to repeat Hamlet once more, is "to

hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature" (III.ii.17-19). Once the mirroring curtain was

raised, the mirroring performance commenced. Playbills frequently proclaimed au-

thentic representations of the crimes and scandals of the metropolis. On this occasion,

however, the audience was treated to a Gothic melodrama, The Temple of Death,

"'which has for months past excited the Wonder and Admiration of all Paris, now first

adapted to the English Stage, with a degree of Magnificence and an extent of Machin-

ery never before attempted."

Even before that mirroring curtain was raised for a performance of Tom and Jerry,

the spectators at the Royal Coburg already witnessed themselves on stage, were al-

ready experiencing that peculiar pleasure of beholding their own images communica-

ting their personal antics from within the proscenium arch. When the curtain rose the

metatheatrical illusion had been fully solicited. Not just the mirroring of their grimac-

es and gestures, the spectators were soon mimicking the speech and manners that Egan

or Moncrieff had supposedly copied from real life. Actors imitating life enter a closed

circuit with spectators soon imitating actors. Even though the theater, as theater, is

recognized as a place for performance and representation, not of actual reality, part of

its illusion is often invested in denying the illusion, so that spectators may "accept

those signs as signifiers of what they encode," and reduplicate the acting by living "the

peculiar illusion that their preposterous behavior is appropriate" (Huston 114). The

confusion of illusion and reality in the reception of Tom and Jerry is perpetuated both

in the contemporary reviews and in the several imitations and parodies of the original

production. The self-reflexive phenomenon of the stage representation of life in Lon-

don is made most apparent when the managers mount a different sort of 'mirror' on the

stage: a play about the fans gathering for the championship boxing match that had just

been held at Warwick on July 19 1825, followed by the appearance of Tom Cannon,

former champion and loser of that bout, engaging in an 'actual' boxing match on stage

with the latest contender, Peter Crawley, the bare-knuckle boxer who was soon to be-

come Heavyweight Champion of England in 1827.

The stage play about a boxing match, so the playbill announced, was to be fol-

lowed by a boxing match on stage. The stage play made use of the characters and dia-

logue already familiar through the many performances of Tom and Jerry. As in the

Newcastle playbill, the playbill for The Fancy at Warwick (Coburg, 1 August 1825)

adopts the slang of the boxing fan as it had been introduced by Egan.

[A] New, Local, Queer, Out and Out, In and In, thorough Bred, Tip-top, Pancratical

Sketch, founded upon Events which have recently excited the Attention of the Sporting

Frederick Burwick

152

World, and in which various regular Sells, Rum Covies, Cannonites and Warders, will see

themselves faithfully depicted.

The various fans, gamblers and sharpers gathering for the event bear such names as

Benjamin Back and Edge, Esq, Harry Hedgeout, Tom Trapall, Timothy Try-it-on,

Frank Flashout, Humphry Hogsbone, Old Grumphorse, and Scorewell. The play opens

the day before the fight, with the crowd gathering at "the Swell's Retreat at the War-

wick Arms, on 18th of July." The intervening scenes depict "the Ladies Chaffing

Club" and the "Gallery at the Inn." But the final scene shifts to the site of the match,

"Mr. Edwards's Field on the Birmingham Road." At this juncture, the re-enactment of

the championship match between Tom Cannor and Jem Ward shifts to a different

plane of representation with Tom Cannon stepping forth to perform as himself:

A 36 Feet Square Stage erected on the Stage of the Theatre [...] (being an exact Rep-

resentation of that on which the late Battle was fought) – the Scene of Action, – arrival of

Tom Cannon, who to gratify the Intense Curiosity of the Public to witness his Muscular

Strength and Prowess, has been engaged at an Immense Expense for 6 Nights only, and

will have the honor of appearing before the Publick in a Set-to with Peter Crawley, the

New Candidate for the Championship, who has offered to stand for that honor till the

Fight is taken out of him for £500. A neat Set-to may be expected, and a good Wind-up

calculated on.

The day of that fight, 19 July 1825, was exceptionally hot, with temperatures recorded

over 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Many of the spectators fainted from the heat and were

carried from the field. Within ten minutes Jem Ward dispatched Tom Cannon and be-

came the new English champion. Having lost the £200 he had invested in himself,

Cannon was trying to recoup his losses with a series of exhibition fights with Peter

Crowley. The crowd at the Coburg packed the performances, prompting the managers

of the Coburg to extend the contract with Cannon and Crowley. The Fancy at War-

wick and the exhibition performances by Cannon and Crowley were continued for an

additional six nights.

Describing the tourist attraction at Knott's Berry Farm near Los Angeles, Umberto

Eco in "Travels in Hyperreality" pondered the confounding of fake and real in the re-

construction of a frontier village school. Costumed in "a bonnet and an ample checked

skirt" a woman played the role of a schoolmarm by offering simple lessons in the 3 R's

to the children of the visiting tourists who seated themselves on the school benches.

The school was a replica, the teacher an actress, but, Eco reports, "I heard one tourist

ask his wife if the children were real or 'fake'" (Eco 8). Similarly, was the sport fan's

'flash' real or fake when repeated by Tom or Jerry? Real or fake when mimicked by a

glass-factory apprentice in Newcastle? Were the pantomime antics mirroring the front

row spectators at the Coburg more or less real than those performed by the Coburg

cast after the mirror curtain had been raised? A replica boxing ring had been built on

the Coburg stage featuring real pugilists in an exhibition match. The spectators, many


153

if not all of them real sports fans, were caught in the same sort of hyperreality3

as the

children in the replica school house of Knott's Berry Farm.

Works Cited

Altick, Richard. The Shows of London A Panoramic History of Exhibitions, 1699-1862.

Cambridge MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1978.

Conolly, Leonard W. The Censorship of English Drama, 1737-1824. San Marino, CA:

Huntington Library, 1976.

Eco, Umberto. "Travels in Hyperreality." Faith in Fakes: Essays [Semiologio quoti-

diano]. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986. 3-58.

Egan, Pierce. Anecdotes (original and selected) of the Turf, the Chase, the Ring, and the

Stage. Embellished with thirteen coloured plates, designed from nature, and etched by

Theodore Lane. London: Printed for Knight & Lacey, 1827.

––––. Boxiana; or, Sketches of ancient and modern pugilism: from the days of the re-

nowned Broughton and Slack to the heroes of the present milling æra! 5 vols. Illus.

George Cruikshank. London: Printed by and for G. Smeeton, and sold by Sherwood,

Neely, and Jones, 1812-1829.

––––. Life in London; or, The day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorne, esq., and his ele-

gant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their ram-

bles and sprees through the metropolis. Illus. Robert and George Cruikshank. London:

Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1821.

––––. The Life of an Actor, the poetical descriptions by T. Greenwood; embellished with

twenty-seven characteristic scenes etched by Theodore Lane; enriched also with sev-

eral original designs of wood, executed by Mr. John Thompson. 1825.

––––. [? ascribed]. Real Life in London, or, The rambles and adventures of Bob Tallyho,

Esq. : and his cousin the Hon. Tom. Dashall, &c., through the metropolis: exhibiting a

living picture of fashionable characters, manners, and amusements in high and low

life. 2 vols. London: Printed for Jones & Co., 1821-1822.

Farina, Jonathan. "Flash Romanticism: The Currency of Urban Knowledge in Tom & Jer-

ry." The Wordsworth Circle 51.3 (Summer 2010): 50-54.

Huston, Hollis. The Actor's Instrument: Body, Theory, Stage. Ann Arbor U of Michigan

P, 1992.

3 In describing the myriad of illusionist displays, Richard Altick in The Shows of London

surveys numerous examples of illusionism and theatricality in popular entertainment. He

does not explore, however, the parallel conditions of 'hyperreality' in the stage effects of

the theaters.

Frederick Burwick

154

MacFarren, George. Tom & Jerry in France, or, Vive la bagatelle; a musical enter-

tainment in three acts [also billed as Tom and Jerry 'Tother Side of the Water]. Lon-

don: Printed for J. Lowndes, 1822.

Milner, Henry M. The Temple of Death; a melodrama in three acts. Translated, altered,

and arranged for the English Stage. London: T.H. Lacy, 1821.

Moncrieff, William Thomas. Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London. An operatic extrava-

ganza, in three acts. London, 1826.

––––. Songs, parodies, duets, chorusses [...] Tom & Jerry, or, Life in London (1821). First

performed at the Adelphi Theatre, Strand, Monday, Nov. 26, 1821; the music selected

and modified [...] by Mr. G.W. Maddison [...]; the costume & scenery superintended

by Mr. J. R. Cruikshanks [sic] from the drawings of himself and his brother Mr. G.

Cruikshanks [sic] Copy 1 frontispiece "Mr. Wrench as Corinthian Tom"; copy 2 fron-

tispiece "Mr. John Reeve as Jerry."

Playbills 174, British Library. Coburg 1818-1823.

Playbills 175, British Library. Coburg 1824-1833.

Playbill, Tom & Jerry. Theatre Royal Newcastle. February 17 1823.

Waldie, John. The Journal of John Waldie: Theatre Commentaries, 1799-1830. Ed. Fred-

erick Burwick. E-Scholarship Repository, California Digital Library, 2008. <http://

escholarship.org/uc/uclalib_dsc_waldie>.

Ward, Adolphus William, and A. R. Waller, eds. Cambridge History of English Litera-

ture. 15 vols. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907-17.

�� !��

The Modernist Poetics of Urban Memory and the Structural

Analogies between ‘City’ and ‘Text’: The Waste Land and Benjamin’s

Arcades Project

Jens Martin Gurr, University of Duisburg-Essen

1. Introduction

Let me begin by juxtaposing two passages: The first is from Kevin

Lynch’s influential exploration of mental representations of cityscapes in

his 1960 The Image of the City. Here, he speaks of urban environments as

surroundings in which

[a]t every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can

hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by

itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events

leading up to it, the memory of past experiences. (Lynch 1960, 1-2)

The second passage is from Michael Coyle’s essay on The Waste Land:

The sense of meaning escaping one on every side, the sense that at any given

point there is more going on than the reader can taken in, is integral to the

experience of the poem (Coyle 2009, 166; cf. also Lamos 1998, 111 et passim).

Taking these corresponding observations on the excess of simultaneous

semiosis in both city and text as a point of departure, this essay sets out to

read Modernist urban poetry and poetics in the light of roughly

contemporary early Urban Studies. For reasons of space, I have to confine

myself to The Waste Land as the paradigmatic urban text of the period and

will have to leave out Pound, T.E. Hulme, Hart Crane and others.

In particular, I propose to read The Waste Land side by side with

Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which has received an astonishing

amount of critical attention in urban studies (and elsewhere) in the last 20

years as arguably the paradigmatic text on urban modernity. I want to

focus on the urban texture of both texts, particularly with regard to how

they represent layers of urban memory. While there are of course

innumerable readings of the city in The Waste Land and a few scholars

have suggested Benjamin as a relevant analogy (cf. Bowen 1994,

Martindale 1996, Perloff 2010, Yang 2011; cf. below), the connection

between urban and literary textures has hardly been elucidated (for a

survey of literary strategies of textual urban simulation, cf. Gurr 2011).

Though one would think it should long have been clear that Coyle is right

in arguing that The Waste Land “is a poem where the most important

things happen on the level of form” (Coyle 2009, 163), most readings

engaging with the poem’s view of the city do so more or less mimetically

on the content level and essentially ask ‘what does it say about London?’

(cf. for instance Day 1965, Johnston 1984, 155-181, Thormählen 1978,

123-140, Versluys 1987, 172-191). In one of the few attempts to explain

the urban texture of Eliot’s text, McLaughlin (2000, 183), for instance,

states that “Eliot’s poem is richly overcrowded with ‘ethnographic

moments’ offering the reader […] an objective correlative for urban

overcrowding.” However, this notion is not extended in any significant

way in an essay that otherwise hardly considers poetic strategies at all (one

of the best discussions of the urban texture of The Waste Land is

Wolfreys’s chapter, which, however, takes an approach entirely different

from mine and only mentions Benjamin in passing, suggesting differences

rather than similarities, 221).

My particular focus in reading Eliot and Benjamin side by side will be

on Benjamin’s notion of “superposition” and the related concept of

“remembering the new”. The underlying view of the city as a palimpsest

and the notion of layered spatialized memory this entails, I believe, accord

well with the poetics of Modernist urban poetry. The Waste Land, I will

argue, is the quintessential poem of urban memory, because the text in its

layering of structures and meanings resembles the urban fabric itself.

I will first comment on the more or less simultaneous origin and

development of modernist poetics in the decades around 1900, which

coincided with the formation of urban studies and particularly of urban

sociology as a field of study. How, we may ask, does Eliot’s text—and by

implication, Modernist urban poetics—situate itself in an ongoing

discussion of ‘the urban’ as the dominant locale of people’s lives in a

period of dramatic urbanization? I will then point out a number of

analogies between The Waste Land and Benjamin’s Arcades Project in

terms of their negotiation of urban complexities; I will here especially look

at the representation of layered and spatialized urban memory in

palimpsestic structures. Finally, I will very briefly comment on how this

ties in with questions of transnational poetics in the period of Modernism.

2. The Modern City and the Origin of Urban Studies

In an enlightening essay on the rise of urban sociology, Ilja Srubar outlines

what he calls “the formation of sociological inquiry by means of

metropolitan perception” (Srubar 1992, 37, my translation). The

underlying point that sociology is essentially and originally an ‘urban’

discipline is hardly new, but his discussion of the importance of the city in

the formation of sociology as a discipline is nonetheless still enlightening.

Srubar speaks of the “four decades around 1900” as the formative period

of (urban) sociology, mentioning Durkheim, Tönnies, Weber, Simmel,

Kracauer and Benjamin as key exponents (Srubar 1992, 38, my

translation). That some of them—including Benjamin—wrote after 1922

is not an issue here. In short, without positing an influence in either

direction, I propose that key concepts in Urban Studies—especially those

of its roughly contemporaneous early exponents—might more

systematically be employed in discussing Modernist city poetry. Parallels

between central concepts in early urban studies on the one hand and the

formal as well as thematic concerns of both British and American

Modernist city poetry on the other hand are hardly surprising, one might

argue: Both made similar observations on a related subject, the modern

city. Raymond Williams and others have of course commented on the

“decisive links between the practices and ideas of the avant-garde

movements of the twentieth century and the specific conditions and

relationships of the twentieth-century metropolis” (Williams 1985, 13; cf.

also Bradbury 1976, 96, Long 1985, 144, Sharpe & Wallock 1987).

Poetry—and especially Modernist poetry with its characteristic strategies

of compression—as a condensed form of expression, it seems, lends itself

to rendering the density and intensity of encounters, social ties and

palimpsestic structures characteristic of the modern metropolis.

A few examples will suffice to establish the connection between

Eliot’s text and the roughly contemporary observations on key urban

phenomena in early Urban Studies: In his influential 1903 essay “The

Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel speaks of the “intensification of

nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change

of outer and inner stimuli” and the “rapid crowding of changing images,

the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the

unexptectedness of onrushing impressions [as] the psychological condi-

tions which the metropolis creates” (Simmel 2004, 13, italics original).

The result, Simmel famously argued, is an intellectualized, indifferent,

blasé attitude of the urbanite, who reduces other city dwellers to their

particular function in a given situation and no longer engages with them as

full personalities. The resulting sense of alienation and isolation in the

crowd is a familiar sentiment in modernist city poetry, not least in The

Waste Land. In this vein, one might think of the “crowd flow[ing] over

London Bridge”, where “each man fixed his eyes before his feet” (Eliot

1974, ll.62, 65). Simmel’s notions entered Anglophone urban discourses

by means of Robert E. Park’s influential essay “The City: Suggestions for

the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment” published

in 1915 as one of the founding essays of the Chicago School of urban

sociology. Park here clearly shows the influence of Georg Simmel, with

whom he had studied for a while around the turn of the century.

In one of the best discussions of the connection between Modernist

form and the texture of the modern city—in which Eliot is only mentioned

in passing—Sharpe and Wallock state:

City and style, object and evocation quickly take on aspects of one another as

the urban environment shapes an aesthetic perception, which in turn produces a

new form of vision of the city. The city is the locus of modernism, and each

aspect of city life seems to generate or demonstrate a characteristic of this

artistic movement—multiplicity of meaning, loss of sequential or causal

connection, breakdown of signification, and dissolution of community. […]

One of the most useful ways of studying the city envisions the urban landscape

as a form analogous to that of a literary composition. (Sharpe and Wallock

1987, 5, 11)

What we might want to trace, in other words, are structural parallels

between urban and literary fabrics and textures. However, while Sharpe

and Wallock propose to study how the city functions like a text, I aim to

show how a text can function like the city in its layering of meanings (the

notion of the city as a text to be read appears to have originated with

Ludwig Börne’s Schilderungen aus Paris (1822-1824); for approaches to

‘reading’ the city, cf. also Alber 1997, Eco 1980, and

Gottdiener/Lagopoulos 1986; for a state-of-the-art collection of essays, cf.

Hassenpflug/Giersig/Stratmann 2011; for an application, cf. Hassenpflug

2010).

3. The City and Urban Memory in Eliot and Benjamin—Collage,

Palimpsest, Superposition I do not, of course, posit any kind of influence, but I do want to suggest

‘elective affinities’ between The Waste Land and Benjamin’s Arcades

Project, which are remarkably similar in their aesthetics of representing

urban textures and particularly urban memory as well as in the structures

and patterns of representation they deploy. Both the Arcades Project and

The Waste Land are essentially topographical: “The Waste Land is a

London poem” (Martindale 1996, 114)—Long even goes so far as to argue

that the “Modernist, fragmented city is virtually the poem’s protagonist”

(Long 1985, 145; cf. also Sharpe and Wallock 1987, 6), while Benjamin is

centrally concerned with Paris. Moreover, both take essential cues from

Baudelaire as arguably the first truly ‘urban’ poet.

While analogies with Benjamin’s work have occasionally been

suggested (cf. Bowen 1994, Martindale 1996, Perloff 2010, Yang 2011),

critics have not yet discussed what I regard as the most illuminating

parallels: Martindale mentions Benjamin in connection with Eliot’s

technique of citation and fragmentation and points out parallels in the

technique of montage, arguing that “The Waste Land comes closer, in its

uses of fragmentation, to the writings of Walter Benjamin” (1996, 131);

Perloff similarly focuses on the poetics of citation (Perloff 2010, 24-49).

Her analysis of Benjamin’s Arcades Project is one of the most intriguing

short discussions, though I believe Perloff does slightly overstate the

‘poeticity’ of the work. Finally, in an insightful essay, Yang ties her

discussion of The Waste Land to some of Benjamin’s preoccupations—the

media, representations of the urban, Baudelaire, and the flâneur as an

urban figure—and does refer to The Waste Land as “an example of the city

archive” (204), but she does not provide a reading of its historical layering

in the light of Benjamin’s urban epistemology and palimpsestic urban

memory as conceptualized in the Arcades Project.

Let me comment on a few structural parallels, the tertium

comparationis being the texture of the metropolis both texts seek to

convey.

The Arcades Project, Das Passagenwerk, which Benjamin worked on

between 1927 and his death in 1940, though the first notes and suggestions

go back to the early 1920s, is a vast collection of about 1000 pages of

some 3500 quotations and thoughts on the 19th-century arcades in Paris,

organized into 36 folders or sections [“Konvolute”] and a number of

essays and outlines. The text is quintessentially a work of fragmentary

historiography (rather than a fragmentary work of historiography),

proceeding as it does, not discursively, but by means of the suggestive

juxtaposition and montage of quotations from over 800 different sources,

ranging from police reports to Baudelaire and from snippets of observation

to more or less aphoristic remarks on methodology. Perloff appropriately

describes Benjamin’s technique as an “astonishing piling up of quoted

passages” (2010, 25) and suggestively states that

the repeated juxtapositions, cuts, links, shifts in register … conspire to produce

a poetic text. … The most sober documentation [of] police edicts regulating

prostitution in 1830 … is placed side by side with an extract from Baudelaire

or Rimbaud (2010, 43).

As Benjamin noted himself, “[t]his work has to develop to the highest

degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately

related to that of montage” (458; all references are to the 1999 English

edition).

In a way remarkably similar to this type of montage, Eliot’s urban

montage in The Waste Land also makes use of various types of distinctly

‘urban’ text—pub conversation, street scene, domestic conversations in

various social classes, snippets from popular songs, the language of

business transaction etc. This type of urban montage allows both texts to

do justice to what urban sociologist Gerald D. Suttles has called “the

cumulative texture of local urban culture” (Suttles 1984, 283), defining

“local urban culture” as “a vast, heritable genome of physical artifacts,

slogans, typifications, and catch phrases” (Suttles 1984, 284). He speaks

of some cities—and both Paris and London would of course be supreme

examples—as places that “have a lot of such culture” (284). Suttles further

mentions

songs that memorialize […] great streets or side streets, homes once occupied

by the famous or infamous, a distinctive dialect or vocabulary, routine festivals

or parades […] dirty lyrics, pejorative nicknames, […] celebrated wastrels, and

so on (Suttles 1984, 284)

This sequence of examples appears striking in the context of both The

Waste Land and The Arcades Project, which both also use such trivia to

suggest local texture. Interestingly, Suttles argues that these items of local

culture are richly interconnected in the minds of community residents in

that they mutually evoke each other. The “mnemonic relatedness” (Suttles

1984, 294) of such items seem strikingly familiar to readers accustomed to

the textures of Eliot’s and Benjamin’s urban evocations.

In his discussion of the Arcades Project, Irving Wohlfahrt links

Benjamin’s practice to contemporary developments in the arts and speaks

of “Benjamin’s … hypothesis that the montage technique of the

avantgarde points towards the form of presentation necessary today for a

material philosophy of history” (Wohlfahrt 2006, 266, my translation). In

a related vein, Bolle comments on the “constellation of thousands of

buildings blocks of text which are used in an attempt to translate the order

of the city into the syntax of a historiographic text” (Bolle 2010, 19, my

translation). In our context of textualizing the city, it should be noted that

the German title Passagenwerk—in contrast to the English Arcades

Project, where this connection is lost—by virtue of the ambiguity of

‘Passagen’ as both ‘arcades’ and ‘passages (of text)’ suggests a

convergence of urban and textual structures that is profoundly resonant in

Benjamin’s opus magnum (cf. also Bolle 2010, 19).

In the Arcades Project, the complex structure of the urban fabric with

its multiple interconnections is represented in a strongly non-linear,

hypertextual form (cf. Perloff 2010, 31ff.; Bolle 2010, 22). There are, for

instance, multiple cross-references and some 30 different symbols marking

thematic clusters across the different folders. This system of internal

cross-references instead of a linear presentation strongly invites a kind of

hypertextual reading following certain threads or thematic strands; Bolle

here speaks of a “network-like reading” (Bolle 2010, 25; my translation;

cf. also Bolle 2005).

The device of recurring phrases in a text suggesting non-linear

connections between different parts is also apparent in The Waste Land.

Though a number of critics have commented on the analogies between

hypertext and modernist collage writing, citing The Waste Land as an

example (Bolter 1991, 131; Barrett 2005, n.p.; Gray 2001; Yang 2011,

190, 199), the exact way in which the structure of The Waste Land appears

to leave behind linearity and to mimic urban complexity, as I see it, has

not really been pointed out. One might begin with the archetypal ‘city’

passage:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. (Eliot 1974, ll. 60-68)

This passage is referred to again twice in the course of the text, the first

time in “The Fire Sermon”: “Unreal City/Under the brown fog of a winter

noon” (ll. 207-208) and again, more cryptically but unmistakably, in the

final “What the Thunder said”:

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal (ll. 373-76.

Though Coyle briefly comments on some of the characteristic

repetitions, he reads them as part of “a poetic texture that challenges

readers to look for pattern and [calls] attention to the very processes of

interpretation” (2009, 163). While this is certainly reasonable, it does not

do justice to the specific way in which meanings are being overlaid and

multiplied in the text. Gray correctly, I believe, discusses these internal

links as functioning in analogy to “anchor links” on websites (Gray 2011,

237), though he appears to me to overstate the “digital” nature of the text.

The repetition of characteristic phrases, it seems, for its function

depends on Eliot’s technique of extreme condensation enabled by the

multiple allusions: In only a few words of quotation or allusion, all the

associations connected to a given intertext and frequently even its original

contexts are imported into the poem and add to its semantic potential.

Here, of course, it is the familiar allusion to Dante’s Inferno in lines 63

and 64 (cf. Eliot’s own note; Eliot 1974, 81)—and thus the familiar topos

of London as the ‘infernal city’ they invoke—which are carried on into the

further “Unreal City” passages (for London as an infernal place, among

many other examples, cf. Denham’s “Coopers Hill” (1642), Wordsworth’s

Prelude, Shelley’s “Peter Bell the Third”, Thomson’s “The City of

Dreadful Night” or Phillips’s “ A Nightmare of London”).

The apocalyptic lines invoking the “[f]alling towers” of a sequence of

cities destroyed or threatened with destruction at some point in their

history is here overlaid with the infernal associations invoked by the mere

repetition of “unreal.” The technique appears to be the following: Incisive

allusions create additional levels of meaning which are then channeled into

further passages by means of suggestive repetition, an effect that is also

achieved, for instance, with the Philomel associations established in “A

Game of Chess,” where the phrase “by the barbarous king so rudely

forced” (ll. 99-100) and the “Jug Jug” (l. 103) of the nightingale’s song are

established, which are later recalled in “The Fire Sermon” (ll. 203-206).

This double effect on the one hand provides a means of leaving behind the

linearity of print; on the other hand, it suggestively allows for an extreme

multiplication and condensation of meaning appropriate to the

representation of complexity in the modernist city.

A further parallel lies in the fact that both The Waste Land and—even

more centrally—the Arcades Project foreground a distinct flâneur

perspective on the metropolis. The importance of the flâneur of course is

reinforced by the prominent role Baudelaire as the quintessential 19th-

century city poet plays in both texts: in Benjamin’s work, the folder on

Baudelaire makes for about one fifth of the entire text, and Baudelaire is a

constant presence throughout, but Baudelaire also, of course, repeatedly

features in the central “Unreal City” passage, not least in the notorious

direct quotation of “You hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon

frère!” (Eliot 1974, l. 76). Both for Benjamin and for Eliot, Baudelaire was

a major figure in attempting to comprehend and represent the modern city;

Benjamin even owed central concepts of his historiography and cultural

critique to Baudelaire’s poetics (cf. Bolle 2010, 38; cf. also Bowen 1994,

31f.). What is more, the sentiment of being lost and isolated in the crowd

that is central to the “Unreal city” passage in The Waste Land is of course

one that Benjamin is fundamentally concerned with: “[The flâneur] is the

solitary and lonely man in the crowd, who knows about his solitariness

and loneliness” (Hassenpflug 2006, 10, my translation). The sense of

observing disconnected scenes of urban life that we hardly ever witness

from beginning to end but rather, as the flâneur might, in glimpses,

contributes to a flâneur perspective in The Waste Land, and Michal Coyle

appropriately argues that the “the poem positions us as that artist-as-

spectator-of-modern-life whom Charles Baudelaire called the flâneur”

(Coyle 2009, 159; cf. also Yang 2011, 196).

How, in addition to suggesting the “cumulative texture of local urban

culture” and its memorialization (sensu Suttles), do these observations

relate to the poetics of urban memory?

In the Arcades Project, Benjamin develops a notion of the

interpenetration of different layers of time and of their simultaneous co-

presence in urban space, a phenomenon he refers to as “superposition”.

This concept is never set out discursively in any coherent way by

Benjamin; thus, what Bolle (2000, 413) states about Benjamin’s notion of

historical cognition, namely that is has to be re-constructed from a large

number of fragments scattered throughout the Arcades book, is also true of

his notion of superposition and the reading of the layers of meaning in

urban history. My reading of Benjamin’s notion of “superposition” is

indebted to Dieter Hassenpflug, who has explored its implications for

urban semiotics. Hassenpflug summarizes the idea as follows:

[Superposition is] the ability to remember the new—for instance by regarding

present urban elements as elements of a spatialised memory and, in so doing,

as anticipations of prospective urban realities. … The technique of

superposition points to history which is preserved in the elements of cities

(Hassenpflug 2011, 54).

Given a certain frame of mind—and Benjamin clearly characterizes

this frame of mind as that of a flâneur—this simultaneous co-presence can

be perceived and understood by an urban observer. He even speaks of this

“interpenetration and superposed transparency” of different times in a

given space as the “perception of space [unique to] the flâneur” (1999,

546): “Thanks to this phenomenon, anything that ever potentially

happened in a space is perceived simultaneously. Space winks at the

flâneur: ‘Well, whatever may have happened here?’” (1999, 418,

translation modified; cf. also 4, 390, 392, 418, 462, 841, 854, 879f.). Thus,

superposition refers to both the temporal layering and to the ability to

perceive it; Hassenpflug even refers to it as a “technique” (2011, 54).

In an excellent discussion of Benjamin’s view of modernity in the

Arcades Project, Brüggemann speaks of two types of modernity,

represented by Breton and Le Corbusier, of which the former conceives of

the metropolis as “a memory and image space of mutually overlaying and

interpenetrating periods” (Brüggemann 2000, 595, my translation).

Though he does not comment on Benjamin’s concept of “superposition”

here, it lies close at hand in the notion of the city as a time-spanning space

of layered memory, an understanding which clearly anticipates all the still

current notions of the ‘city as palimpsest’ (for various aspects of this, cf.

Assmann 2009, Butor 2000, Freud 1986, 16-18; Harvey 1989, 66;

Hassenpflug 2006 and 2011; Huyssen 2003; Martindale 1995; Sharpe &

Wallock 1987, 9; Suttles 1984.)

The remarkably similar way in which the structure of The Waste Land

suggestively establishes a layered texture of urban memory again partly

depends on the combination of extreme condensation by means of

multiple allusions with the repetition of key phrases which connect

different sections of the text. However, the textual equivalent of the

palimpsestic layering of memory as spatialized in the city is primarily

achieved through the layering of texts from different periods, as in the

layering of Spenser’s pastoral view of the river Thames into contemporary

London in “The Fire Sermon” (“Sweet Thames run softly till I end my

song”, ll. 176, 183f.), of Ophelia’s parting words into the pub conversation

(l. 172), or in the sudden appearance of a combatant from the Punic Wars

in the crowd on London bridge (l. 70).

This collapsing of past and present into a timeless continuum

effectively suggests the layers both of physically built urban fabric (where,

for instance, an underlying medieval layout is still visible in even the most

heavily bombed and rebuilt European city) and of memory in the

contemporary city. In this context, it is remarkable that classical scholars

have even pointed out the use of “palimpsestic superimposition”

(Martindale 1996, 137) as a poetic technique in the work of Eliot’s revered

idol Virgil—for instance, they cite the passage in which Aeneas walks

over sites of later Roman grandeur in book VIII of the Aeneid (cf.

Martindale 1993, 50-52 and Reeves 1999, 13 et passim).

If we follow Martindale’s distinction between two “models for our

understanding of the past, the first historical and diachronic, the second

archaeological and synchronic” (1996, 117), the notion of the past in The

Waste Land clearly adheres to the ‘synchronic camp’. Martindale

appropriately refers to “Eliot’s theory of poetry [as] in part an

‘archaeological’ one, in terms of recessive layers of meaning [which are]

brought to simultaneous life” (116, also 115).

This “archaeological and synchronic” notion of the co-presence of the

past in the present suggests a philosophy of history according to which, as

we later famously read in the opening of “Burnt Norton,” “all time is

eternally present” (Eliot 1974, l. 4). However, nearer the time of writing

the Waste Land, Eliot famously outlined this view in Tradition and the

Individual Talent, where he defines what he calls “the historical sense”:

[The historical sense] involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the

past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely

with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the

literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his

own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

(Eliot 1975, 38; for Eliot’s notion of literary tradition in the light of the

palimpsest, cf. Dillon 2007, 37 and 61)

Though we should be wary of uncritically reading into The Waste Land

Eliot’s aesthetics as outlined in the essay (which appears to be far more

aesthetically conservative than his practice especially in The Waste Land),

I find this a remarkably close textual equivalent to the notion of

“superposition” and the presence of the past in the physical urban

environment as Benjamin outlines it. Thus, although the largely negative

evaluation of the city from Eliot’s early poetry onwards (cf. Gordon 1977,

19; Versluys 1987, 173) contrasts with Benjamin’s more positive views,

the textual strategies of attempting to simulate urban textures and the

layering of urban memory are remarkably similar.

4. Conclusion: Ideological Implications—and a Transnational Poetics

of Urban Memory?

It is tempting to argue that ideologically—certainly if one thinks in terms

of ‘left’ and ‘right’—there can hardly be parallels between Eliot and

Benjamin; however, a different picture emerges if one considers their

frequently deeply pessimistic historical thought and the ambivalent sense

that reconstruction and rebirth in many ways require previous destruction.

For although their political conclusions differ drastically, Eliot’s extreme

conservatism sharply clashing with Benjamin’s highly unorthodox

messianic Marxism, their cultural diagnoses and perceptions of history are

remarkably similar.

Bowen’s excellent essay “The Politics of Redemption: Eliot and

Benjamin” is illuminating here. Bowen approaches Eliot through

Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and persuasively

argues for a shared diagnosis of history as catastrophic. In this sense,

Benjamin’s famous ninth thesis, in which, inspired by Klee’s “Angelus

Novus”, he describes history as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling

wreckage upon wreckage … while the pile of debris … grows skyward”

(Benjamin 1969, 257f.) is suggestively paralleled by Eliot’s view of

“contemporary history” as an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy”

in his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (Eliot 1975, 177). Thus, a

shared sense of cultural crisis and the recognition that the only form of

writing that can possibly do it justice is one that “register[s] in its very

fabric the marks of loss, pain and fragmentation” (Bowen 1994, 43) leads

to the rejection of totalizing discursive approaches or ‘grand narratives’

and to the privileging of fragmentary attempts at the representation of

historical memory. Both The Waste Land and the Arcades Project

exemplify literary textures that lend themselves to representing the city as

a space where such assemblages of wreckage and fragments condense into

multiple layers of spatialized memory.

Finally, the question arises in how far we can speak of a transnational

form of urban poetics and urban memory here, besides the obvious view of

Eliot as a crucial figure in a ‘transatlantic Modernism’? A few suggestions

must suffice here: First, Eliot not only superimposes levels of the history

of London upon one another, but in a sense makes London the successor

of previous cities of empire—“Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna

London” (Eliot 1974, ll. 374f.). Second, we can speak of the transnational

migration of the flaneur sensibility, with a direct lineage from Poe’s “Man

of the Crowd” set, interestingly, in London, via Baudelaire, who not only

translated Poe but also saw him as a major influence, to transatlantic Eliot

on the one hand and to Benjamin’s deeply Francophile Arcades Project on

the other hand. Third, it might even be argued that the mingling of

different voices and quotations from a range of languages and cultures

suggests the cultural multiplicity of the metropolis and in a sense makes

the Waste Land a transcultural text, though I am not sure I read either The

Waste Land or Eliot’s remark about “the whole of the literature of Europe”

in quite that way; despite the references to Buddhist and Hinduist

traditions in “The Fire Sermon” and “What the Thunder Said” sections,

the poem seems to me to be deeply Eurocentric in its cultural allegiances.

A further transnational element has been suggested to lie in what

David Harvey has famously called “time-space compression” (Harvey

1989, 260ff). In this vein, Yang argues that Eliot’s text points forward to

an age in which “the conception of the urban is no longer synonymous

with locale, [in which] the time-eliminating and space-spanning properties

of the new information technologies are creating an urban civilization

without cities” (Yang 2011, 194). Yang does not make this explicit, but

this would tie the text to discussions in the wake of David Harvey, Manuel

Castells and other urban scholars who theorize about the globalized

network society. In addition to believing that the entire discussion about

the ubiquity of the urban in an age without cities is seriously misleading

(which is another discussion altogether), I find somewhat problematic this

tendency of ascribing prophetic sensibilities to Eliot and others. Read

simply in the light of roughly contemporary urban theory, of a

preoccupation with urbanization and its cultural consequences, and of a

concern with literary strategies of simulating layers of urban memory,

Eliot’s poem significantly gains contextual significance and cultural

embeddedness.

What is most ‘transcultural’ here, it seems, is simply the experience of

the modern metropolis—Paris or London, Berlin or Vienna—with its

diversity, heterogeneity and complexity, its palimpsest of historical layers

of memory, the overwhelming sense of ubiquitous semiosis and sensual

overload, as well as the anthropological and social consequences of this

metropolitan way of life, and finally the palimpsestic layering of urban

memory characteristic of the European city. This experience, similar as it

must have been across different modern metropolises central to the

Modernists endeavour, appears to have engendered remarkably similar

aesthetic responses highlighting the affinities between literary textures and

the urban environments they respond to.

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Jens Martin Gurr, Wilfried Raussert (Eds.)

Cityscapes in the Americas

and Beyond

Representations of Urban Complexity in

Literature and Film

Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingüe

Copublished by

Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier

Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond

Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film / Jens Martin Gurr, Wilfried Raussert (Eds.). – (Inter-American Studies | Estudios Interamericanos; 4) Trier : WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011

ISBN 978-3-86821-324-9 Tempe, AZ : Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingüe

ISBN 978-1-931010-82-5 Cover Artwork: Daniel Bläser Cover Photographs: Elisabeth Hagopian and Jens Martin Gurr Cover Design: Brigitta Disseldorf Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cityscapes in the Americas and beyond : representations of urban complexity in literature and film / Jens Martin Gurr, Wilfried Raussert (eds.). p. cm. -- (Inter-American studies = Estudios interamericanos ; v. 4) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-931010-82-5 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-3-86821-324-9 (alk. paper) 1. American fiction--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Fiction--20th century--History and criticism. 3. City and town life in literature. 4. Inner cities in literature. 5. Cities and towns in literature. 6. Public space in literature. 7. City and town life in motion pictures. 8. Cities and towns in motion pictures. I. Gurr, Jens Martin, 1974- II. Raussert, Wilfried. PS374.C5C55 2011 809.3'9358209732--dc23 2011026993 © WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011 No part of this book, covered by the copyright hereon, may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without prior permission of the publisher.

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Contents

JENS MARTIN GURR AND WILFRIED RAUSSERT Introduction 1

JENS MARTIN GURR The Representation of Urban Complexity and the Problem of Simultaneity: A Sketchy Inventory of Strategies 11

I. LITERARY IMAGINARIES OF URBAN COMPLEXITY

UTKU MOGULTAY Cracks in the Urban Utopia: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day 39

HATICE BAY

Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things: A Journey into a Thousand Heterotopias and Flows of Becoming 53

BIANCA BRINKMANN AND MARCEL THOENE

The Provincial Metropolis: The Function of the Urban as Dynamic Agency in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies 63

STEFANIE WEYMANN

Performing New York, Narrating Urban Complexity: E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley 77

MELANIE U. POOCH

The Transcultural Novel and the Urban Complexity of Los Angeles: Narrative Transculturation and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange 85

WILFRIED RAUSSERT Global Cities and Cosmopolitanism Re-visited: Inter-American Mobility in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange 99

JULIA BORST Spaces of Violence: The Construction of the Cityscape in Lyonel Trouillot’s Fiction 117

CHRISTINA SEELIGER The City from Afar: Representations of Urbanity in Recent Indian-American Literature 133

vi

MARCUS HARTNER Psychogeography and (In)Sanity: Walking London, New York, and Dubai with Will Self 145

JOSHUA PARKER Simultaneous Narratives: Re-Storing Jewish-American Memory in Berlin 157

II. ENTR’ACTES: INTERMEDIAL EXPLORATIONS OF URBAN COMPLEXITY

BERIT MICHEL Urban Identity in a State of Flux: Strategies of Representing Simultaneity, Chaos, and Complexity in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close 173

FRANK ERIK POINTNER Deep Gutters and Monolithic Blocks: The Representation of Urban Complexity in Eric Drooker’s Graphic Art 197

CHRISTOPH SCHAUB Conflicting Imaginaries of Urban Socio-Cultural Complexity: Diversity and Division in Contemporary U.S.-American Cultural Production 211

III. CELLULOID COMPLEXCITIES

BETSY VAN SCHLUN Berlin—A Mazing Metropolis: Representations in Films of the Weimar Republic 229

BOND LOVE “Architectural jungle” or the “sum of its people”? Policing Post-War Urban Space in Anthony Mann’s Side Street (1950) 243

MIRIAM BRANDEL, MARIE LUISE GLOYSTEIN, JWAN MIRO, SASKIA NOLTE, AND NILS RASCHE The Cinematic City: The Point of Arrival as a Clash of Spaces in the Films

Midnight Cowboy, Great Expectations, and Day Night Day Night 257

GRACIELA MARTÍNEZ-ZALCE Mexico City: Public and Private Spaces in the Work of Four Female Filmmakers 267

CONTRIBUTORS 287

Psychogeography and (In)Sanity:

Walking London, New York, and Dubai with Will Self

MARCUS HARTNER

‘Oh, I see!’ she exclaims, ‘It’s, like, a quest.’

No, no, it is a quest—there’s no likeness

implied. It’s a quest for identity, and a search

to find that urgent commingling of blood and

soil. But no matter what enthusiasm she may

possess, Keisha still has no idea of how to

walk out of JFK.

—Will Self, Psychogeography 48

When Will Self, former enfant terrible of the British literary scene,1 attempts to walk

(!) out of John F. Kennedy International Airport, he is confronted with one of the

purest manifestations of what Guy Debord calls the “dictatorship of the automobile”

(Society 97). Exiting the terminal, he finds himself in a pedestrian’s nightmare—a

place where the modes of modern transportation have been stamped into the environ-

ment, erasing all features of its original scenery, turning the famous airport into a

literal terra incognita: In this virtually ‘uncharted’ land for the bipedal traveller, all

maps are useless; they “show expressways and beltways and parkways—but indicate

no pedestrian rights of way” and it is impossible to tell “if roads are elevated or sunk

in the ground” or if there are sidewalks or hard shoulders (Self, Psychogeography 47).

Consequently, the walk out of JFK is not only potentially dangerous but also possesses

a certain subversive quality: While dodging traffic and climbing crash barriers, Self is

aware that his actions might seem suspicious to the local authorities: “[E]very second I

expect a police siren to squawk and blades of blue light to slash through the orangey

morass” (48). Yet, just like previous cartographers who ventured into unknown lands,

he relishes those obstacles and deliberately assumes the role of the “solitary walker” as

“an insurgent against the contemporary world” (15).

1 Will Self is usually considered a British writer and associated with British literature,

although he is a dual citizen with both a British and an American passport. He himself is

indecisive concerning the question of his nationality and rather likes to define himself as

a ‘London writer’ (cf. Guignery 28). Self has won several literary prizes and published a

considerable collection of novels and short stories as well as a large body of journalistic

work. He famously snorted heroine on John Major’s campaign plane during his cov-

erage of the general election in 1997—a scandal that triggered considerable public

attention in tabloids and major papers at the time. For more detailed biographical in-

formation, cf. Hayes 7-20.

Marcus Hartner

146

However, difficult as exiting JFK on foot may be, Will Self does not enter con-

ceptually unknown territory with his decision to turn walking into a conscious investi-

gation of the “relationship between psyche and place” (11). By engaging in acts of bi-

pedal exploration which he calls ‘psychogeography,’ the author rather ties in with a

long and diverse tradition of urban ambulation. This essay investigates the connections

between Will Self’s ‘psychogeographic’ journeys and the ideas developed by his pre-

decessors. By focusing on his walks in London, New York, and Dubai—rendered in

Psychogeography (2007) and Psycho Too (2009)—, the essay demonstrates that

(despite certain affinities) Self’s approach differs significantly from previous concepts

of psychogeography. His texts develop a version of urban walking that, on the one

hand, signifies a primarily individualistic quest for self-discovery, while on the other

hand, it provides a powerful illustration of the complex nature of urban space.

1. A Very Brief History of Psychogeography

According to Merlin Coverley, the term ‘psychogeography’ is firmly associated with

Paris in the 1950s, where it was coined and popularized by Guy Debord and the

Situationist movement as the study of the intersection of geography and psychology

(cf. 31, 85ff.). However, the practice of capturing the complexities of urban space by

means of rambling through the city has a number of forerunners, among whom critics

have named the poet William Blake or the writer Thomas de Quincy (cf. Baker 326;

Coverley 38ff.). Yet, most people will associate the figure of an urban wanderer first

and foremost with that of the flâneur. Inaugurated in the works of Poe, Baudelaire, and

Walter Benjamin, the flâneur has indeed come to serve as arguably the most prominent

figure of the urban wanderer in our cultural imagination.2 Heralding “the emergence of

a new type of city” that can no longer be comprehended in its entirety (Coverley 60f.),

the flâneur is both product and artistic producer of the modern metropolis, which has

become an entirely “strange and exotic place” (62). For Baudelaire he is a ‘hero’ of

modernity, anonymously walking the complex spaces of modern urban life in order to

explore this uncharted territory:

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of the birds and water of fishes. His passion

and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for a

passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heat of the multitude,

amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be

away from home and yet to find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at

the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world … (9)

While Baudelaire, thus, still depicts an idealized version of the flâneur as a figure es-

sentially ‘at home’ in the metropolis, the image soon becomes less optimistic. For

Walter Benjamin, for example, the industrial city constitutes a terrain increasingly

2 For an introduction to the figure of the flâneur, cf. Baker 191; Coverley 57-80; Jenks.

For a discussion of gender in relation to flânerie, cf. Wolff.

Psychogeography and (In)Sanity

147

hostile to the flâneur, who is “reduced to little more than a cog in the machine” of the

commercial forces ruling the modern world (Coverley 64; cf. Benjamin). No longer

the hero but rather the victim of modernism, the figure acquires a subversive quality; it

takes a stance against (technological) progress and capitalism which will become a

central characteristic of the Situationists’ notion of psychogeography during the 1950s.

As concepts of the city and its inhabitants continue to change during the twen-

tieth century, the influence of capitalism on all aspects of urban space continues to in-

crease. While the figure of the flâneur remains linked to modernism, the notion of

psychogeography, thus, emerges in a postmodern context, i.e. a culture entirely shaped

by the effects of late capitalism (sensu Jameson). Deeply appalled by this develop-

ment, the situationists “[make] it their business to disrupt the bourgeois worldview”

(Sadler 78) and engage in an ultimately political struggle against what Debord would

later call ‘The Society of the Spectacle.’ In that context, psychogeography constitutes a

practice or technique in the service of this fight.3

In more detail, psychogeography is based on the “postulate that different en-

vironments or ambiences work directly on human feelings and are more or less condu-

cive to desirable states of being or behavior” (Sherringham 162). The inhabitants of a

city are, in other words, as much shaped by their urban environment as they are

responsible for its construction. In order to counter the capitalist nature of urban life, it

is therefore necessary to first investigate the complex relationship of topography and

psyche. Accordingly, Debord defines psychogeography as

the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, con-

sciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective

psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasant vagueness, can thus be applied to the

findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings,

and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit

of discovery. (“Introduction” 8)

Given this interest in the intersection of psychology and geography, the task of the

psychogeographer is to carefully monitor and record “the emotional and behavioural

impact of urban space upon individual consciousness” in order “to promote the con-

struction of a new urban environment” (Coverley 89). For this purpose Debord,

following Chtcheglov (cf. Chtcheglov 6f.; Coverley 83ff.) proposes to analyze the

various emotional influences that different districts or zones of the city exercise on

their inhabitants:

People are quite aware that some neighbourhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they

generally simply assume that elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor

streets are depressing. … In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances,

analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives

rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke.

(“Introduction” 10)

3 For introductions to the Situationists and Guy Debord, cf. Plant; McDonough; Jappe.

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148

The image of the chemist in this quotation has been chosen deliberately since the

psychogeographer’s task is as much scientific as it is political. While the analysis of

the “division of a city into zones of distinct atmospheres” (Debord, “Introduction” 10)

is supposed to be conducted in a spirit of scientific research (cf. Coverley 89f.), the

method for producing such “psychogeographic maps” (Introduction 7), however, has

to exhibit a subversive quality. In order to ensure a “complete insubordination to [the]

habitual influences” of postmodern culture (“Introduction” 7), Debord develops the

theory (or method) of the dérive [“drift”], i.e. the ‘aimless stroll.’ According to

Caroline Bate this technique can be understood as

a more committed and engaged version of the Baudelairian flâneur: to dérive is to drift

through the city, resisting the habitual influences that would ordinarily dictate move-

ment. In this way, the Situationists aimed to subvert the reification of capitalist (spec-

tacular) society by reconstructing the city as a terrain of passion and desire. (118)

As a result, psychogeography has to be understood as a collective and organized effort

to shake up everyday life (cf. Sherringham 164), while it simultaneously constitutes “a

sort of therapy, a fetishization of these parts of the city that could still rescue drifters

from the clutches of functionalism” (Sadler 78).

As the remainder of this essay will argue, Will Self’s ambulatory journeys

through urban space differ from the Situationists’ approach in various important

aspects. Nevertheless, his version of psychogeography clearly stands in the intellectual

tradition outlined above and reveals deep affinities to the ideas of Guy Debord and the

Situationists. In this context, the most evident similarity is the division of urban spaces

into various zones that display distinct qualities and evoke different emotional respon-

ses. By mapping the city in this manner, both Self and Debord reveal a deep and

genuine interest in the complexities of urban space.

2. Explorations of Urban Complexity: ‘Bucolic’ London

Will Self’s fascination with cities, particularly with London, permeates his entire

work. “Nobody really knows how cities work,” he explains in an interview. “They

work through the great sum of a myriad of little things. … But really cities seem to me

incoherent and the fact that they work at all is kind of a miracle, because we only ever

know our own little bit” (qtd. in Guignery 27). For Self, the investigation of this

‘mystery’ is not only one of the underlying motives for his psychogeographic journeys

but also reverberates through his novels and short stories. Particularly London and its

suburbs do not only provide the setting for much of his fictional work but actually

function “as one of Self’s most ambitious and recurring characters” (Hayes 8). Yet,

although his work is generally preoccupied with the “interlocking relationship between

place, identity and cognition” (7), his genuine interest in the intersection of the indi-

vidual and the complexities of urban space becomes most apparent in the renderings of

his psychogeographic walks.


149

Like Debord and the Situationists, Self takes those walks quite seriously. Paying

much attention to detail, he painstakingly records historical, geographical, and emo-

tional characteristics, always remaining alert to the surprising and unfamiliar. Conse-

quently, he not only encounters unexpected sites of multicultural diversity, like a

Muslim praying on a rush beach mat next to Ground Zero, or a South African mini-

mart full of biltong in the heart of London (cf. Psychogeography 29-30, 60); he also

assigns particular emotional essences and associations to specific locations, thereby

dividing his journeys into zones of distinct impressions and psychic ambiances. Thus,

for example, he characterizes large parts of South London as being historically and

psychologically dominated by the industrial “behemoth” of the Battersea Power

Station (21ff.); South Ozone Park in Queens (New York), on the other hand, appears

to be a neighborhood solely inhabited by “Yule entities,” i.e. inflatable Santas as well

as “snowmen, elves, angels and reindeer, all of them twisted out of fibre-optic cabling”

(53) that make a lasting impression on Will Self.

However, his real fascination is with what he calls the “interzones” of urban

space: areas and places where the rural (natural) and the urban (artificial) blend into

each other. Surprisingly, Self encounters a variety of such spaces during his long-dis-

tance walks through the city: Small parks, neglected footways along the embankments

of little rivulets, or boggy meadows between a motorway and a golf club can be found

all over London like streaks of gold that pervade the bedrock of a mountain. They

constitute “neglected and underimagined interzone[s]” (36) of urban space that do not

fit into the common image of the buzzing metropolis and yet do form a substantial part

of it:

This, perhaps, is the hardest thing to explain about the walk to New York: bucolic Lon-

don. “You walked to Heathrow?” people will ask me in succeeding weeks. “Wasn’t that

awfully grim? I mean, didn’t you have to slog along the hard shoulder of the A4?” And

then I tell them: “Oh no, you don’t understand, probably only four of the seventeen-odd

miles were on roads at all, the rest …” are like this: the babbling brook, the damp

tongue of leaf pressed tarmac snaking through the grass, the sentinel yews and tipping

rowans, the massy oaks still in leaf. (35, omission marks and punctuation original)

The unexpected extent to which such zones feature in Self’s psychogeographic ac-

counts lead to a considerably more complex re-imagination of the city. Well outside of

touristic spaces and hidden in-between the networks of modern transportation and

commerce, these zones cannot be observed through the windshield of a car but have to

be traversed on foot. Their existence is not only one of the reasons for Self’s bipedal

journeys, but conjures up a counter-image to the vision of the city as a space of cars,

crowds, progress, technology, and retail. In this context it is hardly surprising that he is

not interested in tidy, well-kept municipal parks with picturesque cafés; his attention is

devoted to neglected, “unmade environments” where forgotten manhole-covers and

crumbling concrete sluices have been reclaimed by the undergrowth, or where a dis-

carded farm on the way to Heathrow has turned into a soggy moor, “the gates to its

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150

fields festooned with fading tape: ‘Foot and Mouth Disease KEEP OUT’” (Psycho

Too 31).4

In such spaces, Self argues, “country and city do battle for the soul of a place”

(154). Here, the ‘familiar’ turns into the ‘uncanny’ and vice versa as the interzone

simultaneously conveys impressions of growth and decay. The common image of the

environment being destroyed by civilization is thus (partially) reversed: The interzone

foregrounds the consuming quality of nature and emphasizes the transience of culture.

In this respect, Self’s psychogeography exhibits a dystopian tinge, which reminds one

of the fiction of J.G. Ballard—a writer Self calls “the purest psychogeographer of us

all, ever dissolving the particular and the historical in the transient and the psychic”

(25).5

3. Changing Idols of Capitalism: New York and Dubai

According to Michel de Certeau, one of the characteristics of the modern city is the

juxtaposition of two perspectives: the point of view of the ‘walker’ and that of the

‘voyeur.’ While the voyeur is associated with the skyscraper, the walker belongs to

“the ordinary practitioners of the city” and can be found at street level. “To be lifted up

to the summit of the World Trade Center,” he explains in this context, “is to be lifted

out of the city’s grasp” (127). The view from above accordingly transfigures the

“spectator” into a “voyeur” who is at a distance from (real) city life and looks down

“at the bewitching world” from a godlike position (127). With this separation, de

Certeau establishes a general opposition between ‘up’ and ‘down,’ assigning power to

the view from the skyscrapers, while associating the street level with the space of

(ordinary) men, “whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write

without being able to read” (128). De Certeau’s analysis (first published in 1980)

draws on the example of Manhattan, because in his point of view “New York is the

apotheosis of the modern city” (Coverley 104). Nowhere in the world, he seems to

suggest, is there a greater distance between the street-level and the top of the sky-

scrapers. Consequently, the World Trade Center represents the “most monumental

figure of Western urban development” (de Certeau 128), and New York generally sig-

nifies a quite exceptional and “gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and

production” (127).

4 In this context, Self mentions his favorite film director Andrei Tarkovsky. “His films,”

he explains, “are full of locations such as these: unmade environments, discombobu-

lations of the urban and the rural. His favoured leitmotif is rain falling inside a building,

a suspension of natural law that is curiously mundane” (Psychogeography 36). 5 Self repeatedly draws attention to the influence of Ballard on his writing; he explicitly

discusses their personal and intellectual relationship as well as the connection of Bal-

lard’s work to his project of psychogeography in “Walking to the World” (Psycho Too

11-76).


151

However, thirty years have passed since de Certeau’s analysis and the World

Trade Center no longer exists. Instead, the terrible events of 9/11 have made a deep

imprint in our cultural imagination. While they have left Manhattan irreversibly con-

nected to the spectre of international terrorism, the image of the city’s commercial and

cultural uniqueness has silently faded. Nowhere does this become more obvious than

in Will Self’s psychogeographic journeys through the (former?) heart of global capital-

ism. While he is walking through New York, the dichotomy of ‘up’ and ‘down’ does

not feature in his account. Hardly mentioning the skyscrapers—let alone their eco-

nomic or cultural significance—, most of his journey is instead preoccupied with

“Suburban New York” (Psychogeography 47):

People always say that you can’t walk in American cities—implying that the very

sidewalks curl up in front of your feet, or that the traffic mows you down. But that isn’t

it: no one walks through East New York, I’m forced to conclude, because it’s so fucking

dull. Mile on mile of tract houses and apartment blocks, with only plastic Santas to

break the monotony. (54)

In Self’s psychogeographic imagination, Downtown Manhattan is dwarfed by the

sheer extension of the surrounding (sub)urban space he has to traverse in order to get

there. “The chrome watchtowers and steely spires of Midtown,” he asserts, “are mere

pinpricks set beside this!” (42). Accordingly, the relative importance and cultural sig-

nificance of the Manhattan skyscrapers seems to dwindle into nothingness for the

author. He neither praises them as technological marvels, nor does he condemn them

as emblems of capitalist exploitation: New York—for Self—has lost its vertical

dimension.

However, this does not mean that Will Self has also lost his sensibility for the

antagonism of ‘up’ and ‘down’ in relation to urban space in general. Merely no longer

perceiving New York as the epitome of capitalism, he localizes the contemporary

monuments of financial might in the city of Dubai. Here, the tallest building of the

world—the Burj Khalifa—has recently been erected and some of the most ambitious

(and at the same time seemingly absurd) building projects of the planet are under

construction.6

The Dubai boom … had never been anything save the most glaring example of Guy

Debord’s society of the spectacle: the mounding then patty-cake-shaping of capital itself

into an image—or an idol. The money had come from the Gulf—oily lucre piped across

the sands—or else from Russian mafia; … Then again, investment had zapped elec-

tronically across the Atlantic after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001; so that

as two skyscrapers crashed into dust, another forest of them—irrigated by liquidity—

arose on the obverse of ‘the world.’ (Psycho Too 22)

6 The most obvious examples of this are three artificial archipelagos of small islands in

different shapes off the coast of Dubai. One of them, a group of islands called ‘The

World,’ has been “bulldozed into an approximation of the world’s landmasses” (Psycho

Too 20). It comprises the ultimate destination of Will Self’s psychogeographic trip in

“Walking to the World,” in which the author attempts to walk from J.G. Ballard’s house

in Shepperton to the Island representing ‘England’ in ‘The World’ (11-76).

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152

Moreover, Dubai is not only an idol of capitalism, but its disarray of multi-lane

highways, stripes of desert, and gigantic construction sites also proves to be the most

hostile terrain imaginable for the solitary walker. In Self’s previous journey to New

York (cf. Psychogeography 39-68) only JFK International Airport essentially con-

stitutes a space where the (road) map “has taken precedence over the territory it

describes” (Psycho Too 26). Here, however, an entire city turns out to be virtually un-

charted land for the pedestrian. Yet, Self’s (ultimately failing) attempt to cross this

space on foot, comprises one of the clearest examples of the British author’s concern

to expose the “excessive indulgences and the stilting banalities of modern society” that

characterizes his entire work (Hayes 17).

Once more devoting much attention to all sorts of strange peculiarities (air-

conditioned bus stops, Iranian street vendors selling inflatable goats), the walk through

Dubai more importantly represents Self’s most straightforward attack on the excess

and self-destructive insanity of capitalism. It is on this psychogeographic journey

(Psycho Too 11-76) that he displays a clear affinity to the leftist political tradition of

Debord and the Situationists, a position that convinces him of the impending doom of

this capitalist spectacle: “[W]ithin a lifetime the oil to fuel this simulacrum … will be

gone, the fountains will piddle to a halt, the skyscrapers, and the mock-mock-mock-

Palladian villas, will begin to disintegrate, … the pseudo-pools, fake lagoons and

ersatz rills will choke with sand” (46).

4. Strategies of Sanity and Survival: (Re-)Connecting Space, Body and

Mind

Despite some of the mentioned affinities between Will Self’s urban travels and the

project of Debord and the Situationists, there also exist significant differences. Con-

ceptually the most important one concerns the manner (or method) of walking adopted

for psychogeographical ‘research’: “In a dérive,” Debord maintains, “one or more per-

sons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their

relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attrac-

tions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (“Theory” 62).7 Will Self, on

the other hand, finds all notions of aimless ‘roaming’ “quite alien” (Psychogeography

1558):

7 The Situationists insisted that despite the ‘aimless’ nature of the urban stroll the dérive

is not entirely random: “[T]he dérive may lack destination but it is not without purpose.

On the contrary the dériveur is conducting a psychogeographical investigation and is

expected to return home having noted the ways in which the areas traversed resonate

with particular moods and ambiences” (Coverley 96). In this sense, psychogeography

almost reminds one of a military strategy, “a reconnaissance for the day when the city

would be seized for real” (Sadler 81; cf. Coverley 97). 8 Cf. Self, Psychogeography 155-56.: “Personally, I find the whole notion of roaming

quite alien, and I’m not even sure that I know how to do it at all. Take my morning rou-


153

I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix

which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical

geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure—that would be merely frivolous, or even

for exercise—which would be tedious. No, to underscore the seriousness of my project I

like a walk which takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other

people into my eotechnical world view. (69)9

Although there appears to be a certain ‘missionary’ aspect, Self’s main objective is the

reconnection of individual human and physical space. In cities that transcend “the

capacities of the human body to locate itself and cognitively map its position” (Val-

lorani 166) the psychogeographer is on a quest to re-establish this lost connection. The

writer believes that modern forms of transportation ‘destabilize’ and ‘decenter’ the

subject (cf. Self, Psychogeography 15f.) by creating a virtual space that “warps the

relationship between psyche and place” (11). Modern technology (like satellite naviga-

tion systems or airplanes) contributes to the distortion of our mental images of both

public and private spaces, turning modern society into “an army of disorientation”

(16).

However, Self seems to consider walking as an antidote to this threat of disorien-

tation since it enables us to reconnect with our bodies and thus our evolutionary past:

“The body’s awareness is so much more plangent than that of any mere mind,” he

claims (61). “Bodies like mine have been walking distances like these for hundreds—

Yea! thousands—of millennia; what can a few score years of powered rolling and

whistling [airplane] flight mean set beside this immemorial trudge?” (61). Walking,

thus, decompresses the artificially compacted ‘time-space continuum’ by confronting

the walker with the materiality both of his own body and the surrounding geographical

space. As such it allows the psyche to map its position in the external world. However,

for Will Self it is not only the bodily experience offered by this “most primal of physi-

cal activities” (157) that provides reassurance and potentially alleviates the dis-

orienting effects of the Society of the Spectacle. The bipedal exploration of the city,

furthermore, leads the traveller into the ‘interzones’ that lie in between the networks of

streets and railway tracks as well as outside of commercial or touristic spaces. Such

locations do bring relief from the virtual reality created by the culture of the (capitalist)

spectacle, since their blending of the urban and the rural disrupts habitual modes of

perception. The “hypnotising effects of the modern commercial world” (Coverley 84)

and the ensuing “mental disease” of “banalization” that according to Chtcheglov “has

swept the planet” (4) can be countered by ambulatory retreats into such spaces. Tra-

tine: where am I to go if I don’t walk to the bathroom? Should I just stroll aimlessly

around the bedroom until I end up pissing in the bookcase? This has been known to

happen, but usually only after the ingestion of strong liquors. And what about my walk

over the road to buy the paper? If I roam up and down Mike’s aisles for too long,

tolerant as he is he’ll call the Old Bill.” 9 Cf. Sinclair (75) in this context, who argues that the flâneur has been replaced by the

‘stalker.’

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versing the interzone for Self consequently constitutes “a sound survival mechanism,

the only possible way to stay mentally fit in the psychotic entrails of a twenty-first

century megalopolis” (Psychogeography 154).

This being the case, it becomes apparent that psychogeography for Will Self has

a therapeutic dimension. His writings lead to an almost romantic “fetishization” of cer-

tain areas within urban space that still have the potential to “rescue drifters from the

clutches of functionalism” (Sadler 78). The decisive difference from the psychogeo-

graphical project of Debord and the Situationists, however, lies in Self’s focus on the

psyche of the individual. While the Situationists perceive their project as a collective

and organized ‘therapeutic’ effort “to overthrow and replace … the bourgeois nature of

western society” (Coverley 92), Self is primarily preoccupied with the individual’s

mental health. As a former drug addict and diagnosed borderline personality (cf. Hayes

12), the fragility of sanity is one of the central topic of his fictional work as well as his

psychogeographical journeys. Self openly addresses the “beneficial impact” of such

walks on his mental health as well as their capacity to heal psychological ‘wounds’

from the past (Psychogeography 12; 13f.). In this way, he turns the project of psycho-

geography into a primarily individualistic quest for self-discovery.

Consequently, Self’s explorations into the relationship of psyche and topography

exhibit a distinctly personal quality on several levels. His walks are dominated by sur-

facing memories, reveries and traumas, thereby foregrounding the impact of personal

history on the intersection of self and city. Accordingly, in a review of Psychogeo-

graphy Bharat Azad observes:

From the grandstanding phallus of the Gherkin to Battersea Power Station, every street

corner intersects with some small but significant memory; every alley opens on to its

potent memories. His experiences of New York and London are interspersed with

spectral memories of his parents and it is through these that Self reveals some of his

sources: we are informed, for instance, that some of the New York scenes in How the

Dead Live are taken from his mother’s account of the city. (n.p.)

Azad’s observation draws attention to yet another aspect of Self’s psychogeography:

On his walks through London, New York, and Dubai the impact of fiction on the

author’s image of those cities become quite obvious. Repeated references to his own

literary texts, but more importantly to those of writers like J.G. Ballard, emphasize that

urban and fictional space cannot be separated from each other. To traverse London on

foot, therefore, means simultaneously to navigate the realms of the private, the public

and the fictional, thus further increasing the complexity of our understanding of the

city.

5. Conclusion

Though displaying certain affinities with the flâneur and the concept of psychogeo-

graphy developed by Guy Debord and the Situationists, Will Self’s version of urban

walking significantly differs from the notions of flânerie or dérive. Despite sharing a


155

critical stance towards the society of the (capitalist) spectacle, his psychogeographial

journeys are less concerned with reforming society than they are with aspects of ‘heal-

ing’ and psychological sanity. This preoccupation with personal rather than urban

history has led to dismissive observations concerning the theoretical validity of his

project. Ian Sinclair, for instance, complains in an interview that the term psychogeo-

graphy “now [has] become the name of a column by Will Self, in which he seems to

walk about South Downs with a pipe, which has nothing to do with psychogeography”

(qtd. in Jeffries n.p.).

Indeed, the walks collected in Psychogeography and Psycho Too do engage in a

certain kind of navel-gazing. Furthermore, as those collections originate in a news-

paper column, their theoretical discussion is accordingly less pronounced. Neverthe-

less, both books do not only provide intriguing insights into the personality and the

(fictional) work of Will Self, but also vividly illustrate the complexities of the intersec-

tion of mind, memory, and city. Like many of his texts they “reshuffle the topograph-

ical and psychological tissue of urban space” (Vallorani 164); they foreground its

conceptual multiplicity by investigating the nature of ‘interzones,’ the relationship of

reality and fiction, or the connection of memory and urbanity. Celebrating the com-

plexity of people and cities, the books mark another instance of Will Self’s continual

quest to illustrate that “the world is a strange and heterogeneous place, no matter how

hard we try to hammer it down” (qtd. in Guignery 26).

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Hayes, Hunter M. Understanding Will Self. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2007.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and

New York: Verso, 1991.

Jappe, Anselm. Guy Debord. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.

Jeffries, Stuart. “On the Road.” The Guardian 24 April 2004. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/

books/2004/apr/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview14>.

Jenks, Chris. “Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur.” Visual Culture.

Ed. Jenks. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. 142-60.

Knabb, Ken, ed. Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition. Berke-

ley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.

McDonough, Tom, ed. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts & Documents.

Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004.

Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age.

London: Routledge, 1992.

Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1998.

Self, Will. How the Dead Live. London: Bloomsbury, 2000.

–––––. Psychogeography. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.

–––––. Psycho Too. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

Sheringham, Michael. Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present.

Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

Sinclair, Ian. Lights out for the Territory. London: Granta, 1997.

Vallorani, Nicolettea. “Slipstream London: The City of Apocalypse in Martin Amis and Will

Self.” Textus 14 (2001): 163-78.

Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flâneuse: Woman and the Literature of Modernity.” Theory,

Culture and Society 2.3 (1985): 37-48.

Urban Identity in a State of Flux:

Strategies of Representing Simultaneity, Chaos, and

Complexity in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

BERIT MICHEL

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of

space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the

epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of

the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at the moment, I

believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a

long life developing through time than that of a network that

connects points and intersects with its own skein.

—Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1967), 22

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be

lifted out of the city’s grasp. … When one goes up there, he

leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself

any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above

these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile

and endless labyrinths far below. … Must one finally fall

back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth,

crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves

unable to see down below? An Icarian fall.

—de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), 92

Portraying post-9/11 New York from what is commonly considered an experimental

vantage, Foer’s second novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close stands out as the one

narrative approach that most strikingly seeks to depict the mood of a profoundly shat-

tered sense of (urban American) identity by means of metafictional and intermedial

ploys. As was to be expected, Foer’s playful rendering of New York has encountered

extremely disapproving opinions for what to some readers may appear an entirely in-

appropriate representation of serious issues. Likewise, it comes as no surprise to find,

on the other hand, that various critical contributions have by now already responded to

those voices which challenge Foer’s narrative strategies, voices which claim for

instance that “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, in its attempt to fuse the aesthetics

of fairyland with the unresolved trauma of Bush’s America, may well be the ultimate

test of how much gravity each individual reader requires” (Faber n.p.).1 In particular

Siegel, Däwes, Jakob as well as Ingersoll, Versluys, and Codde in their articles epito-

1 For further comparably derogatory responses, cf., e.g., Adams, Barbash, Kirn, and Miller.

Berit Michel

174

mize a readership that—regardless of gravity—cannot be easily shocked by such nar-

rative strategies. By outlining how the novel skillfully exhausts its narrative potential

to emplot the conflicted mind after 9/11 which seeks to overcome the traumatic events,

they have all shown that the novel is more than the mere “stylistic exercise” (Adams

n.p.) the Observer dismisses it to be.

2 We may nonetheless ask ourselves whether those

narrative modes which according to most critics represent the traumatized post-9/11

New York landscape are indeed peculiar to this exact period—the immediate wake

after 9/11—or whether they are not first and foremost simply strategies of representing

urban complexity, traumatized or not. In his appeal for a spatial reading of history,

focusing on the complexity and simultaneity of geographical sites, historian Karl

Schlögel has shown that the events of 9/11 rather function as a catalyst reminding us

of such a spatial perspective that has to be rediscovered (cf. 25-29). Against this

background, Foer’s ‘experiments’ might not even need justification, nor do the events

of 9/11 themselves mark an abrupt and groundbreaking change in the use of represen-

tational strategies.3 If anything, they have rather sensitized us to the dynamics shaping

the urban scenery. Conceiving of the city as emblematic of the cultural climate, an

investigation of those strategies which seek to imitate its structure will reveal how the

novel’s narrative modes do not simply capture the mood of a specific event, but on a

larger scale rather mark general changes in our 21st-century cultural awareness the

revelatory quality of 9/11 then just symbolically comes to signify. In this context it

will be interesting that most readings of Foer’s novel so far have been rather one-sided

in that they primarily enlarge on the diachronic perspective of remembering 9/11,

when they argue that the novel simulates strategies of mental operations.4 Claiming

2 In crude terms, the main contributions by Ingersoll, Däwes, Codde, Siegel, and Versluys

may all be categorized as elaborate variations of the same argument which claims that

the novel’s narrative modes represent attempts to overcome the trauma that succeeded

9/11. 3 Däwes in particular suggests treating the 9/11 theme as a case in point for general shifts

in narrative modes of representation: Referring to Alfred Hornung, who, as she says,

used “the term of ‘Ground Zero’ as a wider concept [that] includes the new challenges

of representation in the aftermath of postmodernism,” Däwes intends to “take [his]

argument one step further [to] show that—in contrast to those novels written before

9/11—‘Ground Zero Literature’ does not necessarily abandon the principles of relativ-

ity, pluralism, and self-reflexiveness which postmodernism cherished” (21). Her pro-

posal is ill-centered, as I hope to show. Firstly, there has never been a question of

abandoning those narrative modes she refers to; the question is rather how and to what

effect self-reflexive strategies in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close tie in with current

representational concerns. Secondly, 9/11 in this context by no means marks a general

turning point in representational modes, but may at best be considered as emblematic of

broader and more general changes. 4 Däwes reads the novel as an account of “the collective memory of the attacks” that is

constituted by those very forces underlying the novel’s structure, namely the tension

between the human need and the inability “to make sense of the incomprehensible”

(519). Similarly, Siegel claims that the novel, “as an example of historiographic meta-

Urban Identity in a State of Flux: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

175

that the text’s negotiation of the past is just one dimension of mental organizational

structures the novel performs, in this essay I want to read the novel as representing a

moment of increased urban awareness and thereby suggest what may be termed a ‘syn-

chronic reading’ of the post-9/11 urban identity the novel emplots: The novel’s title

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close may thus imply a state of heightened awareness of

spatial sense perception that in turn suggests a general epistemological orientation in

spatial terms. Indeed, such indications of spatial orientation may remind us of Fou-

cault’s idea of mental organization which, in a Saussurean understanding, is organized

through synchronic relationships within a network of signs, i.e., is “less that of a long

life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects

with its own skein” (22). This essay will show how Foer’s New York is, in fact, in-

formed by spatial concepts and how the novel seems to present the city in this “epoch

of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dis-

persed” (Foucault 22). Based on the assumption that narratives represent our mental

modes of organization, this approach to Foer’s novel thereby suggests that the urban

condition of the 21st century and spatial categories of thinking inevitably inform the

schemes and frames by means of which we conceptualize narratives. It thus responds

to both approaches in cognitive narratology investigating narrative’s experiential

potential5 and claims that the urban novel, according to a new mimetic understanding

Alter terms ‘experiential realism,’ in an increasingly urbanized culture—rather than

providing us with mere descriptions of the city and city life—has come to represent

“fundamental transformations in the nature of urban experience” (Alter xi). I will

outline how Foer’s novel integrates this spatial category of thinking, which has been

widely discussed after suggestions for a general spatial turn.6 Above all, I will investi-

gate how the novel’s narrative modes support such a ‘spatial’ account of post-9/11

identity that ‘thinks geographically’ to represent and emplot urban complexity.

It may at first seem that, in Foer’s attempt to capture the city’s simultaneity,

chaos, and complexity, the challenges he has to face are no different from those Joyce

and other modernists were confronted with in their endeavors to find ways of breaking

with textual linearity in order to show the city in its spatial immediacy. And yet, as we

will see, what becomes even more symptomatic of the 21st-century city is a heigh-

fiction,” simulates the reconstruction of the past (n.p.) and Versluys accordingly sug-

gests that, through the novel’s representational strategies, we are shown how “traumatic

memory must be turned into narrative memory” (79). 5 Cf. in particular Fludernik’s groundbreaking study Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology

and David Hermann’s contributions, which both try to define ‘Cognitive Narratology’:

both argue for a new form of ‘experiential realism’ that is no longer based on the idea of

plot but determined by the reader’s capacity for narrativization. 6 Cf. Bachmann-Medick, who in her exploration of cultural turns among others outlines

the impact of a ‘spatial turn’ that suggests a spatialized mode of conceptualizing experi-

ence—as distinct from a narrative and temporal orientation—as a new methodological

and analytical category to reshape our general idea of ‘culture.’

Berit Michel

176

tened awareness of the textual ‘force-field’ and the most fluid, dynamic, uncontrol-

lable form of human self-organization it constitutes (cf. Faßler 11). 9/11 testifies to

this, since, as urban historian Klein confirms,7 we finally but not for the first time

became increasingly conscious of the city’s dynamics underneath those apparently

coherent surfaces we may idealistically associate with urban systems and which may

commonly blind us to the active and living organism formed by urban ecologies. How,

then, do Foer’s narrative strategies respond to the cultural climate if we assume that

aesthetic perceptions reflect the urban cultural climate? Independent of 9/11, the 21st

century as an increasingly digitalized century has yielded narrative strategies tran-

scending the printed word which incorporate this heightened sense of self-awareness.

Consequently, if we are to analyze the reciprocity of urban environments and their

aesthetic discourses, we should also take into account that seemingly more extreme

modes of representation incorporating this very awareness have already been used to

portray urban complexity and have been shown to be successful in doing so.8 Could it

possibly be a conceptually significant coincidence that the 21st century is both referred

to as the digital age and the first urban century? With the example of Foer’s text I want

to explore in how far the novel, resorting to rather recent and innovative narrative

strategies, can represent our current cultural condition and depicts the extremely fra-

gile state of structural fluidity of which the post-9/11 period comes to be symptomatic.

Given the growing challenge of capturing the structures of today’s digitalized world on

paper, this approach to Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close will modify and update

Lessing’s question of how literature can represent simultaneity and can overcome the

limitations of its necessary linearity and adapt it to 21st-century standards of commu-

nication and representation. We will finally be able to observe a convergence between

narrative and urban developments, which makes Foer’s representational strategies

dovetail with current cultural conceptualizations of experience.

1. Mapping the Trauma: Foer’s New York as a Metaphor of Urban

Complexity, Spatial Organization, and the Appropriation of Spaces

Foer’s story is about loss in a twofold sense: Just as New York mourns the absence of

the World Trade Center, Oskar grieves the death of his father who died in the attacks

7 Norman Klein describes how 9/11 lays bare 21st-century cultural tendencies: “But now,

after September 11, the next century finally has revealed itself. Its irony suggests a

future that is much more fragile, vulnerable, certainly to Americans. It will not be

camouflaged by Pradastores and Vegasized and Disneyfied shopping cities. We can

now begin to excavate beyond the visible” (451). 8 Cf. Gurr, “Politics,” who has shown how the innovative narrative mode of Norman

Klein’s interactive documentary novella Bleeding Through (a text of short fiction

accompanied by a DVD, which, due to its hypertextual design, allows the reader to take

part in the story’s possible (re-)constructions) aptly represents urban complexity in Los

Angeles.


177

of 9/11. Sending Oskar on a quest wandering around New York City to find the lock

for a key his father has left, Foer’s novel does not merely personify a national trauma,

but allegorically maps the urban landscape after the attacks.

The act of wandering the city in itself is rather crucial and symbolically comes to

lay bare the apparently shattered state of urban structures given the loss of Manhat-

tan’s landmark: It seems a startling but more than telling coincidence that de Certeau

once elaborated on the view of the city from the top of the World Trade Center to

illustrate how the practices of walking structure the city “down below” (92). Juxtapos-

ing the perspective from the top with the pedestrian perspective, de Certeau dis-

tinguishes between two ways of ‘reading’ the city. The perspective from the top allows

the viewer to indulge in the “pleasure of seeing the whole” and “[to totalize] the most

immoderate of human texts” (92). The viewer seems to gain authority over the city’s

otherwise intricately dynamic and impenetrable structure that he himself is usually part

of. As de Certeau has it, the viewer’s “elevation … transforms the bewitching world

by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to

read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god” (92). De Certeau further speaks of

the “erotic of knowledge” the pedestrian down below cannot share in (92). The pedes-

trian, by contrast, can only experience the city by walking, thus shaping the structure

without being able to comprehend it. The Twin Towers are consequently attributed a

structuring function that turns them into the one authorial instance able to subjugate

the elusive complexity of the city. De Certeau accordingly thinks of the World Trade

Center as “the 1370 foot high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan and continues

to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable,

and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text” (92).

But what if New York is all of sudden deprived of this ‘transparent’ fiction

serving as an organizing principle and is left with a seemingly unreadable complexity

and the ‘opaque mobility’ of urban structures? What if Manhattan becomes subject to

its own ever-changing textuality? It is this very scenario Foer maps when he focuses

on the pedestrian perspective, i.e. on the experience of those “walkers, Wandersmän-

ner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without

being able to read it” (93). The wanderer’s ignorant point of view beyond the illusion

of a tangible urban fiction becomes thematically illustrated in the quests Foer sends

Oskar on, first playfully in Central Park, the heart of New York and then, more im-

portantly, all around New York City. The reader becomes aware of those underlying

dynamic structures that define urban complexity and, according to de Certeau, “[slip]

into the clear text of the planned and readable city” (93), only that there is now no

longer a readable city. To symbolize the loss of a centered panoramic illusion, in a

double-page picture, a white shadow integrated like a rectangular hole into the sea of

Manhattan buildings we see from a bird’s perspective (cf. fig. 1) implies the absence

of Central Park, while at the same time in the story’s context it may also connote the

shape of the Twin Towers and may be associated with the void left by the absent

World Trade Center.

Berit Michel

178

Fig. 1: The absence of Central Park suggests the absence of the Towers (Foer 60-61).

It seems more than telling that—despite the story’s emphasis that Central Park is

present (according to Oscar’s father’s bedtime story of New York, it was once inten-

tionally put there (cf. the chapter “The Sixth Borough” (217-23))—, given the loss of

the Trade Center, it comes to connote Ground Zero. As if to draw attention to the

problem of the city’s readability, we find the picture in the very chapter on the

“Googolplex” locks of the city that may represent the infinite number of possible

readings New York allows for. At the beginning of his quest around New York, Oskar

thus tries to estimate his chances of finding the correct keyhole for his key and envi-

sions the city in numerical terms. He reflects on the innumerable keys that might be

used by the “more than 9 million people [who] live in New York” (40-41) only to find

it an impossible calculation:

I timed myself and it took me 3 seconds to open a lock. Then I figured out that if a baby

is born in New York every 50 seconds, and each person has 18 locks, a new lock is

created in New York every 2.777 seconds. So even if all I did was open locks, I’d still

be falling behind by .333 locks every second. And that’s if I didn’t have to travel from

one lock to the next, and if I didn’t eat, and didn’t sleep … I needed a better plan. (41)

Oskar’s numerical account of New York is supported by a picture of hundreds of keys

hanging on a wall (53) as well as a picture of numerous thumbprints (65). Oskar may

be the only person we accompany on his way around post-9/11 New York to observe

his ‘practices of everyday life’; the nature of his quest, however, sensitizes us to the

complex network of stories shaped by numerous unknown identities that compose the


179

city’s textuality. Oskar’s quest, as a result, becomes paradigmatic of what de Certeau

termed “Pedestrian Speech Acts” in that he demonstrates that the “act of walking is to

the urban system what the speech act is to language” (97). On the other hand, Oscar’s

quest foregrounds urban complexity, or more precisely, the underlying state of flux

that now seems to govern New York’s urban identity and exposes all structures as

actualized possibilities among an abundance of virtual readings. Oscar thus finally

settles on the plan of visiting all inhabitants called ‘Black.’ Yet, though patterned, we

know full well that Oscar’s route is just one possible way among many others of

coming to terms with “the networks of … moving, intersecting writings” (de Certeau

93) structuring the urban system.

2. “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”: Foregrounding Organization

through Spatial ‘Appropriation’ in a State of Hyper-Sensitized

Perception

Planes going into buildings.

Bodies falling.

People waving shirts out of high windows.


Bodies falling.


—Foer 230

It becomes clear that the apparent depiction of a shattered sense of urban identity is in

fact strongly informed by the disillusionment about what seemed like a coherent fic-

tion. Long before the attacks, de Certeau considered the image of the city provided by

the Trade Center to be deceptive. Asking himself if “the immense texturology spread

out before one’s eyes [is] anything more than a representation, an optical artifact,” he

concludes that the “panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’ (that is, visual) simulacrum, in

short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of

practices” (92). In this vein, the post-9/11 trauma describes a moment of heightened

awareness of those complex dynamics that ordinarily constitute the urban scenery, and

it is this moment of hyper-sensitized perception the novel captures. In her article

Siegel aptly reasons that the “ending of the novel recalls the looped TV-sequences

broadcast on September 11, 2001 that showed the planes crashing into the World

Trade Center over and over again,” and finds that “these repetitions suggest an ar-

resting of time and development” (n.p.). Indeed, it seems that time comes to a halt in

the moment of shock when the filter of the event grants us an instant of heightened

awareness that lays bare the city’s textual structure, as Schlögel argues: “September 11

not only made the towers of the World Trade Center come down. At least for a

Berit Michel

180

moment it also made visible the space of which the towers are the center. It was only a

historic second, but it sufficed”9 (31, my translation).

This vulnerable state, then, also accounts for the novel’s title as well as its es-

tranged child narrator, two elements foregrounding the question of structural organi-

zation: Whenever he feels agitated, Oskar starts ‘inventing,’ that is imagining fantastic

things such as skyscrapers “that move up and down while the elevator stayed in place”

(3). Inventing a world that is out of proportion, the child narrator embodies and medi-

ates the city’s structural dynamics. Moreover, in the state of over-sensitized perception

he measures this experience in degrees of intensity and repeatedly resorts to the title’s

adverbs ‘extremely’ and ‘incredibly.’ The novel’s title Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close may thus suggest a general epistemological orientation in spatial terms: The

adverbs “extremely” and “incredibly” recur in numerous contexts that toy with the

title’s deictic implication of distances and distorted sense perceptions. More often than

not, they even merge an actual material and geographical level with the abstract level

of emotions and thought, implying a state of heightened spatial sense perception and a

general mental organization in spatial terms. Notably the chapter “Alive and Alone”

foregrounds the importance of spatial organization. Oskar’s thoughts are described in

spatial terms, his pessimistic inventions “being extremely loud” (235), and “a thought”

being referred to as coming “into [his] brain … closer to [him], and louder” (259). At

the same time, the organization of the actual geographical scenery in terms of spatial

distances becomes the center of attention when Oskar, observing the close-up frag-

ments of the pedestrian network through the observatory’s binoculars from the top of

the Empire State Building, describes them as “things … far away [appearing] incred-

ibly close” (245). Conceptualizing the city, or else the experience of the city, in spatial

terms, Foer’s novel—very much in the sense of Foucault’s epoch of ‘simultaneity,’

‘juxtaposition,’ ‘the near and the far,’ ‘the side by side,’ and ‘the dispersed’—presents

us with the city’s complex network of co-existing interacting structures we have found

epitomized in Oskar’s quest. Oskar’s selective impressions of New York are indicative

of this synchronic perspective which thinks of the city’s geography as a network of

simultaneously existing structures that keep being reshaped by the numerous pedes-

trians from various ends at the same time. The novel moreover foregrounds the organi-

zational dynamics of the resulting urban structural complexity. We become sensitized

to the fact that the spatial structures are shaped by social practices of appropriation, i.e.

that “it is urban space in particular which functions as an arena of actions and inter-

actions of individuals and collectives and thus, in a very concrete way, serves as a site

for the expansion of the ‘force-field’ generated by urban cultural practices” (Gurr,

“Urbanity” 249). In the course of Oskar’s quest we thus come to realize that New York

9 German original: “Der 11. September hat nicht nur die Türme des World Trade Center

zum Einsturz gebracht. Für einen Augenblick wenigstens hat er den Raum sichtbar wer-

den lassen, in dessen Zentrum die Türme stehen. Es war nur eine historische Sekunde,

aber sie genügte.”


181

is its inhabitants: Lives are buildings and spaces, just as much as these buildings,

rooms, and spaces in turn are texts.

Oskar specifies the novel’s meditation on the role and meaning of geographical

places with regard to urban structures contemplating the meaning of unnamed places.

When he finds himself in the unnamed void on the borderline between two boroughs,

he wonders:

When I was exactly halfway across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, I thought about how a

millimeter in front of me was Queens. So what’s the name of the parts of New York—

exactly halfway through the Midtown Tunnel, exactly halfway over the Brooklyn

Bridge, the exact middle of the Staten Island Ferry when it’s exactly halfway between

Manhattan and Staten Island—that aren’t in any borough? (88)

The imagery is picked up at the end of the novel when Oskar and his family “go over

the part of the bridge that wasn’t in any borough” (317). There Oskar takes “pictures

of the stars” and connects them “to make words, whatever words [he] wanted.” The

picture of the stars, which is also included as a photo (cf. 318), may re-evoke the hun-

dreds of keys symbolizing the multitude of readings the city offers but also reminds us

of another earlier scene: Oskar’s aimless search in Central Park. Hoping for clues to

complete his last ‘Reconnaissance Expedition,’ a riddle game he used to play with his

father, Oskar digs up metal things in Central Park and looks up the places where he

could find something on a map. As a result of connecting these dots that “look like

stars in the universe,” he comes up with the word ‘fragile.’ Wondering, “What was

fragile? Was Central Park fragile? Was nature fragile?” (10), Oskar foregrounds the

fragile nature of semiotic structures, be they urban or textual. Not only does the novel

draw our attention to Saussurean notions of the arbitrariness of words and meaning

(which connect just as randomly as Oskar’s stars and dots),10

but, what is more, it also

seems to equate urban and linguistic semiotic structures. Places that connote absence

in the text are thus accompanied by a seeming absence of linguistic signification, as

becomes clear in a number of passages: Oskar’s grandfather symbolically loses his

voice after the bombardment of Dresden. Similarly, the communicative void between

Oskar’s grandparents is mapped by the “Nothing Places” (e.g., 110-11) they create in

their flat. Oskar’s grandmother’s futile attempt to write her life story on a dysfunc-

tional typewriter—leaving entirely blank pages—might be another example of the

spatial visualization of linguistic absence, on which she herself most tellingly com-

ments that her “life story was spaces” (176). Conversely, text symbolically becomes

space: Oskar’s grandfather for instance starts communicating by writing his messages

10 Oskar’s quest around New York City is strongly reminiscent of Paul Auster’s New York

Trilogy, which shares with Foer’s novel the same issue of people feeling lost and

wandering the city as well as the depiction of complex urban structures as an intangible

network. Especially those episodes about collecting litter and retracing the way of one’s

quest (i.e. connecting the dots of places for them to become words) are considered core

elements of Auster’s novel and in this context highlight the dynamics of appropriation

as a process of sense-making on a spatial and geographical level.

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182

into empty notebooks, so that when he returns to New York decades later, he ‘wanders’

through these notebooks (274) just as he ‘wanders’ around the city, “getting to know it

again” (278). A barn made of books (cf. 126-27) and the walls of an entire flat covered

with handwritten messages (cf. 233 and 238) belong to the numerous elements that

blur the distinction between textual and material spaces. However, even though Foer

makes us aware that urban spaces are subject to the same dynamics of construction all

semiotic systems are, he does not present us with an entirely chaotic and intangible

urban site. Portraying a state of heightened awareness, the novel may point out the

numerous structural possibilities there are, but as Oskar’s father puts it, among the

possible universes “this is the universe that happened” (13), and despite its increased

sense of structural awareness, the novel finally does not deny the existence of an over-

all—if dynamic and flexible—structure. Rather, the structural state of flux seems to

become some kind of underlying awareness, the backdrop against which the novel is

set.

The Empire State Building emblematically presents us with this structural signif-

icance of urban spaces. It symbolically marks the loss of the Trade Center on the one

hand, while at the same time it also shows that New York has not lost all sense of

structure. As a matter of fact, the Empire State Building is turned into proof of the

multiplicity of possible structures in which urban complexity can find expression. This

is at least indicated by the fact that from the top of the Empire State Building Oskar

can see “the gigantic hole where the World Trade Center was” at the very moment he

seems to discover an alternative urban panoramic ‘simulacrum’ for it. After all, similar

to de Certeau’s view from the top of the Twin Towers, Oskar observes that

people on the street … look like little people … It’s like New York is a miniature

replica of New York, which is nice, because you can see what it’s really like, instead of

how it feels when you’re in the middle of it. It’s extremely lonely up there, and you feel

far away from everything. (245)

We are further reminded of de Certeau’s contrast between the city from the top and

from down below when we learn that Ruth Black, today living on the top of the

Empire State building, once used to get up to the observation deck to find her husband,

a salesman, lighting up at her from ‘down below’ with a spotlight fixed to the crate he

rolled through the city, tracing his way around New York (cf. 152-53). To some ext-

ent, Oskar’s account of the Empire State Building thus seems to manifest a re-cen-

tering of the fiction de Certeau once found to be evoked on the top of the Twin

Towers. Despite the awareness of structural multitude and pluralism, strong concepts

again seem to be associated with the building:

The feeling and spirit of New York City is embodied in the Empire State Building.

From the people who fell in love here, to the ones who have returned with their children

and grandchildren, everyone recognizes the building not only as an awe-inspiring

landmark which offers one of the most spectacular views on earth, but an unequaled

symbol of American ingenuity. (249)


183

And yet, Foer, does not leave us with the illusion of a replaced landmark, but

supports the idea of dynamic structures: Insofar as the Empire State Building comes to

be the single tower symbolic of New York, it also connotes very general ideas of the

appropriation of spaces that are—not least due to Oskar’s quest which leads him to

various households—ubiquitous in the novel and generally applicable to urban struc-

tures. It is ultimately the building’s visitors—those lovers, children, and grandchildren

recognizing the building—who attribute significance to it. By contrast, we are most

tellingly informed that the building was once referred to as the “Empty State Building”

when it was still uninhabited. On a larger scale we learn that “in fact New York’s most

famous building is made with materials from just about everywhere but New York, in

much the same way that the city itself was made great by immigrants” (248). The

material the building is made of is thus analogized with the social texture of the city.

The seeming replacement of a landmark’s significance thus carries in itself crucial

hints to the dynamic network of social structures shaping the city that we are alerted to

by the absence of the World Trade Center.

The very idea of shifting structures finds further resonance in the story of the

Sixth Borough. A borough with Central Park at its core was once part of New York,

but then started to float away from the city. Oskar’s father’s fairy tale about the origin

of Central Park gives a meticulous account of how it was once removed, “was pulled

by the people of New York, like a rug across a floor, from the Sixth Borough into

Manhattan” (221) to remain part of New York. The replacement of the Sixth Borough

becomes a metaphor for both the need to appropriate places and to endow them with

significance as well as an analogy for the dynamics of shifting urban structures. The

park is thus fittingly described as the “mosaic of … the dreams” of those children

sleeping on it during its removal (221), while the hole it leaves—not unlike Ground

Zero—simultaneously foregrounds the fact that principles of appropriation ultimately

constitute the social texture of urban places.

Both Foer’s examples of shifting structures, the towers and the Sixth Borough,

consequently point out an underlying sense of structural multitude, while at the same

time they reveal strategies of spatial sense-making. It is noteworthy here that the city is

not exclusively structured geographically, but as a matter of fact is to a large extent

shaped by the pedestrians’ social connotations, which then in turn penetrate the city’s

structural surface. We may, in other words, speak of the interaction between the social

dynamics of appropriating spaces and the geographical surface that keeps at bay the

state of flux peculiar to urban culture.

If we were to expound on the concept of urban complexity, Foer’s novel seems to

prove Zapf’s definition of complexity as the “processual, transitory, and changing

nature of reality.” If we conceive of the city as a text, its semiotics are characterized by

what Zapf more closely describes as (actually) literature’s tension between “linear

patterns of teleologies” and “non-linear turbulences and cyclical recurrences of ele-

mental life processes” (91). The city appears to perform what Zapf terms the “unity of

diversity” (91), when possible structures are informed by the underlying awareness of

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184

relativity, so that cognitive processes of spatial sense-making coincide with the chal-

lenge of complexity which literature then has to face. Any account of urban structures

will thus have to incorporate the dynamics of appropriation while taking into account

the concept of complexity as an organizing principle. Zapf elucidates the seeming

paradox, explaining that complexity

is not an artificially contrived complicatedness and elitist cult of difficulty, but a partial-

ly chaotic yet at the same time highly structured form of complexity which corresponds

to vital human needs and, indeed, as modern ecobiology seems to suggest, to the crea-

tive structure of the human brain itself. (92)

The semiotic ‘force-field’ the city ultimately constitutes consequently does not shift

and change entirely arbitrarily. Instead, ‘possible structures’ revolve around those

social and geographical cornerstones—in this case monuments, sights, and landmarks

or else the ideas of structural coherence associated with them—which, acting as a

regulating force, inscribe a social structure into what could always be revealed as a

fictional structure.

3. Foer’s New York Revisited: Undoing Space and Time in an

Intermedial Representation of Simultaneity, Chaos, and Complexity

Foregrounding the fact that the organization of urban structures results from acts of

appropriating spaces, the novel does not so much demonstrate how urban spaces

become semantically charged. More importantly, it seems to suggest that urban struc-

tures cannot be understood but in their spatial dimension and that those representa-

tional modes seeking to render an appropriate image of the city will themselves also

have to be informed by spatial concepts to map the complex simultaneous interplay

between structural sense-making and a state of dispersion. With regard to this chal-

lenge, Thrift in his differentiated treatment of the concept of ‘complexity’ mockingly

mentions how “the early regional historians of the 16th and 17th centuries often found

themselves exhausted by the sheer magnitude of the task of attempting to record every

aspect of a place” (31). This serves as a foil against which we are to see that “the chief

impulse behind complexity theory is an anti-reductionist one.” A modern awareness

“representing a shift towards understanding the properties of interaction of systems as

more than the sum of their parts” (32) therefore has to focus on the dynamics of creat-

ing those urban surfaces we cannot grasp, which the novel also foregrounds in Oskar’s

quest that cannot possibly cover all of New York’s inhabitants. With regard to this

problem of representation, Zapf speaks of “new paradigms in the humanities as well as

in the natural sciences, in which ‘thinking in complexity’ becomes the hallmark of a

reintegrative approach to human and non-human reality on the basis of processual,

non-linear models of mind and world” (92). How, then, do Foer’s representational

strategies support the novel’s depiction of urban complexity in terms of content—and

what are the representational problems the novel’s attempt at a spatial account of post-

9/11 New York encounters?


185

It is first of all the intermedial devices that make the novel appear ‘superficially’

complex in that it at first sight seems to explode with the multitude of different impres-

sions. Letters, identity cards and the likes mentioned in the text are printed and, more

importantly, almost all chapters are interspersed with pictures that randomly seem to

interrupt the various acts of narration. What on the face of it appears to be a random

choice of pictures—not least due to the great variety of motives—are, however, in fact,

impressions from either Oskar’s life taken from his book “Stuff that Happened to Me,”

a kind of diary, or photos and notes (as well as blank pages) from his grandfather’s

life; and while we may gain the impression that the images disrupt the narrative flow,

they do in fact tie in with the three narrative strands the novel comprises. Critics have

observed that the images on the one hand seem to disrupt the narrative strands when

on the other hand they become explained in the narrative, but have not sufficiently

contemplated the way they are scattered all over the text to explain their crucial impact

on the narrative’s departure from linearity. The most common account of the visual

devices stresses an immediacy of the narration created by the images, which “allows

the reader to look into Oskar’s mind” (Siegel n.p.), but does not take into account that

the pictures do not only relate to Oskar’s point of view. We equally share the grand-

father’s experience, and at the latest when Oskar’s grandmother comments that “[t]he

next page was a doorknob” (178), we can no longer be sure if she refers to the book in

her or in our hands. Versluys paradoxically recognizes the multiple perspectives with-

out relating them to the pictures supporting them, which ultimately makes one of his

pivotal ideas appear misleading: He refers to the images as “visual devices … that

serve to underscore the incommunicability of experience” in a novel “full of ploys and

devices that hamper the meaning-making process,” even though he notes that “the

interlocking episodes, which are told from several narrative vantage points by the al-

ternating narrators, overlap and dovetail” and concludes that “therefore the plot

development enacts the emergence of meaning in the wake of an event that obliterates

the means of creating meaning. In its very structure, the novel stages a radical decod-

ing of reality followed by a significant recoding” (81). Versluys’s latter observation

stands out in that he emphasizes the co-existence of the two apparently contradictory

movements of decoding and recoding, chaos and structure. In his analysis of traumatic

memory, however, Versluys places them in a temporal sequence, whereas I intend to

stress that the opposing tendencies co-exist simultaneously: The crux of the matter in

my reading is that the opposition is not established, as Versluys suggests, between a

coherent text and a disruption achieved by visual devices. Rather, an underlying sense

of simultaneous chaos and structure seems to permeate the narrative structure as a

whole. After all, we have found the images to complement the narrative in its ‘over-

lapping’ and ‘dovetailing.’ I would therefore suggest that the narrative structure, with

visual devices and text working together, is constructed in such a way as to suggest a

sense of flux that underlies the overall structure of the plot.

The way the photos are distributed throughout the novel is important here in that

they help the narrative depart from a linear pattern following a chronological structure:

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186

The narrative’s structural interest in a coherent chronological sequence (although there

is a chronological order) gives way to spatial concerns when the past seems to morph

into the present: Even though the pictures integrate with the narrative, they are not ex-

plained in their chronological sequence, hence the first impression of randomness.

Instead, some refer to what will not be explained until a later stage in the novel, while

others refer back to things that have already been mentioned. The pictures thus to a

significant extent undo the idea of the narrative’s chronological sequence, leveling the

novel’s progress to the one point of time where we are able to receive the overall struc-

ture to piece together the seemingly loose parts. The more the novel is nearing its end

(an end that, as we will soon see, both foregrounds and relativizes the story’s struc-

ture), the closer we get to the point when, contrary to our initial impression, we be-

come familiar with the coherent whole formed by the network of textual and visual

references spread across the novel. This overall structural impression becomes espe-

cially relevant when we consider that the novel in its complementary use of two utterly

different sign systems reconciles narrative strands belonging to different periods of

time. Oskar’s photos may be shown in his chapters and his grandfather’s photos (the

doorknobs) and diary entries likewise in the grandfather’s chapters, the distinction

between a visual and a textual level of texture, however, is the more striking and pre-

dominant one. While the reader would normally be solely preoccupied with getting the

story’s chronology right, Foer’s novel makes this organizational concern seem second-

ary to the spatial challenge of having to fit the images into their place. Leafing through

the book, we will hardly think about the possible amount of story time separating the

respective pictures, but we will be busy locating them somewhere in the novel. The

two distinct sign systems seem more relevant to us than the different periods of time

the various narrative strands result from, which makes them appear to exist next to

each other. As a result, the photos in combination with the alternating narrative strands

make all three characters’ approaches to the current situation appear equally simul-

taneously present. Relating to the narrative’s different incidents, pictures of various

places—the colored names Oskar finds in a paper store (45, 47-49, 63), for example,

or a swing door (198)—seem to mingle and invite us to several places at the same

time. The repeated pictures of house fronts (103, 289, and the third of three un-

paginated pictures before the novel’s title), the two photos of birds (166-67 and the

second of three unpaginated pictures before the novel’s title) which are associated with

the top of the Empire State building, and a number of other pictures give us the im-

pression that we accompany Oscar on his quest, while at the same time yet other

photos indicate other places. This is particularly true of two photos that recur through-

out the novel, the first one displaying a falling man (59, 62, 205, 327-55), the second

one showing a doorknob in Oskar’s grandparents’ flat (29, 115, 134, 212, 265, and the

first of three unpaginated pictures before the novel’s title). We may feel especially

close to the disastrous events of 9/11 just as we are inside the flat of the traumatized

Dresden survivors. Most tellingly, the novel contains one picture of what seems like

the blended photos of an airport and an observatory layered to merge into one place


187

(246). Signaling the simultaneous existence of various stories that shape the present

condition, the pictures from Oskar’s and his grandfather’s lives thus support the three

narrative strands which let us, too, simultaneously enter the narrative from different

angles. Foer’s intermedial account of 9/11 consequently not only seems to emplot

mental operations of memory as Versluys, Siegel, and Däwes contend. The resultant

juxtaposition of narrative events and the concomitant erasure of temporal distinctions

also seem to emphasize the necessity of taking into account the spatial dimension of

mental organization: As Crang and Thrift claim in Thinking Space, a reflection on

mental organization in spatial categories, “the ecology of thought is no longer seen as

somehow standing outside the spatial” (2). In this vein, Thrift in his critical con-

templation of the term ‘complexity’ thinks about a new understanding of time given a

heightened spatial awareness, arguing that

complexity theory must be seen, then, as in a direct line of scientific thinking from

topology through Einsteinian relativity theory, quantum theory and the like which has

now become a part of a progressive recasting of popular Euro-American beliefs about

time and space as dimensions open to possibility. (59, italics original)

By means of its intermedial narrative modes of representation, Foer’s novel creates

this sense of simultaneity in which various structural possibilities may co-exist. A

close-up of a key hole under a doorknob preceding the novel (and even its title page)

seems to identify the fiction we read as one option of a story and to prove the concept

of time and space discussed here. This concept finally culminates in the idea of a

reversal of time at the end of the novel, a reversal which sets the story back to the

point when all is possible again: Oskar’s grandmother’s backwards account of the

attacks on Dresden is interpenetrated by references to blurred binary oppositions

which indicate the general undoing of structures11

until she is with her sister again and

there is no telling of what happened when: “The spaces between our words grew. It

became difficult to tell when we were talking and when we were silent” (313). Simi-

larly, the flipbook denies history, reversing a falling man’s death. Creating a new

Icarus who ‘falls upwards,’ Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close not only reverses the

temporal sequence of events. By turning the world upside down, it also demonstrates

that a spatial reversal accompanies this reversal of time which winds back the clock to

the very point when everything seems possible again. At the same time, the flipbook

raises the reader’s awareness of the book’s material and spatial dimension that pro-

vides room for a multitude of possible stories.

In general the novel’s urban portrait seems to be informed by an increased aware-

ness of problems of spatial representation it may encounter: If Lessing two and a half

centuries ago raised the question of how, in the attempt at representing spatiality, a

literary work can achieve the same mimetic effect as a painting, this notion of narra-

11 Cf., e.g., “Not coming or going. Not something or nothing. Not yes or no” (Foer 312) or

“God brought together the lands and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the

water, evening and morning, something and nothing” (313).

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tive’s genre-based deficiency in overcoming its linear rendering of events has long

been countered: Structuralist positions stating that the text itself does not only repre-

sent space but constitutes a spatial dimension in its own right have struck a chord—at

the latest with the spatial or topographical turn—and point out that the medium, i.e.,

the text itself, should be taken into account.12

Foer’s novel shows itself well-aware of

the space it provides for the stories told inside it, as is after all also suggested by the

visual devices establishing a variation of the sense of simultaneity and co-existence

normally peculiar to the visual arts. Furthermore, the text in its typographical appear-

ance more often than not reveals itself as spatial: Communicating with the help of

notebooks, Oskar’s grandfather accordingly finds himself short of room, which is not

only stated—“I need more room I have things to say, my words are pushing at the

walls of the paper’s edge” (277)—but is also imitated by the novel’s typography,

which in the course of the nine pages following the grandfather’s said announcement

grows increasingly dense and unreadable until the lines finally merge altogether and

form one black page of ink (cf. 277-84). As Crang and Thrift argue in Thinking Space, it seems that “just as texts are worldly and worlds textual … we also need to consider

the relationship of space and language. … [N]ot only is space seen as linguistic but

language is seen as spatial” (4). When letters overlap until no coherent structure can be

singled out any more, we get the impression that the material dimension of the book

has to face the same problem of selection Oskar encounters given the city’s complex

textuality. Confronted with this predicament, Oskar’s grandfather demands “an

infinitely blank book and the rest of time” (281). Foer’s representational modes, then,

seem to enact the very problem of representing a landscape in which spatial and tem-

poral dimensions merge into the city’s dynamic structure of simultaneous possibilities.

Among the critics so far, solely Wanda Jakob, focusing on the novel’s visual represen-

tational strategies, grasps the novel in its spatial dimension. According to her, the

text’s self-referentiality foregrounds its own constructedness and materiality and

deprives all signs of their semantic value to the effect that the text has to be regarded

as an image. Any denial of semantic content in her view thus comes to pose a positive

appeal to take into account the text’s synchronic appearance. She particularly refers to

the novel’s toying with the visual appearance of typography and of sentence structures,

which to her mind may be compared with postmodern poems (cf. Jakob n.p.). The

novel thus plays with the visual appearance of its text and, deviating from the usual

representation of sentence structures, in its material appearance seems to break down

the text’s temporal linearity into a self-conscious spatial presentation of fragments.

The question remains if such typographical ploys necessarily have to be cate-

gorized as ‘postmodern’ if we may also argue that these effects simulate electronic

12 Cf. Sasse, who in particular refers to Genette to prove the relevance of spatial concepts

in literature and to point out a changed structural understanding that no longer reduces

literature to the content-based question of how it may represent space, but takes into

account that language, the text itself, may function in spatial terms.


189

media with regard to both their informational overload13

and their non-linear modes of

representation adequately to emplot urban complexity in a 21st-century context: After

all, we have seen that these narrative traits which might invite a post-structuralist

reading need not necessarily be informed by a purely linguistic view of the world but

might in fact help represent the dynamics of appropriating spaces and are possibly the

most suitable way to meet the challenge posed by urban complexities: Just as Oskar is

confronted with de Certeau’s ‘pedestrian predicament’ (and even Oskar’s grandparents

in their attempt to map the space of their flat symbolically have to find that “a friction

began to arise between Nothing and Something” (110)), the novel’s intermedial nar-

rative modes imply the same sense of structural multiplicity. The novel thus does not

only imitate urban spatial structures. In fact, we can see that by simulating a new—or

rather re-discovered—awareness of structural multitude, those narrative modes which

come to represent urban spatial structures are strongly informed by digital influences.

Layered text and fragmentary images of sound, such as the visualization of gaps in a

conversation between Oskar’s mother and his doctor Oskar partly overhears (203-

207), the red marks and corrections added to Oskar’s grandfather’s letter (208-216), as

well as three pages of the numerical code Oskar’s grandfather types into the telephone

(269-71) seem to confirm Hayles’s reading of such phenomena as evidence for a

change in the epistemology of writing. In Electronic Literature Hayles discusses the

impact of electronic media on the development of literature on the whole. If she claims

that “digitality has become the textual condition of twenty-first-century literature”

(186), parts of Foer’s novel in fact seem to show how “digital technologies have

completely interpenetrated the printing process” (163). In her argument, Hayles herself

draws on Foer’s novel. She stresses the importance of the numerical codes in the text

and points out the technique of the flipbook to show “the recursive dynamics between

print and digital technology” (170).

13 Cf. Matthias Hillner’s Virtual Typography for changes in the use of language and in the

role of typography in the information age: From a graphic designer’s perspective,

Hillner retraces developments of the 20th century and sets virtual typography against

the informational profusion of an increasingly interlinked society to argue for a reversal

in the roles of words and their printed realizations: If 500 years ago the revolutionary

invention of printed words was to render the world legible and to enhance social inter-

action, today—due to the increasing “struggle to put up with the infinite amount of in-

formation”—words give way to images, i.e., the visualization of words, which accord-

ing to Hillner now function as “substitutes for words” (8-9). As can be observed in

Foer’s typographical play with digital writing techniques, such a conceptual reversal not

only makes the material become the “first-order signifying system” (15), but it also

shows that similar conditions of informational abundance and complexity are char-

acteristic of both digital and urban environments. Significantly—and nicely appropriate

for our purpose—, Hillner does not define virtual typography in technical terms, but in

philosophical terms as unread possibilities of actualization. As Heller has it, the term

“can be attributed to anything that is expected to appear or evolve. ‘The virtual’ is what

is possibly real, even though it is ‘not actually there’” (50).

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190

Hayles’s interpretation ends with the observation that the text is informed by

digital technology without further looking into the implications of those networks of

communication and informational technology the text seeks to copy. Discussions of

spatial representations, however, have found digital modes of representation of crucial

relevance for the depiction of chaos and complexity. The novel’s equation of urban

and linguistic semiotics becomes even more compelling if we consider that, as Crang

and Thrift remark, “the spaces of text … are spaces of constant experimentation,

which attempt to write beyond current forms of textuality” (24). Notably the idea of

hypertextual design has proved the ideal mode of representation and has recently

received a lot of scholarly attention.14

Burnett in Toward a Theory of Hypertextual Design sets great store by the rhizomatic cognitive structures typical of electronic

hypertextual writings, which make them comparable to those modes of spatial organi-

zation that have here been explored in the context of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Burnett confirms this relevance in that she finds that “a hypertextual map is

more closely related to geographical maps than to search histories” (15). In fact, the

principle of multiplicity—i.e., as Burnett describes it, the “varying modes of access to

a single structure on the one hand, and of varying structures on the other” (13)—may

remind us of Oskar’s mapping the city for undiscovered potential links to his own

story, which in this context would not only be a metaphor of urban structures but of

hypertextual design at the same time. The novel itself thus seems to suggest that it

should be read in the context of a 21st-century mediatized culture—just as Oskar is

told about keys that “it’s all electronic these days” (39). Especially given the fact that a

hypertextual nature may be ascribed to non-electronic texts whose representational

modes seek to achieve the same effects of disrupting linearity as hypertext do,15

Foer’s

novel lends itself to a reading that contemplates its hypertextual quality to see how

Foer continues the tradition dating back to Cervantes and Sterne. Even though the

novel may not be electronic and therefore can never achieve many of the crucial func-

tions characteristic of hypertext, it may nevertheless on a figurative level incorporate

the concepts these functions connote. If Bolter in his discussion of Writing Space

speaks of the writing space as “literature’s root metaphor for the human mind,” it

should prove interesting that Foer’s novel is penetrated by digital concepts which now

seem to function as new paradigms for the print novel16

—and the text indeed incor-

14 The critics referred to in the context of this essay, Hayles, Burnett, Bolter, and Landow,

are just a small selection. 15

Burnett for example also speaks of “the hypertextual nature of pre-hypertext literary

projects from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants”

(n.p.); Bolter, too, takes into account print literature and refers to Joyce’s Ulysses and

Finnegans Wake as “hypertexts that have been flattened out” (24). 16

Cf. Bolter, who himself to a large extent maintains the distinction between the space of

the printed book and electronic writing (“These different conceptual spaces foster dif-

ferent styles and genres of writing and different theories of literature” (11)), but also—

in keeping with the notions presented in this essay—admits possible conceptual com-


191

porates some of the electronic features Bolter describes: Foer’s representation of urban

structures thus has been shown—as Bolter has remarked about hypertext literature

generally—to “[deny] the fixity of the text” on both a semantic and a semiotic level

and in “constructing … a network of related episodes … comes to emphasize the for-

mal qualities of art” (Bolter 153). It is particularly the distinction between visual and

textual devices which foregrounds the text as artifact and, as we have found, allows for

a sense of simultaneity which then informs the ‘related episodes’ we are presented

with, i.e., the pictures and the various narrative strands. To cut a long story short, with

digital media the co-existence of multiple structures, as is implied in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close for example by toying with typography and space, becomes a

concern in its own right. Connoting such 21st-century paradigms of writing space, the

novel’s visual narrative strategies thus provide an adequate impression of the multi-

layered and complex nature of urban structures. In this vein, in her general theoretical

line of argument Hayles more closely describes her understanding of electronic litera-

ture as literature that “can be understood as a semiotic technology designed to create—

or more precisely activate—feedback loops that dynamically and recursively unite

feelings with ratiocination, body with mind” (134). Comparing the dynamics of

electronic literature with Bourdieu’s distinction between knowledge in the body and

knowledge in the mind, she argues that the electronic medium blurs this differentiation

in that it becomes consciously aware of the otherwise proceduralized knowledge, i.e.,

the knowledge in the body, and toys with the two ways of knowledge. Literature,

Hayles argues, then “activates a recursive feedback loop between knowledge realized

in the body through gesture, ritual, performance, posture, and enactment, and know-

ledge realized in the neocortex as conscious and explicit articulations” (132). Inter-

estingly, Hayles claims that traumatic events are “understood in precisely th[e] way”

(134) electronic literature seems to handle these two ways of knowledge. Electronic

literature on this account seems to incorporate the blurred distinction between the act

of meaning-making and the awareness of the very process. With regard to hypertexts

Bolter similarly speaks of “the oscillation between looking through and looking at”

(168). Since electronic media seem to perform the awareness of their own mediality,

they seem to be the ideal mode to represent the complexity of urban landscapes, so that

Foer’s metaphorical connotations of digital qualities are aptly chosen. In fact, in the

state of traumatic heightened awareness it portrays, the novel seems to emplot just

those recursive loops ascribed to electronic media: the oscillating movements which

consciously lay bare the ways of acting, i.e., the ways of sense-making, while at the

same time they perform the act of sense-making. It is due to this sense of oscillation

that an overall structure can emerge against the background of an underlying aware-

ness of the chaos of space and time.

What becomes plain is that the novel’s representational potential to a consid-

erable extent draws on its self-consciousness. Since it is beyond the potential of a

monalities when he discusses narrative functions: “what was only figuratively true in

the case of print, becomes literally true in the electronic medium” (158).

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192

printed text to actually play through different versions of one story, self-referential

traits have the function of pointing out the multitude of possible texts that form the

background to this one story, which finally emerges from the abundance of possibi-

lities. In this sense, we have seen how the text in a number of ways foregrounds the

dynamics of spatial mental operations. The novel’s thematic concerns, such as Oskar’s

quest, thus do not only tell exciting stories but also allegorically function as comments

on the general nature of spatial sense-making. This idea is supported by the novel’s

semiotic representational modes. Foregrounding the book as artifact, they reveal the

spatial nature of its textual room which simulates the city’s synchronically organized

texture. What in a conventional understanding would be considered as illusion-break-

ing17

in the representation of urban complexity becomes a necessary sense of self-

awareness and, it seems, the only mode able to meet the challenge of simultaneity.18

Continuing the tradition of representations of complexity, Extremely Loud & Incred-ibly Close is remarkably written at a time of a doubly increased awareness of spatial

structures: On the one hand, there is the catalytic moment of 9/11 which draws our

attention to New York’s urban structure, while on the other hand representational

modes have come to be informed by an underlying awareness of structural multitude

due to our digitalized 21st century. It is especially the latter idea which explains the

general tendency to categorize Foer’s narrative modes as ‘postmodern.’ Critics have

already to a considerable extent enlarged on the intersection of recent digital structures

and poststructuralists notions of deconstruction. Landow’s Hypertext: The Conver-gence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology mentions “shocks of recogni-

tion,” as “over the past several decades literary theory and computer hypertext, ap-

parently unconnected areas of inquiry, have increasingly converged” (2). Arguing for a

new episteme he concludes on this basis that “we must abandon conceptual systems

founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with

ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks” (2). Bolter similarly observes that

17 Cf. Nünning and Fludernik: Drawing on the distinction made by Nünning and Fludernik

between ‘metanarrative’ comments, which explain acts of sense-making, and ‘metafic-

tional’ comments, which destroy the illusion of constructed stories, one might argue that

the novel foregrounding the various processes of sense-making and textual spatiality

breaks the illusion of its own stories. Such contemplations prove superfluous in this

essay since a spatial reading that foregrounds the dynamics of construction is presented

as desirable. 18

Cf. Wolf for the general role of an increased medial self-consciousness in the 21st-

century: Drawing on Sperber’s interdisciplinary research on the faculty of meta-

representation, Wolf speaks of man’s general “metarepresentational capacity,” which he

compares to the faculty of language and, like Sperber, thinks of as part of our anthro-

pological human basis. In his humanist contribution to interdisciplinary investigations

of this supposedly human metarepresentational capacity, Wolf considers the very phe-

nomenon of particular relevance for a recent cultural context and accordingly wants to

“prepare the ground for a cultural-historical exploration” that “elucidate[s] the functions

and origins of what may even be called an on-going ‘metarage’” (11).


193

“in a curious way electronic writing seems to end the recent and sometimes bitter

debate between traditionalists and contemporary theorists” (147). Suggesting a con-

ventionalized use for what was once thought of as radical narrative strategies, he

argues that “for the traditionalist reader … it will in fact confirm much of what the

deconstructionists and others have been saying about the instability of the text” (147).

Linear representations of the world thus no longer seem to be appropriate when we are

to depict the potential of those self-contained systems surrounding us, the complex

structures of urban systems figuring among them. Ultimately, urban structures seem to

give these concepts a material dimension. Abstract philosophical semiotic ideas that

were once only applied to linguistic ‘realities’ are carried to a mundane level with an

actual and material dimension, and the spatial turn experiences a new twist19

when—in

the sense of Schlögel—we are reminded that not all the world is simulations and sym-

bols, but that there are actual places that can be hit and shattered.20

Emphasizing the

material dimension of a possible spatial epistemology, we can see that, centered on

geographical cornerstones, those processes often associated with postmodernism

actually describe a structural state of flux that hinges on very worldly dynamics.

Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, in conclusion, appears to be a skillful

21st-century depiction of the impenetrable network of the ‘fictions’ formed by urban

structures. When the novel draws on digital concepts that now function as a new para-

digm for the genre of the print novel, these concepts seem to converge with notions of

urban complexity. The novel’s use of pictures and typographical ploys thus fore-

grounds its own spatial dimension in such a way as to undo temporal sequence. On a

figurative level, the text instead connotes concepts of hypertextual structures that seem

to present events in a simultaneous dimension. The rhizomatic structure associated

with hypertext does not only map a surface structure but simulates the dynamics nego-

tiating between a multitude of co-existing potential structures and their actual realiza-

tions. Modeled on such concepts, the novel meets the challenge posed by urban

structures in a state of flux: Especially the novel’s increased sense of self-awareness

points out the interplay between the actualization of structures on the one hand and a

vast multitude of possible—‘virtual’—structures on the other hand and seems to make

it possible aptly to map the city within the confines of the printed book. Foer’s playful

representational strategies, as a result, most adequately point out those dynamics inter-

acting between the many possible ways of appropriating the urban landscape and those

unstable urban surface structures that are continuously to be reshaped.

19 Bachmann-Medick in her explanation of the spatial turn also stresses the refocusing of

our spatial understanding in favor of the material geographical understanding Schlögel

suggests. 20

Schlögel 31: “Wir werden daran erinnert, daß nicht alles Medium und Simulation ist,

daß Körper zermalmt und Häuser zerstört werden, nicht nur Symbole … Es wurden

Türme getroffen, nicht nur Symbole.”

Berit Michel

194

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Haven: Yale UP, 2005.

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buildingjonathan-safran-foer>.

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. New

Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.

Burnett, Kathleen. “Toward a Theory of Hypertextual Design.” Postmodern Culture: An Elec-tronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 3.2 (1993). <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/

postmodern_culture/v003/3.2burnett.html>.

Codde, Philippe. “Philomela Revisited: Traumatic Iconicity in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Ex-tremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” Studies in American Fiction 35.2 (2007): 241-54.

Crang, Mike, and Nigel Thrift. Thinking Space. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Däwes, Birgit. “On Contested Ground (Zero): Literature and the Transnational Challenge of

9/11.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 52.4 (2007): 517-43.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of

California P, 1988.

Faber, Michael. “A Tower of Babble” [rev. of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close]. Guardian

4 June 2005. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/ 04/featuresreviews.Guardian-

review22>.

Faßler, Manfred. “Vorwort: Umbrüche des Städtischen.” Urban Fictions: Die Zukunft des Städtischen. Ed. Manfred Faßler and Claudius Terkowsky. München: Fink, 2006. 9-35.

Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 2001.

–––––. “Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to Metanar-

ration and Metafiction.” Poetica 35 (2003): 1-39.

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. London: Penguin, 2006.

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–––––. “The Politics of Representation in Hypertext DocuFiction: Multi-Ethnic Los Angeles

as an Emblem of ‘America’ in Norman M. Klein’s Bleeding Through: Layers of Los An-geles 1920-1986.” Screening the Americas/Proyectando las Américas: Narration of Na-tion in Documentary Film/Narración de la nación en el cine documental. Ed. Josef Raab,


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Sebastian Thies, and Daniela Noll-Opitz. Trier and Tempe: WVT and Bilingual P, 2011

(forthcoming).

Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: U

of Notre Dame P, 2008.

Herman, David. “Cognitive Narratology.” Handbook of Narratology: Contributions to Nar-rative Theory. Ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin and

New York: de Gruyter, 2009. 30-43.

Hillner, Matthias. Virtual Typography. Lausanne: AVA Academia, 2009.

Ingersoll, Earl G. “One Boy’s Passage, and His Nation’s: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English As-sociation 71.3 (2009): 54-69.

Jakob, Wanda. “‘Stuff That Happened To Me’: Visuelle Verfahren in Jonathan Safran Foers

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.” COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgraduate Ame-rican Studies 6 (2005). <http://www-copas.uni-regensburg.de/articles/issue_6/Wanda_

Jakob.php>.

Kirn, Walter. “Everything is Included” [rev. of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close]. The New York Times 3 April 2005. <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/books/review/0403-

cover-kirn.html>.

Klein, Norman. “Absences, Scripted Spaces, and the Urban Imaginary.” Die Stadt als Event. Ed. Regina Bittner. Frankfurt: Campus, 2002. 450-54.

Landow, George P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Tech-nology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie.”

Lessing. Literaturtheoretische und ästhetische Schriften. Ed. Albert Meier. Stuttgart: Re-

clam, 2006. 49-94.

Miller, Laura. “Terror Comes to Tiny Town” [rev. of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close].

New York Magazine 21 May 2005. <http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/

11574/>.

Nünning, Ansgar. “On Metanarrative.” The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology. Ed. John Pier. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2005. 11-58.

Sasse, Sylvia. “Literaturwissenschaften.” Raumwissenschaften. Ed. Stephan Günzel. Frank-

furt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2009. 225-41.

Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik.

München: Carl Hanser, 2003.

Siegel, Elizabeth. “‘Stuff That Happened To Me’: Visual Memory in Jonathan Safran Foer’s

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005).” COPAS: Current Objectives of Postgradu-ate American Studies 10 (2009). <http://www-copas.uni-regensburg.de/articles/issue_10/

10_07_text_siegel.php>.

Thrift, Nigel. “The Place of Complexity.” Theory, Culture & Society 16.3 (1999): 31-69.

Updike, John. “Mixed Messages” [rev. of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close]. The New Yorker 14 March 2005. <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/03/14/050314crbo_

books1>.

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Versluys, Kristiaan. “A Rose is Not a Rose is Not a Rose.” Versluys. Out of the Blue: Sep-tember 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. 79-119.

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Zapf, Hubert. “Literature as Cultural Ecology: Notes Towards a Functional Theory of Ima-

ginative Texts with Examples from American Literature.” Literary History/Cultural His-tory: Force-Fields and Tensions. REAL 17 [Research in English and American Litera-ture]. Ed. Herbert Grabes. Tübingen: Narr, 2001. 85-99.

“Architectural jungle” or the “sum of its people”?

Policing Post-War Urban Space in Anthony Mann’s

Side Street (1950)

BOND LOVE

“Since the end of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of cinema and the city have been

inextricably linked,” writes Mark Shiel (1). From the beginning cinema has been

marked by a strong thematic concern with metropolitan living, and, formally speaking,

“has long had a striking and distinctive ability to capture and express the spatial com-

plexity, diversity, and social dynamism of the city through mise-en-scène, location

filming, lighting, cinematography, and editing” (1). Such compatibility between

cinema and the city helps explain why, of all art forms, film has most shaped our

experience of urban space. Jean Baudrillard has gone so far as to claim that in the city,

“the cinema does not assume an exceptional form, but simply invests the streets and

the entire town with a mythical atmosphere” (56). One reason for the easy applicability

of film images to urban space is the quality of virtual reality that movies offer in com-

parison with other art forms. Unlike painting, and more so than still photography, film

goes beyond visually representing urban space to presenting a simulacrum of it (cf.

Clarke 9). And there is a payoff to cinema’s mediation of our vision of urban space

that further accounts for the entwined fortunes of cinema and the city: Film organizes

urban space in ways that help make it more habitable. It does so primarily, I would

argue, by ordering the visual confusion of city space and by placing its potentially ab-

stract and alienating geography within a humanistic framework—both of which can be

found in other art forms, but which here, in the context of film’s simulating capacity,

acquire unique force and immediacy.

In this essay, I will examine closely how one particular movie operates to orga-

nize city space in these ways: Side Street (1950), a U.S. film directed by Anthony

Mann. I have chosen this movie because it thematizes this very issue of how the

metropolis can be ordered and exemplifies a wide range of standard cinematic strate-

gies for creating order. The movie comes out of the American film tradition known as

“film noir”—a term scholars still debate how to define, but which I will define here, in

a sentence, as Hollywood crime films originating from the 1940s and 1950s, whose

stories typically feature morally complex protagonists drawn into criminality, seduc-

tive femme fatales who ruin those protagonists, cynical, trench-coated private investi-

gators, and a host of other seedy underworld types, all struggling to make their way in

a deterministic, violent world filmed in expressionistic uses of light and shadow or

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documentary-style realism. (Famous examples include The Maltese Falcon [1941],

Double Indemnity [1944], Out of the Past [1947], and Touch of Evil [1958].) Arguably

more than any other Hollywood film genre, film noir has historically provided a forum

for representing and negotiating cultural anxieties about urban living. Side Street

follows in this tradition. After discussing the formal strategies Side Street employs to

organize urban space, in the second part of my essay I will address the political impli-

cations of such organization. For the power of cinema to influence our perceptions of

city space and make it more coherent is anything but ideologically neutral, particularly

so in this Cold War-era film, which was released amid increasing public anxiety about

communist infiltration of national life.

1. Ordering and Humanizing the City

Plotwise, one could characterize Side Street as a Hitchcockian thriller about a basically

good man caught up in criminal forces beyond his control. The film tells the story of

Joe Norson, a young husband and father-to-be who steals money to provide for his

wife and child—money that unbeknownst to him belongs to a gang of extortionists.

Norson finds himself hounded not only by the gangsters but by the police, who suspect

him in a murder associated with the extortion money he stole. However, the portion of

the film I want to analyze, the opening sequence, has little to do with the plot. It serves

as a kind of introduction to New York City, portraying scenes of city life with voice-

over narration provided by the police captain who later handles Joe’s case. Here the

film lays bare its agenda to organize urban space that will inform the crime story to

follow.

The sequence begins by attempting in both words and images to provide a com-

prehensive view of the metropolis. Following the opening credits, which appear over

roving aerial shots of Manhattan, the narrator intones, “New York City. An architec-

tural jungle where fabulous wealth and the deepest squalor live side by side. New

York: the busiest, the loneliest, the kindest, and cruelest of cities.” His statement forms

an effort to contain the city within contradictions and to lend it coherence through a

series of metaphors, as the incongruous “jungle” gives way to an implicit, contradic-

tory person in the final sentence. This attempt at rhetorical mastery of the metropolis is

underscored by the exertions toward visual mastery in the continuing aerial shots that

give us a bird’s-eye view of the cityscape (cf. fig. 1). Shots like these commonly open

films noir (e.g., The Naked City [1948], Criss Cross [1949], The Big Combo [1955]),

in keeping with the film genre’s preoccupation with urban complexity and how to

make sense of it. They constitute a utopian perspective on the city, a synoptic

overview unavailable to those on the streets below, which facilitates and makes

plausible the assignment of a holistic identity to the city such as Side Street’s narrator

does—an assignment that is a simple but powerful step in the organization of urban

space. It is worth noting that if such aerial footage was showing up more often in

Hollywood films thanks to U.S. wartime advances in aerial surveillance technology, it

Policing Post-War Urban Space in Anthony Mann’s Side Street

245

was also appearing more in the service of city development, as urban planners relied

on the improved aerial filming technology to carry out the postwar boom’s unpre-

cedented number of infrastructure-building and urban renewal projects (cf. Dimend-

berg, Film Noir 46-47). The aerial view offered by Side Street and other postwar noirs

was one increasingly associated with the management of urban space.

Fig. 1: Aerial views of New York in the opening sequence of Side Street: “New York City.

An architectural jungle where fabulous wealth and the deepest squalor live side by side.”

Fig. 2: Aerial view of New York in the opening shot of Naked City.

Side Street’s opening aerial shots and voice-over register the desire not only to orga-

nize urban space, however, but to ‘humanize’ it. To recognize this, it is important to

look at how, on another level, the images and narration exist in tension with each

other. Judging from the images alone it is difficult to tell which city this is, because it

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is filmed from a fairly low altitude and steep angle. One can compare these shots with

the higher, more comprehensive opening shot in the film noir Naked City, which

allows the buildings to combine into the signifier ‘New York’ (cf. fig. 2). In the case

of Side Street we cannot see enough of the cityscape at once to identify it. The build-

ings that enter and exit the frame appear more as a generic “architectural jungle,” to

quote the narrator, and increasingly take on the aspect of a shifting configuration of

abstract geometric shapes. This abstracting aerial view of the city clashes with the nar-

rator’s personification of New York (“the busiest, the loneliest, the kindest, and the

cruelest of cities”), as if the city’s chaotic abstract geometry were a problem that his

rhetorical humanizing of the city is designed to rectify. Indeed, the remainder of Side

Street’s opening sequence attempts to counteract the threat of a dominating abstract

space. Here I borrow from Henri Lefebvre, who uses the term “abstract space” to refer

to a spatial regime characteristic of modern capitalist societies—one that embodies a

society’s foundation in economic rationalization, mass production, commodification,

and mediated exchange relations. Abstract space tends to consist of homogenous and

geometric structures, like those depicted here. In contrast to what Lefebvre terms

“social space,” areas that can be appropriated for a variety of human uses such as a

park or town square, abstract space drastically restricts the range of human activity

within it. As Edward Dimendberg explains, while a park can be the site of “a picnic, a

nap, a lover’s tryst, [or] a reading of the newspaper,” a shopping mall “invite[s] …

only shopping” (“Henri Lefebvre” 32). Lefebvre associates abstract space with the

domination of people rather than appropriation by people—abstract space is imposed.

And certainly no abstract space is more imposing than a field of skyscrapers.

The narrator’s attempt to humanize the city space is readable not just in light of

Lefebvre’s spatial theory, but, more importantly, in light of discourses about the “in-

humanity” of modern cities that predate the making of this film. For example, the

Charter of Athens, a manifesto put out by the 1933 International Congress of Modern

Architecture, announced that Western cities had become “inhuman” because of the

“ferocity of private interests” in shaping the cityscape (Le Corbusier 138). And in

1944, six years before Side Street was released, architect José Luis Sert declared in an

urban planning anthology that “man is lost in the vast extension of our metropolitan

areas as they are today. There is no relationship between their vastness and the human

scale. … The humanization of cities … appears as one of the main tasks of the coming

decades” (394-95). It is a task undertaken by Side Street’s opening sequence. The

aerial shots effectively stage the threat of an alienating, abstract space in order to

dispel that threat with the narrator’s voice-over, which offers the fantasy that the entire

metropolis can be predominated by an individual human presence—a reversal of Sert’s

claim that the individual is lost in a modern city grown beyond all human dimensions.

The narrator’s wording provides further remedy: Not only does he supplant his initial

characterization of the city as an architectural jungle with a personification of the city

(“the busiest, the loneliest,” etc.), but later in the sequence, in a montage of street

scenes, asserts that “every problem that troubled a man’s heart, every dream that ever


247

stirred his blood, is here. For this city, like any other, is the sum of its people, with

their frailties, hopes, fears, dreams.” This subsequent characterization turns the city-

scape of those roving aerial shots into a locus of human drama and transforms its

sprawling physical extension into an index of the range of human experience it con-

tains. No longer personified, the metropolis now stands, conversely, as a figure for hu-

manity.

Most of the movie’s ordering and humanizing of city space occurs, however,

after the camera has descended to the street and starts filming at a level approximating

a city-dweller’s perspective. Drawing on basic elements of filmmaking and on film-

viewing dynamics, the rest of Side Street’s ‘Introduction to New York’ sequence orga-

nizes the urban space in many ways typical of Hollywood. I want to focus on the rapid

succession of street scenes that begins around the time of the narrator’s above descrip-

tion of New York as the “sum of its people.” Here I give a shot from each scene, along

with the concurrent narration (cf. fig. 3).

Fig 3: “New York is the sum of its people … with their frailties, hopes, dreams.”

“This one: does he secretly long to recap- “And this one: a part-time letter carrier,

ture his vanished youth?” dreaming of the unattainable: a fur coat

for his wife.”

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248

“This man looks troubled. He has a problem.” “These: are they tragedy or comedy?”

All the shots in this scene are four seconds apart, forming a montage of rapid, disjunc-tive scenes occurring on or near a New York sidewalk. The montage can be viewed as a resolution of the kind of street-level visual confusion traditionally ascribed to the city by thinkers such as Georg Simmel, who wrote in the early twentieth century that walking in an urban downtown entails “the intensification of nervous stimulation, which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” (409). Considering the age of the human species, this level of visual cacophony is a relatively new phenomenon, he argued; the human sensorium remains unaccustomed to the city’s “rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpected onrushing impressions” (409-10). (Such street-level disarray makes those aerial shots an even more appropriate beginning to a film’s assignment of holistic identity to a city.) When the camera is on the street in this mon-tage, it simulates the disjunctive, fragmentary visuality of a bustling New York side-walk, yet in a way that ultimately provides coherence and order. On the one hand, the camera presents discontinuous shots filmed from a range of distances, some from in-side windows, others from outside, fragmenting the visuality further with an unusually high angle midway through. The montage even exceeds the “sharp discontinuity” of images afforded by a real downtown street insofar as here the images are freed from the cohering context of a spectator’s bodily movement, thanks to the disembodied camera eye. In addition, the brevity of the shots prevents the viewer from resting long in any single perspective, recreating a sense of Simmel’s “onrushing impressions.” In a pronounced way, this part of Side Street’s opening sequence exemplifies film noir’s signature, urban-appropriate reliance on tight cutting, as opposed to the “leisurely establishing shot, the generous long shot and the sensuous moving camera” more pre-dominant in a rural film genre like the Western (Hirsch 89). On the other hand, the narration that threads these shots together counteracts the visual instability and gives the montage overall order and coherence. Narrative, in the sense of an implicit storyline, always smoothes over the potentially jarring effects of camerawork and editing, as Stephen Heath has pointed out (cf. 392, 402), and this is a fundamental way through which films in general bring order to the disjunctive urban visuality they


249

simulate; but in the case of this montage, spoken narration spells out the organizing context of these images (New York as a collection of individual stories). The unruly visuality of the city has thus been heightened, but at the same time granted larger-than-life coherence by the friendly voice-over.

The narration in this montage not only brings order to these street scenes, but casts the city in humanistic terms, as discussed above. Yet the narration humanizes city space in more subtle ways that go beyond the words spoken to the dynamics of film viewing itself, by which most films taking place in a city humanize that space. There is the simple fact that in order for a narrative to cohere shots of urban space, we as an audience must either infer that narrative from the action depicted or, when it takes the form of explicit narration, as in this case, accept that what we hear is a valid interpretation of what we are seeing.1 Either way, to cohere these images, narrative requires our col-laboration. In this sense we are ‘sutured’ into the film, taking up the audience-subject position that the film offers us and making sense of the represented world in the film’s own terms. The urban space onscreen becomes not just a meaningful universe but one in which we are fundamentally invested, as opposed to a real-life urban space whose abstraction (Lefebvre) or inhuman scale (Sert) can alienate us. It is fitting that Side Street, a film that thematizes the humanity of the city, would add another layer to this general filmic process of humanizing urban space by putting its opening narrative in the mouth of a person. The film works to cement our acceptance of the narrative, and therefore our incorporation into the film’s world, by encouraging us to identify with the perspective of this policeman-narrator—which also constitutes an ideologically loaded move that forwards the film’s political agenda, as I will discuss in a moment.

In addition to basic film-viewing dynamics, standard filmic constructions of space facilitate Side Street’s humanization of the city. In most movies we see, narra-tive designs individual shots as well as joins them. As Karel Reisz and Gavin Miller put it, a “director’s aim is to give an ideal picture of the scene, in each case placing his camera in such a position that it records most effectively the particular piece of action or detail which is dramatically significant” (qtd. in Heath 389). Heath adds that the space in a shot is “‘used up’ by the presentation of narratively important settings, character traits (‘psychology’), or other causal agents. … Frame space … is con-structed as narrative space.” In other words, he explains, film turns space into place—an area determined by human activity and significance (392, 394). Certainly the space in these montage shots in Figure 3 is composed to foreground the human activity that the narrator contemplates, whether the people dominate the frame, such as the couple at lunch or the man adjusting his watch, or whether they appear small, as when the store mannequin dwarfs the part-time postman, emphasizing the “unattainability” of the coat he dreams of buying his wife. (Although the viewer does not know it yet, this man is in fact Joe the protagonist, who will steal the cash to afford such things.) Each of these shots turn street-level space into place, transforming this “architectural jungle” 1 One exception to this rule would be the case of unreliable narration, which prompts us

to reject the explicit interpretation in favor of a different narrative that we have inferred.

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into “the sum of its people.” Hence, when the narrator employs what we might call a flaneurial discourse in this montage, picking individuals out of the urban crowd and speculating about their stories, treating the street space as a theater for human activity, he thematizes the camera’s conversion of space into place which occurs throughout this film, and in fact most Hollywood films set in the city.

By now the point has become clear: Organizing and humanizing urban space are not two separate maneuvers in Side Street’s introduction to New York; the opening sequence organizes urban space through humanizing it. Significantly, the introduction ends with a street-level shot of people at the foot of a skyscraper (cf. fig. 4), an antit-hesis to the aerial views of skyscrapers at the beginning. One might think it a curious note on which to end, given that this final shot seems to emblematize people’s domination by the kind of inhuman, abstract space whose threat the initial aerial shots announced. Yet this space is place, not only for the specific reason that it highlights Joe’s (center) low socioeconomic status and high material aspirations, but because the entire sequence up to this point has enchanted the cityscape, rendering it the concrete embodiment of people’s “hopes, fears, dreams.”

Fig. 4: Final shot in Side Street’s ‘Introduction to New York’ sequence.

2. Policing the City

As I asserted at the beginning, film’s power to simulate urban space and organize it humanistically is not ideologically neutral, and indeed Side Street’s thematic over-determination of New York as the “sum of its people” that conventional mise-en-scène makes of it anyway points to a powerful political agenda. The outlines of this agenda become clear when we remember that this humanization occurs within the context of a crime film. The parts of the opening sequence examined above must now be related to


251

another important part of the film’s introduction to New York, to which I want to turn:

the narrator’s discussion of policing this huge metropolis.

After the opening aerial shots (cf. fig. 1) and his initial characterization of the

city—New York as “architectural jungle,” “the busiest, the loneliest,” etc.—and before

the montage of people on the sidewalk (cf. fig. 3), the police-captain narrator intro-

duces himself as Walter Anderson, “one of an army of twenty thousand whose job is to

protect the citizens in this city of eight million.” The aerial shots at this point give way

to a montage of street-level police actions (cf. fig. 5), during which he adds, “So 24

hours a day you’ll find our men on Park Avenue, Times Square, Central Park, Fulton

Market, the subway.” This montage inaugurates the opening sequence’s other major

theme, that of fighting urban crime. Although a sober issue in comparison with the se-

quence’s later celebration of the cornucopia of humanity that is New York, the two

themes fit into a logical proposition: If the city is the sum of its people, then part of

that sum comprises socially dangerous elements that must be kept in check. The entire

‘Introduction to New York’ sequence transitions between these themes so easily, how-

ever, that they blur into each other, making the humanistic ordering of city space itself

look curiously like surveillance. For example, those initial aerial shots (cf. fig. 1) that

attempted to order the cityscape (via the bird’s-eye view used also by urban planners,

and the narrator’s concomitant assignment of a holistic identity to the city) and to

humanize it (via the human voice’s containment of the city’s abstraction and inhuman

scale, the narrative’s personification of the city, and the panorama’s figuration of the

range of human experience that New York comprises) take on a panoptic aspect when

juxtaposed with the montage of police street-surveillance that immediately follows.

The camera’s aerial coverage complements the police coverage.2

“… Park Avenue” “… Times Square”

2 It is a fitting historical fact that just as postwar urban planners joined Hollywood in

exploiting the new aerial filming technology, so too did urban police departments,

which at this time started regularly to employ aerial cameras to patrol cities (cf.

Dimendberg, Film Noir 46-47). The aerial city view in Side Street was thus historically

associated not only with the management of urban space, but also its surveillance and

regulation.

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“… Central Park” “… Fulton Market”

Fig. 5: “24 hours a day you’ll find our men on …”

Such depictions of policing also give a surveillant charge to the later flaneurial mon-

tage of street scenes discussed above (cf. fig. 3). Shortly before narrator Anderson

calls New York “the sum of its people” and indulges in playful conjecture about the

individuals we see onscreen, he gives a string of statistics about the city’s average an-

nual number of births, marriages, deaths, etc., culminating in the number of murder

cases per year that end up on his desk. “Which of these people will be the victims?

Which will be the killers?” he ponders, as two different images of crowd scenes flash

onscreen (cf. fig. 6).

Fig. 6: “Which of these people will be the victims?” “Which will be the killers?”

His speculation about strangers onscreen here parallels his speculation about strangers

in the later montage of street scenes, establishing a continuity between his discourse of

police surveillance in the former and his breezy flaneurial musing in the latter. This

continuity is further emphasized when the flaneurial montage ends on an explicitly

surveillant note. After saying, “[t]his man looks troubled. He has a problem” (final

shot in fig. 3), the narrator continues, “[i]t might be helpful to a policeman to know the

details of some of the problems that walk the streets of New York,” as the camera


253

follows the man into a building, filming from a high angle that recalls the panoptic

aerial shots (cf. fig. 7).

Fig. 7: Surveillance: “It might be helpful to a policeman to know the details

of some of the problems that walk the streets of New York.”

So what are we to make of this unsettling connection between ordering the city hu-

manistically and policing it (maintaining “law and order”) in Side Street’s ‘Intro-

duction to New York’ sequence? The easy answer would be that, because this an urban

crime film, it makes sense that law enforcement would form the context for, and there-

by color, the film’s humanistic reflections on, and constructions of, the city. But in fact

the connection goes deeper than this, leading to an ideological agenda. The overlap

between the film’s construction of New York as a fundamentally human space and as a

space in need of surveillance registers the film’s insistence that we associate crime

with a humanized space. We are to consider crime as an unavoidable component of a

city that is the sum of its people—not, that is, as the product of an alienating urban en-

vironment of profound material inequality. The film is steering us to attribute crime to

ethical, not systemic causes. It makes sense that the film’s humanistic organization of

urban space looks like policing, because it is policing. Through it the film is sur-

veilling us.

The final montage I will examine offers a specific example of what I mean by the

film’s regulation of its audience. As discussed above, at one point during the opening

aerial shots the narrator calls the city an “architectural jungle where fabulous wealth

and the deepest squalor live side by side” (cf. fig. 1). This material inequality he refers

to could be taken as a source of the urban crime that the police patrols depicted soon

thereafter (cf. fig. 5) are trying to prevent. Later in the sequence the film raises the is-

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254

sue of class inequality again, but this time by showing us wealth and squalor living

side by side with a pair of back-to-back shots: the first of a couple riding horses in

Central Park, the second of a group of homeless men eating soup by the Brooklyn

Bridge (cf. fig. 8).

Fig. 8: “New York is all things and all places gathered into one community. Every problem

that troubled a man’s heart, every dream that ever stirred his blood, is here.”

The narration during these shots, some of which I have already quoted, casts the in-

equality onscreen in entirely humanistic terms. “New York is all things and all places

gathered into one community. Every problem that troubled a man’s heart, every dream

that ever stirred his blood, is here.” Now we are asked literally to see the class inequal-

ity mentioned by the narrator before, but this time in a different context: no longer as a

potential source of crime, but as a manifestation of New York’s range of human

stories. By reframing class inequality as a humanistic issue, a matter of dreams and

heartache, the film insists that the roots of crime are fundamentally ethical, not socio-

economic. In short, the film recognizes a systematic critique of urban crime by offer-

ing us grounds to make one, only to revoke those grounds and foreclose the critique—

containing it just as the threat of abstract space was staged and contained by human-

istic narration in those aerial views. With the policeman’s voice-over narration to

guide us through this foreclosure and to control how we connect these images of rich

and poor—a policeman, as I said before, whose friendly narrative persona invites us to

identify with him—the film regulates how we think about class inequality and crime.

Of course, all of this raises the question of why the film’s policing of us should

be necessary. What exactly is at stake behind this push for a humanistic conception of

urban crime? It is important to remember that Side Street was made in 1950 at the

height of the Cold War, the same year red-baiter Joe McCarthy rose to national promi-

nence, and three years after the first Hollywood blacklist. This film, I would argue, is a

product of the Red Scare, and a politically conservative response to films noir of its

day, which tended to the left. Whereas post-war noirs largely took a progressive, criti-

cal stance toward urban capitalism, frequently portraying crime as an underclass

response to a rigged economic system that made a joke of the American Dream (cf.


255

Lewis 207-208), Side Street works to foreclose any critique of capitalism that could be

made by attributing crime to class inequality, rather than ethics. This, ultimately, is the

reason for the film’s surveillance of us. The film orders urban space along humanistic

lines to keep us in order, according to a conservative Cold War model.

But again, Side Street is by no means singular for its humanistic organization of

the city. This, I have argued, is the fundamental operation that mainstream narrative

films, Hollywood or otherwise, perform on urban space. What is distinctive about Side

Street is the particular conservative agenda to which it vigorously puts that organiza-

tion. Although it is worth investigating whether mainstream film’s multilayered,

frame-by-frame conversion of space into place inherently lends itself to conservative

ideology, certainly one could point to numerous films (such as many noirs) in which

this basic maneuver advances an agenda that challenges the social, economic, or politi-

cal status quo. Whatever the ideological messages conveyed by such humanistic spa-

tial organization, however, film conveys these messages so effectively, again, because

of film’s power to simulate city space. In David Clarke’s words, “rather than a repre-

sentation of space as such, film (re)produces a virtual space, marked by a ‘proximity

without presence’” (9). Movies make it remarkably easy for us to suspend disbelief

and take their worlds for reality in the time we spend watching them, which makes

cinematic images of urban space easily applicable to real urban space. In this essay I

have held up Side Street as an example of how mainstream movies offer the ideolog-

ically charged public service of making cities feel more habitable. They have histori-

cally done this primarily by simulating and cohering the fragmentary visuality of urban

space, and by humanizing that space, though Side Street points to the inseparability of

these processes. Considering the vividness that film’s simulating power gives to this

twofold service, it is hardly surprising that it is difficult to imagine the city without

film, or film without the city. Because “movies influence the way we construct images

of the world, and in many instances… influence how we operate within it,” Nezar

AlSayyad writes, “movies are an integral constituent of the urban environment. … A

study of twentieth-century urban space requires an engagement with both the real and

the reel as two sides of the same coin” (xiii, 1).

Works Cited

AlSayyad, Nezar. Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real. London:

Routledge, 2006.

Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 1989.

Clarke, David B. “Introduction: Previewing the Cinematic City.” The Cinematic City. Ed.

Clarke. London: Routledge, 1997. 1-18.

Dimendberg, Edward. “Henri Lefebvre on Abstract Space.” Public Space. Ed. Andrew Light

and Jonathan M. Smith. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. 17-32.

———. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004.

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256

Heath, Stephen. “Narrative Space.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Ed. Philip Rosen. New

York: Columbia UP, 1986. 379-420.

Hirsch, Foster. The Dark Side of the Screen. San Diego: A.S. Barnes, 1981.

Le Corbusier. The Athens Charter. New York: Grossman, 1973.

Lefebvre, Henri. “From Absolute Space to Abstract Space.” Lefebvre. The Production of

Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. 229-91.

Lewis, Jon. American Film: A History. New York: Norton, 2008.

Sert, José Luis. “The Human Scale in City Planning.” New Architecture and City Planning.

Ed. Paul Zucker. New York: Philosophical Library, 1944. 392-412.

Shiel, Mark. “Cinema and the City in History and Theory.” Cinema and the City. Ed. Shiel

and Tony Fitzmaurice. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 1-18.

Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. and ed. Kurt H. Wolff. New York:

Free Press, 1950.

Filmography

Side Street. Dir. Anthony Mann. MGM, 1950.

The Naked City. Dir. Jules Dassin. Hellinger Productions and Universal, 1948.

EthniCities

Metropolitan Cultures and Ethnic Identities

in the Americas / Martin Butler,

Jens Martin Gurr, Olaf Kaltmeier (Eds.). -

Trier : WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011

(Inter-American Studies / Estudios Interamericanos; 3)

ISBN 978-3-86821-310-2

Cover Artwork: Daniel Bläser

Cover Photographs: Elisabeth Hagopian and Marc Simon Rodriguez

Cover Design: Brigitta Disseldorf

© WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2011

ISBN 978-3-86821-310-2

No part of this book, covered by the copyright hereon,

may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means

without prior permission of the publisher.

WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier

Postfach 4005, 54230 Trier

Bergstraße 27, 54295 Trier

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Co-Publisher:

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Hispanic Research Center

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http://www.asu.edu/brp

[email protected]

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

MARTIN BUTLER, JENS MARTIN GURR, AND OLAF KALTMEIER Introduction: On the Intersection between Urban Environments and Ethnic Identities in the Americas 1

CHRISTOPH MARX Globalizing Cities: Ethnicity and Racism in Vancouver and Johannesburg in the First Wave of Globalization 13

I. USEABLE PASTS & INDIGENOUS IDENTITIES: ETHNIC HERITAGE,

URBAN RENEWAL, AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL MEMORY

JULIANA STRÖBELE-GREGOR The Construction of an Indigenous Culture and Identity in El Alto and Its Impact on Everyday Life and in the Political Arena 31

OLAF KALTMEIER Historic City Centers in Globalization Processes: Cultural Heritage, Urban Renewal, and Postcolonial Memories in the Americas 41

EVA MARSCH The Construction of Ethnic Identities in Street Art 55

MARC SIMON RODRIGUEZ Latino Mural Cityscapes: A Reflection on Public Art, History, and Community in Chicago after World War II 67

CERSTIN BAUER-FUNKE The Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Mexico City as a Point of Crystallization for Urban Cultural and Ethnic Identity 79

II. ETHNICITIES ON THE MOVE: MIGRATIONS, MOBILITIES,

AND THE METROPOLIS

AXEL BORSDORF AND ALOISIA GÓMEZ SEGOVIA A New Founding of Lima in the City Center of Santiago de Chile?: Structure and Problems of Peruvian Immigration to the Chilean Capital 97

WALTER ALEJANDRO IMILAN A Segmentary Society in the City: Urban Ethnification of Mapuche in Santiago de Chile 111

vi

ALEXANDRA GANSER Navigating Little Italy: Carceral Mobility in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets 139

KARIN HÖPKER The Cab and the City: Chance Encounters and Certalian Perspectives in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth 155

RÜDIGER KUNOW City of Germs: Biological Identities and Ethnic Cultures in the Metropolis 171

III. PRECARIOUS IDENTITIES: ETHNIC SELVES & COMMUNITIES

AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE CITY

PAULO BARRERA RIVERA Metropolitan Cultures and Religious Identities in the Urban Periphery of São Paulo 193

YVONNE RIAÑO Addressing Urban Fear and Violence in Bogotá through the ‘Culture of Citizenship’: Scope and Challenges of a Unique Approach 209

RAINER WINTER AND SEBASTIAN NESTLER Film Analysis as Cultural Analysis: The Construction of Ethnic Identities in Amores Perros 227

* * * * *

LAWRENCE A. HERZOG Globalization and Transnational Place Identity along the U.S.-Mexico Border 241

CONTRIBUTORS 255

Navigating Little Italy: Carceral Mobility

in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets1

ALEXANDRA GANSER

Little Italy for me is in a sense a microcosm for something much, much larger.

—Martin Scorsese (qtd. in Massood 77)

1. Introduction

In the context of his theory of the simulacrum as the real(ity) of postmodernity, Jean Baudrillard once said of the U.S.-American city that it “seems to have stepped right out of the movies” (56), and that it was hence with urban film that the analytical rapprochement to American urbanity should start. It can indeed be argued that iconic urban films, along with other visual cultural products, pre-structure the perception of New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles; furthermore, and more importantly in the context of the nexus of urbanity and ethnicities, film uses the “participative distance” (Caviglia n.p.) of its spectators in order to enable them to vicariously and imaginative-ly experience off-limit ethnic neighborhoods—only think of Spike Lee’s iconic con-structions of ghettoized African-American urbanity—and thus to acknowledge that cities are made of myriads of stories, some manifest in stone, some in social structure, and others in celluloid. In this view, urban screenscapes broaden our urban imaginaries without reducing urbanity to single grand narratives.

As a screenscape, the modern U.S.-American city has been articulated as a site of contesting social forces where difference must be addressed so that a complex social fabric might be navigated by its pluriethnic inhabitants. Set before the first waves of Italian immigration, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), for instance, imag-ines the gang wars between different ethnic groups as formative for the history not only of the city, but of the whole U.S.-American nation. In this essay, however, I will concentrate on another filmic enactment of Little Italy in Scorsese’s oeuvre, Mean

1 This essay is an outcome of collaborative research with Karin Höpker (cf. her article in this

volume). The theoretical similarities and duplicities between her contribution to this volume and my own are by no means unintentional. On the contrary, we hope that in this way, our articles demonstrate the usefulness of a spatial perspective on the ethnic-urban filmic imag-inary inspired by the writings of Michel de Certeau beyond the limited scope of a single case study. Parts of this essay have been published in an earlier version (cf. Ganser/Höpker).

Alexandra Ganser 140

Streets (1973). Not only was Mean Streets Scorsese’s first widely acknowledged feature film; it also marks a cornerstone of the Italian-American director’s engagement with the production of Italian-Americanness, preceded by the little-known Who’s That

Knocking at My Door? (1965-68)2 and continued by both semi-documentary and fic-tional films: Italianamerican (1974), Goodfellas (1990), A Personal Journey with

Martin Scorsese through American Movies (1995), and Il mio viaggio in Italia / My

Journey to Italy (1999). All of these works emphasize the importance of film for the formation of Italian-American identity and could hence be read as the cinematographic rendering of Baudrillard’s statement from an Italian American point of view. This point of view is a crucial structuring element of Mean Streets and is translated by a variety of semi-documentary camera techniques, influenced by the French nouvelle

vague and cinéma vérité styles and by Italian neorealism. On this cinematographic metalevel too, then, Scorsese tries to articulate a distinct transatlantic filmic language, doubling the immigration legacy of Italian Americans.

Mean Streets uses the claustrophobic script of its predecessor, Who’s That

Knocking at My Door, for an iconic New Hollywood staging of Italian-American characters who have a hard time navigating the dense fabric of their ‘hood,’ a territorial space that exceeds geographical boundaries and marks what Guy Debord has called the ‘psychogeography’ of its protagonists. However, the importance of Mean

Streets exceeds that of articulating an Italian-American filmic vision and language, as on a general level it also reflects both the hopes and fears for the U.S. metropolis of the 1970s, torn between ethnic conflict and integration, between Robert Moses’s plans for metropolitan purification and renewal and Jane Jacobs’s visions of micro-level multiethnic harmony (cf. Caro; Jacobs; Sennett 439; Ganser/Höpker). In the following selective reading of Mean Streets, my focus will be the enactment of ethnic (im)-mobility in a film that communicates as the crux of a ghettoized ethnic urbanity what I term ‘carceral mobility’: confined by narrow geographical boundaries, the protagonists are “paradoxically liberated by the turmoil of the bars, tenements, and streets that make up their confines” (Kolker 168). This paradoxical version of mobility is structured by an often contradictory dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, of shelter and imprisonment, of safety and surveillance characteristic not only of Little Italy but of other ethnic neighborhoods as well.

2. Carceral Mobility, Certalian Tactics, U.S.-American Mobilities

How does Mean Streets construct the carceral mobility of Little Italy, and how, in turn, does spatial confinement influence the screened development of the ethnic subject? What role does the specific history of Italian America play in this context? In order to

2 As Lourdeaux notes, Mean Streets was in fact conceived as the third part of a trilogy,

starting with Jerusalem, Jerusalem (a project Scorsese never realized) and continued by Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (232).

Navigating Little Italy: Carceral Mobility in Scorsese’s Mean Streets 141

answer these questions, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life provides a vocabulary of mobile forms and itineraries as well as of resistant tactics versus hege-monic strategies that has influenced urban studies to a great extent for a few decades now. According to de Certeau, urban movement always contains an element of (re-) appropriation, a claim to space by the person who moves about, even if such a claim may only be momentary.3 As Karin Höpker also argues in this volume, the present and presence relative to time and place will necessarily establish the individual as a (temporary) agent within a network, interconnected via spatial relations of proximity and distance and informed by codes of race, class, and gender.

De Certeau himself presents much less than a harmonious view of the socio-cultural realm, as he describes culture as a force field which “articulates conflicts” and “develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often violence” (xvii). In the chapter “Walking in the City,” de Certeau is mainly interested in the manifold practices of everyday mobility through which individual agents tactically reappropriate space; tactics, according to de Certeau, are applied from a position which has no place of its own as such and which is not visibly distinguishable in terms of a clear borderline.

This tactical mobility is also at work in Mean Streets, where protagonists do not behave according to the grand narrative of U.S.-American exceptionalist individualism and ascendant social mobility, but act as “loc[i] in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of … relational determinations interact” (de Certeau xi). The filmic vision counters the dominant U.S.-American narrative, in which mobility has been of special symbolic value for the formation of ideas and ideals of freedom and national identity (and thus constitutes an important element in the discourse of American exceptionalism). The ascription of a democratic, conflict-solving potential to social and geographical mobility constitutes a main topos in U.S.-American culture and literature, from slave narratives to Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, from Woody Guthrie to Jack Kerouac and the road movie. Yet U.S.-American cultural constructions of mobility, in their mainstream versions at least, often implicitly rest on the construction of the ethnic or gendered Other as immobile, as ‘not free to move.’ Argu-ably, literary and cultural narratives have had a crucial share in the process of forming a rhetoric of territorial expansion and limitless social mobility, which neglects those ‘less central’ stories of slavery, internment, marginalization, segregation, and exclu-sion from the grand narrative of American mobility. Correspondingly, the street or the road often acts as a shifting signifier in cultural narratives, immersed in a dialectics of

3 While de Certeau’s theories have been criticized for their structuralist, sometimes dichot-

omous logics as well as for their representational, humanist approach, The Practice of

Everyday Life and especially the much-anthologized chapter “Walking in the City” are still valued by urban theorists as a starting point for making sense of the urban everyday. It has to be noted that de Certeau differentiates between walking as a form of self-directed, tactical mobility and movement by railways or busses, which he considers passive. For a view of urban automobility building on and updating de Certeau, cf. Thrift.


geographical and social mobility and immobility within the larger context of ethnic, class, and gender differences.4

The dialectics of (im)mobility is also at work in de Certeau. He, too, develops a notion of “‘traveling incarceration’ in which human bodies are able to be ordered” (Thrift 44-45), but he only refers to traveling by train and bus where “the carriage is mobile, the passengers are immobile” at this point (Thrift 44-45; cf. de Certeau 111). For him, only the ‘walked’ street itself functions as an urban space that has the poten-tial for moments of rupture in the socio-spatial structure and the monitored machinery of urbanity, a space where a vis-à-vis with the Other is possible on a shared street-level.5 However, such encounters do not imply that social hierarchies are ever com-pletely or permanently suspended. As is the case in Mean Streets, these hierarchies can even feed into a paradoxical carceral mobility of roads in closed circuit structuring an ethnic ghetto.

In the 1970s, Martin Scorsese brought the results of postwar urban development on screen and made them a subtext of popular perception: Taxi Driver (1976) is the most renowned outcome of this project (cf. Ganser/Höpker). Scorsese’s Mean Streets addresses spatial practices of motion and interaction as a part of everyday itineraries, foregrounding the paradox of carceral mobility as a result of invisible but closely policed segregational cityscapes. The trajectories of Scorsese’s protagonists move on “lignes d’erre” (de Certeau xviii), aberrant lines that navigate what de Certeau describes as “a jungle of functionality” and of “technocratically constructed, written, and functionalized space” (xviii).

3. The Urban Villagers

How can we make sense of the cultural specificity of Scorsese’s filmic articulation of Italian-Americanness through the concept of carceral mobility and the Certalian theoretization of the street? For one, Mean Streets is grounded in, though by no means reducible to, the historical experience of Italian immigration to urban America. In 1962, sociologist Herbert Gans published his classic study of the life of Italian Americans in Boston’s West End, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of

Italian-Americans. With a focus especially on the second and third generations, Gans characterized Italian Americanization by fast acculturation (especially due to mass culture and the media)6 on the one hand and slow assimilation on the other. The latter 4 Regarding gender, I have analyzed this dialectics more closely elsewhere (cf. Ganser 2009). 5 The similarity of this point in de Certeau’s theorizing with Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception

of the chronotope of the road and its democratic potential are striking, but space does not permit a more detailed discussion here.

6 Scorsese’s musical choices in the soundtrack would confirm this diagnosis; a number of classic Anglo-American soul and rock’n’roll songs by the Ronettes, the Shirelles, or the Rolling Stones are much more dominant in the film than Italian music, which appears mostly in association with the parent generation.


he understood as “the disappearance of the Italian social system” (35) that did not happen in America’s Little Italies and subsequently led to what Fred Gardaphé calls the “trappings of Italianitá” (Italy 4): this continual social “Italianness” becomes an obstacle to entering American mainstream culture, as it “becomes a closet with all the claustrophobia that small spaces encourage” (Gardaphé, Italy 159). The pervasiveness and durability of the social system, built on strong kinship ties among extended families, religious conformism, strong social cohesion, and nostalgia for the past, is what led Gans to the seemingly paradoxical title that characterizes Italian Americans as “Urban Villagers” who had successfully transferred socio-economic structures of Italian villages to New York, Boston, and other American cities. Contemporary commentators like Gardaphé are hesitant to call this transferral a success, however; Michael Viscusi, for instance, terms Little Italy “a captive market of eternal exiles, who could neither enter the order of English America nor return to Italy” (64-65).

Historically, a main factor that accounts for the durability of the Italian ways of social life—besides the upholding of family values and religious and cultural traditions—functioned on a territorial basis: campanilismo or “village-mindedness” (Glazer/Moynihan 186) referred to the fact that America’s Little Italies were uniformly ordered according to regional provenience of the Italian immigrants, who stuck to their village of origin and distrusted forestieri, the ‘strangers’ outside one’s own extended family; Little Italy was thus by no means a homogeneous whole (cf. Maffi 109, 116; Glazer/Moynihan 184) but rather, as Richard Sennett calls it, an “ethnic palimpsest” (440). Scorsese’s own neighborhood of New York’s Elizabeth Street, for instance, was almost exclusively inhabited by Italians from around Palermo; as he himself commented, even as a third-generation Italian American he often was confused as a child as to whether he lived in America or Italy (qtd. in Blake 153). “Although the nation he was in might have been a matter of some confusion to the young Scorsese,” Richard Blake comments, “the neighborhood was not”:

In fact, so precise were the boundaries of this world that in his documentary film Italianamerican (1974), his father … makes a clear distinction between their street and the Neapolitan settlement two blocks over on Mulberry Street. Although outsiders may speak of New York and New Yorkers of Little Italy …, the residents view their area as a federation of even smaller enclaves, each with its own personality. (153-54)

The resulting tightness of social control within any Italian-American neighbor-hood can be viewed as a consequence of these tightly-knit federations, even though it might have been more lenient in comparison with other ethnic ghettos like Chinatown, as Maffi argues (cf. 112). Mean Streets presents a conclusion that differs from Gans’s sociological study, however. Gans writes:

In view of the severity of social control, it would be easy to caricature peer group life as a prison for its members. To the outsider, the concern with social control and self-con-trol might indeed seem oppressive. But he must also take into account that there is little desire for voluntary nonconformity, and consequently, little need to require involuntary conformity. Nor do people seem to be troubled by fears about the breakdown of self-control, or about the possibility that they may be suspected of misdeeds. Although these


potentialities do lurk under the surface, they do not usually disturb the positive tenor of group relations. (88)

Scorsese chooses to focus on this very issue: what happens when adolescent Italian-American males, well integrated into a socially cohesive community, are “troubled by fears about the breakdown of self-control, or about the possibility that they may be suspected of misdeeds”? What happens when the lurking potentialities come to the surface and do disturb “the positive tenor of group relations”? In this manner, Mean Streets tests the boundaries of the Italian-American urban social system and asks its audience to evaluate the price the ethnic/ized individual pays for its sustenance: violence, self-denial, and loss of mobility. In this way, the film presents us with a rather bleak critical evaluation of this system.

Tight social cohesion on the inside and strong rejection of the non-Italian-American world certainly also account for spatial segregation or ghettoization, which has functioned, from an ‘inside’ perspective, as both shelter from a discriminatory outside (manifest also in the violation of Italian Americans’ civil liberties and the detention of Italian Americans as both ‘Reds’ and fascists up to the Cold War; cf. Gardaphé, Italy 24-26) and a guarantee for cultural continuity. The street was a distinct site of negotiating Italian American masculinity and cultural identity, as “the male’s corner hangout, the streets, and the stag environments in which he spent his spare-time as a young man were not respected by the American climate of opinion” (208).7 An earlier major sociological study on Italian American life by William Foote Whyte is tellingly named Street Corner Society. The street as a central site of performing Italian-American masculinity and identity functioned as a territorial marker for the carceral mobility of the enclave, providing ‘home turf’ while simultaneously inhibiting movement:

Movement could be dangerous when crossing the street meant entering a neighborhood patrolled by a hostile group. Consequently, Little Italies across the country became stages for the public display of manhood as Italian-American men protected their home turf from invasion, and these neighborhoods were breeding grounds for street gangs. (Gardaphé, Wise Guys 18)

Where Gans speaks about Italian-American mobility, he differentiates between individual and group mobility on the one hand (referring to the social unit that is undertaking to change itself ) and internal and external mobility on the other in his chapter “Obstacles to Change: The Pattern of Social Mobility” (217-25). For the discussion of Mean Streets, the most interesting interplay is that between internal mo-bility, exemplified by the upwardly mobile protagonist Charlie, and external mobility, a moving-out of the community that potentially breaks up groups and social structures and thus is often perceived as a threat to Italian-American cultural continuity: “The 7 Cf. also Maffi 75-78, who characterizes the streets of the Lower East Side as “a vital source

of inspiration and apprenticeship” where “amid yearnings and traumas, discoveries and obsessions, … the difficult process of reinventing one’s identity [as an Italian American] began” (78).


rejection of external mobility is largely a rejection of middle-class elements in the outside world” (219), the mainstream American society associated with suburban life, college attendance, careerism, and different ‘tastes’ (cf. 219). This rejection, Gans argues, is based on feelings of “inferiority, and consciousness of some real—and some imagined—deficiencies” (221). While internal mobility might change the behavior of the group but will not threaten it as such, external mobility has therefore been fre-quently punished by expulsion from the group and was thus almost nonexistent among Bostonian West Enders around 1960. In Gans’s study, “people who have moved away from the group are described as renegades or deserters” (221).8 Similarly, Mean

Streets highlights the harsh and violent form this ostracization may take, emphasizing the potential personal and collective tragedies to follow.

In representations of American Little Italies, both Michael Viscusi (cf. 65) and Fred Gardaphé (cf. Italy 151) note, nostalgia and death are major themes that are related to the fact that as ethnic enclaves, Little Italies have become increasingly smaller in the course of the 20th century. As long as Americans of Italian descent occupied the area, the histories and stories of immigration and cultural identity did not die; but when Italian Americans moved out and other Americans moved into the neighborhoods, oral culture was turned into cultural products like literature, film, photography, and museums to provide Italian Americans with a sense of ethnic identity and tradition (cf. Gardaphé, Italy 151). The ambiguity of Little Italy as both refuge and closet continued to structure many of these narratives (cf. Gardaphé, Italy 159), as Mean Streets perfectly demonstrates. In that way,

Little Italies can be studied as instances of the precarious pluridimensionality of the nation in the twentieth century. If they move beyond the origin, immigrant enclaves also resist the location, the structure hosting them, the nation of nations of which they are a part. With respect to one or with respect to the other, as a non-territorial extension or as an internal component, they are always somehow centrifugal, never quite coincide with the political units (or unities) which purport to enclose them or to define them. (Loriggio 21, original emphasis)

8 Italian-American housing patterns are not always as stable as in Gans’s object of study,

Boston’s West End. Binder and Reimers, for instance, name a number of Italian-American residential areas in 1970s’ New York, many of them emerging in the wake of U.S.-American suburbanization: Brooklyn’s Canarsie, Red Hook, Bensonhurst, and Cobble Hill neighbor-hoods or parts of Staten Island (cf. 205). Earlier, upwardly mobile Italian Americans had settled in East Harlem or Yorkville, for instance (cf. Maffi 108). Unsurprisingly, it has often been class mobility that resulted in geographical mobility as well (cf. Sennett 452), but one should also remember working-class forms of mobility such as seasonal mobility before 1900 (cf. Maffi 111-12) and those Italian Americans moving to the margins of New York in search of semirural areas where one could grow vegetables and raise goats (cf. Glazer/Moynihan 187).


4. The Mean Streets of Little Italy

The bleak appearance of New York in the early 1970s is a central issue in Mean

Streets, a film I read as symptomatic in its dystopian vision of a number of urban filmic discourses at the time. Martin Scorsese and the New York School of filmmakers were especially investigative of the seemingly incoherent street ramblings of disen-franchised men (and much fewer women)9 whose lives were confined by narrow geographical boundaries in ethnic enclaves like that of Little Italy. Drawing heavily on the French nouvelle vague and cinéma vérité, Mean Streets foregrounds film syntax and constructs an episodic, elliptical narrative with the plot less important than the themes. It articulates a specific ethnic milieu as a dilapidated, quotidian diegetic world or what has been termed a sociological “simulation of the Lower East Side” (Grist 65). Historically, Mean Streets is also significant because it was the first feature film to depict Little Italy from a distinct insider perspective (cf. Taubin 15).

The film portrays the lives of small-time crooks, focusing on Charlie Cappa, Jr. (Harvey Keitel), the well-dressed nephew of the local ‘mafia’ padrone, who dreams of his own Italian restaurant,10 and his friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), a crazy trickster-conman11 constantly taunting the hood’s loan sharks, or, in sociologist Herbert Gans’s terms, one of those schizophrenic characters that have historically functioned as a source of entertainment for the neighborhood (15). Gans distinguishes between action-seekers and routine-seekers in his study of Italian-American life in Boston around 1960, and Johnny and Charlie seem in fact to embody the prototypes of each.12 Charlie is torn between street life on the one hand and social aspiration paired with a

9 As Paula Massood notes, women usually have little agency in Scorsese’s films, although

they often signify movement. In Mean Streets, Teresa (Amy Robinson) is the only one who seriously plans to move out of Little Italy, and Charlie projects his desires of border-crossing onto the bodies of women like Teresa and Diane (Jeannie Bell), an African-American stripper (cf. 82).

10 The problematics of stereotyping via the mafia theme in the representation of Italian Amer-icans has brought forth a plethora of scholarly studies. With respect to film, cf. esp. Cavallero; Tamburri; Hostert/Tamburri; Bondanella.

11 Fred Gardaphé has argued that the Italian-American wiseguy is in fact a continuation of the archetypal trickster figure (cf. Wise Guys, 3-9). Like Hermes, the trickster figure of Greek mythology, Johnny Boy “begins to represent a power against familial collectivism and for acquisitive individualism” (7) and stands for “chaos and change …, disorder to a system” (8). He overlooks, however, that traditional trickster figures ultimately function to re-establish harmony and to ensure the continuation of the social system.

12 Gans characterizes them as follows: “Routine-seekers are more likely to be regular church-goers, to live by the ethical norms of the religion, and to favour moderation in all pursuits. They will accept the authority of the more powerful as long as it is wielded equitably … . The action-seeker … is belligerent in the presence of authority, and is certain that government is always exploitative and corrupt” (30).


strong religiosity on the other.13 He sees his faith tested in the form of Johnny Boy and Teresa (Amy Robinson), Johnny Boy’s cousin and Charlie’s secret girlfriend, both of whom are outcasts of the famiglia; through them, he seeks penitence for what he perceives as his sinfulness but finally reaps violent physical punishment by associating with two ‘untouchables.’ As Francesco Caviglia states, Scorsese’s portrait of Italian-American men enacts a nostalgic vision of old-fashioned Italians translated onto American cityscapes, a vision “that is the American dream plus more archaic Catholic overtones, with sins that have to be atoned for somewhere, and suffering as a way to redemption” (n.p.).14 Old-fashioned Italian ideas about masculinity and family here function as integral parts in constructing a shared memory of immigration, a “foundation myth” (Caviglia n.p.) from which Italian-American cultural narratives can take off. On a similar note, Fred Gardaphé sees Scorsese’s visual explorations as resting on a self-fashioned mythology of Italian-American life that contrapuntally accompanied the process of assimilation (cf. Italy 37).

In the initial sequences, the jump-cut high-angle shots of Little Italy’s Mulberry Street at night, illuminated by the feast of San Gennaro15 in a view from above, place it as an “insignificant enclave within the dark mass of Manhattan” (Grist 73). These images stand in opposition to the shots of the feast taken in the streets, which create a crowded shabbiness, but also a vibrant, energetic atmosphere of heterogeneity (Grist 73). As the 8mm shots expand into a full-screen frame, the camera sinks into the street and begins the filmic narrative. A coherent, totalizing view from outside is no longer possible as the viewer is now absorbed by a bilingual ethnic community of semi- or illegal economies, pool-hall fights, card games, money collecting, and movies. By a cacophonous sound mix and documentary filmic devices such as hand-held cameras and the integration of fictional home movies, the spectators are spatially entrapped with the characters in a sub-cultural environment seemingly homogeneous and ‘au-thentic,’ despite its being shot only partially in Little Italy (cf. Grist 73; Massood 79).

13 The coupling of a heightened religiosity among Italian Americans since the 1940s and a

simultaneously rising Italian middle class is analyzed, for New York, by Glazer/Moynihan (cf. 203). Their observations revolve around the fact that Catholic churches gave upwardly mobile Italians the opportunity to show off their success in public.

14 Caviglia names four characteristics typical of Scorsese’s construction of Italian-American masculinity: self-denial, moral and amoral familism, violent jealousy, and a hierarchical, hostile outside world. Regarding familism, he notes how “there is nothing unusual or wrong in the family itself—at least not worse than in other ethnic groups: the problem lies in relations to the external world” (n.p.). While this is generally irrefutable, I would argue that Charlie’s relationship with Teresa, who is denied normality by the inside rather than the outside world, complicates this dichotomous analysis. On Scorsese’s filmic construc-tions of masculinity, cf. also Gardaphé, Wise Guys; Nicholls.

15 A feast celebrated in Little Italy every September for the patron saint of Naples. According to popular legend, the blood of San Gennaro liquefies and turns bright red during the time of the feast (cf. Grossvogel 69). The importance of religious festas for early Italian Ameri-can culture is noted by Binder/Reimers (cf. 147) and Maffi (cf. 113-14).


These filmic techniques, producing documentary effects, are deeply colored by the characters’ perspective, yet always “allude to a material presence, a factual existence” (Kolker 165). The ambiguity of narrative actuality and potentiality (the alternative filmic reality suggested by the use of 8mm reels) thus generated not only foregoes closure, but ultimately also suspends the fiction of the scopic—in de Certeau equivalent to the figure of the World Trade Center—as that which renders urban com-plexity readable. Thus the film resists turning opaque mobility into a simplified, trans-parent filmic text.

The film starts with home movie scenes that seem to depict a future fantasized by its protagonist: we see Charlie at the baptizing party of his imaginary child, with Johnny Boy as the godfather16 and Teresa as his wife. The sequence is interrupted by what is apparently Charlie’s voiceover (but is spoken by Scorsese himself rather than Harvey Keitel) immediately after he wakes up in his bed. To the soundtrack of the Ronettes’s “Be My Baby,” an ironic comment on the immaturity of the protagonists to be introduced (cf. Gardaphé, Wise Men 69), Charlie’s opening words imply that although this subculture of Little Italy might oppose hegemonic lawfulness, it also creates a strict, regulative socio-economic system of its own: “You don’t pay for your sins in church: you pay in the streets and at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Charlie draws a parallel between doing penance in the street as well as at home, foreshadowing the theme of conflicting private-public configurations. While the Super 8 reels of the opening sequence unite Charlie’s domestic bliss with Teresa and his street career, the plot opens analeptically and ends with the three main characters as only potential survivors of a ‘mafia’ attack. Scorsese thus leaves it to the viewer to decide whether these reels document Charlie’s actual future or merely visualize his (utopian) dreams and hopes—as pars pro toto, Charlie’s future might stand for the future of ethnic urban life in general.

In the film, the main characters appear as random parts of unpredictable events. When Charlie is in the streets, for example, no matter how central he is to the narrative moment, he is composed in the frame as one figure among many, standing off-center, next to a building, other people moving by him (cf. Kolker 168). Similarly, the outcast Johnny Boy exemplifies a misfit who, eluding disciplinary measures from the inside, employs a guerrilla tactic reliant on moments of opportunity as well as on the spatial blind spots of urban order and control. Charlie knows the risks involved in taunting prescribed rules and is determined to save Johnny Boy in an attempt to unite the private and the public—his religious fervor and personal loyalty as well as his street credibility. Yet Johnny Boy is a lost cause, overrating his abilities and unable to control himself, a main concern of Italian-American action-seeking adolescents, according to Gans (87), mainly for fear of losing attachment to one’s group (a fear that Johnny Boy shows in his pleas with Charlie to help him). Finally, he, Charlie, and Teresa are

16 On the familial standing of the godparent in Italian-American culture and his/her impor-

tance for upholding, affirming, and extending family relationships, cf. Gans 74.


punished, shot during their attempt to escape Little Italy—it remains unclear who, if any of them, survives.17 In the end,

[t]he film’s concluding moments suggest that border crossing is dangerous, whether it’s a literal emigration from the neighborhood or a more figurative departure from one’s upbringing and traditions. It cannot be forgotten that Charlie’s uncle warns Charlie away from the deviance that Johnny Boy and Teresa represent. (Massod 83)

“Mean streets”: in the American metropolis, the street is an integral part of the ‘hood,’ a communal, ethnically marked space travelled routinely and circularly by its inhabitants. Those in motion always return to the same locations, leaving the im-pression that they are drawn into the ethnic enclave by centripetal social forces; thus, “[c]ars offer little promise of escape to a world beyond Little Italy” (Blake 171). That Mean Streets comes to a brutal end at the very moment the main characters try to escape from their tightly-knit segregated community by crossing Brooklyn Bridge by car is not a coincidence, but a punishment for their transgression, their attempted escape: Charlie pays for his sins in the streets, and the film comes full circle.18 Brooklyn Bridge, as a symbol of the expansion of modern New York, loses its force and expansion is foreclosed.19 The cityscape has shrunk into an ethnic enclave, a mixture of the carceral (referring to seclusion from outside) and the gated community (referring to seclusion from inside), for Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Teresa. At the same time, the film’s conclusion narrates “the breakdown of the third-generation Italian-American family and the failure of its traditional culture, particularly the Church, to maintain its integrative function” (D’Acierno, qtd. in Gardaphé, Wise Guys 76). Again, one can thus discern a strong nostalgic element in the film’s construction of Little Italy and its inhabitants; yet this nostalgia is not the same as regret or romanticization (which is formally evaded by Scorsese’s realist, semi-documentary cinematography).

The specific spatiality of Mean Streets is made up by “a mosaic of locations within an extremely small geographic area,” each of which “reveals a facet of the constricted, claustrophobic world of the main character” (Blake 170); its tragedy, as Martin Seeßlen has observed, is thus not that the main characters fall prey to inner-city violence, but that they cannot cross the ghetto border, within which they must continue to exist (cf. 77).

The clash of differing cultural versions of public and private spheres is embodied by Charlie, who suffers from the disintegration of conflicting values (an element

17 Teresa’s crime, for which she is symbolically punished in the accident, is perhaps simply

her aspiration to leave Little Italy and move uptown. 18 Lourdeaux discerns a multicultural conflict within Charlie, noting that Mean Streets shows

an Irish-Catholic, individualist, institutional understanding of penance, law, and order (due to the fact that even in Little Italy it was Irish priests who reigned the parishes) that acts as a counterpoint to Italian ideas of responsibility and family (cf. 228, 241).

19 For the symbolic dimension of Brooklyn Bridge in the context of the modernist city, cf. Trachtenberg; Shiel 166.


typical of film noir, cf. Siegel 149).20 A second or third-generation immigrant, he is torn between romantic love (his feelings for Teresa) and the reality of his Italian-American patriarchal famiglia, a sphere that traditionally encompasses both ‘private’ affairs and local economics and politics.21 As Glazer and Moynihan have argued, the early immigrants brought with them a strong sense of family, which served “both to advance and to limit them” (182). It is for the sake of family conformism that Charlie denies his feelings for Teresa and asks her not to speak of an official relationship, as his boss/uncle, the local don Giovanni Cappa (Cesare Danova), interprets her epilepsy as mental deficiency; the values and judgments of the famiglia thus pervade the bedroom. For different reasons, Charlie and Johnny Boy’s attempt at breaking free of ethnic patriarchy entails breaking laws and the temporary disruption of the neighbor-hood, a structure Lourdeaux finds typical of Scorsese’s filmic oeuvre (cf. 218).

The second conflict, related to the first, is that between religious duties and the everyday demands of secular society that Charlie tries to retranslate into the religious domain. The restless camera and bustling urban atmosphere resonate with these cultural tensions, as the city presents the characters with two conflicting apparatuses of interpellation, producing subjectivities that reflect this collision and are unable to escape the rules of either. The most satisfying resolution of the resulting tensions, suggested by Glazer and Moynihan, is some form of worldly success that is admired by one’s family and the friends of one’s childhood (cf. 194). They thus read Charlie’s ambition, which indirectly also lures him away from Little Italy, as an attempt to solve the tension between individual strivings and community demands; crime is interpreted as a consequence of the desire for upward mobility coupled with a lack of access to professional labor (197).

In Mean Streets, Scorsese mixes documentary conventions and European realist cinematography and expressionism (e.g., the use of intense colors and glaring neon lights) to create a distinct ‘street imagery’ characteristic of a transatlantic vision of American-Italianness and Italian-Americanness. Yet, while Mean Streets emphasizes a reality of an ethnic enclave in both its violence and community aspects, it ultimately remains dystopian in its insistence on Little Italy as a modern continuation of what Ed Soja, following Mike Davis, has termed the ‘carceral archipelago’ (cf. 298-322). The street as a place of encounter and negotiation has turned into the closed circuit of the ghetto and has thus lost its democratic potential. This dystopian vision of the city as a desolate battleground responds to the worsening conditions of inner cities in the 1970s, to racial conflict, rising crime, urban dilapidation, and financial ruin. In the aftermath of the 1960s and in the context of a paradigm shift from modern to postmodern urbanity, Los Angeles had become the archetypal, expansive postmodern city in the cultural imaginary, while ‘modernist’ New York remained as either a dystopian pro-

20 On the influence of film noir on Scorsese’s Mean Streets, cf. Martin, chapter 3. 21 Cf. the reasons Gans gives for the importance of the family as a social and economic unit

in the history of Italian immigration in America (211).


jection, or, in fewer instances, an object of nostalgia (e.g., in the films of Woody Allen). Scorsese’s work of that time reflects a sensitivity for an atmosphere of con-testation and tension, highlighting the threat of ethnic immobility to stifle the utopian vision of a nation defined crucially by the freedom of social and spatial mobility as an ethnically integrative force.

5. Conclusion

New York, endowed with a model character of the modern city and suspended be-tween European and a radically different West Coast urbanity, has been cinemato-graphically represented as both a utopian and dystopian ethnic site since the late 20th century. Depicting rites of passage in an urban jungle, Mean Streets shows as a leitmotif the problematic dynamics between the wish for both mobility and belonging. Scorsese counters the romantic view of the gangster presented by Mean Street’s most influential predecessor, Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather (1972), by using a semi-documentary cinematography and provoking a striking sense of realism, thus empha-sizing “the reality of the documentary rather than the romanticism of fictional drama” (Gardaphé, Wise Men 68).

Rather than romanticizing traditional Italian-American masculinity in a dramatic plot, the film opts for the visualization of the multidimensional tensions concerning Italian-American urbanite males at a time in which the future of the multicultural metropolis in the U.S. was at a watershed: between adolescence and adulthood, the religious and the economic, Irish, Italian, and American cultural elements, the parent and peer generations, homosociality and heterosexual relations, the public and the private, stasis and mobility. Scorsese portrays a “destructive patriarchy,” “young men who gradually destroy themselves while trying to fit their ethnic family values to the Anglo-American success ethic” (Lourdeaux 229): “a superstitious, insensitive patriarchy that has no use for either an ill young woman or a clever hellion” (Lourdeaux 245). In a reading of Mean Streets and Gangs of New York that focuses on ethnicity and urban space, Paula Massood also emphasizes the interconnected themes of ethnicity and the maintenance of literal and figurative borders in both of these films, which thus become narratives “that are at one and the same time about local and national mythologies” (77) revolving around Italian-American identity and the myth of the melting pot, clearly debunked in Mean Streets.

As I have argued in this essay, Mean Streets enacts the paradox of carceral mobility in its effects on three young Italian-American characters, who are all trapped, for different reasons, within the confines of their ethnic neighborhood. Their tactical appropriations of urban space, in Certalian fashion, are only momentarily, fleetingly successful before the surveillance system of the ‘mean streets’ of Little Italy polices the boundaries of territorial norms. Ultimately, the film engages with opacities and criss-crossing movements and seeks to trace the turns and meanderings of those ‘less central’ spatial stories and itineraries that arguably ‘make’ U.S.-American ‘EthniCities,’


but its ultimate evaluation of non-conformist tactics vs. institutional, systemic strate-gies of control emphasizes the strength of the latter over the potential of the former.

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Filmography

Manhattan. Dir. Woody Allen. United Artists, 1979.

Mean Streets. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Warner Brothers, 1973.

Who’s That Knocking at My Door? Dir. Martin Scorsese. Trimod Films, 1965-8.

The Cab and the City: Chance Encounters and Certalian

Perspectives in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth1

KARIN HÖPKER

1. Introduction: Urbanity and the Quotidian

The city, for sociologists, geographers, and philosophers alike, has been thought of as host and place of culmination of both a society’s utopian and dystopian tendencies. The city condenses and throws into sharp relief, it accumulates and concentrates. Consequently, the city often serves as a seismographic device to read a society’s pertinent motions, indicative of its “best of times” and “worst of times” (Dickens 3). Host to a plenitude of contradictory forces and interests, the city is at the center of struggles for power and control, while, at the same time, its complexity and particular materiality seem to endow it with a capacity for recalcitrance and an obdurate resistance to becoming subject to any singular force. Henry Lefebvre, for instance, perceives the city as a “differential space” (52) of encounter capable of evading the homogenizing forces of a dominant culture; similarly, Marxist geographer David Harvey envisions an interesting spatial exceptionalism:

The logic of capital accumulation and class privilege, though hegemonic, can never control every nuance of urbanization (let alone the discursive and imaginary space with which thinking about the city is always associated); the intensifying contradictions of contemporary urbanization, even for the privileged …, create all sorts of interstitial spaces in which liberatory and emancipatory possibilities can flourish. (Harvey, “New Urbanism” 3)

As a screenscape, the modern American city has been articulated as a site of contesting social forces by numerous writers and filmmakers throughout the 20th century. It opens up a potential for confronting difference and has thus become the locale and subject of many cultural productions, where differences must be addressed and where (post)modern inhabitants struggle to navigate its complex social fabric. Clearly, at the center of current debates lies the question whether the city’s heteroclite

1 This essay has developed from joint research and a collaborative paper presented at the ZiF

Bielefeld with Alexandra Ganser (cf. her article in this volume and also Ganser/Höpker). Although my present essay goes beyond my earlier observations, the theoretical similarities and duplicities between our contributions to this volume are intended. We thus hope to demonstrate the broad range of fruitful applications that a critical spatial perspective based on concepts of Michel de Certeau might yield for readings of an ethnic-urban filmic imag-inary, and are grateful to the editors of this volume for granting us the opportunity to do so.

Karin Höpker 156

spatial structure, its division along faultlines of race and class into enclaves and exclaves, fortresses and carceral archipelagoes, will lead to zoned forms of homogeni-zation. Both urban theory and discourses of cultural production speculate whether, ultimately, this process will result in a segregated conformity or whether, as suggested by Lefebvre and Harvey, the constant processes of restructuring may, repeatedly if temporarily, open up spaces of transience and subversion.

More recent trends in cultural and urban studies have developed new perspec-tives on these urban phenomena and reject top-down organizational approaches along with the traditional privileging of macro- over micro-level studies. The constant negotiations and sometimes violent struggles of social forces along the faultlines of, above all, race and class may not be best assessed from a theoretical bird’s-eye perspective. Instead, a street-level observation of everyday practices is more fruitful to understanding the specificities of a prototypical and yet peculiar U.S.-American city like New York or Los Angeles. In his work L’invention du quotidien (Vol. 1: Arts de

faire, 1980), which I will refer to in its widely received 1984 translation by Steven F. Rendall, The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau generated a framework for an analysis of the micro-level and the quotidian which provides a vocabulary of mobile forms and itineraries, of small tactics versus overall strategies. In the following, I will employ terms from this Certalian framework to discuss how filmic forms of the urban imagination stage such scenarios in ways that reflect both the hopes and the fears for the late-20th-century American metropolis. As I will argue, Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth has become iconic in its depiction of an American cityscape from the vantage point of the car window and provides for a new perspective on the dense fabric of postmodern urbanity and the inhabitants who navigate it.

Read in conjunction with Michel de Certeau, driving through the city, be it in a cab or a private car, operates within a grammar of spatial interaction, a system of moving about and interacting within the urban social grid. Any trip through the cityscape must contain an element of (re)appropriation, a claiming of space by the person who moves about; even if such a claim may only be fleeting and temporal. This present and presence relative to time and place establishes the individual as an agent within a network of spatial relations, interconnected via relations of proximity and distance, and informed by codes of race, class, and gender. De Certeau focuses on the operations and manifold practices through which individual agents or consumers reappropriate space produced by specific socio-cultural techniques. The rules, the internal logic of the operations, which according to a Certalian framework must neces-sarily remain fragmentary and relative to situations, will be investigated. Since these rules never manifest themselves in ideologies or institutional structures but can only be insinuated and concealed, they may precisely surface only as spatial narratives. Filmic cultural productions may narrate such patterns and become a vehicle to such motions of insinuation and concealment; they can sound out how individual agency may manifest itself in highly diverse urban settings and how individual operations may be foregrounded from the assumed passivity of urban inhabitants (without suggesting

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modernist forms of exceptionalist individualism as a consequence). Protagonists come to the fore not primarily as singular individuals, but, according to de Certeau, “as the locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of … relational determinations interact” (xi). Confronted, for instance, with urban spaces heavily inscribed by strategies of urban planning, zoning, and segregation, or by a closely regulated space like the taxi cab, an investigative Certalian interest must lie in the uses of such spaces—not in the abstract phenomenon of spatial re-formation but in individual and collective acts of appropriation and making habitable. In the case of a cab, these acts constitute a series of individual encounters which adhere to the framework of social roles and rules regulating the use of such a cab. Simultaneously, these acts also consist of tactics which render possible propitious signatures of actual encounters that suggest openings and moments of permeability in the clear divides of driver and fare and the particular orders of demarcated hierarchies. Ways of moving through urban spaces in everyday itineraries thus become acts of a poiesis underneath and within the more obvious systems of production which seeks to reduce its recip-ients to the passivity of consumers and to census-transparent groups of biopolitical subjects. To look at such forms not in terms of an anthropological gaze but as a witness to forms of a filmically constructed urban imaginary may be a crucial device, which makes this difference between intended and appropriated consumption more gaugeable to perception. That which is not generated as part of the productive apparatus but as a making-do form of an inventive but provisional bricolage is highlighted by the intentional acts of filmic imagination and mise-en-scène.

De Certeau himself has a far from naively utopian view of the socio-cultural realm; he describes culture as a force field which “articulates conflicts” and “develops in an atmosphere of tensions, and often violence” (xvii). Here temporary contracts, alliances, and compromises may develop in ways which render the quotidian highly political. Hence, to sound out social practices of interaction in and through forms of cultural production may itself become an investment in movements of the tactical kind.

In the following analysis, I foreground characteristic figures of spatiality and movement in an ethnically inscribed cityscape, which have since become iconic to our perception of specific forms of American urbanism. Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) addresses spatial practices of motion and interaction as a part of everyday itineraries. Jarmusch’s film attempts to utilize the peculiar, half-public, semi-perme-able moving space of the taxi cab to narrate a street-level urban imaginary that focuses on the characteristically metropolitan and urban rather than solely on the historically specific aspects of the U.S.-American city. In his view of urban interaction and every-day chance encounters, Jarmusch seeks to connect the serial with the accidental, the regulated with the transgressive, and the global with the local. The figure of the cab is used to envision and narrate complex cityscapes and individual attempts to navigate the multiple and intersecting lines of the public and the private, of interiority and exteriority, and of inclusion and exclusion. Where Jarmusch’s film depicts a rhetoric of the quotidian in images and dialogue, the trajectories of his protagonists never-

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theless seem to move on “lignes d’erre,” on aberrant lines (de Certeau xviii), but they seem capable of establishing tactics that remain without permanent or visible place but adaptable enough to grant an amount of sustained mobility.

2. Jim Jarmusch: Propitious Moments

Throughout his career as an independent filmmaker, Jim Jarmusch has honed an anthropologist’s gaze, which, however, does not aim at the quasi-documentary and its claims for social reflection. Instead, it develops a dense visual fabric of thick description which approaches the everyday of a rich and heterogeneous American imaginary. In almost 30 years he has made films like Down by Law (1986), Dead Man (1995), Ghost Dog (1999), or Broken Flowers (2005) that address core subjects of U.S.-American society neither via the abstract theoretical or philosophical, nor by directly evoking the grand narratives of American mythology. His films provide trains of images which in all their density stage an encounter with their subjects on an eye-level perspective without becoming flatly socio-realistic or identificatory. As Night on

Earth serves best to demonstrate, his filmic gaze has been trained by a close look at the quotidian and the particular of the American city- and screenscape, and the likeness of his scenarios becomes all the more striking through the fact that his imagery and narratives tend to foreground their intertextual and artifactual character in an understated way.

Jarmusch shows the city as a living fabric, formed not only through its built space but by its inhabitants, as a dense social fabric interwoven with boundaries and trajectories of human action, as an invisible ordering system that establishes fault-lines of race, class, and gender. His cities are full of David Harvey’s “intensifying contradictions” that may create “interstitial spaces” (“New Urbanism” 3) and surpris-ing moments of vis-à-vis human encounters beyond the compressing forces of exclu-sion and ghettoization. While Night on Earth acknowledges the repressive forces of implicit zoning that inform the city—when the first episode leads us across Los Angeles into plutocratic Beverly Hills, or when the New York episode renders visible ethnic divides—, it also pays heed to those forces which are dynamically at work in ways traverse to these boundaries. Literally zooming in on the zoned grid of the metropolis, down to the street-level and into the itineraries of the cities’ inhabitants, the film locates moments when categories and orders are destabilized and create contact zones between individuals of disparate groups, or when unlikely encounters within a framework of the usual and unspectacular simply happen.

Combining these unlikely elements with the familiarity of common, everyday situations, Jarmusch’s film connects the spatial with the temporal to form what might best be described by the Certalian figure of the propitious. For, in his reflections on tactics, de Certeau imagines a moment when a vis-à-vis with the other seems possible on the shared street-level (cf. xix). Movement renders possible a chance encounter, and to him it is specifically the city which holds the potential for confronting not


sameness but an otherness which may be engaged in conjunctural operations without necessitating a utopian suspension of a repressive order or a further dissolution of differing socio-cultural and historical contexts in universalisms.

Clearly, the unexpected encounter with a potential outsider or newcomer is a much-used topos within filmic representations and itineraries of metropolitan life. The occurrence of the strange and heteroclite opens up a momentary and fleeting rupture within the institutionalized homogeneity of the Cartesian grid and the monitored machinery of functioning urbanity. But Jarmusch foregrounds the common space of the taxi and the brief period of its journey across the urban fabric as he seeks to highlight the structural commonalities across specificity and accidental peculiarity of the singular encounter. This interest and tactical agenda is not only observable on the level of content and filmic diegesis but has repercussions that traverse Jarmusch’s work.

3. The Construction of Space: The Cab and the City

A characteristic of Jarmusch’s oeuvre is the method of working ‘from the inside out,’ starting with specific actors in mind and letting the film develop from an idea of specific characters and a collection of notes (cf. Hertzberg vii-viii). This method (or alleged absence thereof ) becomes particularly evident in the production process of Night on Earth, which was not preceded by long-term planning. It was a spontaneous project Jarmusch engaged in after Mystery Train (1989) when the financing efforts for his following film (Dead Man, 1995) seemed to have reached an impasse.

Evolving from the idea of a short film centered around Isaach de Bankolé as cab driver and Béatrice Dalle as blind passenger, Night on Earth establishes notions of the fleeting moment and the incidental as its subject matter, but it also incorporates ideas of coincidence, the fleeting but propitious as parts of its own myth of origin: “So it was all a little accidental” (Jarmusch, qtd. in Mauer 158). Jarmusch’s claims to have written the script within eight days aside, driven by frustration with the faltering project of Dead Man, brevity of form and episodic structure clearly have become a poetic principle in Night on Earth. While Jarmusch himself likens his episodic work to poetry—“I consider myself a minor poet who writes fairly small poems. … I’d rather make a movie about a guy walking his dog than about the emperor of China” (qtd. in Hertzberg 92)—Roman Mauer in his 2006 monograph Jim Jarmusch: Filme zum

anderen Amerika draws a connection between Night on Earth and the modern form of the short story, ranging from Anton Chekhov to Sherwood Anderson in terms of its demands for considerations of the life-like and for credibility in the choice of subject matter. According to Anderson, it is the open and fragmentary form of the short story that best reflects actual experience, for “[life] is a complex delicate thing. … There are no plot stories in life” (qtd. in Rideout 566)—a quotation which points to an even more significant connection: Similar to Anderson, Jarmusch generates his subject matter from the realm of the quotidian, creating situations which are familiar and yet peculiar enough to hold the viewer’s interest.

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Stylistically, Night on Earth already shows developments in Jim Jarmusch’s film-making which render his earlier demands for reduced, minimalistic structures and his well-known “skepticism about camera-movement and non-diegetic music” (Hertzberg ix) less rigorous. Compared with earlier films such as Stranger Than Paradise, Night on

Earth is also much more dialogue-oriented. Interestingly enough, Jarmusch describes that as a necessary consequence of his choice of locale:

Because we’re in an enclosed space, I didn’t have much room for characters to express themselves physically or in moments where there is no dialogue as I could in Stranger

Than Paradise. That’s what I like most about that film: the moments between dialogue when you understand what’s happening without them saying anything. If you think about taking a taxi, it’s something insignificant in your daily life: in a film when someone takes a taxi, you see them get in, then there’s a cut, then you see them get out. So in a way the content of this film is made up of things that would usually be taken out …: the moments between what we think of as significant. (Jarmusch, qtd. in Keogh 106)

Obviously, the choice of the taxi’s restricted interiority as setting and the spatial construction of the taxi-scenario as a fundamentally interstitial urban space put a strong emphasis on spatial demarcation as such, on boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that are to be negotiated within the ethnically heterogeneous city. Night on

Earth presents its audience with an array of shots of the cities and the protagonists, a dense fabric of gazes, which range from exterior shots of the cab to interior shots of the protagonists. It alternates between shots into the cab from the outside, shots of the exterior streets from inside that take the perspective of a passenger, and perspectives interior to the cab, filming not only drivers and passengers but mimicking glances through the back mirror. Thus, depicting the city functions through an assembly of seemingly chance images and glimpses and aims at generating a mood or atmosphere characteristic of the particular city rather than at representing it in more explicit ways:

This is not merely a question of depicting a city’s topography or architecture, or even of highlighting a particular aspect of its social life (the racial melting pot and aggressive conversational manners of New York, for instance, or the presence of African immi-grants in Paris, or the influence of the Catholic Church in Rome), but of playing variations on the way the cities have been represented in the movies. (Andrew 156)

The spatial reduction, imposed by centering the narrative around taxi journeys, creates visual constraint. In my reading of Jarmusch, this is a chosen and intentional constraint, not simply a side-effect of the technical difficulties of filming within and around a taxicab that might produce a certain amount of stereotypical images of the city. The images of Night on Earth are iconic rather than stereotypical; they evoke recognition by the viewer and thus serve the narrative economy and visual density of the episodes. More importantly, the visual aesthetics directly relate to the spatial construction and mobility and thus become curiously self-reflexive: the ‘flatness’ of the images (in a Jamesonian use of the term, cf. Jameson 60) creates a visual effect specific to the type of movement—to cruise through an urban environment in a car often creates a sense of filmic experience, when the images of the exterior city seem to


move and flicker across the screen of the window panes. At the same time, Jarmusch utilizes the ‘flatness’ of the image to resist or at least discourage allegorical readings of the city—it is not the modernist city, through which the flâneur may walk at leisure, and not the complex system of signs and symbols behind which a viewer and reader may find a deeper meaning. Instead, Night on Earth insists on a certain degree of ‘face-value’ and Unhintergehbarkeit of the iconic image. The street-level perspectives of the passing cabs are part of the everyday itinerary and of the quotidian; they neither penetrate nor do they assume the authority of implying deeper symbolic meaning. Flatness implies not only a reduction, but the impermeability of the surface image. It thus grants a certain openness to the individual episodes and the kaleidoscopic view of the global city as such, as well as a distinctive resistance to depicting alterity as transparent.

As a film that evolves around the fleeting moment and the urban interstitial, the taxi-film has virtually no generic precedents to Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. It is not a film of trains, busses, or airplanes, of small social gatherings or groups and their dynamics, but a film of the individual and her loneliness, granting a brief glimpse of a stranger’s life (cf. Kilb 219). Here, the trip functions not as a connecting device between two narrative segments but to draw attention to this interstitial moment itself. Even a film like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) focuses not on taxi driving but uses it as an illustrative if generic social scenario to relate stories in which the taxi situation itself is marginal.2 The limitations of the miniature interiorities of taxicabs as movie sets impose a “kind of artistic straitjacket, both technically and esthetically” (Pall H13). This is even more so since Jarmusch “scorns the use of sound stages” and also had no budget for cutting sections of numerous cars open and towing them on a flatbed trailer (cf. Pall H16).

The moment of meeting consists of a short verbal exchange, a gesture, a glance, and yet these fleeting moments seem to contain an entire story. Jarmusch’s reductive aesthetics contribute to the effect of a low-key density often said to be strongly influenced by Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose minimalist narrative style and symbolic techniques Jarmusch had worked with since Stranger Than Paradise (cf. Schindler 78). And yet critics like The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann have lamented the alleged co-optation of Jarmusch by Hollywood cinema, complaining that Frederick Elmes (who among other projects also filmed David Lynch’s Eraserhead 2 What the taxi as a specific form of urban mobility is meant to illustrate and how this ele-

ment changes throughout the history of American feature film is a different subject. The semi-public situation of the cab traditionally ranges between the social settings of public transport (often signaling scenarios of the under-privileged or anonymous urban crowds), of driving one’s own car across the cityscape (as, for instance, a symbol of independence and modern mobility), and of being chauffeured. Thinking of film noir as an example of a typically urban genre, the hard-boiled detectives of the West Coast tend to rely on their own cars but frequently make use of cabs for spontaneous pursuits and preferably anonymous tailing; these purposes create brief moments of complicity with otherwise faceless cab drivers as the ‘common man’ who assists the case for ‘a little extra.’

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and Wild at Heart) “shot this film in excellent color, from the late afternoon of L.A. to the wintry dawn in Helsinki. But what’s a Jarmusch film doing in excellent color?” (Kauffmann 32).

4. Driver and Fare: Encountering the Other

Formative to Night on Earth is what Geoff Andrew calls “the anthology structure of separate stories” (153), a series of five episodes connected through the taxi as a topos, but with apparent shifts not only in geography but in the parameters that inform the various urban encounters. The parallelism of the temporal setting for each episode is emphasized by its corresponding visual introduction. Each begins with a tracking shot of a clock and zooming in on a dot marking the geographic location of the respective city on a map, or rather, globe. What follows is a brief sequence of iconic images of the city, static shots of everyday sights (bridges, diners, squares, neon lights, phones) that are nevertheless characteristic of the location.

While the first episode of Night on Earth, the L.A. episode starring Winona Ryder and Gena Rowlands, implicitly negotiates issues of class and age, the second episode, set in New York, foregrounds ethnicity as a theme. Displaying an openly episodical structure, the five segments of the film are devoted to the cities of Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. And yet, while the images are to a certain extent iconically characteristic of the cities and the individual storylines derive part of their humor from the recognizability of setting and inhabitants, the film never-theless refrains from overplaying the culturally stereotypical. Instead, the individual narratives are strongly shaped by aspects of their contingence, which forges an inter-connectivity between the otherwise unconnected episodes. Thus, the theme of each segment, with dialogues shot respectively in English, French, Italian, and Finnish, is not necessarily attached to the city (pitting, for instance, a clichéd notion of urbanity of West Coast L.A. against East Coast New York, or New World against Old World), but instead, the curious arbitrariness of the stories suggests a certain amount of cosmo-politan interchangeability between cities, despite the culturally specific encoding.

The motif of the global—suggested already by the title and the first images of Earth from outer space which are repeated within each episode—interconnects the five segments through the specific topos of the taxi cab: The situation is inscribed by a peculiar relationship of interiority and exteriority, private and public. More than a setting, the city renders itself visually present as it runs by, as it were, on the ‘screen’ of the car windows. The interior is socially closely circumscribed by ‘rules’ of inter-action between driver and fare, parameters of an economic situation of service, which is by no means as strictly and mono-dimensionally shaped as one might expect. Quite on the contrary, driver-fare relations are imprinted by a complex situation of service and empowerment, rendering the cab driver economically dependent on his passengers, while the sheer number of fares distributes this power to an extent which also grants a certain amount of independence. In addition, the passenger is also the one in need of


transportation, temporarily dependent on the driver as the one who grants access and mobility.

In the second episode of Night on Earth, the implications of this mutual depen-dency are explored in ways which render visible the urban texture of latent segregation. The New York episode ties in with the leitmotif of vision, visibility, and blindness that runs through the entire film3 by depicting protagonist Yoyo (played by Giancarlo Esposito) as an ‘invisible man.’ Unable to hail a cab to Brooklyn despite his openly displayed cash and social status of a confident, fashion-conscious member of the Brooklyn middle class, the protagonist is introduced, with emphasis on his ethnic background, as standing on the other side of some unspecified ‘color line.’

When finally a cab stops, its driver turns out to be the East German Helmut Grokenberger (played by a memorable Armin Mueller-Stahl), a former circus clown from Dresden, who not only has limited command of the English language and would as such not be unusual for a stereotypical Manhattan cab driver, but he also has difficulties driving an automatic and no idea of how to reach their destination. In the following exchange, after brief negotiations, a switch of seats takes place, temporarily suspending the traditional roles of driver and fare. The evolving conversation between Yoyo and Helmut derives its humor, similar to the other episodes, from a confronta-tion and subsequent subversion of cultural stereotypes, contrasting for instance Helmut’s hyperbolic immigrant naïveté and heavy German accent with Yoyo’s cool display of the street- and fashion-savvy Brooklynite. When Helmut tries to bridge their evident difference by emphasizing similarities, his observation on their “same hats” is indignantly rejected by Yoyo, who refuses to have his fashionable headgear which he calls “fresh” and “the hype” compared to Helmut’s NVA-issue fake fur Chapka.

This sets the tune for an ensuing dialogue based on patterns of comparison, which unwittingly emphasize the similarities in their differences. While Yoyo in his native urbanite confidence makes fun of the stranger’s name, claiming “Helmut” was like calling your child “lampshade,” he reacts piqued at Helmut’s comment on the potential semantic ambivalence of his own name connoting a toy, claiming that this “has nothing to do with it.” Yet, across the differences and the distance of an obvious imbalance in the distribution of means and knowledge, the halting dialogue negotiating the confrontation of ethnic and social differences remains sympathetic. It is interrupted and structured by the introduction of external factors like the city entering into the interiority of the cab via shots of the cityscape or the pickup of an additional passenger. Helmut, clearly demarcated as ‘the stranger’ even within the bounds of his own cab, mainly reacts with a sense of astonishment and wonder to the new impressions of the city, its sights and inhabitants. He stares at the Brooklyn Bridge with the same fascination he displays for Yoyo’s sister-in-law Angela (played by Rosie Pérez), a mixture of street-smart beauty and high-flaring Nuyorican temper. Yoyo’s and Angela’s clear sense of belonging, a mixture of pride and love-hate 3 As Andrew points out, there are also night-blindness in L.A., a blind female passenger in

Paris, and sunglasses at night in Rome (154-55).

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relationship to their Brooklyn neighborhood, thus becomes contrasted with Helmut’s stance as outsider, which they treat with the friendly casualness of driving advice, directions for the return to Manhattan (which he fails to heed), and the humorous and stereotypical “learn some English.” When, at the end of the New York episode, Helmut drives lost and erratically through the streets of Brooklyn, his overwhelmed admiration is not directed at the iconic sights and glamorous promises Manhattan is traditionally depicted to hold for the newcomer and immigrant. His disbelieving “New York. I’m in New York” is instead filled with a curious sense of wonder at the heterogeneous metropolis, where a chance encounter with the unexpected Other may grant a glimpse into other lives, a moment of dialogue which, even in its miscommuni-cation, may momentarily suspend the grids of social order and interactional boundaries and open up the unlikely possibilities of the propitious moment. The utopian potential is less one of promise and new order, but presents itself, here as in the other four stories, as part of everyday itineraries and a poetics of the quotidian.

Thus, the seemingly generic space of the cab, a microform of what Marc Augé calls “non-places” (cf. 75-76), is endowed with qualities of what Marie Louise Pratt describes as ‘contact zones’: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (33). The micro-space of the taxi constitutes itself as a space between social poles of tension and asymmetrical power relations—the anonymous service-relation between driver and paying customer regulates but sometimes conflicts with the intimate spatial proximity of the car’s confined interior; the static and passive interiority is contrasted with an experience of exterior mobility, granted by the function of transportation across urban space (cf. Mauer 159-60). Jarmusch’s taxi situations explore the peculiarities of this space; they stage a moment of encounter in which dialogues and interaction perforate the membrane of urban anonymity between the closely circumscribed social roles of driver and fare. Protagonists step out of their roles and become visible to each other as individuals with personal stories, making possible a moment of recognition of the other in an actual vis-à-vis encounter, and yet the intimacy of, for instance, the confessional scenario (Rome) does rely heavily on the anonymity of the temporal situation, after which the participants part, in all likelihood, never to meet again.

5. Mapping the Metropolis

Especially the American cities Los Angeles and New York have traditionally been considered, each in its own way, a model of the modern city. They each represent both utopian and dystopian elements as their cityscapes are suspended between a seemingly European and a radically different American urbanity.4 The filmic constructions of 4 For a more extensive discussion of dystopian representations of Los Angeles as a highly

mediated city, cf. my chapter on real-and-imagined spaces, in which I use the early 1990s “Chinatown”-controversy involving Mike Davis, Ed Soja, Derek Gregory, and Rosalyn Deutsche to illustrate the peculiar featuring of L.A. as urban critics’ favorite dystopia (23-28).


urban experience, which are in many ways generically American in their heterogeneity and post-immigrant genealogy, offer a new perspective on an urbanity on the verge of change: they are caught between ideals of modernist metropolitanism and the not-yet postmodern, between post-war urban renewal and conservationist concerns, between the estrangement of disinherited city dwellers, the aggressive propagation of suburban single-family housing as the American middle-class ideal, and efforts toward affordable urban housing as part of community building.

Although de Certeau’s depiction of New York (or, more specifically, Manhattan) in the street-walking chapter of Practices of Everyday Life seems greatly to differ from Jarmusch’s visual mises-en-scène and emplotments of individual experience, his concepts provide a productive framework for an analysis of such real-and-imagined spaces. By juxtaposing de Certeau’s tropes of urban experience with Jarmusch’s 1990s vision, I intend to forge a descriptive framework which profits from de Certeau’s potential to analyze spatial structures of the quotidian; by a selective reading of spaces and spatial movement in Night on Earth, by investigating the patterns which the protagonists ‘write’ onto the street maps, I aim to devise a spatial hermeneutics which uses de Certeau’s grammatology of urban movement and involvement in daily urban practices. This hermeneutics does not seek to construct a voyeur’s “texturology,” subscribing to “the fiction of knowledge … related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (de Certeau 92), but a ‘migrational’ and ‘planetary’ one, which engages with opacities and criss-crossing movements, which seeks to trace the turns and meanderings of spatial stories and itineraries without projecting onto them authorial fantasies of the linear.

As New York Times film critic Vincent Canby pointed out in his review,

[t]he first image in Night on Earth … is important: that of universal darkness in the center of which is a rotating sphere of brilliant blue overlaid by wisps of white.

As the camera approaches, the wisps of white turn into cloud formations so beloved by forecasters as “weather systems.” Familiar oceans and seas appear, also land masses that are as yet undivided by and unclaimed for by national aspiration. (C1)

Thus, Night on Earth refers to a reality of the global city as already perceived through a (culturally and historically specific) tradition of filmic representation, a perspective on the city already shaped by film, filtering the images of the cityscape through previous shots and views. The respective city is an intertextual construct, but no less real since that very realization shaped our viewing habits, for Jarmusch is far from any sort of lament of a loss of the real for the hyperreal. Quite on the contrary, Night on

Earth loses none of its atmospheric density nor any of its interest as a filmic negotia-tion of a glocalized cityscape when it stresses its constructedness and artifactual char-acter instead of representational notions of depicting social reality. Despite his evident and professed admiration for those filmic qualities he sees in the works of Scorsese or Cassavetes, such as realistic strength or credibility of characters (cf. Keogh 108), Jarmusch’s own brand of realism does reflect its own constructedness. When in the opening sequences the Earth is shown from a distance, the camera zooming in shows

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us very literally a ‘global’ vision, for what the zoom renders visible is not an overall image of Earth but a second-degree representation. What we see is a topographic map, an old-fashioned globe. Zooming in reveals the material structure of its surface, the slight welt where its seams overlap and are glued together. Thus, the materiality of the medium is foregrounded through a mise-en-abyme and the visual representation of space is no longer deceptively transparent. The actual vision of the globe as a whole, a dream of mankind ever since the introduction of the cartographic grid and the Mercatorian system of projection (cf., e.g., Schneider 64-65) is reflected as historical and necessarily based on a construction.5

In Night on Earth, the visible materiality of the map functions as a self-reflexive commentary on a narrative which offers the audience both a global and a local perspective. The visual frame narrative embedding the episodes only superficially takes the god’s eye-view of a traditional omniscient observer. For the outer-space per-spective, zooming in on cities of one’s choice, into the individual lives and itineraries of an everyday street-level interaction, must remain a fiction, a fictive yet, as I would argue, necessary act of imagination. Or, as Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks write:

How can we do justice to both the phenomenological richness of individual existence and the immensity and complexity of the global world system to which life is bound? How can we conceive the connections among the most intimate local dimensions of subjective experience and the abstract and impersonal forces of a global system? (22)

6. Night on Earth: Imagining the Planetary

As I have shown so far, one of Jarmusch’s greatest achievements is the way in which he manages to present the ordinary and quotidian to the viewer as a matter of human interest, as an aesthetically interesting construction, and as an ever-changing per-spective on urban existence. What may easily be read as an entertaining and slightly absurd comedy of miscommunication and oddly timed connections is also an under-stated and unobtrusive commentary on the contemporary western metropolis, for “the flickers of humanity in those taxis are soon dulled by time, sex, race, language and money” (Travers 111). There is a trait in Jarmusch’s filmic work that might be called an “epistemological modesty” (Suárez 4). It is the acknowledgement that what can be known (and, within filmic logic, rendered visible) is always limited and thus includes only a small portion of lives, situations, scenarios encountered. Indeed, film would become ideologically dubious, if it were to suggest it could procure the totality and panoptic possibilities of a CCTV from a god’s-eye perspective.

And yet, as I have argued above, Night on Earth is not free from a utopian impulse in an attempt to render the transnational metropolis more imaginable. This effort to think across borders without making claims to totality or a controlling and

5 For a fascinating and more detailed account of cartography and digital imaging, cf. Serres

xxxi.


projective gaze, heedless of difference and alterity, might best be described as an effort not towards an imagination of the ‘global,’ but, as Gayatry Spivak suggests, as a move towards the ‘planetary.’ For, as she suggests in chapter three of Death of a Disclipline, it is the ‘planet’ that can overwrite the ‘globe’: Whereas the globe and globalization signify an overall imposition of similar systems of exchange within a “gridwork of electronic capital” (72), Spivak’s notion of the ‘planetary’ rejects homogeneity as a necessary consequence of comprehensive transnational thinking and embraces human alterity (cf. 101-02).

Night on Earth is programmatic for Jarmusch’s filmic enterprise beyond the specificity of the urban locale in that it does venture to address a transnational notion of the city on a larger, more encompassing scale. The title already suggests such an endeavor in a deadpan manner, and the period of a night from dusk (Los Angeles) to dawn (Helsinki) sets the geographic limits through time zones. And yet its images do not harness the cartographic grid of global information systems which suggests panoptic visibility within a computer-simulated globe: “The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan” (Spivak 72).

In keeping with this view, Jarmusch’s spatial poetics, as I argued above, rely on their visible constructedness—an interpretation that cannot only be supported by the imagery, but also by the particular soundtrack. When Tom Waits sings “Back in the Good Old World” and “On the Other Side of the World,” the songs function as a pro- and epilogue to Night on Earth and as a commentary on the depiction of ‘world’ not so much as a totalitarian vision of the global, but, as the initial segments of an ‘outer space’ camera shot suggest, as an alternative view of the ‘planetary.’

The scratchy harmonies of the gypsy waltz sung by his trademark raspy voice are suggestive of a transcultural and deeply hybrid dimension that evades the ominous mélange of the generic segment of record store ‘World Music.’ Its form and lyrics caricature and run transverse to songs of imagined globality which have long entered the collective cultural encyclopedia of U.S.-American mythology, such as, most notoriously, “It’s a Small World (after all).” Written by the Sherman Brothers in 1964, the song accompanies the ride of the same name in Disneyland (cf. Smith 354). The cheerfully polyglot stanzas and simple counterpoint harmonies become uncannily tenacious—mainly due to their mere repetitiveness from which the audience literally cannot escape during the railed ride in open box-cars.6 Its well-known infantile lyrics rely heavily on the alleged universalism of human emotions in a world within which geographic separation is the biggest obstacle. The song’s second stanza constructs a metaphoric globality that can be read as characteristic of a disneyfied global paradigm: “There is just one moon and one golden sun / And a smile means friendship to

6 Apart from the direct exposure of taking the ride at Disneyworld, this may best be ex-

perienced in the 1964 Wonderful World of Color clip “Disneyland Goes to the World’s Fair,” in which Walt Disney himself narrates his introduction of the new ride “It’s a Small World.”

Karin Höpker 168

everyone. / Though the mountains divide / And the oceans are wide / It's a small small world.” Even if the intertextual connection was not intended, the popular evocation of global imagery is directly countered in Tom Waits’s opening lyrics to “Back in the Good Old World”: “When I was a boy, the moon was a pearl the sun a yellow gold. / But when I was a man, the wind blew cold the hills were upside down” (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack).

The soundtrack runs contrary to generic expectations, just as Jarmusch’s shots of cityscapes may be iconic and recognizable for each city but have little in common with Disney’s imaginations of a global locale, let alone with the distinctly non-urban scenario of Main Street, U.S.A. as core of the all-American town.7 The corporate consumer vision of the global as an imagined space consists of a cleverly engineered mixture of stereotypical scenarios which combine the all-too-familiar with enough of the exotic to be able to claim a pedagogical and informational interest. Jarmusch, on the other hand, not only uses but caricatures and subverts images of cultural stereotypes, either by way of excess and exaggeration (most apparent in the Rome and Helsinki episodes) or by foregrounding the intertextuality of his own work, high-lighting his filmic quotes and samples. As I previously pointed out, Jarmusch’s films always retain a certain amount of opacity; they render visible their artifactuality and their contextuality within a filmic universe of urban images and stories instead of making claims for authenticity and transparency of representation. Thus, Night on

Earth remains at a participating distance from its subjects and preserves a sense of alterity without presenting the Other as beyond all imagination:

If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary crea-tures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialec-tical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with it as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. (Spivak 73)

Night on Earth manages to provide a tertium comparationis via its temporal figuration of the propitious moment and the basic spatial situation of the taxicab. Human encounters become comparable and partially accessible beyond their individual particularity without leveling the intersecting boundaries of race and class, age and gender. The film preserves alterity without abandoning all hope for envisioning ‘humanity’ as part and parcel of the contemporary metropolis, and thus, in its neither naïve nor overtly pedagogic but undeniably utopian implications, may be read as an attempt towards what Spivak came to demand as a ‘planetary ethics.’

7 For an interesting exploration of the global Disneyfication of space and the ‘imagineering’

of the nostalgic, cf. Chung.


Works Cited

Andrew, Geoff. “Jim Jarmusch.” Andrew. Stranger Than Paradise: Maverick Film-Makers in

Recent American Cinema. London: Prion, 1998. 135-164.

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso, 1995.

Brüggemeyer, Maik. “Tourist im eigenen Land.” Rolling Stone 176 (2009): 57-63.

Canby, Vincent. “Urban Life Seen From a Taxi Seat.” New York Times 4 Oct. 1991: C1& C8.

Chung, Chuihua. “Disney Space.” Project on the City: Harvard Design School Guide to

Shopping. Ed. Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tyung Leong. Köln: Taschen, 2001. 270-98.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1985.

Ganser, Alexandra, and Karin Höpker. “Cruises and Crusades: Productions of Urban Space in Taxi Driver and Mean Streets.” Conformism, Non-Conformism, and Anti-Conformism in

American Culture. Ed. Antonis Balasopoulos, Gesa Mackenthun, and Theodora Tsimpouki. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 237-57.

Hardt, Michael, and Kathi Weeks. “Introduction.” The Jameson Reader. Ed. Hardt and Weeks. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 1-29.

Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

———. “The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap.” Harvard Design Magazine 1 (1997): 1-3.

Hertzberg, Ludvig. “Introduction.” Jim Jarmusch: Interviews. Ed. Hertzberg. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. vii-x.

Höpker, Karin. No Maps for These Territories: Cities, Spaces, and Archaeologies of the

Future in William Gibson. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011.

Hommels, Annique. Unbuilding Cities: Obduracy in Urban Sociotechnical Change. Boston: MIT P, 2008.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 1991. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.

Kauffmann, Stanley. “On Films: Around the Globe.” The New Republic 18 May 1992: 32.

Keogh, Peter. “Home and Away.” Jim Jarmusch: Interviews. Ed. Ludvig Hertzberg. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 104-10 [first published in Sight and Sound 2.4 (1992): 8-9].

Kilb, Andreas. “Night on Earth.” Jim Jarmusch. Ed. Rolf Aurich and Stefan Reinecke. Berlin: Bertz, 2001. 213-26.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. 1974. Malden: Blackwell, 1991.

Maurer, Roman. Jim Jarmusch: Filme zum anderen Amerika. Mainz: Bender, 2006.

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Pall, Ellen. “‘Night on Earth’: Was Filming Inside a Cab a Deadly Trap?” New York Times 7 June 1992: H13 & 16.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 91 (1991): 33-40.

Rideout, Walter B. Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America. Vol 1. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2006.

Schindler, Oliver. Jim Jarmusch: Independent-auteur der achtziger Jahre. Hamburg and Alfeld: Coppi, 2000.

Schneider, Ute. Die Macht der Karten: Eine Geschichte der Kartographie vom Mittelalter bis

heute. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004.

Serres, Michel. “Vorwort.” Thesaurus der exakten Wissenschaften. Ed. Serres and Nayla Farouki. Trans. Michael and Ulrike Bischoff. Frankfurt/M.: Zweitausendeins, 2001. ix-xxxix.

———, and Nayla Farouki, eds. Thesaurus der exakten Wissenschaften. Trans. Michael and Ulrike Bischoff. Frankfurt/M.: Zweitausendeins, 2001.

Smith, Dave. Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia. New York: Disney, 32006.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Chapter 3: Planetarity.” Spivak. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 71-102.

Stockhammer, Robert. Kartierung der Erde: Macht und Lust in Karten und Literatur. München: Fink, 2007.

Travers, Peter. “When Worlds Collide in a Taxicab.” Rolling Stone 630 (1992): 111-12.

Filmography

Night on Earth. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. JVC et al., 1991.

Discography

Waits, Tom, and Kathleen Brennan. Night on Earth: Original Soundtrack Recording. Polygram Records, 1992.

City of Germs: Biological Identities and Ethnic Cultures

in the Metropolis

RÜDIGER KUNOW

Infection in the sentence breeds —Emily Dickinson1

Berlin ist größtenteils unsichtbar —Alfred Döblin

New York City [during the Bicentennial] had hosted the greatest party ever known. The guests had come from all over the world ... . This was the part the epidemiologists would later note when they stayed up late at night and the conversation drifted toward where it had started and when. They would remember that glorious night in New York Harbor, all those sailors, and recall: From all over the world they came to New York. (qtd. in Wald 239)

This quote is taken from Randy Shilts’s bestselling report on the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States. It is useful as an introduction because it strikes a note to which I will return repeatedly in my paper: the city as a city of germs, the city as a diseased milieu in which people, in addition to their social and cultural identities, acquire also a bio-logical identity. And this identity is particularly important when we figure outsiders, strangers, ethnic minorities into the picture. Their presence in the city is undesired to begin with, but it can cause even more apprehension once their biological identity comes into the picture. Strangers, ethnic or social Others can, as the Shilts quote indi-cates, attain a presumed microbiological agency, they can be seen as carriers, more or less unwitting movers of dangerous biological material. This issue of biological identi-ty is all the more important since diseases have in many cultures been constructed as ‘imports.’ For instance, the names given to syphilis—the French disease, the Italian disease, etc.—offer ample evidence that illnesses, and especially contagious diseases, carry with them an index of foreignness. As a matter of fact, for long periods of West-ern history, disease was the only way in which urban populations experienced such foreignness.

In this context it is certainly no accident that contagious diseases, such as the plague, cholera, yellow fever, are, in medical parlance designated as communicable diseases, diseases transmitted through contact between people. There is a double

1 Poem # 1261: “A Word dropped careless on a Page / May stimulate an eye / When folded

in perpetual seam / The Wrinkled Maker Lie / Infection in the sentence breeds / We may inhale Despair / At distances of Centuries / From the malaria.”

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entendre in the term ‘communication,’ an obvious semiotic reference which we are all familiar with and which we use, and a less well-known biomedical sense which I will highlight in my argument. Incidentally, the term ‘culture’ likewise has an equally often neglected biological dimension at the semantic root of the word.

There exists ample historical evidence to prove that the city, particularly the big city, the metropolis, is an almost ideal contact zone, not only for people but also for germs, it is a veritable melting pot, but as Priscilla Wald has suggested, a “melting pot … of microbes” (Wald 51). In this zone of intense biological traffic the spread of pathogenic materials can proceed much more effectively than in remote areas of casual, rare contact such as the countryside. Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone,’

which has figured prominently in the Cultural Studies debates, could be usefully re-read in terms of biological contacts in the urban spaces. Thus, when she speaks about “the spatial and temporal co-presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjuncture and whose trajectories now intersect ... often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (6-7), this describes quite accurately the situation in city spaces where one encounters, sometimes with alarming frequency, unfamiliar people who bring with them materials visible and invisible and which may or may not transform both residents and newcomers.

This samples in a roundabout way the compass of my present inquiry for which the somewhat ostentatious title of my paper serves as shorthand. This title contains an echo. In 1971 Toni Tanner published a seminal study called City of Words in which he presents a nuanced argument about the inherently unstable relationship between the city of words in which writers live and the social world, “between the provinces of words and things, and the problematical position of man [sic], who participates in both” (21).

My own argument today is not altogether different from his. I am likewise inter-ested in the relation between what Tanner calls “lexical playfields” (33) and the urban fields, but these urban fields are in the present context anything but playful. Com-munities afflicted by a communicable disease are communities under hermeneutic stress, under a pressing need to make sense of what is happening to them. Ethnic mi-norities are involved in this sense-making to a degree that far exceeds their ‘objective’ presence in numbers. I will return to this later in my paper. Communicable diseases have in past and present often been the impetus for developing new forms of com-munication. In various cultures and historical contexts the presence of an epidemic ill-ness in a city has acted as a catalyst for new modes of representation, from Thucydides and Sophocles, via Boccaccio and Defoe to the AIDS narratives of our time.

Communicable diseases possess great representational significance—representa-tion here understood in both its semiotic and political sense. I regard communicable diseases, in classical Cultural Studies manner, as biomedical ‘facts’ that are socially and culturally constructed and, given the danger vested in these diseases, this construc-tion process proceeds under great emotional and cognitive strain. Therefore, what is at stake in these ‘disease constructs’ is not their truthfulness, their representation of the medical ‘facts’ as seen at a given moment in history. What matters just as much is a

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representation of another kind, the representation they produce of a community—an urban community—in crisis. “[C]ommunicability configure[s] community” (Wald 12). What matters is the vocabulary used in this process of fashioning an imaginary community, the stories told about the how, why, wherefore, and especially the where-from of the communicable disease. I read communicable diseases as offering both, cognitive strain and cognitive gain: Epidemics do not only challenge our capacity of understanding, they also produce understanding, for example by making visible the otherwise invisible interactions between people in the urban manifold.2 The HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, for example, made ‘visible’ unacknowledged or unobserved forms of sexual contact, and it also made visible the ways in which the United States defined the compass of “we the people.”

Furthermore, epidemics and the socio-cultural responses to them follow a certain ‘dramaturgy’ with beginnings, twists and turns, and, hopefully, a happy ending. A prominent part of this dramaturgy is the military response model. Diseases are routinely fought, germs are perceived as invaders, even silent invaders against whom “legions” of medical experts fight in hopes of finding “a magic bullet,” etc. (Weidling, qtd. in Slack 14, 15). Furthermore, there is the outbreak scenario, the real or imagined ‘beginning’ of a disease, a beginning that is often associated with certain persons, the mythic Patient Zero, in the case of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Canadian flight atten-dant who allegedly brought the disease ‘out of Africa’ to the unwitting gay community in the United States. There is also the medical detective story, featuring the lone ranger hero in his laboratory pitted against a hysterical public and a cynical bureaucracy.

Also, I hope to show how communicable diseases are central for the ways a city as “the site of juxtaposed ethnicities” (LiPuma/Koeble 160) forges individual and collective identities.3 The ethnic city “cannot be known by its internal coherence and thus its closure and territorialization. Its residents do not therefore become part of the city by becoming part of a community” (Welsch 198), but they can become part of a biological community, not in terms of essentialized racial or ethnic identity, but as sharing the same ecosystem.

Thus, in my argument, I will attempt to develop a triangulation between ethnicity, epidemic illness, and the city. And I hope to show that not only will certain structural characteristics of cities explain the emergence of epidemic illnesses, but, inversely, also certain features of epidemics can serve to explain ways of life in the city. The triangu-lation I propose between ethnicity, illness, and urbanism is not only theoretically challenging, it is also historically plausible. After all, what Victoria Harden has called

2 “HIV makes sex visible; it shows that people’s desires are not bound either by the social

sanction of marriage or the social classifications of race, gender, and sexuality, and it dem-onstrates the indifference of those desires, like the virus through which they are manifest, to national boundaries as well” (Wald 240).

3 “Microbes do not just represent social bonds; they create and enforce them” (Wald 120); “The gradual acceptance of the dangers of microbes and healthy carriers as facts of life altered their representational significance” (124).

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the “heroic decade of bacteriological discovery” (9)—the age of Pasteur and Koch4—was the heroic period also of colonization and also the not-so-heroic high time of mass immigration and accelerated urbanization.

My paper is organized in three parts: in the first section, “Cities of Germs,” I will deal with a historic example which shows the interrelation in the urban crucible of epidemics and ethnicities; in the second section under the title “Urban Disease Imag-inaries” I will develop the proposition that communicable diseases generate a genuine-ly urban imaginary, an imaginary in which the city as a public sphere and as a way of life is configured or re-configured around the notion of the ethnic communicability, of the ethnic other as the embodiment of a biological threat. In the concluding section under the title “Medical Urbanism: Epidemics, Bare Life, and the Public Sphere,” I will try to explore the relationship between communicable diseases and urban commu-nities, also with an eye toward the theoretical challenges this brings to our understand-ing of the city and of urban life.

1. Cities of Germs

In this chapter I propose to view cities not so much as urban landscapes but as eco-systems. Such an ecosystem is characterized by the fact that great numbers of people must share the same relatively circumscribed environment and are thus vulnerable to undesired biomedical contact. It is no surprise, therefore, that visions of the city as a cauldron of contagion can be found in cultural archives all over the world. Such visions of the urban as breeding grounds for all kinds of diseases were more often than not inflected by the association of such diseases with socially undesired elements of the population. Ethnic minorities in particular were continually and iteratively iden-tified with contagious diseases. They also figured prominently in origin stories of such diseases.

On December 12, 1899, five deaths in the Chinatown section of Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, were attributed to the bubonic plague. At that time, more than half of Honolulu’s population (of 30,000) was made up of Asians living in a crowded tenement district. As these tenements showed unsanitary living conditions to the inspectors of the all-white city Board of Health, a hysterical public opinion began to blame the coming of the Black Death to the paradisiacal Pacific island on the Chinese immigrant population, and not on the conditions under which they were made to live. Visions of Oahu as hotbed of infection were spreading faster than the disease itself. The government called in the National Guard. They immediately disinfected all Chinese, herded them into railroad cars as temporary shelters and after that burned down all

4 Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) discovered the role of bacteria in fermentation processes, found

vaccine for anthrax, rabies, and swine erysipelas; Robert Koch (1843-1910) discovered the bacteriological processes causing cholera and tuberculosis; Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1905.

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their homes. It is perhaps a small irony that the fire went out of control and burned down other city sections, including the house of the fire department (cf. Wisniewski 9).

This example is instructive in a number of ways. It shows how the emergence of an epidemic in a city causes not only a medical emergency but also a cognitive one. People needed to make sense of what was going on around them, and this very fast, before the disease could infect greater parts of the city’s population. In such an emergency, questions of disease control and questions of community formation and belonging became inextricably interwoven. The plague, while in itself invisible, thus made visible the tenuous and complicated relations of immigrant quarters with the rest of the city. What was mostly overlooked in 1899 and continues to be overlooked to this very day is the fact that the outbreak of the plague in Honolulu would not have occurred had it not been for the network of trade and service in which Hawaii, just recently annexed by the United States, was implicated. The Chinese had been ‘imported’ to the island to work on the sugar plantations, plantations that were owned by Americans. So this particular incident can also be read as bringing to light the otherwise invisible fabric of personal mobility and an emerging global connectivity. What made people wealthy could also make them ill.

The case of Honolulu may not be particularly well-known, but it is by no means an exception, especially not at that historical juncture when the new and prestigious field of bacteriology entered the international scene. Bacteriology not only made possible a new disease construct, one which made the containment of certain diseases more feasible, but it invested the newly found biomedical processes with a decidedly Euramerican point of view. Medical historian Philipp Sarasin has shown how bacteri-ology very quickly became a “master metaphor” in Western thought (15), however, a master metaphor with decidedly sinister implications at home and abroad: Those infectious pathogens which invade our bodies from outside and make it sick became, by a catachrestic “sleight of hand, synonymous with the strangers that were presum-ably their carriers” (16). The identification of diseases with certain population segments invests the usual insider-outsider dichotomy with added urgencies. Outsiders are not just others but others that bring something with them, something that is unseen, un-known and undesirable. This construction of the infectious Other worked itself out also in the colonial empires of the West. Here the colonized people—“half devil, and half child,” in Rudyard Kipling’s (in)famous words—were seen as enacting their childish selves by failing to measure up to the standards of sanitation and hygiene achieved by the ‘white man,’ whereas their devilish side manifested itself when they transmitted to the colonizers all sorts of diseases which then added to the “White Man’s burden.” The German word “Fremdkörper” and the terrible uses to which it has been put represents yet another example of this same sinister identification of the Other with communicable diseases. I will return to this issue later.

As time went on, this notion of the ‘infectious Other’ became an integral part of a thought complex which I would like to call ‘phobic urbanism’ or perhaps better, and less dramatically, ‘medical urbanism.’ In the wake of new ‘scientific’ thought, and

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vested with the authority of such modern science, medical urbanism became centrally important for a city’s “project of self-totalization” (LiPuma 175), for the ways a city reproduced itself socially, culturally, and of course also politically. Not only did this urbanism bring about a new mapping of urban spaces around the dualism of purity and danger, it also contained an element of performativity configured around the Other as itinerant carrier of invisible and infectious biological material. He/she does not just embody the dark sides of city life, but carries with him/her and into the city a per-ceived lack of discipline and control and an undesired dose of contact with the un-known. No wonder, then, that at the end of the 19th century the new mobility within urban spaces of single women quickly came to be conceived as a health threat: They might infect the family father and thus bring blight into the bourgeois nuclear family.

As biomedical considerations of health or rather health hazards came to play a critical role in the discourses of urbanism, they fashion something I want to call ‘a vocabulary of non-belonging,’ a glossary in which, as my Dickinson epigraph sug-gests, infection breeds and produces disease constructs which impact people far beyond the original infliction, or, in Dickinson’s words: “Infection in the sentence breeds / We may inhale Despair / At distances of Centuries / From the Malaria.” It is to this kind of interpretive work performed by discursive constructions of disease that I will now turn in my next section.

2. Urban Disease Imaginaries

My prime example in this section is the 1793 epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia, PA, then the capital of the newly independent United States. Yellow fever had been at that time a globe-trotting disease (cf. Wald 30) which had broken out intermittently in harbor cities all over the world. It had also been ravaging the coastal towns of America almost from the beginning of European settlement on. Concerning the etiology of this disease, two conflicting theories were in competition with one another: one was the miasma theory, according to which the fever was caused by exhalation of vaporous effluvia from stagnant water in the city. This ‘localist’ theory of infection constituted the medical orthodoxy at that time. It was challenged by a ‘traveling theory’ in a sense not quite adumbrated by Edward Said, a theory based on the recognition of the transnational mobility of communicable diseases. Its adherents argued that the fever had been imported to Philadelphia by French refugees and their slaves who had recently escaped from the revolutionary uprising on Haiti headed by Toussaint l’Ouverture. This “outbreak narrative” (Wald 26 et passim) brought with it its own distinct containment strategy, the demand that the United States break off all relations with Haiti and other places, in order to keep the revolutionary “contagions”—this was the word they used—from Europe and the American hemisphere from infecting the young republic. This latter theory found support mainly among those Philadelphians whose Republican political persuasions made them wish the U.S. should mind its own business, whereas the supporters of the opposite camp, many of them Hamiltonians, had their own trade

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interests in mind when they suggested that such isolationism would stymie the country’s promising economic growth. This early instance of the classic U.S.-American dichot-omy between Internationalism and Isolationism shows how intimately the representa-tion given to microbiotic processes is linked to questions of what the meaning of ‘America’ is or should be (cf. Berlant).

The Philadelphia epidemic is important for the present inquiry because it produced and continues to produce a wide variety of disease constructs, which in their different ways use the disease to reflect on this very same question—what is the mean-ing of ‘America?’ My first example, almost contemporaneous with the event itself, is Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799). Brockden Brown’s (1771-1810) fiction, self-advertised as “a faithful sketch of the condition of this metropolis during that calamitous period” (1), is one of the first genuinely ‘U.S.-American’ novels. It is resourced by the discursive archives of the Gothic romance, particularly Godwin and Richardson, a Gothicism which allows Brown to develop what might be called ‘a disease aesthetic’ organized around the cognitive strain which the epidemic inflicts and which is particularly geared to convey the invisible and inexplicable modes of infection:

As I approached the door of which I was in search, a vapour, infectious and deadly, assailed my senses. … I felt as if I had inhaled a poisonous and subtle fluid, whose power instantly bereft my stomach of all vigor. Some fatal influence appeared to seize upon my vitals; and the work of corrosion and decomposition to be busily begun. (137)

It would be interesting to trace in more detail the contours of this Gothicism inflected by biomedicine and read it against some of Poe’s texts of urban life, but this would extend beyond the capacities of this paper, thus I will turn to the medical urbanism in Arthur Merwyn and the interpretive work it performs.

I want to begin by noting that Brocken Brown, like Defoe before him in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722), anchors his representation of the city and the disease afflicting it through the figure of a participant observer, or, as Brown calls him in his Preface, a “moral observer” (1), Dr. Stevens. Stevens not only mediates on the plot level between the eponymous figure of Arthur Merwyn and the city, he also metadiegetically registers the representational challenge which the sujet of a medical-ized urbanism presented. Only by mustering all the powers of his mind can he dwell on what he calls “the theatre of disasters” (132) in a way that is helpful to his patients and enlightening to the reader: “During this season of pestilence, my opportunities of observation had been numerous and I had not suffered them to pass unimproved” (208).

Speaking of observations, much of the representation of city life in this novel is organized less around the medical aspects of the disease or its victims than around the civic dimension of disease. This civic dimension manifests itself as a phobic dynamism which wraps the city in fear and causes the fictional characters, as the narrative voice observes, to be “haunted by a melancholy bordering upon madness … [and] sleepless panics” (124). On the other hand, Arthur Merwyn, a young man of 18, enters the narrative as an outsider whose home is in the countryside. He becomes the Patient

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Zero of the narrative whose experiences capture all the issues Brockden Brown wants to bring up in his novel. Originally, Arthur does not even know that a yellow fever epidemic has broken out in Philadelphia; he decides to go to the city because he wants to clear himself of allegations of embezzlement and arrives at the very moment when many others, among them the city elite, are leaving. He is soon stricken with yellow fever but befriended and finally cured by Dr. Stevens. My reading of this not-so-exciting novel is less concerned with the various twists and turns of the plot through which the author attempts to convey the dramatic nature of the disease. I am interested instead in the ways the novel portrays Philadelphia as a city in which a communicable disease communicates civic disorder. In the process, the capital city is scripted less as a stable urban whole than as a highly confusing maze composed of invisible and intangible contacts between people whose ‘real’ identity is uncertain. What totality then emerges is made up of bonds, the involuntary biological bonds established by the infectious disease and the voluntary bonds of “compassion” and “charity”—values explicitly mentioned by Brown in his Preface.

Another way of saying the same thing would be to note that the people who inhabit this urban space and circulate within it do not become parts of the urban totality simply by virtue of their being in the metropolis. Rather, the city of Philadelphia is, at least in part, an invisible city in the sense suggested by my Döblin epigraph, a disease(d) environment in the grip of a communicable illness whose modus operandi remains invisible and inscrutable. From almost the very beginning of the text, yellow fever, here called “pestilence,” is a powerful presence redefining citizenship in biological terms, and in the process it simultaneously redefines who in the city of brotherly love is in fact making up the professed brotherhood. As Boccaccio before him had done in the Decamerone (1349-51), Brown repeatedly dwells on the socially divisive nature of the pestilence; many people leave the city; people in need are refused access to safe places, etc. (132). The anti-urban bent which Toni Morrison and others have noticed in early American writing here uses the communicable disease to register the failure of fashioning a community of shared responsibility. In the words of the text,

[t]he city … was involved in confusion and panick, for a pestilential disease had begun its destructive progress. Magistrates and citizens were flying to the country. The numbers of the sick multiplied beyond all example; even in the pest-affected cities of the Levant. … The usual occupations and amusements of life were at an end. Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents. … The consternation of others had destroyed their understanding. (122)

In this way, Brown’s novel constantly negotiates the line between public and private. The personal is certainly becoming political here, because the epidemic, by calling the physician to his civic duties, configures an ideal community, composed not of self-seeking individualism but of communal responsibility. What made people sick can also make them develop “a more perfect union.” Thus Dr. Stevens explains: “I was sustained, not by my concern for safety, and a belief in exemption from this malady … but by a belief that this was as eligible an avenue to death as any other; and that life is

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a trivial sacrifice in the cause of duty” (157). It is this personal commitment which develops and persists among the dissolution of all civic commitments that ultimately contains the disease. The repeated references in the novel to the unselfish care provided by individuals like Dr. Stevens are expressions of Brown’s belief that “the response of individual sensibility to the trials of existence, was at the heart of fiction” (qtd. in Arthur Mervyn 11).

In this way, Brown’s novel dwells on both, the cognitive strain caused by the epidemic and the cognitive gain: the latter afforded by the “lessons of justice and humanity” provided by this experience, lessons which Brown repeatedly highlights in his Preface to the novel. In this way, the novel is more than a disease narrative; it is also a narrative of healing, in which the emergence of an ethos of individual responsi-bility practiced by some people can serve as a cure for both the corporeal and the moral malaise caused by the fever epidemic afflicting the whole city. Brown was a firm believer in the use of U.S.-American materials for a new national literature, and within this frame his first novel can be read as a biopolitical tale of sorts, a tale in which the capital city of Philadelphia becomes an example and exemplar for what Brown hoped ‘America’ as a whole would become.

Philadelphia as example and exemplar—this is an issue which also emerges in the fictions of African-American writer John Edgar Wideman. Wideman uses the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic as historical donné in two of his fictions. In the 1989 short story “Fever” he is concerned with the ways in which ‘race’ signified as 18th century Philadelphians sought to make sense of the yellow fever epidemic.

His novel Cattle Killing (1996) is intended as a revision of the earlier text in which, as Wideman stated, he “didn’t get it right” (Lynch 2). Cattle Killing returns to Philadelphia, this time through the figure of an African-American itinerant preacher in search of a mysterious woman in a city that is violently split between black and white, healthy and infected people. In both texts, the Philadelphia epidemic figures as an early instance of the troubled relationship between the races in America. While in Brockden Brown’s novel an occasional “faithful black” (153) ministering to the needs of the ill was a marginal figure at best, Wideman’s two fictions are centrally organized around the presence of African Americans at the heart of the epidemic, as victims, as nurses, and as alleged carriers of the disease.

“Fever” takes us right to the heart of the public debate in 1793 about the causes and consequences of the epidemic. This debate played out in the newspapers of the time and also in two publications which function as intertexts for Wideman’s own narrative. One of them is Matthew Carey’s A Short Account of the Malignant Fever

Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia which appeared the same year. In this text Carey, a Philadelphia printer and labor leader, distributes praise and blame along racial lines. While he pays tribute to white Philadelphians, he criticizes the city’s African-American population for taking advantage of the disease. As whites were sometimes “abandoned to the care of negro[es],” these did not really minister to the needs of the afflicted; “the vilest of the blacks,” Carey notes, “were even detected in plundering the houses of the

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sick” (qtd. in Lynch 782). Carey’s racial polemic represents African Americans only in the idiom of non-belonging, of de-realizing their presence during the disease.

Carey’s account was almost immediately challenged by a counter-narrative authored by two former slaves, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones. Their Narrative of

the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia

1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown Upon Them in Some Late Publications (1794) offers a record of the civil services performed by African Americans during the epidemic, services which the authors insist were rendered at great personal risk and which did not receive much acknowledgment, even less gratitude from the white majority among the city’s population. As they write African Americans back into the historical narrative of the yellow fever epidemic, their text is in its turn written into a fictional narrative. Actually, Wideman draws both texts into his own, by making Allen one of the central characters of “Fever,” and by offering a mock dedication to Carey, “who fled Philadelphia in its hour of need and upon his return published a libelous account of the behavior of black nurses and undertakers, thereby injuring all people of my race” (127).

The 1793 epidemic, for Wideman, anticipates the racial antagonism that has continued to exist in America today. He explicitly links this antagonism to the coerced mobility of the slaves who were not only brought to America against their will but who were also accused by white Americans of bringing with them fever and other contagious diseases. As the fictional Allen says,

“They say the rat’s nest from Santo Domingo brought the fever, Frenchmen and their black slaves fleeing black insurrection. Those who have seen Barbados’ distemper say our fever is its twin born in the tropical climate of the hellish Indies.” (132)

Allegations of this kind were frequently made at that time, even by well-intentioned people. As Lisa Lynch has shown, the African slave as ‘infectious Other’ figured prominently also in Abolitionist texts which “used the fear of disease to promote anxiety about the slave trade” (Wald 781). Among the discursive maneuvers used in such texts was the motif of the slave “ships, which like the curse / Of vile Pandora’s box, bring forth disease” (Wald 781). Thus, the fever is seen as traveling on the very same routes along which the slave trade flourished.

Epidemics are shockwaves of mobility, past and present. Communicable diseases have long been ‘global players’ avant la lettre. Not only have these diseases faithfully followed the routes of trade and information, they have demonstrated with a forcefulness uniquely their own the artificiality, the porousness, and tenuousness of political, social, and cultural borders even while they routinely offered occasions for reasserting these borderlines. This brings me back to Wideman’s story.

As with Brockden Brown’s novel, one can detect at certain moments of the narrative the contours of a disease aesthetic. One example is a scene in which the narrative voice delivers a tale of the actual process of the transmission of pathogens, a process which was inaccessible to him as to his contemporaries and which is therefore completely imaginary. The scene is on board a slave ship during the Middle Passage:

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“In the darkness he can’t see her, barely feels her touch on his fevered skin. Sweat thick as oil, but she doesn’t mind, straddles him, settles down to do her work. She enters him and draws his blood up to her belly” (130). Medical infection is here taking place in the moment of contact between a male slave and a mosquito, scripted as female. This is a gendered, perhaps even sexist image for what is going on during the infection with a communicable disease.

Wideman further shows how the accident of bodily pigmentation, the contin-gencies contained in what is called ‘race,’ determine the civic status of people: “First they blamed us ... We were proclaimed carriers of the fever and treated as pariahs, but when it became expedient to command our services to nurse the sick and bury the dead, the previous allegations were no longer mentioned” (140). But even these services do not lead to the acceptance of the African Americans as full citizens: “wave after wave of white immigrants have come to the city and made their fortune, yet the road to such success has been barred for blacks” (Lynch 784). In this way, yellow fever as depicted by Wideman is less a medical than a civic emergency, an emergency, moreover, for which the text provides no healing. Instead, the civic subject position assigned to African Americans can be read as an instance of what Foucault called “bio-politics,” a “technique … of power present at every level of the social body ... [which] also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization ... guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony” (141).

In his narrative Wideman repeatedly shows how the explanations given for the disease outbreak are located within competing orders of knowledge. In the passage from which I quoted above, the narrator pits the ‘white explanation’ and its racist identification of contagion with blacks against alternative Africanist knowledge:

They say the rat’s nest from Santo Domingo brought the fever. … I know better. I hear the drum, the forest’s heartbeat, the pulse of the sea … to explain the fever we need no boatloads of refugees ragged and wracked with filling fevers … We have bred the affliction within our breasts. … Fever descends when the waters that connect us are clogged with filth. … fever is a drought consuming us from within … Fever grows in the secret places in our hearts, when one of us decided to sell one of us to another. (132)

White medicine, allegedly the most advanced form of dealing with contagious diseases, falls drastically short when it comes to grasping that other equally contagious disease, slavery. This is the central point Wideman is making throughout the story “Fever,” i.e., that the form of biomedical citizenship which evolved during the epi-demic anticipates the racist notion of second-class citizenship that would run through U.S. history. His narrative then is not, like Arthur Mervyn, a story of individual and communal healing—rather, it is a narrative of an interactive communal disease, one that reveals “the corporeal contingencies of [the] civic status” (Anderson 5) of African Americans. In this way Wideman’s “Fever” continues to chart the contours of black urbanism, a project he began in Philadelphia Fire (1991).

I now turn to my second example, another historical context. In the period from 1896 to 1914, the Indian subcontinent was visited by a series of communicable diseases,

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some of which assumed pandemic proportions and killed more than 8 million people. This pandemic had international and intercultural ramifications. Not only did such illnesses represent in the mind of many British people, in India and back home, the backwardness of their colony; inversely, for many Indians the first hesitant, then massive intervention by the colonizers stood for their callous disregard for India and her traditions. And on an international scale, the epidemics entered into the rivalries between the European powers during the period of Imperialism. After all, as Rajnarayan Chandavarkar and others have demonstrated, Great Britain significantly lagged behind France and Germany in that prestigious new science, bacteriology (cf. Arnold 143ff.; Chandravarkar). Like the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic, this pandemic has been heavily textualized, for example by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh in his novel The

Calcutta Chromosome (1995) and also in theoretical writings, especially those inspired by the Subaltern School and its concern with Colonialism.

In 1898 the pandemic hit especially hard the city of Kolkata, then Calcutta, the metropolitan center of the Bengal province. In the history of this pandemic, the city spaces developed into a veritable urban contact zone in which the dichotomies usually associated with local caste practices were crosshatched with the imperial gaze (cf. Arnold 131) to establish biomedical notions of the ‘infectious Other.’ Thus, during the course of the pandemic, the city and its population came to be configured around a complex system of binary opposites: Indian vernacular healing5 vs. Western ‘scientific’ medicine, native ‘apathy’ vs. colonial paternalism, family-oriented crisis management vs. governmental intervention, etc.

The Kolkata epidemic, like those hitting Philadelphia or Honolulu, brought into broad daylight the otherwise invisible fabric of ideological and material connectivities without which the outbreak would not have occurred and which in turn determined the response by those in power to the disease. As the death rates rose precipitously, the British became alarmed by the prospect that the pandemic might substantially harm the commercial future of the ‘jewel’ of their empire and that it might harm their own people. Here again, the mechanism of ‘what makes you wealthy can also make you sick’ played itself out with particular forcefulness, as also the supposed superiority of the colonizer was at stake. Thus, some British administrators regarded the plague as a golden opportunity to clean up (qtd. in Arnold 217)—in more ways than one—their backward and superstitious colony. Said one official: “I consider that plague operations … present some of the best opportunities for riveting our rule in India” and “also for showing the superiority of our Western science and thoroughness” (qtd. in Arnold 214).

So the British brought an impressive array of the best Western medical experts to Kolkata. Together with the colonial government, “the most drastic [measures] that had ever been taken to stamp out an epidemic” (qtd. in Arnold 207) were set in motion. And the British went about their work with great zeal, conducting veritable ‘search and destroy missions’ into the urban ‘jungle’ of Kolkata. They isolated suspicious homes, 5 Cf. Swami Vivekananda’s “Plague Manifesto“ (written in Bengali); <http://www.rama-

krishnavivekananda/volume~9/writings~prose~and~poems>.

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subjected suspect individuals to public search, dug up the ground and destroyed whole sections of ‘native’ neighborhoods. These measures redrew the lines between the public and the private, dragged what was most intimate into the limelight of public attention, an attention, moreover, that was the colonizer’s gaze. Unfortunately for both colonizers and colonized, all these measures were pretty much in vain. There was at that time no remedy for the bubonic plague and the British ‘scientific’ measures were as effective or ineffective as those proposed by native healers or outright quacks.

So, in looking back at the pandemic from a historical perspective, what is striking is the degree to which the British reaction to the plague was grounded less in medical fact than in culturalist assumptions about the Indians, whose “weak and puny constitu-tions” (as one colonial official described them) made them particularly susceptible to the ravages of the plague. In a way, it was “their disease,” which they, i.e., the Indians, had brought upon themselves by—in the words of another official—by their “racial characteristics and innate prejudices” (qtd. in Arnold 220). In the system of colonial governance, the Indian colonial subjects were doubly coded: as infectious Others they required strict control, while as victims of the disease they fell under the purview of the enlightened colonialist white man’s burden to extend the gift of Western healing to them while their illness ratified his superiority.

This multiple coding of the diseased Other is a central point also in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Calcutta Chromosome. The novel’s epigraph establishes a reference to Sir Ronald Ross who won the 1902 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery of the manner in which malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes. Ross was a member of the Indian Medical Service, the service which had so singularly failed in containing the cholera epidemic in Calcutta. I have spoken above of the “heroic decade of bacterio-logical discovery” (Harden 9)—The Calcutta Chromosome clearly debunks the heroism of scientific discovery by making Ross the more or less unwitting tool of a group of underground native scientists who were themselves trying to discover another form of transmission, i.e., the transmission of genetic information, the so-called “Calcutta Chromosome” (109). The novel develops the theme of transmission of biomaterial on a number of levels. Chief among them is a narrative, produced by a highly unreliable narrator, about the city of Calcutta as the site of major discoveries in biomedicine, one secret, the other well-known: Ross’s findings about the transmission of malaria.

Ross’s ‘discovery’ took place in a Kolkata laboratory and the text takes us—in true global fiction manner—from New York to present-day Kolkata and from there to the colonial city at the high time of Colonialism—and of bacteriological discovery. In a multi-layered narrative that one reviewer described as “a Pynchonesque web of conspiracy and cosmic connection” (Milani n.p.), the author mixes medical mystery tale with colonial science fiction. Ghosh repeatedly insists on the link between colo-nialism and communicable disease. “Remember,” says a fictional character who is a medical sleuth trying to disentangle the various plots and counter-plots that surrounded Ross’s alleged discovery, “remember,” he says

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this was the century when old Mother Europe was settling all the Last Unknowns. ... And this was just about the time that the new sciences were beginning to make a splash in Europe. Malaria went right to the top of the research agenda ... everywhere except England. ... No sir: the Empire did everything it could to get in his [Ronald Ross’s] way. (56-57)

In a related way, Paul Gilroy sees at work in the crisis response by colonial governance not so much considerations of public health than of public order in the colonial metropolis: “colonial government contributed to the manifestation of bare life … under the supervision of administrative and managerial systems that operated by the rules of raciology [with its] necessary reliance on divisions within humankind” (48-49; emphasis added). I will return to the theme of bare life in my conclusion.

Repeatedly, the text shows the callousness of British colonial governance toward malaria (cf. 93); this callousness extends to medical officers who use ‘natives’ as more or less unwitting medical guinea-pigs (cf. 72, 74, 90), but The Calcutta Chromosome does not exhaust itself in simple anti-colonialist polemics. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the narrative ‘provincializes Europe.’ Dipesh Chakrabarty, from whom I have borrowed this phrase, argues that Colonialism’s most effective operation consisted in suggesting to the colonized a “‘waiting room’ version” (9) of historical development in which the colonized people were on the way to Modernity, under the guidance of the colonizers, but not yet on the same level of economic, political, and intellectual sophistication. Against this vision of the world-historical path to progress, the narrative pits its own counter-historical narrative and presents a counter-history of scientific progress by offering us “the other team” (104) composed of Indians who practice “counterscience” (106). They are not part of the comprador elite envisioned by Macauley in his vision of India, they are “fringe people” (106), or in critical parlance, subalterns, led by a cleaning woman who works for the English in the famous Ross laboratory. She may be a witch, a high priestess or a goddess, in any case, Westerners “can’t ever know her, or her motives” (253), the subaltern agency manifesting itself in a project seeking to discover a new principle of information transmission which does not involve sexual reproduction: “when your body fails you, you leave it, you migrate—you or at least a matching symptomatology of your self. You begin all over again, another body, another beginning” (109). This vision clearly owes something to the Hindu belief in successive reincarnations, but it can also be read as a non-Western model of the life sciences, a colonial science fiction.

That this model is being developed in a British laboratory in Calcutta (141) unbeknownst to the British is more than a colonial or postcolonial irony. The city, “whose vocation is excess,” is a fitting location, for scientific pursuit as well as for the fictional narrative. The greater part of the city, it seems, is invisible, composed of a veritable maze of imperceptible connections, “where all law, natural and human, is held in capricious suspension, that which is hidden has no need of words to give it life” (25). No wonder, then, that the medical sleuth who tries to find the real truth about Sir Robert Ross’s discovery is lost in this place, and the novel withholds from us any conclusive knowledge about whether the whole plot he claims to have uncovered

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is ‘real’ or the figment of his imagination or a feverish mind, a mind infected by malaria.

In this way, Ghosh in this novel poses two forms of “medicalized nativism” (Alan Kraut’s term)—“the fear of contamination from the foreign-born” (3)—against each other.

As I hope to have shown in this section, narrativizations of communicable dis-eases, while offering cultural constructs of biological ‘facts,’ do not exhaust their inter-pretive work in the field of biomedicine. Rather, these narrativizations are centrally about the civic meaning of disease.

Communicable diseases configure communities, but they do so under the in-auspicious auspices of what Chris Shilling has called “body anxiety” (35); anxieties that manifest themselves in individual phobias and collective hysterias, and for both the urban spaces provide a vast echo chamber.

3. Medical Urbanism: Epidemics, Bare Life, and the Public Sphere

In this paper I have tried to sketch the contours of a medicalized urbanism. Such a concept ties with some recent reversals in urban theory, especially those that suggest a changeover from a center-oriented to a relations-based understanding of the city. An example of this changeover is the work of Ludger Pries, who in the Simmel tradition of urban sociology views the city in terms of a ‘leaky container’ which allows people and material into the circumscribed urban spaces from where, inversely, other people and material leak out. How this ‘leaky container’ concept can be further developed in ways that bring in biological identity and infection can be shown by turning to Edward LiPuma and Thomas Koeble’s 2002 essay “Cultures of Circulation and the Urban Imaginary.” Using Miami, Florida as example the authors develop a notion of the city-scape as a porous space, through which people and objects, many of whom are originating elsewhere, are constantly “circulating at different speeds and with different degrees of rootedness or attachment” (157). Such a city cannot very easily know itself; it lacks the means for a core identity formation. Whatever sense of wholeness none-theless accrues to such a city is then something made, not found, something LiPuma and Koeble call an ‘urban imaginary.’ Such an imaginary in their view “achieve[s] a certain perspectival totality through the creative (performative) production of an urban imaginary—an imaginary that is a necessary reification in the sense that … it is the necessary appearance of the circulatory object that it conceals” (157). Disease narratives can be read as instances of an urban imaginary, an imaginary, however, that is invested with a sense of personal and civic crisis.

The concept of medical urbanism can be situated within a long history of thought in which the city, in addition to its spatial identity, is invested with a biological identity, too, an identity which relied on the presumed analogy of the city to the human body. Richard Sennett has shown in more detail than I can present here how urban life and especially diversity found their representation through this analogy which, during

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the 17th and 18th centuries had performed a similar consolidating function for the emerging nation state. In the context of an evolving modernity, the body as concept metaphor for the city anchors its representation in the organic vision of a totum simul, the perfect fit between the increasingly diverse composite parts of the urban manifold: for example, “planners wanted the city in its very design to function like a healthy human body” (Sennett, qtd. in Urry 13).

Interestingly enough, the city-body analogy was pursued also with regard to the infectious body. The Chicago School of Urban Sociology, particularly Robert E. Park and Louis Wirth, found in the processes of biological transmission from body to body a way to express how social interactions in city spaces functioned. Park, for one, was convinced that “human society is organized on two levels, the biotic and the cultural” (Wald 127), and the former could be used to explain processes going on in the latter realm.

Thus, his answer to the question of “[h]ow does a mere collection of individuals succeed in acting in a corporate and consistent way?” (Wald 133) is organized around a principle that Park called “social contagion” or “the invisible contagion of the public” (Wald 133). Contagion became even more important as an explanatory concept, as Park and others were looking for a way to describe what they called “the assimilation cycle,” the processes through which immigrants became Americans. In this context, the immigrant city became, for Park, a “moral region” (Wald 141), in which the immigrant went through a process of ‘generative infection’ (my term), or in Park’s words, “a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other [i.e., American] persons or groups” (Wald 139). Social contagion was for Park and his colleagues a way to imagine an Americanization that proceeded without coercion, an insinuation rather than a direct persuasion.

Epidemic diseases mark the moment when bare life enters the city. They are powerful reminders of the existence within urban spaces of what Judith Butler has called “the precariousness of life” (142). A body in the grips of the plague, malaria, cholera, or HIV/AIDS is not only a body whose very claim to life hangs in the balance, it is a body that makes normative claims concerning the principles and norms that guide urban life. Between the emergence of an epidemic and the communal response to it, a space opens up that is a space of representation, representation here understood in both its semiotic and its political meaning. This is the moment also when the epistemological obligations of a discipline such as Cultural Studies become indistin-guishable from its ethical obligations, when cultural critique of the (mis)representa-tions of certain marginalized groups of the urban population expands into a political critique of their (non)representation in the political domain.

Thus I want to return one more time to Butler and her argument that the precar-iousness of life, while a human universal, “functions differently, to target and manage certain populations, to derealize the humanity of subjects who might potentially belong

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to a community” (142).6 Whenever one uses the term ‘bare life’ these days, a red flag pops up with the name Agamben written on it. His arguments on naked life and politics are circulating widely, perhaps beyond their deserts, and I do not want to rehearse them here.7 I am less interested in states of exception than in states of rule, and in this context, bare life as represented in the guise of the ‘infectious Other’ is the name for a site where biopolitics and geopolitics intersect within urban spaces.

The entry of bare life into the public sphere is a deeply ambivalent process. Whenever public health becomes a matter of public concern, as it does in moments of communicable diseases, then the line separating the private from the public is being redrawn in a way that inserts what is most private into what Benhabib has called “discursive public space” (Situating 89), into the ongoing conversation within demo-cratic societies about the norms and values governing public life in the city. Considera-tions of ‘life’ and the ‘body’ are taken from what Hannah Arendt called “the shadowy interior of the household” (38) into the public domain. This is no small matter. After all, questions of the needs of the body, of reproduction, of care for the sick and elderly, have in many different cultures not only been relegated to the realm of the private, they have defined the very essence of privacy. This was one of the reasons why the population of Kolkata resented so much the intrusive medical operations launched by the British.

What is at stake in the public debate is nothing less than “the co-implication of private and public autonomy” (Habermas 420). The debate about HIV/AIDS has demonstrated how crucial the public conversation or non-conversation about a conta-gious disease can be for the afflicted and for the overall direction a society will take in questions of ethics and the social fabric. Seyla Benhabib has shown how crucial the public space is for the emergence of a deliberative democracy and for defining “the principles and practices of incorporating aliens and strangers, immigrants and new-comers, refugees and asylum seekers, into existing polities” (Rights 1).

Against this background, the discursive production of disease through narratives, films, or other media must be seen as part and parcel of the processes of discursive will formation in the public sphere. Inserting questions of bare life into the public domain is all the more important today, because in “the chill of globalization” (Gilroy 142), as many state-supported care-giving institutions have been dismantled, the public sphere of modern democracies is perhaps the only place left where the persistence of precarious life can be shored up.

6 Accounts inspired by the ethos and methodology of Cultural Studies usually see ethnicity

as importation of fixed, often counter-hegemonic identities into the demarcated city space—people with biological as well as cultural identities situated in the unstable porous urban spaces—“bodies of individual persons become metamorphosed into specimens of the ethnic [or national] category for which they are supposed to stand” (Malkki 88, qtd. in Appadurai 309).

7 For a succinct critique of Agamben, cf. Bernstein.

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Calcutta Chromosome.] The San Francisco Chronicle 26 Oct. 1997. <http://www.sfgate. com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1997/10/26/RV55421.DTL>.

Morrison, Toni. “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction.” Literature and the American Urban Experience: Essays on the City and

Literature. Ed. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1981. 35-43.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992.

Pries, Ludger. Die Transnationalisierung der sozialen Welt. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008.

Sarasin, Philipp. “Anthrax”: Bioterror als Phantasma. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2004.

Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage, 1993.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903); “The Stranger” (1908). Rpt. in The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. Kurt Wolff. New York: Free P, 1950. 402-08.

Slack, Paul. “Introduction.” Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of

Pestilence. Ed. Terence O. Ranger and Slack. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 1-20.

Tanner, Tony. City of Words: A Study of American Fiction in the Mid-Twentieth Century. 1971. London: Cape, 1976.

Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity P, 2007.

Swami Vivekananda. “Plague Manifesto” (originally in Bengali). <http://www.ramakrishna-vivekananda/volume~9/writings~prose~and~poems>.

Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.

Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of

Culture: City, Nation, World. Ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash. London: Sage, 1999. 194-213.

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———. The Cattle Killing. 1996. London: Picador, 1997.

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appeared in: Teaching Contemporary Film. Ed. Susanne Peters, Klaus Stierstorfer, Laurenz Volkmann,

Dirk Vanderbeke. 2 vols. Trier: WVT, 2013. II, 463-479.

Jens Martin Gurr

Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation (2003)

Sofia Coppola’s celebrated 2003 film Lost in Translation is in many ways a classic example of what has come to be known as ‘Indiewood’ film-making (see King 2009). This label is increasingly used for productions which, both in terms of film aesthetics and audience appeal and in terms of productions economics and affiliations, are neither quite mainstream Hollywood nor quite independently produced. Especially since the 1990s, a number of developments indicate the convergence of these traditions: First, there is the economic success of a number of ‘arty’ films (such as Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 Sex, Lies, and Videotape) and film festivals (such as the Sundance Festival). A second key indicator is the establishment of a number of specialty film divisions of major Hollywood conglomerates and of specialty distributors such as Fox Searchlight, Miramax (sold to Disney in 1993), and Time-Warner’s New Line. Though committed to more ‘demanding’ films, these players are still closely allied to mainstream filmmaking and can ultimately be seen as a strategy of tapping into an economically important segment of film-making.

Sofia Coppola, born in 1971 as the daughter of Hollywood legend Francis Ford Coppola, very much appears as an auteur filmmaker with a number of recognizable aesthetic characteristics and thematic concerns. Lost in Translation, her second of four full-length films to date, has been by far the most successful with both critics and audiences and received four Oscar nominations, winning the one for best original screenplay. The film lends itself to an exploration of both Coppola’s work as a whole and the specific type of ‘Indiewood’ film of which it has become a classic example. With its unspectacular and low-key negotiation of loneliness and relationships in the big alien city, the film obliquely also negotiates issues of globalization, urban modernity as well as questions of identity in the age of mediatisation.

Sophia Coppola’s career as a film-maker: Thematic and stylistic continuities

As the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola grew up with film-making, accompanied her father to most film sets and occasionally took on small roles in his films. She was born while Coppola was filming The Godfather and appeared as the (male) baby in the film’s christening

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scene near the end; as a young woman, she received scathing reviews for her role in Godfather III.

Coppola studied painting and photography at the California Institute of the Arts. In addition to film-making as an actor, script writer and director, she has also been active as a photographer, TV show host, designer for her own fashion brand, model, and music video director. She is frequently regarded as one of the central figures in a cosmopolitan group of film-makers, artists, designers and musicians, which at various times included figures such as designer Marc Jacobs, actor Nicholas Cage (in fact, Sofia Coppola’s cousin), director Spike Jones (Being John Malcovich, Adaptation), to whom she was married from 1999-2003, director Wes Anderson, director, screen writer and actor Zoe Cassavetes (daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands), members of her father’s film-making circle, her brother Roman, also a director, her cinematographer Lance Acord, who also filmed Being John Malcovich and Adaptation, or musician Kevin Shields. She now lives in Paris with musician Thomas Mars of the French alternative rock group Phoenix, who also contributed music for the soundtracks of all her films since Lost in Translation.

Before her debut full-length film The Virgin Suicides (2000), her well-received adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel about five girls who are driven to suicide by their parents’ bigoted and harsh education while obsessed over by a group of boys, Coppola had made a few short films and video clips. Since Lost in Translation, her most important work to date, she has made two more films. Marie Antoinette (2006), the adaptation of a biography by Antonia Fraser, is a stylish pop-culture update, a mixture of historical decor (shot in Versailles) and present-day fashion, shoe and food extravaganza. The film was frequently criticized as an ahistorical, entirely non-political and ultimately ignorant, superficial celebration of a style icon (played by Kirsten Dunst, who had already played a lead role in The Virgin Suicides), though it does portray the young Austrian princess as initially overpowered by alien court protocol, court intrigue and marriage problems. In her most recent film Somewhere (2010), a successful but bored Hollywood star residing in luxury at Chateau Marmont hotel in West Hollywood is shaken out of his existential ennui by the arrival of his 11-year old daughter, who unexpectedly comes to stay with him. The film arguably ties in with Coppola’s previous films in that it – yet once more, as some critics complained – deals with the emptiness in the life of a privileged protagonist.

Though both The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette are adaptations, the first three films are sometimes regarded as a trilogy,

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thematically held together by the theme of ‘lost’ adolescent girls or young women somehow feeling ‘locked up’ as they are trying to grow up. If one wanted to identify parallels and continuities especially between The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, the theme of female adolescence or early adulthood is a common concern. Moreover, both are films centrally hinging on the suggestion of a certain mood as opposed to a tight plot, which might be said to be largely absent in Lost in Translation. This has prompted many less artistically inclined viewers to refer to it as “one of the most boring movies EVER” (qtd. in King 2010: 45; emphasis original). The films are also connected by a sense of fleetingness, loss, loneliness and melancholy, though both are far from simply being ‘depressing’ in tone and atmosphere. The importance of music in the creation of an ambience is a further continuity (Brian Reitzell was responsible for the music in both films). Most dominant, however, is a sense of ‘stylishness’ that is hard to pinpoint and is the result of careful lighting, camera-work and the artful framing of Coppola’s cinematographers Edward Lachmann and Lance Acord. Taking into account all three films, King has identified the unifying theme of materially “privileged ... ’beautiful’ young women effectively imprisoned or isolated in one way or another” (King 2010: 52). This, in turn, may give rise to readings of all of her films as being vaguely autobiographical (for a discussion of continuities and discontinuities in the three films, see also Woodworth 2008 and Coppola’s own comment cited in Woodworth 2008: 139).

Commenting on her œuvre as a whole, a number of critics have remarked on the fact that – in contrast to her father’s sweeping “epic” films – Sofia Coppola’s films tend to be on the smaller, more intimate scale, “not Tolstoy but Chekhov,” as Hirschberg appropriately remarked (2003: n.p.; for a hagiographic account of Coppola’s career up to Lost in Translation, see Hirschberg; for a more balanced view, see King 2010: 47-59).

Brief plot outline

Bob Harris (Bill Murray in what some critics regard as his best role ever), an American film star slightly past his best in something of a late mid-life crisis, is in Tokyo to cash in on his fame by earning two million dollars filming commercials for Suntory whiskey. He is frustrated, jet-lagged and bewildered by his excessively friendly yet demanding Japanese entourage and is needled by his somewhat nagging wife of 25 years, who, apparently obsessing over a major redecoration of their home, frequently calls him, sends faxes and FedExes carpet samples to him. In the bar of the fancy but sterile Park Hyatt Hotel, he meets Charlotte (Scarlett

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Johansson in her breakthrough adult role), Yale philosophy graduate in her early 20s, who is there to accompany her egotistical and apparently superficial fashion-photographer husband. He mostly leaves her alone at the hotel during his assignments and flirts with a dim-witted American starlet. It is clear that the marriage is unhappy already and that she does not know what to with her life. Out on an assignment, he leaves her at the hotel for a few days. Jet-lagged and alone in the anonymity of the sleek hotel, she and Bob strike up an unlikely – if platonic – relationship. It seems clear their relationship will only last as long as their stay in Tokyo, but together they venture out into the strip clubs, karaoke bars and pachinko parlours of the enormous city. One morning, Charlotte comes to his room to find he has spent the night with the bar singer. They continue to spend time together and quickly make up after initial irritation. After a somewhat hurried and unsatisfactory farewell, they have a final chance meeting in the city, when Bob sees her through the window of his taxi, gets out and runs after her. They embrace and kiss. Bob very intimately whispers something incomprehensible into her ear and climbs into his taxi for the airport.

At the fringes of the mainstream – the production of an ‘Indiewood’ film

The deliberately paradoxical phrase “fringes of the mainstream” in my section title is meant to suggest the way in which Coppola exemplifies a type of film-making neither clearly in line with classic ‘big studio’ Hollywood nor quite independent (for more detail on the following see King 2010: 7-30).

The film relies on Coppola’s familiarity with Tokyo and was partly scripted during her stays there. As a child already, she had travelled to Japan with her parents, and she reports having spent some time there every year since her early 20s, not least because her own fashion label is mostly active in Japan. The film script was written with Bill Murray in mind for the lead role, and Coppola has repeatedly claimed the film would not have been made without him (see for instance the interview in the bonus material on the DVD), but it appears to have taken a lot of persuasion to get the reclusive Murray to commit to making the film. Here, too, her network appears to have helped.

Lost in Translation cost less than four million US$ and was shot in only 27 days (see Hirschberg 2003: n.p.). Funding for the production was secured by separately selling distribution rights in various countries, Japan having been first (see King 2010: 8), with Focus Features – a subsidiary of major media conglomerate NBC Universal – eventually


buying the US distribution rights for four million US$ (see King 2010: 13). This is evidence of a certain proximity to Hollywood, since a purely ‘independent’ film would have been shot and edited before any such involvement, though even Jim Jarmusch as arguably the icon of independent film-making has financed a number of films that way.

The production conditions were more clearly independent-style: Only 8-10 crew members were brought along from the U.S., while the others were recruited in Japan; crowd scenes in the streets were shot ‘guerilla style’ without official permission and without streets being cordoned off. A lot of filming was done with hand-held cameras and with a significant amount of improvisation. Coppola apparently gave her actors much more room to improvise than would be common in any Hollywood production.

The film’s advance marketing appears to have been rather ingenious with pre-screenings and the placement in high-status US film festivals and a careful slotting of the release date into the release calendar in September 1993, initially on only 23 screens in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, targeting sophisticated, up-market metropolitan opinion-leaders (see King 2010: 15). Though the film never became a block-buster competing with major mainstream productions (in its fourth week, it peaked at number 7 in the box office charts). Total revenues in cinemas worldwide was 119 million US$, which – given production costs of only 4 million –, is a tremendous success (see King 2010: 21).

Having won three Golden Globes, Lost in Translation was nominated for four of the most important Oscars (best film, best director, best actor, best original screenplay) and did win Coppola the one for best screenplay. In addition to mainstream awards, it also won several more ‘arty’ awards at prestigious festivals. Critical reception was also very favourable, with quite a number of critics naming Lost in Translation their choice for “best film of the year.” In reviews of the film, Coppola’s name as the daughter of Hollywood giant Francis Ford Coppola played an enormous role, though it is unclear whether the name is a blessing or a burden in the film industry. In securing contacts and financing, however, it appears to have helped.

As a writer and director, Coppola is perceived as an auteur filmmaker, a concept associated both with a certain ‘independence’ from mainstream Hollywood – problematic as the concept of independence has become in the days of Indiewood filmmaking –, but also with a recognizable style and recurring thematic concerns (see also King’s 2009 book on Indiewood).

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Key themes and interpretative approaches

As the title Lost in Translation suggests, the issue of intercultural communication or rather mis-communication is a central theme. The iconic scene representing meaning lost in translation – or rather meaning remaining untranslated in the first place – is the filming of the Whiskey commercial, in which the Japanese director, obviously dissatisfied with Bob’s performance in saying his line – “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time!” –, yells apparently detailed instructions, which are reduced to barely the essentials by the less-than-competent Japanese interpreter. Bob’s sense of hopelessness – jet-lagged, frustrated and unsure of what is expected of him – is underscored by the camera perspective: The aggressive director, standing up while Bob is sitting, towers over him with Bob being filmed from above, while the director appears from below and is thus even more intimidating. Numerous further scenes also highlight failures of communication, predominantly between Bob and various Japanese characters. However, despite her greater openness, even Charlotte does not appear to communicate meaningfully with any Japanese character: Even with her Japanese ‘friends,’ there does not seem to be any meaningful conversation beyond laughing, drinking, dancing and singing.

Though this is a likely first impression, the theme of communicative failure is not limited to intercultural misunderstanding along the simple dichotomy of ‘Western‘ versus ‘Japanese.‘ In one of several scenes which complicate this dichotomy, Bob finds himself in the sauna with two Germans and does not understand a word of their conversation, which revolves around their missing German food in Tokyo. Similarly, the iconic scene at the fountain in La Dolce Vita, which Bob watches in his hotel room, is a mixture of English and Italian dialogue with Japanese subtitles. Moreover, miscommunication even occurs in characters’ native languages and among friends and partners: There does not seem to be much mutual understanding in the phone conversations between Bob and his wife or between Charlotte and her American friend, who does not understand how extremely unhappy she is when they talk on the phone. Miscommunication even manifests itself on various levels in the face-to-face conversations between Charlotte and her husband John (for multilingualism, failures of communication and the questionable nature of translation, see Cronin 2008: 81-91).

A related theme is the representation of Japan and the Japanese. The film has been criticized for making use of rather unsubtle stereotypes (see for instance Day 2004, Hijiya-Kirschnereit 2004 and Rich 2004). This begins with a number of visual jokes, as for instance in the scene in which Bob and Charlotte first notice each other as especially Bob appears to


tower over all the Japanese characters in the hotel lift. A further example is the rather implausible scene in which Bob struggles with a shower head fixed too low for his height in what is clearly a top-class international hotel. In a similarly unlikely scene, a rather aggressive prostitute enters Bob’s room, challenges him to “lip [rip] her stockings” and virtually wrestles him to the floor in what seems meant to suggest ‘kinky’ Japanese eroticism. Bob’s visit in Matthew’s Best Hit TV show is similarly clichéd, the show host being completely over-the-top, camp and hysteric in his pink suit and dyed blond hair. Bob’s Japanese entourage, too, is represented as nerve-wreckingly polite and servile. In a manner that is – broadly speaking – ‘orientalist’ (sensu Said), these and other scenes largely represent Japanese culture as garish, superficial, over-the-top and frequently plainly ‘wacky.’

More precisely, however, Silke Roesler has drawn attention to the contrast between the scenes set in hectic Tokyo – often represented by fast-paced, rapid cuts – and the much more sedate, almost rural, pastoral Kyoto, where Charlotte visits a temple and where there are long takes and gentle cuts (see Roesler 2004: n.p.). It even appears as though the film values ‘old’ Japanese culture – ancient shrines, Buddhist monks and ikebana –, but ridicules or berates ‘modern’ Japan – pseudo-westernized pop culture, globalized ‘brutalist’ architecture as seen from the hotel windows as well as sex clubs and pachinko halls (see also Day 2004).

On the other hand, critics have argued that the film appropriately captures the impression Tokyo does make on uninitiated Westerners and does not present caricatures or stereotypes. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that this is not in any narrow sense a film ‘about’ Tokyo or about Japanese culture, but rather a film about two Americans bonding in a culture that remains largely alien to them. And then, to be sure, a good deal of fun is being poked at American clichés, too, if we recall the star actor’s wife obsessing over carpet samples for a home redo or the imbecile blonde starlet. Moreover, Bob is frequently impatient, condescending or downright sarcastic at the expense of Japanese characters who speak little or no English (at the hotel reception, in the process of making the commercials or in a sushi bar). The film thus partly appears to juxtapose American and Japanese culture: For instance, immediately after she has witnessed Kelly’s painfully inane and superficial prattle during her press conference to promote what appears to be a dumb action film, Charlotte wanders into a traditional Japanese ikebana class, which – though represented as somehow ‘sincere’ and ‘peaceful’ – nonetheless remains alien to her. Although most of the Japanese characters are ‘westernized,’ the dominant impression is indeed one of alienness.

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A further impression shared by Bob and Charlotte – and a key thematic concern of the film – is the overpowering vastness of Tokyo. Though frequently aestheticized in the enormity of its architecture, in the glaring neon lights and the hectic pace of life, Tokyo is represented as forbidding, a daunting and highly uncomfortable place of overwhelming size, complexity and insurmountable alienness. “It’s not fun. It’s just very, very different,” as Bob tells his wife on the phone. In a related vein, in an interview in the bonus material on the DVD, Coppola comments on her perception of Tokyo as “kind of great, but overwhelming.”

Though the hotel for both is a retreat from a city that is entirely strange to them, there is a telling difference as far as their attitude to their surroundings is concerned: While Charlotte is frequently represented as facing the window and looking out over the city, Bob is largely seen turning his back on the window (see Krebs 2009: 95). This corresponds to Charlotte’s somewhat more pronounced interest in the city – we do see her venture out visiting a public park or a shrine –, whereas Bob appears only to leave the hotel when he has to or when he is with Charlotte.

It is useful here to refer to a widely cited notion introduced by Michel de Certeau, who distinguished between the “walker’s” and the “voyeur’s” perspective on the city (see de Certeau 1988: 92f.). To simplify things a little, the “walker” finds himself in the midst of the city’s complexity and without the sense of control and order which a view from above would yield (see de Certeau 1988: 92). There are indeed many scenes in the film in which both Charlotte and Bob walk or drive through the city and in which we share their feeling of incomprehension and of being overpowered. In de Certeau’s sense, they are “walkers ... whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (de Certeau 1988: 93). In contrast to this, the “voyeur’s” perspective on the city is characterized by the view from an elevated location above the city, which to some extent makes the beholder feel in control and makes the city appear as a legible text. De Certeau here speaks of the “pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts.” In Lost in Translation, however, the scenes in which especially Charlotte looks out over the city from the top floors of the hotel tower yield no such reassuring sense of control or legibility – the city remains vast and impossible to take in (for a related reading, see Roesler 2005: n.p.). What adds to this impression is the fact that the film does not foreground any architectural highlights or landmarks but appears to emphasize the vastness of the city and the predominance of a faceless ‘international’ style.


For instance, in the scene just after John has left her alone at the hotel, we see Charlotte sitting on the window sill, looking out over the vast cityscape, her arms hugging her bare legs, which highlights her vulnerability.

What adds to this impression of the illegibility of the city for the two American protagonists is the sense of semiotic overkill: road signs, advertising billboards, neon displays, video screens, TV sets are ubiquitous, but no graspable meaning comes across for them. An example is to be found in the scene in which Charlotte studies a subway map of Tokyo, which does not appear to give her any sense of directions but leaves her overwhelmed and confused.

The film makes no attempt to give a sense of the outline of Tokyo, of distances within the city or between the city and other locations. We see Charlotte on the Shinkansen fast train, and we see her visiting a shrine in Kyoto, but we do not get a sense of the distance travelled. Similarly, in the scenes in Tokyo, there is a sense of separate scenes taking place in individual locations in the vast maze of Tokyo, but, as we have seen, even in the views from the top of the hotel tower, there is no organizing, totalizing view which would allow the protagonists (or us) to gain a sense of the outlines and the layout of the city. As Clark has pointed out, the film has no “consistent spatial logic,” and locations in and routes through the city are inconsistent with actual locations, directions and distances (see Clark 2008: 214).

With its representation of jet-lagged global travellers, failed intercultural communication, hypermodern cityscapes and sleek, anonymous hotels, this is also a film about the psychological effects of globalization. Unable to keep up with the pace of life and physically and psychologically dislocated, the protagonists get lost in a globalized city, Tokyo being one of only three truly “global cities” in the sense of Saskia

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Sassen (2001). The film does not appear to support the idea or ideal of the ‘global village,’ where people move more closely together and where understanding seems possible. In a curious sense, though such hotels look the same everywhere, they are not places that invite a sense of ‘being at home,’ and Bob’s proposal to Charlotte to escape from the hotel sounds like the conspiratorial preparations for a prison-break. Thus, the anonymity of the hotel comes to represent the anonymity of globalized lifestyles and strongly suggests a sense of what French anthropologist Marc Augé in an excellent study called “non-places.” This is Augé’s term for locations such as airports, railway stations, shopping malls or international chain hotels, a “world of supermodernity [where] people are always, and never, at home” (Augé 1995: 109), where they feel a

solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of

others. The passenger through non-place retrieves his identity only at

Customs, at the tollbooth, at the checkout counter. Meanwhile, he obeys

the same code as others, receives the same messages, responds to the same

entreaties. The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor

relations; only solitude and similitude. (Augé 1995: 103)

As far as the representation of the hotel as a non-place is concerned, this is further highlighted by a marked contrast between most of the hotel scenes, which are filmed in long shots from a static camera perspective and most of the city scenes, which are often filmed with a more mobile and dynamic camera.

According to the logic of the film, it is the shared sense of alienation in a culture they both find incomprehensible, the overpowering megalopolis and the psychological effects of globalization and their stay in the anonymity of a non-place as well as the shared experience of jet-lag and insomnia which makes Bob and Charlotte seek comfort in each other’s company. The parallels are highlighted through a montage of parallel scenes in which both insomniacs are further disturbed by noises associated with their respective spouses, a fax in the middle of the night in Bob’s case, her husband’s snoring in Charlotte’s, or through the two of them watching the same TV programme in their separate rooms.

Both Bob and Charlotte are in vulnerable situations, he in some form of late mid-life crisis, she at an early stage of her life when she does not know what to do with herself yet (the frequent display of Charlotte’s half-clothed body thus seems to be more suggestive of vulnerability than to invite the voyeuristic male gaze or to suggest ‘sexiness’). The visual representation of Charlotte’s relationships with her husband John supports the sense of disorientation and alienation: In the scene in the hotel lobby in which Charlotte appears disappointed by how well John


and the shallow starlet Kelly appear to get along, the changing affiliations are represented by the mise en scène: Kelly at first appears between Charlotte and her husband and is thus represented as an intruder, while in the next shot, when she looks on as the two are talking animatedly, Charlotte appears between the two, subtly suggesting her feeling that she is the odd one out who is in fact intruding upon them.

After a series of encounters at the bar and their night out in Tokyo, the emotional climax and arguably the most intimate scene is the one in which Bob and Charlotte lie on a hotel bed together and talk about their unhappiness. The sense of intimacy ensuing from their shared vulnerability is also supported by the camera angle: They are here filmed in a bird’s eye view, which makes them appear exposed and vulnerable (see also Grimm 2009: 337). During their night together in Bob’s bed, they remain fully clothed and hardly touch. In this scene, the fade to black at the moment when they turn to face each other and Bob lays his hand on her foot echoes the ellipsis which, in a more conventional film, would have suggested a sexual encounter. Here, the fade-out simply appears to suggest they might fall asleep (see also King 2010: 64).

The fact that their intimacy is predominantly emotional rather than sexual is highlighted by the fact that Bob spends a night with the bar singer and that this only leads to a temporary and hardly significant alienation between them. Commenting on their unconventional relationship, critic Roger Ebert in his glowing review of the film appropriately remarked: “They share something as personal as their feelings rather than something as generic as their genitals” (Ebert 2003: n.p.). It even appears that their closeness and the trust they instil in each other to some extent allow them to open up a little more to the alien Japanese culture – with Bob, against his initial impulse, agreeing to appear on the Japanese TV show and Charlotte, who earlier complained that she “did not feel anything” when she observed the chanting monks,

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now appearing touched when she witnesses a traditional Japanese wedding (see also Grimm 2009: 337).

The way in which Coppola’s film negotiates generic conventions should be an important part of any analysis. Like a number of other important independent and Indiewood films – Jarmusch’s Dead Man in the case of the Western being a central example (see Gurr 2007) –, Lost in Translation plays with the conventions of a central established genre, here that of the romantic comedy: The film clearly has elements of comedy without exhausting the possibilities of the genre, and though the encounter of the two protagonists in the hotel and their ‘relationship’ clearly allude to the genre of romantic film, the relationship – in contrast to genre conventions – is suggested to remain sexually unfulfilled (for a detailed discussion of genre, see also King 2010: 60-75). In a more general sense, the film is part of a loosely defined tradition of films often referred to as the ‘fish out of water’ type, representing characters lost in the big city, in foreign countries or in situations otherwise alien to them. Other traditions the film may remind one of are those of the ‘older man meets younger woman type’ – also referred to as ‘May-December romances’ –, the holiday romance, a subtype of the ‘fleeting but memorable encounter’ type arguably best represented by a film such as Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995). In a further characteristic departure from the ‘romantic comedy’ genre of the “younger woman meets older man” type – which frequently has the easy-go-lucky younger woman ‘rescue’ the serious, business-like and stuffy older man (Pretty Woman being an obvious example) –, Charlotte in this film is the much more serious character.

As far as the type of humour is concerned, in addition to the rather feeble jokes employing Japanese stereotypes, there is also humour at Bob’s expense – he sits at the hotel bar with the clips holding his suit jacket in place behind his back, left over from the commercial shoot. Later, unable to handle the fitness machine in the hotel gym, he sets it at an absurd speed, which leads to a form of slapstick when he almost falls off the machine. Moreover, it can be argued that comedy recedes as the film moves on and more directly deals with the personal crises of both protagonists and with their relationship. The film thus seems to re-enact the direction of Murray’s career from comedian to serious actor.

As far as the negotiation of genre is concerned, the film not only undercuts genre expectations by not providing a clear happy ending (see my discussion of the ending below), but also by being rather more loosely plotted than one would conventionally expect. This episodic nature of the film is supported by fade-to-black-editing, emphasising the fact that there is not necessarily a tight connection between the individual scenes. There


are no real turning points, crises, catastrophes and no clear ending. A lot of scenes serve the evocation of moods and subtle parallels between the situations of the two protagonists rather than to propel what little action there is.

With an average shot-length of about 6.5 seconds (see King 2010: 104), the film is significantly ‘slower’ in pace than most contemporary productions, again emphasizing its ‘arty’ look and feel, which is further highlighted by a large number of out-of-focus shots and blurry, slightly ‘dreamy’ images. The fact that virtually all reviewers agreed in describing the film as ‘subtle,’ ‘atmospheric,’ ‘arty,’ ‘classy,’ ‘stylish’ – yet without being overtly ‘avant-garde,’ experimental or difficult – is again indicative of its Indiewood status (for a detailed discussion of the aesthetics of the film, see King 2010: 76-125). The musical choices for the film – Death in Vegas, My Bloody Valentine, Roxy Music, Squarepusher, Phoenix, Air – also convey the impression of having been made to create the impression of artiness, taste and connoisseurship without being arcane or off-putting. Somewhat more critically, it might be argued that the foregrounding of ‘stylishness’ in the film – both visually and in the soundtrack – occasionally borders on the pretentious.

A further key theme of the film is the omnipresence of the media (for this see also Cronin 2008: 82-85 and Grimm 2009), for instance, in the filming of the whiskey commercials, the innumerable advertising screens in the city, constant zapping on hotel room TV, Charlotte’s photographer husband, telephones, mobile phones or the fax-machine in Bob’s hotel room. The connection between ubiquitous mediatisation and identity is first alluded to early on in the film when Bob, on his way from the airport into the city, from his taxi window sees an enormous billboard poster of himself already endorsing the Suntory whiskey. His entire reputation, which landed him the job of the whiskey commercials in the first place, is of course already based on his media presence as a film star. It is important to recognize the scene of the advertising shoot as a form of metaisation, of self-reflexively commenting on the difficulties of film-making in a foreign country and implicitly of film-making in general. In this scene, the diegetic and extra-diegetic cameras appear to be identical – we as viewers of the film see what the viewers of the commercials would see (see also King 2010: 38). However, these takes are framed by metaised takes in which we see Murray’s performance on a video screen. These scenes – together with comments which clearly show he knows he is selling out on his fame in these commercials – characteristically suggest an ambivalent position between allowing viewers to enjoy Murray’s comedian performance while at the same time showing him being filmed. The artificiality of the scene is further highlighted by Bob’s sarcastic

Jens Martin Gurr 14

comment that the glass he is posing with does not contain whiskey but iced tea.

Many of these concerns – the mediatisation of identity, the artificiality of the image, the potential problems of communication, the problematic nature of ‘authenticity’ – are again highlighted in the comparable scene in which Bob poses for the photo stills, this time without the presence of a translator and with communication taking place in English, though this is hardly less prone to misunderstandings. Here, too, the film pokes fun at Japanese pronunciation of English when the photographer asks Bob for “Lat Pack” poses and asks him to imitate, [Frank] “Sinatola” and “Loger Moore.” Much of Bob’s ironic commentary on the situation, however, is not directed at the photographer, but rather at other native speakers of English present at the photo shoot and also, it seems, at the viewers of the film Lost in Translation, thus blurring diegetic and extra-diegetic levels.

This emphasis on mediatisation is reinforced by the frequent metafilmic and intertextual allusions and references to other films, generic conventions and to the process of filmmaking. One example that lends itself to discussing the reverberations and associations produced by the subtle use of such intertextual references in the film is the scene in which Bob and Charlotte watch La Dolce Vita in Bob’s hotel room. Significantly, this occurs immediately before their intimate conversation that is arguably the central scene of the film. Moreover, it is hardly accidental that the scene we see them watch is the iconic one in which Anita Ekberg walks into the Fontana di Trevi. Fellini’s 1960 classic is, of course, highly symbolic in that it, too, deals with the cosmopolitan lives of privileged but melancholy characters in the big city (in this case Rome), a life in which ‘entertainment’ and facade are more important than substance, as evidenced by the profession of Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), the tabloid reporter. The view of Rome in the film in many ways is similar to that of Tokyo in Lost in Translation: fascinating, but certainly not romanticized. Fellini’s film has also been read as a critical commentary on the ubiquity of the media, the importance of ‘image’ in modern societies and the tendency to gloss over the important questions which nonetheless haunt the protagonists. In a sense, even the scene in which Sylvia, alien in the city unknown to her, relies on Marcello for some kind of support, echoes the situation in Lost in Translation. Both are semi-aware of the superficiality of their profession and their lives and are therefore – inconclusively – attracted to each other (see also Grimm 2009: 341-342). The Dolce Vita scene as one of several instances of ‘film within the film’ thus again functions as a form of self-reflexive metaisation.


The scene in which Kelly is seen babbling away at a press conference in the hotel may be read as another – inverted – reference to La Dolce Vita, in which film star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) is shown in a ridiculous promotion interview in a hotel, though there it is the journalists who ask absurd questions. Moreover, the scene again self-consciously draws attention to film as a genre and to the conventions of the industry.

Arguably the most sustained such metareferential ploy is the celebrated role of Bill Murray as the aging film star Bob Harris and the way in which the film in numerous ways plays with his role history in over 40 films since the late 1970s – among his most important previous films one might mention Ghostbusters (1984), Groundhog Days (1993), Rushmore (1998) or the role as Polonius in Michael Almereyda’s modernized version of Hamlet in 2000. This culminates in a scene in which Bob watches his ‘younger self’ on his hotel TV, apparently a scene from one of Murray’s 1970s Saturday Night Live episodes. What may be helpful in commenting on Murray’s performance in the film is Barry King’s distinction between the acting styles of “impersonation,” or unselfconscious ‘proper’ acting, and “personification,” the self-conscious playing of a familiar role an actor is associated with (King 1985; see also King 2010: 32). In Lost in Translation, Murray arguably hovers between the two, on the one hand incorporating elements associated with previous – frequently comic – roles, on the other hand delivering an impressive ‘sincere’ performance of a man in his late mid-life crisis.

The game with an actor’s role history is also perceptible with Scarlett Johansson, though to a lesser extent than with Murray’s performance, and certainly only recognizable to a much smaller audience of cinephiles. Although the film was her breakthrough in an adult role, she had appeared in earlier films such as The Horse Whisperer (1998) or Ghost World (2000) and had come to be associated with ‘innocence,’ ‘maturity beyond her years’ and a vague sense of ‘melancholy.’

All in all, it needs to be emphasized that, although the film thus engages with a number of key issues in contemporary culture – globalization, intercultural encounters, mediatisation, anonymity, urban life –, it is not a programmatic or overtly ‘political’ film, but rather remains ambivalent about most of these issues.

Discussion of a key scene: Genre and audience expectations at the end of the film

Though emotionally and in terms of dialogue, the climactic scene is

arguably the scene in which Bob and Charlotte lie in bed together,

discussing their problems and sharing an unconventional form of

Jens Martin Gurr 16

intimacy, I here focus on the ending of the film, which in a complex way

toys with audience expectations and genre conventions. After a

superficial, hurried and clumsy farewell in the hotel lobby, which

‘disappoints’ audience expectations, Bob climbs into his taxi to leave for

the airport. Plausibility and the sense that the film is nearing its end now

suggest that this is the end of their relationship; the sense of

dissatisfaction with this unpleasant farewell, however, leads to

expectations or ‘hopes’ that this cannot be all. The game with genre

conventions and reader expectations discussed above at this stage does

not point in any clear direction as to the dénouement of the film. This is

further highlighted by a subtle intertextual game the film enters as soon

as Bob glimpses a blonde head in the crowd, which may remind viewers

of the famous scene near the end of David Lean’s classic Dr. Zhivago,

when the protagonist believes he has seen Lara from a tram window. This

scene ends with the fatal heart attack of Yuri before he reaches her. Here,

however, Bob does reach the woman; she turns out to be Charlotte after

all, and the film appears to fulfil expectations of a more ‘meaningful’

ending when Bob and tearful Charlotte embrace and kiss, though even

this is overshadowed by the thought that there is hardly a future in store

for them and that this must be their final farewell.

The film again taunts viewers when, at the emotional climax of their

embrace, Bob’s whispered words to Charlotte are inaudible to the

audience. This scene arguably brings to a climax the strategy of playing

with genre conventions and audience expectations and supports a

reading of the film as a classic example of ‘Indiewood’ both in terms of

production and distribution economics and in terms of content and

aesthetic strategies.


Further teaching suggestions

The film lends itself to being taught both in the final years of school and at university level. Courses or units on intercultural communication, cultural representations of globalization, urban imaginaries, or film seminars on Indiewood or on genre films might be appropriate contexts. A discussion might proceed along the lines of the thematic concerns outlined above, so that this section only makes a few additional suggestions: • A discussion should probably include some information on

production economics and mainstream vs. independent traditions and should seek to locate the film in the spectrum. As a starting point, students might be asked about their associations with the musical choices made for the film.

• When discussing the representation of Japan and the Japanese, a discussion might begin by asking students about their response to the relevant scenes and whether they find them offensive. In this context, it may be worthwhile to note that two other high-profile U.S. films centrally featuring Japan also came out in 2003, Kill Bill I as well as The Last Samurai, which might lend themselves to a comparison (individual scenes might be sufficient).

• When analyzing the film in terms of genre conventions, a self-reflexive discussion of students’ responses to and expectations in certain scenes might be helpful. This may be facilitated by asking students who have not previously seen the film to take notes recording their responses and anticipations during their first viewing.

• In the context of discussions about urban imaginaries, accessible essays or excerpts on key concepts in urban studies – Georg Simmel on anonymity, Edward Soja on the “postmetropolis,” Michel de Certeau on perceptions of the city or Marc Augé on “non-places” – might be used to raise awareness of key issues to look for in a second screening of the film. The wealth of ‘Urban Studies’ readers on the market will easily provide appropriate material.

• Discussions of mediatisation and metaisation might begin by collecting examples of such phenomena in contemporary popular culture and by discussing their functions (soap opera characters watching soap operas, TV police investigators commenting on police procedurals they have watched etc.) in order to raise the students’ awareness for the ubiquity of such phenomena and their function in contemporary cultural production. Such discussions might also be facilitated by providing clips from previous roles played by Murray

Jens Martin Gurr 18

and Johansson or clips from La Dolce Vita (key scenes are available on youtube.com).

• Though generally hailed as an artistically successful and intellectually stimulating film, students should be encouraged to be critical about certain facets of the film – a discussion will surely profit from not introducing the film as iconic ‘work of art’.

Given the multiplicity of key cultural themes the film negotiates or touches upon, it should make for stimulating and fruitful discussions in various contexts.

Works Cited

Primary source

Lost in Translation. Dir. Sophia Coppola. Focus Features. 2003. DVD.

Secondary sources

Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso, 1995.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life [1984]. Trans. by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Clark, Steve. “After the Bubble: Post-Imperial Tokyo.” Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia. Ed. Steve Clark and Paul Smethurst. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008, 209-228.

Cook, Pam. “Sofia Coppola: Portrait of a Lady.” Sight & Sound 16.11 (2006): 36-40.

Cronin, Michael. Translation Goes to the Movies. London: Routledge, 2008. Day, Kiku. “Totally Lost in Translation: The Anti-Japanese Racism in

Sofia Coppola's New Film just isn't Funny.” The Guardian, 24 January 2003. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jan/24/japan.film> (December 14, 2010).

Ebert, Roger. “Lost in Translation” [review]. Chicago Sun-Times, September 12, 2003. <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ article?AID=/20030912/REVIEWS/309120302/1023> (December 14, 2010).

Grimm, Sieglinde. “Liebe zwischen Tausch und Alterität: Sofia Coppolas Lost in Translation.“ Intermedialität und Kulturaustausch: Beibachtungen im Spannungsfeld von Künsten und Medien. Ed. Annette Simonis. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009, 331-343.


Gurr, Jens Martin. “The ‘Native’ Cites Back: Post-Colonial Theory and the Politics of Jim Jarmusch's Western Dead Man." Anglistentag 2006: Proceedings. Ed. Sabine Volk-Birke & Julia Lippert. Trier: WVT, 2007, 191-202.

Hirschberg, Lynn. “The Coppola Smart Mob.” The New York Times Magazine, August 31, 2003 <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/31/ magazine/31COPPOLA.html> (December 14, 2010).

King, Barry. “Articulating Stardom.” Screen 26.5 (1985), 27-51. King, Geoff. Lost in Translation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2010. King, Geoff. Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema.

London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Irmela. “Befangen im Spiegelblick: Der Film Lost in

Translation sorgt für Diskussionen.“ Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 24, 2004. <http://www.nzz.ch/2004/03/24/fe/article9HNHH.html> (December 14, 2010).

Krebs, Martina. Hotel Stories: Representations of Escapes and Encounters in Fiction and Film. Trier: WVT, 2009.

Rich, Motoko. “Land Of the Rising Cliché.” New York Times, January 4, 2004. <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/movies/land-of-the-rising-cliche.html> (December 14, 2010).

Roesler, Silke. “’Vertical Limit’: Urbane Gestaltungspläne und Orientierungsmuster im Film.” TRANS: Internetzeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 16 (2005). <http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/09_3/ roesler16.htm> (December 14, 2010).

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 22001.

Woodworth, Amy. “A Feminist Theorization of Sofia Coppola’s Postfeminist Trilogy.” Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema. Ed. Marcelline Block. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008, 138-167.

erschienen in: Screening the Americas: Narration of Nation in Documentary Film/Proyectando las Américas: Narración de la nación en el cine documental. Ed. Josef Raab, Sebastian Thies, Daniela Noll-Opitz. Trier and Tempe, AZ: WVT and Bilingual Press, 2011. 153-171. The Politics of Representation in Hypertext DocuFiction: Multi-Ethnic Los Angeles as

an Emblem of 'America' in Norman M. Klein's Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles

1920-1986

Jens Martin Gurr

Consider this: the computer is fundamentally an aesthetics of assets. … Thus, if ever there were an aporetic model of story, it is the digital. However, we must never trust any use of aporia that suggests it is a problem to be solved. That is like saying that unreliable narrators are a problem, rather than the heart of the modern novel. … Perhaps we have lost the sense of what gives story presence: Absence. … I came up with a model that captures the immersive power of a Balzac novel or a stream-of-consciousness journey through a city (Musil, Joyce, Proust, even Melville – the ship as city – and Virginia Woolf). The structure works like this: … Each tier [of the DVD] comments on a specific medium that tries to make the city intelligible as it erases, collectively forgets, survives from day to day. The history of forgetting is a distraction from the basic reality of urban life in Los Angeles, its quotidian power of survival. (Klein, "Bleeding Through" 42)

1. Introduction

How does one represent, synchronically as well as diachronically, the complexity of Los Angeles, city of Hollywood myths and inner-city decay, of ceaseless self-invention and bulldozed urban renewal, of multi-ethnic pluralism and ethnic ghettos, a city where both the promises and problems of 'America' have crystallized to the present day? For while the discourses of urban utopia and urban crisis with all their contradictory ideological implications, of course, are as old as the concept of 'city' itself (cf. Mumford, Gassenmeier and Teske), Los Angeles has always been imagined in particularly polarized ways:

According to your point of view, Los Angeles is either exhilarating or nihilistic, sun-drenched or smog-enshrouded, a multicultural haven or a segregated ethnic concentration camp – Atlantis or high capitalism – and orchestrating these polarized alternatives is an urban identity thriving precisely on their interchangeability. (Murphet 8)1

Los Angeles, of course, has long been a center of attention for urbanists as well as for

scholars of urban planning and of cultural representations of the city. It has been the subject of innumerable studies, the locale for countless novels, documentary films and particularly of countless feature films.2 However, one of the most impressive renderings of the complexities of 20th-century Los Angeles, and surely one of the most ambitious attempts to do justice to these complexities by presenting a wealth of material in a highly self-conscious form of hypertext, is Norman M. Klein's multi-media docu-fiction Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986.3.

1 This passage is also cited in Bénézet 56. 2 From among the innumerable studies cf. for instance Davis, Fulton, Klein, Forgetting, Murphet, Scott &

Soja, Soja, Thirdspace, "Exopolis", and "Los Angeles", Ofner & Siefert. 3 Largely written by Klein and programmed by Rosemary Comella and Andreas Kratky, it was co-

produced by The Labyrinth Project at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and the ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medien – Karlsruhe.

Bleeding Through, which combines a 37-page novella with a multimedia documentary DVD4 on twentieth-century Los Angeles, is based on the fictitious story of "Molly", who moved to L.A. in 1920 when she was 22 and whose life and times the narrator of the novella attempts to chronicle.5 The question whether or not she killed her second husband (or had him killed) at some point in 1959 serves as a fake narrative hook to launch the reader and user of the DVD on a quest through layers of 20th-century Los Angeles. Thus, as the cover blurb appropriately notes, Bleeding Through is "a loosely constructed documentary underlying a flexible literary journey, it is an urban bricolage held together by the outline of a novel spanning sixty-six years."6

In this essay, I will argue that Bleeding Through makes full use of the opportunities afforded by the digital medium to represent the complexity, multiplicity and dynamics of the city in a way no other medium could. I will first establish the contexts for an analysis of Klein's multi-media documentary by outlining the key findings of Klein's 1997 monograph The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, on which Bleeding Through is based to a considerable extent. The History of Forgetting, however, also provides the context for Bleeding Through in another sense: The flaunted self-reflexivity of Klein's distinctly non-academic and often highly literary work and its attempts at creating a non-linear textuality also highlight the problems of representing the complexity of the city in any 'traditional' linear form, in print or in a documentary film. These problems of representation demonstrably lead to the non-linear format of multi-media hypertext in Bleeding Through. By outlining the relationship between the novella and the documentary and by highlighting some of the features and design principles of the interactive DVD, I will then show how Bleeding Through re-presents the complexity of 20th-century Los Angeles by taking us on a revisionist tour of its history since the 1920s and by pointing out the extent to which fictitious urban imaginaries – the innumerable films noirs, detective films and thrillers set in L.A. – have shaped perceptions of the city and even the city itself. I will then more explicitly point out the aesthetic and political implications of the multi-media format, of what one might call 'interactive multi-medial docu-fiction in hypertext'. Deploying the narrative and aesthetic strategies of hypertext documentaries, Bleeding Through demonstrably heightens and radicalizes the tendencies towards self-reflexivity, subjectivity and flaunted artifice – as opposed to allegedly objective realism – apparent in documentaries in recent decades. In conclusion, I will show how the work's subversive view of hegemonic strategies of urban planning and ethnic segregation undercuts conventional representations of multi-ethnic L.A. and – sometimes by implication, but often explicitly – of the Unites States as a whole.

2. Establishing Contexts: The Problems of Representing Urban Complexity in Klein's

History of Forgetting

Klein's 1997 monograph The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory is itself highly unusual in its mix of genres: Parts I and IV are scholarly studies of 20th-century urban planning in L.A. and of the impact of filmic representations on the urban imaginary of the city, Part II is the imaginative recreation of the perspective on the city of a Vietnamese immigrant in a novella of some 65 pages (151-215), while Part III is a collection of creatively essayistic "docufables" (217).7 Klein names as one of his key themes "the

4 References to the novella, where this source is not clear, will be abbreviated BT, references to the DVD

will be given by tier and chapter. 5 For the connections between Molly's story and the material on the cultural history of L.A. cf. also the

additional texts in the Bleeding Through booklet by Klein's collaborators on the project, Shaw 52, Kinder 54f., Comella 59 and Kratky 60.

6 Klein's collaborator Rosemary Comella calls it "a sort of stream-of-consciousness interactive bricolage-documentary overlaying a fictionalized story based on a real person" (59).

7 In his "Outline" in the Introduction, Klein sets out his plan for the book as follows: "In the chapters that follow (Part I), I will examine the map of what is left out in downtown Los Angeles, how urban myths

uneven decay of an Anglo identity in Los Angeles, how the instability of white hegemonic culture leads to bizarre over-reactions in urban planning, in policing, and how these are mystified in mass culture" (17).

Referring to what is surely the most drastic urban redevelopment project in twentieth-century Los Angeles, Klein states that "Bunker Hill [became] the emblem of urban blight in Los Angeles, the primary target for redevelopment downtown from the late twenties on" (52). The Bunker Hill Renewal Project, begun in the 1950s and not scheduled to end before 2015, brought the virtually total razing of a neighborhood, the flattening of the hill and the building of the high-rise buildings now popularly regarded as constituting "Downtown L.A.". Similarly, Klein comments on the razing of the "old Chinatown, old Mexican Sonora […] the old Victorian slum district, and other barrios west of downtown, [which] were leveled, virtually without a trace" (97). Commenting on an eerie commonality of all these 20th-century urban renewal projects in L.A., Klein writes:

[E]xcept for Chinatown, every neighborhood erased by urban planning in and around downtown was Mexican, or was perceived that way (generally, they were mixed, often no more than 30% Mexican). … While East L.A. may today seem the singular capital of Mexican-American life in the city, the mental map was different in the forties. The heartland of Mexican-American Los Angeles was identified as sprawling west, directly past downtown, from north to south. Bunker Hill was identified as "Mexican" by 1940, like Sonoratown just north of it … and particularly Chavez Ravine. (132f.)8

In History of Forgetting as well as in a number of essays, Klein further shows how the urban imaginary of Los Angeles has been shaped by images of the city in film, from noir to Bladerunner and beyond, creating "places that never existed but are remembered anyway" ("Absences" 452), even arguing that the ideology of noir and neo-noir films, these "delusional journeys into panic and conservative white flight" also help "sell gated communities and 'friendly' surveillance systems" ("Staging Murders" 89).

More immediately, Bleeding Through – though the details do not all fit – is clearly based on one of the short docufables in part III of the book: In a mere three pages, "The Unreliable Narrator"9 tells the story of 93-year-old Molly Frankel, who moved to the city in the 1920s, ran a shop for decades and rented out most of her spacious Victorian house in Angelino Heights to a large Mexican family. Towards the end of the text, the experimental and tentative nature of these musings is pointed out by self-reflexively sketching a genealogy in a number of references both to the tradition of the unreliable narrator and to accounts of the constructedness of historiography and memory since the eighteenth century: "the Münchhausens and Uncle Tobys … German and Central European fiction after 1880 … the absent presence that in Michelet's words are 'obscure and dubious witnesses' (1847) … the broad crisis of representation in cinema" (233).

A similar concern with forms of representation is apparent in the chapter entitled "The Most Photographed and Least Remembered City in the World" in History of Forgetting. Klein here comments on previous fictional films and documentaries seeking to record the history of ethnic Los Angeles, such as Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles (1961) or Duane Kubo's Raise the

(social imaginaries) have been used as public policy. In the second part, I present a docu-novel, (or novella) based on Vietnamese immigrants who live in areas affected by these policies. In the third part, I present docufables from other residents in these communities, particularly about how their memories are affected by public traumas: drive-by shootings, racist neglect, policies toward immigrants, the Uprising of 1992, and so on. And in the final parts, I examine how literature and other media use techniques of the 'unreliable narrator,' and how the corporate uses of 'unreliable' memory are transforming the cultures of Los Angeles" (17).

8 Klein also refers to the "policy of shutting out downtown to non-whites […] since the 1920s" (132). 9 "Unreliable Narrators" is also the title of a chapter in the novella (26-34).

Banner (1980) and the way in which even these well-intentioned films evade the issue of the razing of ethnic neighborhoods (248f.): "The twin beasts that erased much of downtown – racist neglect and ruthless planning – leave only a faint echo in cinema, because generally one will distract the other, or because cinema, by its very apparatus, resembles the tourist imaginary" (249). Klein here speaks of the "utter instability of cinema as a formal record, and the fact that audiences enjoy this paramnesiac sensation, as memory dissolves. … The layering of erasures is essential to moving the narrative along, to its simultaneity, its unreal solidity, its anarchic orderliness" (253).

Anticipating the self-conscious concern with narrative form in Bleeding Through, Klein notes in History of Forgetting that when he began to write about the 20th-century transformations of Los Angeles, "I noticed that my scholarship was beginning to resemble fiction" and speaks of the "crossed identity" fostered by this type of writing, "[making] the scholar both reader and character within the same text" (6f.). Even more directly linking the arrangement of a wealth of materials to the writing of fiction, he comments: "In many ways the materials I have assembled look like research gathered by a novelist before the novel is written, before the writer turns the contradictions into a character-driven story" (7). In a highly revealing footnote, he further comments on his concern with form:

I am trying, with as much modesty as possible, to identify a form of literature that is not simply 'hybridized', or 'de-narratized', and certainly not deconstructed – not a blend of others but a structure in itself, a structure that is evolving […] By structure, I mean how to generate alternatives within the text itself, within the style itself. (Forgetting 20, note 10, italics original)10 In History of Forgetting, Klein even points forward to Bleeding Through by employing

– if only half-seriously – the techniques of hypertext. In a short section entitled "Brief Interruption" in the "Introduction", in a reference to theories of memory and forgetting, he states: "The only solution for this introduction is a kind of hypertext (click to page 301). For the reader also interested in memory theory […] I have included an Appendix […] Read it now or read it later, whenever is suits you" (14).11 The History of Forgetting in its frequently scrupulous and highly self-conscious concern with narrative form thus clearly points forward to Bleeding Through.12

3. Bleeding Through: Multimedia Docu-Fiction on the Erasure of Multi-Ethnic Los

Angeles While History of Forgetting addresses more directly the perversions of city planning driven by greed and racism, Bleeding Though tackles them more obliquely if more experientially. It does so by juxtaposing two formats: the "traditional" narrative of Klein's novella on the one

10 Cf. also History of Forgetting 7: "There are clear signs that both critical theory and cultural studies have

generated what amounts to a new category of literature (as yet unnamed). What names there are sound a bit early in the cycle right now, clearly not what this (genre?) might be called ten years from now: docu-novels, "mockumentaries" false autobiographies, public autobiography; "faction"; phonebooks or chatlines as variations of personal essay; public autobiography; "witnessing" […]; historiographic metafiction. I would rather not add more labels. Instead, I'll stick to the term "history". That is problematic and fictive enough already." (7)

11 Elsewhere in the introduction, he refers to the effect of his strategies of representation in the book as those of "digital simulations", "special effects, a morphing programme in slo-mo, when the simulation is naked, when the tiger is obviously three frames away from turning human" (BT 16). This morphing of one image into the other is precisely one of the most impressive features of Bleeding Through.

12 On the other hand, establishing a connection between the contextual material on Molly's story on the DVD and The History of Forgetting, the narrator of the novella comments on "numerous characters in the background [of Molly's story] who may show up, but certainly will appear in future volumes of The History of Forgetting" (BT 29; cf. also 32).

hand and a multimedia DVD on the other hand. The documentary is thus held together by the underlying story of Molly and her life in LA between 1920 and 1986.

Klein's constantly self-reflexive 37-page novella "Bleeding Through" has a highly self-conscious first-person narrator who tells the story of Molly and – just as centrally – his attempts to reconstruct it:

I couldn't trust any of her stories. Not that her facts were wrong. Or that she didn't make an effort. [But] she'd fog out dozens of key facts. Whenever I noticed, she would blow me off, smiling, and say, "So I lose a few years." … But there were seven memories in the years from 1920 to 1986 that were luminously detailed. (10)13

It is these seven memories of key stages of Molly's life around which the novella and the DVD are structured, and which serve to explore 66 years of developments in the city.

Set largely within the three-mile radius near downtown L.A. in which Molly spent most of her life, the documentary deals with neighborhoods such as Boyle Heights, Bunker Hill, Chavez Ravine, Chinatown and Echo Park, the disappearance of which was chronicled in History of Forgetting. As the narrator explains here, this area was the site of the most drastic urban renewal projects in the country continuing over decades: "Hundreds of buildings gone: that could just as easily have been caused by carpet bombing, or a volcano erupting in the central business district" (BT 12). The same area around downtown, however, is also the center of a filmic universe: "Inside those three miles, under the skyline dropped by mistake into downtown ten years ago [in the 1980s] more people have been murdered in classic Hollywood crime films than anywhere else on earth" (BT 12).14

The documentary database includes hundreds of images, maps, newspaper clippings, drawings and sketches, historical film clips and (for copyright reasons15) films snippets recognizably re-enacting key scenes of famous L.A. films merely by repeating the camera movements in basically empty streets in the original locations, but without actors.16 Furthermore, there are numerous interviews with long-term residents, sometimes elaborate captions, as well as narrative commentary by Norman Klein.17 Klein's video commentary

13 The "preface" on the DVD, readable above a vintage photograph of downtown L.A. with City Hall still

by far the tallest building, similarly makes clear the central principle of this "cinematic novel archive" (Klein, "Absences" 453) and already highlight its major concerns: "An elderly woman living near downtown has lost the ability to distinguish day from night. Rumors suggest that decades ago, she had her second husband murdered. When asked, she indicates, quite cheerfully, that she has decided to forget all that: 'I lose a few years.' Three miles around where she is standing, more people have been 'murdered' in famous crime films than anywhere else in the world. Imaginary murders clog the roof gutters. They hide beneath coats of paint. But in fact, the neighborhoods have seen something quite different than movie murders; a constant adjustment to Latinos, Japanese, Filipinos, Jews, Evangelicals, Chinese. What's more, in the sixties, hundreds of buildings were bulldozed. And yet, pockets remain almost unchanged since 1940."

14 The novella refers to "290 murder films … shot no more than five minutes from Molly's house" (31). The narrator later states that "Since the Seventies, murders have been relocated a few blocks west, because gunfire looks more ironic underneath the L.A. skyline at night, seen best from the hills in Temple-Beaudry." (BT 37)

15 For this cf. Comella's short essay on the "making of" Bleeding Through; cf. especially 58. 16 The re-shot sequences of films such as Falling Down, Heat, Training Day, Chinatown, The Last Boy

Scout, T-Men, Omega Man, DOA, To Live and Die in L.A. are frequently iconic scenes with the downtown towers looming in the background. In addition, this section also features maps of L.A. pointing out key locations used in these films.

17 The narrator of the novella (whom one is likely to have identified as "Norman Klein") refers to his

materials as follows: "I have about a thousand photographs and newspaper articles, over two hundred relevant movies on file, and over twenty interviews, along with hours of interviews with Norman Klein; and hundreds of pages of text" (BT 27; cf. also 33, 38, 42, 43). The narrator comments on the way the documentary is to be perceived: "I turned toward my research on Molly's life, as if I could edit her

frequently gives clues as to the story behind the disappearance of Molly's husband Walt, which adds a playful dimension of detective game to the navigation experience, because, such is the underlying fiction, the point of navigating Bleeding Through in the first place is to act as a detective on the hunt for such clues. However, as the narrator of the novella comments, "The journey through the evidence is more exciting than the crime itself. We want to see everything that is erased to make the story legible" (BT 37).

The first "Tier" of the documentary, "The Phantom of a Novel: Seven Moments", structured around the seven key moments of Molly's life in L.A. between 1920 and 1986, is dominated by historical photographs of people and places in the neighborhoods surrounding Bunker Hill. Thumbnails of these photographs are arranged in random sequence and can be selected by the user; alternatively, the user can go through the photo archive by enlarging each photo to almost the size of the screen and then continuing either with the photograph on the left or on the right. Making full use of the technical possibilities, the sequence of photographs is not fixed but rather randomly brought up from the archive. Additionally, with each phase of Molly's life, there is a short narrative comment by Norman Klein in a window in the corner – a commentary that can be opened and closed by the user. The narrator of the novella describes this first tier as "a visual, interactive radio program … a kind of modern novel on a screen with hundreds of photos and Norman as narrator. You might say they are also a docu-fictional movie" (BT 43).

Tier 2, "The Writer's Back story", which the narrator of the novella describes as "more like a contextualization", is largely made up of newspaper clippings and establishes the context of other people and places more loosely connected to Molly's story. It collects newspaper clippings covering events and developments occurring during Molly's life, with references to the prohibition and illegal distilleries, the ban on interracial marriages in the state of California in a 1932 newspaper clipping, the controversial reception of a 1941 anti-semitic speech by Charles Lindbergh, the deportation of Japanese Americans during World War II, illicit gambling, the McCarthy era with its Red Scare and the building of air-raid shelters – frequently interspersed with innumerable sensationalist clippings reporting murders in Los Angeles. Additionally, explanatory captions beneath newspaper clippings and photographs contextualize developments, with comments, for instance, on the ambivalent views of Chinatown in the 1920s as both "an exotic place in the popular imagination" and a place "considered as an eyesore, as more brown and black races converged at the Plaza" (DVD 2:1).

Tier 3, "Excavation: Digging behind the story and its locale", is described in the novella as "the aporia of media itself" (BT 43). In five sections, it offers a wealth of further material, here arranged thematically rather than chronologically. There is a section entitled "People Molly Never Met But Would Make Good Characters in Her Story", featuring randomly arranged interviews with twelve residents (including Norman Klein) of these neighborhoods who comment on their experiences within the social and ethnic developments in 20th-century L.A., the Zoot Suit Riots, fear of violent police officers, ethnic festivities, Anti-Communist witch-hunts during the McCarthy era, the 1947 murders of Elizabeth Short – the "Black Dahlia" – and of Bugsy Siegel, or the treatment of Japanese Americans during WW II. Largely consisting of film and video sequences, it is a "vast 'ironic index' of what Molly left out, forgot, couldn’t see. It samples from the back-story that gets lost when the movie or novel is made legible" (BT 43). It is also described as "a meta-text (not a deconstruction). It is the structure of what cannot be found, what Molly decided to forget, what Molly never noticed, what passed before her but was lost to us. It is proof that no novel or film

sensations into a story that was symphonic in some way, or contrapuntal. … I could gather data for Molly's story, and embed it like bots under the skin: newspaper clippings, historical photographs, and patches of interviews. Then I could assemble my assets into a vast database, for a search engine that could be selected according to the senses." (BT 11)

(documentary or fiction) can capture the fullness of how a city forgets, except by its erasures" (BT 38f.).

Thus, neither the novella nor the DVD are to be regarded as a higher-level commentary one on the other; they are mutually complementary: Just as the DVD can be seen as a vast exploration of the themes outlined in the novella, the narrative frequently comments on the contents of the DVD: "Next day, I went into a newspaper morgue, looking for articles on Walt's disappearance. Instead, I found fifty ways to kill man between 1959 and 1961 (along with five suicides). I've scanned all the articles into a database for you" (BT 24). In the novella, the fictional story of Walt's disappearance is constantly related to current developments chronicled on the DVD, tying the wealth of documentary material back to the underlying quest narrative: "Among police photos, I find what should be Walt's body. … Then I discover that on the same day, the downtown editor cancelled photos about racist crimes, particularly the railroading of blacks and Latinos." (BT 25)

With Molly as its protagonist, Bleeding Through shifts attention from hegemonic white males and draws attention to the role of minorities in L.A.'s complex history: Molly, "a twenty-something girl from a Jewish home in the Midwest" (DVD 1:1; cf. also BT 13), is herself a new-comer and an outsider when she arrives in the city in 1920. As Bénézet points out, "Through Molly, Klein articulates a gendered and minority-oriented revision of the city’s history" (69).

From the very beginning, both the novella and the DVD characterize Molly's neighborhood as a multi-ethnic one.18 Much of the material centers on transformations in 20th-century multi-ethnic L.A., whether in references to "Brooklyn Avenue with its famous mix of Jews and Mexicans, Japanese and other 'swart' young men" (BT 15; cf. also 40) to "restrictions against the black community on Central Avenue, especially when by 1924 membership of the Klan reached its highest number ever" (BT 30), to the tearing down of Chinatown for Union Station (built in 1939), to the history of mixed Japanese and Mexican neighborhoods, with a Japanese American family man running a Mexican grocery store (DVD 3:1), the 1943 Zoot Suit riots, the Watts rebellion, or the turning of Little Tokyo into "Bronzeville" during World War II, when African Americans and Mexicans moved into the area while the Japanese Americans were held in deportation camps away from the West Coast (BT 22).

The changes in 20th-century Los Angeles are rendered in a fascinating if oblique way in the frequent pairings of an old photograph and a recent one taken from exactly the same angle; some of these are made to blend into one another in fascinating overlay montage.19 Thus, there is a pair of photos taken on the corner of Spring and Main Street in the 1920s and today, in which a shop sign "D.W. Wong Co. Chinese Herbs" disappears and a billboard advertising Green River Bourbon morphs into a billboard advertising a $ 7,000,000 lottery draw in Spanish. (DVD 1:2), in another of these morphs, juxtaposing 1941 Main Street with a contemporary image, "Fond's Pants Shop" on 655 Main Street (with "Ben's Barber Shop" and "Adams Radios & Appliances" next to it) turns into Dongyang Machine Co." (DVD 1:3). A further morph overlays an 1943 image of City Hall as clearly the tallest building among a few small shops in small two-story buildings with a modern image of City Hall surrounded by anonymous corporate glass-and-steel blocks; yet another pair of photographs morphs the area around the South Hill Street funicular "Angels Flight", with buildings around six floors in height, into the present-day high-rise towers of downtown.

Indeed, the drastic changes imposed by radical urban development projects in areas such as Bunker Hill may well be seen as the central theme of the documentary DVD. The

18 In his insert narrative accompanying the DVD preface, Klein refers to a family of "Latino's renting

downstairs" in Molly's house. 19 For the use of such techniques in city films, particularly in Pat O'Neill's L.A. film Water and Power

(1989) cf. MacDonald 232-34.

section "Collective Dissolve: Bunker Hill", in film sequences from Kent McKenzie's 1956 documentary Bunker Hill and The Exiles (1961), maps as well as photographs from the 1890s to the 1960s attempts to recreate Bunker Hill before the massive demolition program that cleared the area for what is now regarded as "downtown" L.A.. A long sequence from McKenzie's Bunker Hill refers to the Community Redevelopment Agency's major plan to relocate 8000 residents of the neighborhood, to demolish all buildings and to sell the land and have modern office and apartment complexes built (DVD 1:6). This chapter of the DVD also displays images from 1959 and 1960 showing the large-scale demolition of Bunker Hill. A sequence from Gene Petersen's 1949 film "… And Ten Thousand More" [housing units] also refers to the problem of "slums" in L.A. and the need for urban development. This sequence is captioned "The myths of urban blight".20 Similarly, the photograph of a model "Redevelopment Study for Bunker Hill, March 22, 1960" is captioned "Cooking statistics to justify tearing down Bunker Hill" (DVD 1:6). Indeed, statistics on the housing situation and living conditions in Bunker Hill appear systematically to have been distorted in order to win public support for the demolition of this predominantly Mexican neighborhood. In the caption underneath a sequence from McKenzie's The Exiles, the fact that "this was a brown and black identified downtown center" is explicitly identified as "one of the reasons it was torn down" (DVD 3:3).

In the interview section, residents comment on racial segregation in L.A.. Japanese American Bill Shishima recounts his experience of having to leave Los Angeles in May 1942 as an 11-year-old to be interned away from the coast with his family; retired African American fire-man Arnett Hartsfield reports coming to Los Angeles in 1929, "when we couldn't even cross Washington Boulevard on Central Avenue [because of segregation]" (DVD 3:1). Finally, Esther Raucher recalls her experience of first coming to downtown as a white child and of staring at African Americans: "As a child […] I don't think I'd seen a black person […] That's how segregated the city was that you would never see a black person" (DVD 3:1).21 Tying such developments to the underlying story of Molly, a clip from Jeremy Lezin's 1975 documentary A Sense of Community with references to illegal immigrants working in L.A. is captioned "With each year, Molly felt the massive immigration from Latin America change the rules in her world." (DVD 1:7). All in all, in keeping with The History of Forgetting, Bleeding Through thus shows how 20th-century Los Angeles, in the process of becoming increasingly multi-ethnic demographically, continued to erase the visible traces of this diversity in favor of a de-ethnicized all-American look and feel modeled on the needs of a largely white elite and enforced by representing ethnic L.A. along the lines of the paranoid and implicitly racist aesthetic of innumerable noir murder films. It remains to be shown that the attempt at an open, non-hierarchical and anti-hegemonic representation of these complexities is closely tied to the non-linear and de-centered form of the multimedia hypertext documentary. 4. Implications of the Form: Hypertext Docu-Fiction as Radicalized Historiographic

Metafiction and Political Commentary

The experience of navigating Bleeding Through is a fundamentally contradictory one: On the one hand, by making sophisticated use of the technological possibilities of the multimedia database, the fast-paced, multi-dimensional, overpowering, non-hierarchical, multi-faceted documentary recreates the urban experience of 20th or even 21st-century L.A.; on the other hand, there is a nostalgic quality to the experience, which partly arises from the use of vintage photographs, film clips and newspaper clippings which appear to work against the grain of the

20 On the discourse of crisis and the frequently disastrous consequences of large-scale restructuring plans in

L.A. cf. also Soja, "Los Angeles, 1965-1962"). 21 In History of Forgetting, Klein refers to the "policy of shutting out downtown to non-whites […] since the

1920s" (132).

high-tech mode of presentation – in keeping with Klein's views expressed in the The History of Forgetting on the constant self-reinvention of the city and the concomitant memoricide of previous layers of its history. However, while these aesthetic and experiential implications of the form are worth noting, the more momentous implications of the form are its implicit politics, which elegantly complement the more explicit political commentary also packaged into Bleeding Through. Repeated references to the editorial decisions that went into the compilation of the material, the frequently self-reflexive narrator of the novella as well as the meta-narrative22 titles of the DVD's three "tiers" – 1: "The Phantom of a Novel: Seven Moments", 2: "The Writer's Back story", 3: "Excavation: Digging behind the story and its locale" – already point to the fact that this documentary database fiction self-reflexively foregrounds its own narrative constructedness. This is continued throughout the DVD. In between the interviews with eleven other residents of the central L.A. neighborhoods, Klein in interview clips comments on his thoughts on Molly, on the writing of the novella, on his own first coming to Los Angeles.

When we began these interviews … we were continually locating details that were half remembered, badly remembered or often forgotten and lost and couldn't possibly be known to her. … And it seems that we became almost more interested in locating what she couldn't find, what she had to forget, what she couldn't locate. … It's such a great pleasure to not be constrained simply by the legibility of the story.… The complexity becomes such a great pleasure. It's such a pleasure noticing what she wouldn't have noticed. … So in a way the absences become much more present in these interviews than anything else. (DVD 3:1)

Postmodern literary and filmic explorations of the city, it is true, have already dissolved

distinctions between genres, between fiction and discursive exploration; they have self-reflexively highlighted the ambiguous role of the writer or film-maker as both observer and participant in urban interactions; they have highlighted the dissolution of traditional views of the city and have frequently attempted to make the city itself legible as a text; they have set out formally to represent the multiplicity, polyphony and fragmentation of the city through multiple, polyphonic and fragmented textuality (for some of these tendencies cf. Teske). Similarly, in keeping with the views on the narrativity and constructedness of historiography in the work of Hayden White, Michel de Certeau and others, many recent documentaries, constantly foreground artifice, subjectivity etc.23 Furthermore, precisely the fact that the documentary needs to be manipulated by the individual viewer for anything to be visible at all further reminds us of the mediality and the constructedness of what we are witnessing. The medium thus constantly draws attention to itself – in contrast to much traditional documentary film-making which relies on the reality effect of suggesting that what we see is somehow evident and can hardly be questioned; hence the paradox inherent in much documentary film-making that is meant to be anti-hegemonic, subversive etc. but through its very narrative form frequently cannot help being suggestive and (since the viewer is essentially passive24), imposes a view of the world. Bleeding Through, however, in contrast to even the most advanced filmic documentaries, which still inescapably rely on the linearity of film, makes

22 For the concept of metanarrative as distinct from metafiction cf. Fludernik and Nünning. 23 For a discussion of these tendencies cf. for instance Aitken, Hohenberger, Nichols. 24 I am aware of course that the tradition especially of British cultural studies has long pointed out the

viewer's active role in the constitution of meaning of TV, film and other forms of popular culture; for a discussion of the productive role of the viewer cf. especially Winter. Nonetheless, the constant need for active manipulation and the flaunted non-linear and hypertextual nature of the programme in contrast to the reception of even the most experimental, fragmentary, "postmodern" – but ultimately still "fixed and invariable" documentary film is bound to have consequences for the constitution of meaning.

full use of the digital medium to break linearity. Thus, while documentaries, which are originally meant for collective viewing, induce forms of collective medial experience, the effect of Bleeding Through specifically relies on a highly individual experience. The constant need to "do" something in the process of navigating Bleeding Through – all clips are very short, hardly anything happens without being triggered by the user, who is essentially assigned the role of a detective in search of the truth – thus not only foregrounds the mediality, narrativity and construction of the material, it also activates the viewer. In keeping with the promise of the medium25, the non-linear presentation of the material thus precludes closure, stimulates the discovery of knowledge rather than imposing it and thus fosters learning without being explicitly didactic. The aesthetic and political implications of the form can fruitfully be accounted for with reference to the concept of rhizomatic structures. As proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (7-13), rhizomes are characterized by the principles of "connectivity", "heterogeneity", "multiplicity", "asignifying rupture", "cartography" and "decalcomania".26 If, as Burnett has argued, "[h]ypertext is rhizomorphic in all its characteristics" (28) – and Klein's work makes full use of the medium – Bleeding Through may be characterized as fully rhizomatic, with all the non-totalizing and anti-hegemonic implications Deleuze and Guattari famously ascribe to rhizomatic discourses. Thus, the multimedial, multivocal, multi-perspectival, interactive, non-sequential and highly self-reflexive experience of navigating Bleeding Through brings out "traits that are usually obscured by the enforced linearity of paper printing" (Burnett 3) and, like hypertext generally, serves to undercut, liquefy and question established and hegemonic representations with their frequently unquestioned dichotomies and "hierarchies violentes" (sensu Derrida).

As Marsha Kinder argues in her short essay in the booklet of Bleeding Through, "database narratives [are] interactive structures that resist narrative closure and expose the dual processes of selection and combination lying at the root of all stories" (54).27 Bleeding Through is narrative 'enough' so as to create interest and curiosity, but it flaunts its constructedness and constantly requires the user to select from a wealth of narrative items and, by means of a succession of such choices, consciously to perform himself the acts of selection and combination usually hidden behind the surface of conventional narrative. Database fictions, in flaunting the arbitrariness of such choices and enabling users to choose differently next time (but never exactly to retrace their steps), are potentially subversive purely in their form in that they expose as a construction and fabulation what narrative traditionally represents as a given. By making each journey through the material necessarily a different one – and by thus presenting what is merely material for a story as subject to change and human intervention – these narratives also contribute to the activation and mobilization of

25 In a laudatory review of Bleeding Through, Helfand (n.p.) comments on the "digital revolution's promise

of new literary forms" and the "brief blossom and fade [of the "experiments in online interactive fiction"] and – speaking of the "many unfulfilled dreams" of the genre, regards Bleeding Though as living up to the promises of the form's technological possibilities. For analyses of the technological and literary implications of the digital form and their repercussions in literary studies from the early 1990s classics to more recent accounts cf. Aaarseth, Bolter, Burnett, Ensslin, Gaggi, Hayles, Landow, McGann, Sloane.

26 For a discussion of the rhizomatic nature of hypertext along the lines of these characteristics, cf. Burnett. 27 Bénézet's allegedly original coinage of the term "database narrative" and her claim to harmonize what

were previously regarded as the incompatible formats of narrative and of database (56f.) are hardly as original as she claims – she here merely follows Marsha Kinder's essay "Bleeding Through Database Fictions" which already attempts a synthesis based on her reading of Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 (cf. especially 54). Curiously, much of what Bénézet somewhat pretentiously presents as the results of "[her] analysis" (63) is explicitly stated in Klein's text or the accompanying essays or is blatantly obvious anyway: "There are many reasons that may have led Klein and his team to privilege a recombinant poetics. My analysis suggests that the presentation of an openly multifaceted, critical, and self-reflexive creation was one important motivation." (63)

the user in ways that even the most advanced self-reflexive fiction – which is still subject to the unchangeable linearity of print – cannot achieve (cf. also Kinder 54).

True to the 'democratic form" of hypertext digital media, Bleeding Through already by means of its very form thus serves to deconstruct hegemonic constructions of history by constantly drawing attention to the medial, discursive, constructed nature of such conceptions. As a user, one is never allowed to forget this is a revisionist, anti-hegemonic, at times polemical re-construction of a repressed, alternative Los Angeles.

5. Representing Los Angeles, Representing 'America'

What makes Bleeding Through even more directly political is that it self-reflexively draws attention to the political implications of its narrative procedures and even explicitly links its own constructedness to a history of political fabrications from the Cold War to the Bush administration. In this vein, the narrator of the novella self-consciously comments on his narrative procedures: "I need a different model for the unreliable narrator as well as for the fragrant noir world, vital though these have been for modern literature, detective stories, cinema suspense; and for lies the State Department delivered on broadcast news during the Cold War. (This is 1986 remember. You the reader may have more grisly forms of unreliable news to deal with)" (BT 28).28 A similarly self-reflexive passage on the DVD draws attention to the fact that part of the material originally collected for the documentary was destroyed in a computer crash; however, more than merely suggesting the haphazard, selective and necessarily incomplete nature of even the most scrupulously undertaken reconstruction project, this passage again closely associates the contingencies influencing the production of Bleeding Through with contemporary political events:

On November 1 [2002], an electric surge boiled two hard drives for 'Bleeding Through'. Perhaps the Day of the Dead came by phone, reminding us that all media looks better as a sketch. We lost four programs. […] November 9: The drives still smell like burnt upholstery. […] On TV, we watch George W. Bush take charge of our future. The Pentagon was working on a Stinkpot called Stench Soup, so foul smelling that it could stop a crowd. [..] They are trying to decide if it would make a good "non-lethal" weapon. The last paragraph [on Bush and the Pentagon's stink bomb] is completely accurate. The rest is what works for you. March 23, 2003: A last gasp for the project. The troops are less than 100 miles from Bagdad. (Tier 3,"The Lost Section")29

The novella, too, ties events in L.A. back to the grand national questions, turning what seems a novella and documentary on L.A. into a pars pro toto representation of 20th-century America. For instance, the problems of violence and murder in L.A. are tied to the "longstanding American distrust of urban democracy" (25): "Many Americans believe, as they did in Jefferson's day, that equality can survive only in a small town. By contrast, fascism flourishes in crowds. … I prefer to make Walt's murder a critique of urban capitalism; but then crime becomes a defense of the suburbs." (25)

In his essay "Absences, Scripted Spaces and the Urban Imaginary: Unlikely Models for the City in the Twenty-First Century", written while he was also working on Bleeding Through, Klein describes the results of drastic urban renewal projects. After a long section on

28 This passage also shows how the documentary relies on explicitly or implicitly situating not only the

story level (1920-1986) but also the time of production and initial reception (2002/2003) in their political and cultural contexts far beyond ethnic life in Los Angeles.

29 The text is here presented in written form reminiscent of a typed diary entry.

some of L.A.'s contemporary problems, he explicitly relates contemporary L.A. to the problems of the US and the world at large:

In short, the global civilisation has begun to settle in. We see its monuments more clearly, its glitter, its brutality. […] This is a world that has more than lost its way. It is the best and the worst of all possible worlds, dominated by scripted spaces and social imaginaries inside a level of surveillance, top-heavy economic fragility and media feudalism […]. And yet its possibilities are extraordinary. (451) Even more explicitly, this 2002 essay links genre-specific urban imaginaries of Los

Angeles, ruthless urban planning and reactionary and paranoid US politics in general (especially of the Bush era). Interestingly, it then comments on this conjunction of urban imaginaries of L.A. and grand national themes as being central to Bleeding Through, thus suggesting that it should be seen as far more than a multi-media documentary on the changing face of Los Angeles. This passage needs to be quoted at some length:

During the noir film era, from about 1944 to 1958, the horizontal imaginary city [of Los Angeles] evolves into a complex grammar. … This noir grammar has become the standard way for broadcast media to dis-report the news, to generate a highly conservative, fundamentally reactionary vision of the world that finally covered up key information about the presidential election of 2000, the Enron scandal, the War on Terrorism, the anthrax attacks, Homeland Rule. … Of course, noir reportage has always been a mode of distraction. [But now], that distraction has become national presidential policy, and CNN, Fox, CNBC policy as well … So 2002 shows us a noir scenography as our national vision. We have extended this noir staging into national obsession with surveillance as well. … I am currently trying to engage these issues inside a cinematic novel/archive entitled Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986. ("Absences" 452f.)

Engaging with various forms of appropriating the city – from the most direct version proceeding by means of bulldozers to fictionalized and medialized forms in filmic urban imaginaries –, Bleeding Through as itself an appropriation of the city is a unique form of cultural expression in an urban context, in which it takes up a diagnostic as well as catalytic function, seeking to raise awareness and potentially to influence policy-making and urban planning. By celebrating the ethnic and cultural diversity of Los Angeles in the face of ruthless urban redevelopment based on racism and greed, and by explicitly linking this anti-hegemonic view of the city to the grand national themes of the years after 9/11, the war on terror and the beginning disaster in Iraq, the multi-media documentary thus also contributes to national discourses and once more makes Los Angeles in all its multiplicity and ambivalence an emblem of 'America'.

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Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. New York: Verso, 2008 [11997].

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Kratky, Andreas. "How to Navigate Forgetting." Bleeding ThroughNorman M. Klein et al. Bleeding Through. Book included in Norman M. Klein et al., Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 [DVD and Book]. Karlsruhe: ZKM digital arts edition, 2003. 60-61.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization: Critical Theory and New Media in a Global Era. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006 [11992].

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Understanding Complex Systems

Christian WallothJens Martin GurrJ. Alexander Schmidt Editors

Understanding Complex Urban Systems: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Modeling

Editors

Christian WallothInstitute of City Planning and Urban DesignUniversity of Duisburg-EssenEssenGermany

Jens Martin GurrDepartment of Anglophone Studies,

Joint Center ‘‘Urban Systems’’University of Duisburg-EssenEssenGermany

J. Alexander SchmidtInstitute of City Planning and Urban Design,

Joint Center ‘‘Urban Systems’’University of Duisburg-EssenEssenGermany

ISSN 1860-0832 ISSN 1860-0840 (electronic)ISBN 978-3-319-02995-5 ISBN 978-3-319-02996-2 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02996-2Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013954026

� Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part ofthe material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission orinformation storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilarmethodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are briefexcerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for thepurpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of thework. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions ofthe Copyright Law of the Publisher’s location, in its current version, and permission for use mustalways be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at theCopyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in thispublication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exemptfrom the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date ofpublication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility forany errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, withrespect to the material contained herein.

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Contents

Introduction: Towards a Transdisciplinary Understanding

of Complex Urban Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Jens Martin Gurr and Christian Walloth

Multimethod Modeling and Simulation Supporting Urban

Planning Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Ernst Gebetsroither-Geringer

Uncertainty in Urban Systems: How to Optimize Decision

Making Using Stochastic Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Rüdiger Schultz

Understanding Effects of Complexity in Cities During Disasters . . . . . 51

Funda Atun

Towards Evolutionary Economic Analysis of Sustainable

Urban Real Estate: Concept of a Research Strategy Exemplified

on House Price Modeling Using the Self-Organizing Map,

Interviews and Field Inspection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Tom Kauko

Organized and Disorganized Complexities and

Socio-Economic Implications in the Northern Ruhr Area . . . . . . . . . . 87

Hans-Werner Wehling

An Organizational Cybernetics Approach to University Planning

in an Urban Context: Four Intervention Experiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Xosé L. Martínez Suárez and José Pérez Ríos

Emergence in Complex Urban Systems: Blessing or Curse

of Planning Efforts? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Christian Walloth

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‘Urban Complexity’ from a Literary and Cultural Studies

Perspective: Key Cultural Dimensions and the Challenges

of ‘Modeling’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

Jens Martin Gurr

About the Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

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‘Urban Complexity’ from a Literary

and Cultural Studies Perspective: Key

Cultural Dimensions and the Challenges

of ‘Modeling’

Jens Martin Gurr

Abstract This contribution sketches a literary and cultural studies approach tourban complexity. It briefly comments on the neglect of cultural phenomena inmuch urban modeling, discusses key characteristics of urban complexity from aliterary and cultural studies perspective and relates these to technical or mathe-matical notions of complexity. After engaging with the need for reduction andcompression in modeling and with the resulting limitations of urban models, amore specifically ‘literary’ section discusses simultaneity as a central characteristicof urban complexity and as a challenge to narrative representation and points out anumber of strategies in the ‘modeling’ of urban complexity in literature. Thearticle thus sets out to show what literary studies can contribute to truly inter-disciplinary work on urban complexity and urban systems, arguing that literarystudies specifically bring back into the discussion those features of urban com-plexity that resist quantitative modeling but that are nonetheless crucial to a dif-ferentiated understanding of the functioning of urban systems.

Keywords Complex urban systems � Limits to planning � Limits to quantitativemodeling � Literary strategies � Narrative modeling of complexity � Narrativerepresentation � Qualitative modeling � Simultaneity

1 Introduction

This contribution attempts to sketch a literary and cultural studies approach tourban complexity: After briefly commenting on what I perceive as a neglect ofcultural phenomena in much urban modeling, I will discuss key characteristics of

J. M. Gurr (&)Department of Anglophone Studies, Joint Center ‘‘Urban Systems’’,University of Duisburg-Essen, Universitätsstraße 12, 45141 Essen, Germanye-mail: [email protected]

C. Walloth et al. (eds.), Understanding Complex Urban Systems:

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Modeling, Understanding Complex Systems,DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-02996-2_9, � Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

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urban complexity from a literary and cultural studies perspective and will relatethese to technical or mathematical notions of complexity. My third section engageswith the need for reduction and compression in modeling and with the resultinglimitations of urban models before discussing the fundamentally different status ofthe model in urban complexity studies on the one hand and in literary and culturalstudies on the other hand. In a more specifically ‘literary’ section, I discusssimultaneity as a central characteristic of urban complexity; I here outline thechallenge it poses to literary representation and point out a number of literarystrategies in the ‘modeling’ of urban complexity in cultural production and spe-cifically in literature.

The essay thus sets out to show how literary and cultural studies engage withurban complexity and what such an engagement can contribute to truly interdis-ciplinary work on urban complexity and urban systems. I will argue that literaryand cultural studies specifically bring back into the discussion those features ofurban complexity that resist modelling but that are nonetheless crucial to a dif-ferentiated understanding of the functioning of urban systems.

2 The Neglect of ‘Culture’ in Urban Complexity Research

In his masterful study Die komplexe Stadt: Orientierungen im urbanen Labyrinth

(2009), one of the most recent and ambitious attempts to provide urban studieswith an integrating research agenda, Frank Eckardt goes so far as to proposecomplexity as the key characteristic of the city and calls for a transdisciplinaryresearch programme organized around the integrating paradigm of ‘complexity’.However, Eckardt then largely pursues a sociological programme.

It seems that, despite much talk of multi-, inter- or transdisciplinary research in(urban) complexity, the perspective of culture is curiously absent.1 More specifi-cally, while the consideration of actors and groups of actors and their behaviour asan important dimension of ‘culture’ as studied by the social sciences is clearlycentral to modeling endeavours, patterns of symbolic representation and patternsof perception and interpretation as less tangible elements of the city largely resistmodeling and are a conspicuous absence in models of urban complexity. A fewprominent examples may suffice here: The ‘‘Preface’’ to one of the most ambitiouscollections on the topic, Albeverio et al.’s The Dynamics of Complex Urban

Systems, in its plea for a ‘‘fruitful collaboration between natural science’’ and‘‘regional science’’ mentions ‘‘physics, mathematics, computer science, biology,…’’ (omission original) on the side of ‘‘natural science’’ and ‘‘architecture,geography, city plannings [sic], economics, sociology, …’’ (omission original) on

1 The same is true of the roles and functions of urban culture in urban systems. For discussions ofthe functions of urban culture and the contribution of urban cultural studies to transdisciplinaryurban research, cf. for instance Butler and Gurr 2014, forthcoming, Gurr 2011a, b, Gurr andButler 2011, 2012.

134 J. M. Gurr

the side of ‘‘regional science’’ (2008, p. v)—and the volume, comprehensive as itis, does not contain anything even remotely from the field of cultural studies. Evenin the exhaustive and masterful 2009 Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems

Science, Michael Batty’s state-of-the-art contribution on ‘‘Cities as ComplexSystems: Scaling, Interaction, Networks, Dynamics and Urban Morphologies’’(pp. 1041–1071) does not even mention ‘culture’, nor do concepts like ‘individ-uality’ play any role. Similarly, ‘‘Springer Complexity’’ according to thedescription for what is arguably the leading and most prominent book series in thefield, is said to ‘‘cut across all traditional disciplines of the natural and life sci-ences, engineering, economics, medicine, neuroscience, social and computer sci-ence’’ (Portugali 2012, front matter). Moreover, the outline for Springer’s‘‘Understanding Complex Systems’’ (UCS) series, in which this volume appears,states the aim of the programme as follows: ‘‘UCS is explicitly transdisciplinary’’,its first ‘‘main goal’’ being ‘‘to elaborate the concepts, methods and tools ofcomplex systems at all levels of description and in all scientific fields, especiallynewly emerging areas within the life, social, behavioural, economic, neuro- andcognitive sciences (and derivatives thereof)’’ (Portugali 2011, front matter). Themental, non-institutional dimension of culture in the form of symbolically medi-ated patterns of perception and interpretation of human environments, it seems,hardly features in discussions of urban complexity.

3 Characteristics of (Urban) Complexity: Urban Systems

Research and the Perspective of Literary and Cultural

Studies

Many of the characteristics of urban complexity frequently discussed in researchon complex urban systems2 are those that are also of interest to literary andcultural studies. Portugali (2006) conveniently defines the complexity of the citythus: ‘‘a very large number of interacting parts, linked by a complex network offeedback and feedforward loops, within a system that is open to and, thus part of,its environment’’ (p. 657; cf. also Portugali 2011, p. 232). Further characteristics ofcomplexity frequently discussed include self-organization, emergence, nonlinear-ity, phase transitions, density, mobility (as one cause of change over time and asthe occasion for increased interaction and mixing), ethnic and cultural multiplicity,heterogeneity and hybridity, violence, conflicts over the use of space, intersectionsof technology and virtual spaces with physical and experienced spaces,

2 For enlightening explicit or implicit definitions of urban complexity and its central features, cf.for instance Batty 2009, passim; Eckardt 2009, passim; Mainzer 2007, p. 374 et passim; Portugali2000, 2006, pp. 652–657 et passim; Portugali 2011, p. 232ff. et passim; Portugali 2012, p. 4f).

‘Urban Complexity’ from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective 135

overlapping and intersecting spatial scales—from the local to the global—and theirinterdependencies, as well as complex interferences, interdependencies or inter-sections in the interaction between multiple players, intentions, or force-fields,which together make urban systems prime examples of translocal networks ofcomplex relationships, connections and interdependencies subject to rapid changeover time. Moreover, as already indicated in Portugali’s working definition, thecity is of course an open or dissipative rather than a closed system (in the technicalsense): It exchanges goods, energy, information, people, money etc. with itsenvironment. All these characteristics, it seems, are more or less part and parcelalso of urban simulation models in the more technically oriented disciplinesconcerned with urban modeling from a complex systems perspective.

However, the ‘softer’, less easily quantified and modeled characteristics ofurban complexity are no less central to the ‘urban experience’. In this vein, inaddition to the ‘usual suspects’ such as ‘‘hierarchy and emergence, non-linearity,asymmetry, number of relationships, number of parts’’, Mainzer (2007, p. 374)also lists the following features: ‘‘values and beliefs, people, interests, notions andperceptions’’ (they appear in a visualization, hence in no particular order—theorder is mine). Additionally, while the notion of a system’s ‘history’—in the sensethat previous developments have an impact on the present and future course of thesystem—is central to urban modeling (if only in the sense that past developmentscan be extrapolated for predictive purposes), one specific aspect of a city’s historyis of particular importance to an understanding of urban systems from the per-spective of literary and cultural studies: This is the notion of the city as apalimpsest, a form of layered spatialized memory.3 Individual and collectivememory and the way it is physically manifested in and evoked by the builtenvironment is a prime concern in many literary texts (for a detailed discussion ofa specific key text, cf. Gurr 2014, forthcoming).

Arguably the central challenge to a literary ‘modeling’, however, lies in themultiplicity of sense impressions and the resulting sensual overload and semiotic‘overkill’ as a result of a multiplicity of sign systems and ceaseless semiosis. Inthis vein, Georg Simmel in his influential 1903 essay ‘‘The Metropolis and MentalLife’’, one of the crucial texts in the early phase of urban studies, defines ‘‘thepsychological conditions which the metropolis creates’’ as marked by the‘‘intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninter-rupted change of outer and inner stimuli… the rapid crowding of changing images,the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness ofonrushing impressions’’ (p. 13, italics original).

In his recent study Complexity, Cognition and the City, in a remarkably similarway, Portugali speaks of

3 For various aspects of the the notion of the city as a palimpsest, cf. Assmann 2009; Harvey1989, p. 66; Hassenpflug 2006, 2011; Huyssen 2003; Martindale 1995; Sharpe and Wallock 1987,p. 9; Suttles 1984. For the palimpsest in literary studies, cf. especially Dillon 2007.

136 J. M. Gurr

the really complex situation that concerns individuals under a bombardment of informa-tion, that is, under a multiplicity of messages from a multiplicity of sources and of allkinds. This is typical of the dynamics of cities: every agent operating in the city iscontinually subject to a multiplicity of messages in the form of views, noises, smells etc.In order to behave and survive, the agent… must make sense of all those signals andmessages (Portugali 2011, pp. 232f).

As I will argue in Sect. 5., it is precisely the representation of simultaneity thatposes the greatest challenge in the narrative representation of urban complexity.

4 Urban Complexity in Technical and Literary ‘Models’:

Information, Compression, the Limits of Modeling—and

the Status of the Model

In two chapters jointly authored with Hermann Haken that largely go back to anearlier joint essay, Portugali elaborates on the amount of information contained inthe physical structure of the city.4 In the sub-chapter tellingly entitled ‘‘How ManyBits to the Face of the City’’ (pp. 179–186), the authors argue: ‘‘From the point ofview of information theory, the face of the city is a message. As a message itconveys and transmits different quantities of Shannonian information’’ (Haken andPortugali 2003, p. 403). Conceived in terms of informational complexity, it isobvious that the city—even if we just take its physical shape and ignore for themoment the interaction of millions of humans each with their own thoughts, hopes,anxieties etc.—contains a virtually endless amount of information.

As far as the ‘measurement’ of complexity from a literary and cultural studiesperspective is concerned, it is evident that most mathematical or technical mea-sures are hardly helpful: Neither algorithmic or Kolmogorov complexity (i.e., thelength of the minimal programme that reproduces a given sequence, for a dis-cussion, cf. Li and Vitányi 1993), nor Bennett’s notion of logical depth (essentiallya measure of the time required for a given bit string to be computed and repro-duced), nor effective complexity in the sense of Gell-Mann (for a discussion, cf.for instance Gell-Mann 1995a, b), nor the measure of informational entropy, northe question of calculability as in P- or NP-problems, nor dynamic complexity arereally helpful here. It seems that, when descriptions of urban systems and thespecific forms of complexity they exhibit are concerned, it does not really matterwhether we are looking at Kolmogorov complexity or effective complexity, orlogical depth—the multiple interdependencies, overlapping scales, forms of self-organization etc., yield an astonishing degree of complexity by any definition.However, this complexity is not beyond comprehension or calculability: ‘‘Thesignificant achievement of complexity theories is to show that even [under such

4 Cf. Portugali 2011, Chap. 8: ‘‘Shannonian Information and the City’’ (pp. 167–187) and Chap.9: ‘‘Semantic Information and the City’’ (pp. 187–210); cf. also Haken and Portugali 2003.


complex conditions] a scientific approach is possible.’’ The solution, Portugaliargues, lies in what he refers to as ‘‘information compression’’ (2011,pp. 231–233).

Compression and strategic ‘reduction’ of complexity are of course part andparcel of any modeling process. The crucial task, of course, is to decide what cansafely be left out or abstracted so as not to distort the overall picture. This willnaturally depend on what the model is supposed to achieve—what, in other words,is of interest and what can be left out? In this context, Cohen and Stewart (1995,p. 410) aptly remark:

Mathematical descriptions of nature are not fundamental truths about the world, butmodels. There are good models and bad models and indifferent models, and what modelsyou use depends on the purposes for which you use it and the range of phenomena whichyou want to understand… Reductionist rhetoric… claims a degree of correspondencebetween deep underlying rules and reality that is never justified by any actual calculationor experiment.

Lefebvre similarly comments on the need for reduction in dealing with‘‘complexity’’ but also on the inherent dangers:

Reduction is a scientific procedure designed to deal with complexity and chaos of bruteobservations. This kind of simplification is necessary at first, but it must be quicklyfollowed by the gradual restoration of what has thus been temporarily set aside for the sakeof analysis. Otherwise a methodological necessity may become a servitude, and thelegitimate operation of reduction may be transformed into the abuse of reductionism(1991, pp. 105f).

In a related vein, David Byrne in an excellent overview on Complexity Theory

and the Social Sciences aptly remarks that complexity science is ‘‘clearly quan-titative’’ in its aims and methods, and appropriately points out three more fun-damental caveats and limits to quantitative analysis and modeling:

1. The limits to formalisation of any mathematical system established by Gödel2. The limits to capacity of measurement central to deterministic chaos; and3. The working limits for the expression of mathematical formalism derived from the non-

linearity of the real systems with which chaos/complexity is concerned. (1998, p. 5; foran excellent discussion of these caveats, cf. Byrne 1998, pp. 54–71)

More specifically and with a view to practical limitations in the modeling ofurban systems, Portugali (2012) in an enlightening state-of-the-art article on‘‘Complexity Theories of Cities: Achievements, Criticism and Potentials’’, com-ments on a key problem in many contemporary applications of complexity theoryin urban modeling:

There is nothing wrong… in sophisticated simulation models crunching huge quantities ofdata by means of fast computers. What’s wrong is… that simulation models originallydesigned as media by which to study phenomena of complexity and self-organizationbecome the message itself. (p. 52)

138 J. M. Gurr

As a result, ‘‘practitioners of urban simulation models tend to overlook the non-quantifiable urban phenomena’’ (p. 52).5

In his ‘‘Introduction’’ to the same volume, Portugali (2012, p. 4) attempts toaccount for this loss by commenting on the research motivation of scholars in CTC(complexity theories of cities): ‘‘Some are physicists for whom cities is [sic] justanother source for quantitative data with which to test their models, while othersare urbanists who see CTC as the new and more sophisticated generation of the‘old’ quantitative approach to cities. By so doing they overlook the qualitativemessage of CTC’’ (p. 4).6 He then incisively asks: ‘‘But what about the uniquenessof cities—of the properties that differentiate them from material and organicentities, how do these [relate] to their complexity and dynamics?’’ (p. 4). Thus,what is missing, according to Portugali, is only the analysis of what distinguishescities generally from other complex systems; he does not appear to be interested inthe arguably more important question what makes an individual city unique—as instudies on the ‘‘intrinsic logic [‘Eigenlogik’] of cities’’ (cf. Berking and Löw2008)—, let alone in the uniqueness of individuals and their response to the city.

This, I argue, is where literary and cultural studies come in: For although it is ofcourse possible to include certain ‘subjective’ features into a model (for instanceby including group-specific cultural preferences etc.), what is individual, unique,historically and personally specific and not reducible to an underlying pattern iswhat disappears in abstracting from the individual and in the aggregation ofpreferences, needs, desires, hopes, fears into an equation—and this is what literaryand cultural studies find most interesting.

What is the consequence of this type of reduction? While Rolf Lindner (2008,p. 92) has argued that ‘‘[t]he city of sociologists… is frequently a non-sensualplace, a city one does not hear, smell, taste, more precisely, a Non-Place’’,7 Iwould argue that this is even more true of the ‘city of modelers and complexitytheorists’.

5 Similarly, Portugali (2012, p. 54) argues that ‘‘[q]ualitative urban phenomena do not lendthemselves to quantitative-statistical analysis and thus are of little interest to mainstream CTC’’.6 Portugali (2011, p. 227) somewhat schematically accounts for this by commenting on thedifferent methodologies of the natural as opposed to the social sciences: ‘‘The methodologicaltools of the ‘hard’ sciences are reductionism, mathematical formalism, statistical analysis andexplanation, while those of the ‘soft’ humanities and social theory are the exact opposite: anti-reductionism, understanding in place of explanation, and hermeneutics in place of analysis.’’ LikePortugali, Mainzer (2007, p. 12) calls for a recognition of the qualitative features of a system andargues that complexity science can function as a connection: ‘‘Contrary to any reductionistic kindof naturalism and physicalism we recognize the characteristic intentional features of humansocieties. Thus the complex system approach may be a method of bridging the gap between thenatural sciences and the humanities that was criticized in Snow’s famous ‘two cultures’.’’ For anenlightening if frequently schematic problematization of ‘‘the two cultures’’ in the context ofcomplexity theories and cities, cf. Portugali 2011 (pp. 9–52); cf. also Stephen Read (2012) andseveral other contributions in Portugali et al. 2012.7 ‘‘Die Stadt der Soziologen hingegen ist für gewöhnlich ein unsinnlicher Ort, eine Stadt, dieman nicht hört, nicht riecht, nicht schmeckt, genau genommen ein Nicht-Ort.’’ (Marc Augé’snotion of the non-place (1995) is not quoted here, but clearly implied, it seems).


A further key issue that needs to be addressed in comparative discussions of‘urban modeling’ in technical complexity research and in literary studies is thefundamentally different status of the ‘model’ in both fields: While in technicalurban complexity research, the model is the result of scientific endeavour, inliterary and cultural studies, the literary text functions as the ‘model’ and is thusthe object of study rather than the result of the scholar’s own work.

5 Literary ‘Models’ of Urban Complexity: The Challenge

of Simultaneity and Selected Strategies

From the perspective of literary and cultural studies, the question is how thecomplexity of the urban text is ‘modeled’ in literature (and other media, though Ido not discuss them here).8 Despite the universally diagnosed importance ofcomplexity as a key characteristic of the urban and despite the widely perceivedaffinity between the city and the novel (and film)—and a look at innumerable‘urban’ poems and narrative fictions confirms that the issue is indeed central to‘urban literature’—the specific issue of how literary texts represent urban com-plexity has received very limited explicit scholarly attention. In most of theinnumerable studies on urban imaginaries in literature and film, though occa-sionally implied, complexity—let alone simultaneity—almost universally does notfeature as a theme in itself.9

I will argue that the primary challenge in ‘modelling’ urban complexity inliterary texts lies in the representation of simultaneity, in other words: Strategies ofnarrating urban complexity are to a considerable extent strategies of narratingsimultaneity (for a detailed discussion of simultaneity as central to an under-standing of other forms of complexity, cf. Gurr 2011a, b). I will then sketch anumber of strategies used in selected literary texts10 to represent simultaneity.

On the one hand, the representation of co-existing impressions is arguably thecrux of any attempt to narrate urban complexity, for simultaneity, the notion ofinnumerable things—momentous or trivial—happening at the same time, is surelya central characteristic of urban complexity. On the other hand, it is simultaneitywhich in literary texts poses particular representational challenges. Other key

8 I discuss this at some length and with numerous examples and references to secondaryliterature in Gurr 2011a, which is a far more detailed version of this section. Since the presentessay appears in the context of a multi-disciplinary engagement with urban complexity , I discussliterary strategies only to the extent necessary to make my point. I therefore also refrain fromextensive references to potential further examples.9 A few observations on urban complexity are to be found, for instance, in Keunen 2007 andBrandt 2009.10 For a recent volume on representations of—general, not necessarily urban—complexity infilms, computer games and other media, cf. Eckel et al. 2013. For the city in film, cf. Frahm 2010,2011, Sanders 2003 and Shiel 2001.

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aspects of complexity—multiple causal dependencies, conflicts of interest over theuse of space, overlapping and intersecting spatial scales or social and culturalheterogeneity, for instance—pose no principal narrative challenge and lendthemselves to being represented by different constellations of characters, forinstance. In discussing attempts to represent complexity, from a literary studiesperspective, representations of simultaneity are therefore of particular interest.

Lessing’s 1766 Laokoon, his classic discussion of the ‘‘limits of painting andpoetry,’’ as the subtitle puts it, is an appropriate entry into a discussion of literarystrategies of representing simultaneity. Although Lessing’s claims have long beendisputed, Laokoon is demonstrably still central to discussions of the literary rep-resentations of simultaneity.11 In what is essentially a semiotic argument based onthe different sign systems used in painting and literature, Lessing here argues:

If it is true that painting in its imitation uses means entirely different from those ofliterature—the former using figures and colours in space, the latter articulated sounds intime—and if the signs unquestionably need to be comfortably related to that which theysignify, then signs arranged in contiguity can only designate objects which are contiguous,signs arranged in sequence can only designate objects which appear in sequence or whoseparts appear in sequence. (1766, Chap. XVI, pp. 77–78, my translation)

Language, according to this argument, cannot persuasively represent simulta-neity ‘‘because the coexistence of bodies here collides with the consecutiveness ofspeech’’ (XVII, p. 87).12

In what is probably the most widely cited passage from the treatise, Lessingsummarizes his views on the shortcomings of literature:

This remains true: The sequence of time is the domain of the poet, just as space is thedomain of the painter… If several things which in reality have to be surveyed at once ifthey are to create a whole were to be narrated to the reader one after the other in order tocreate a picture of the whole for him, this is an intrusion of the poet into the domain of thepainter—and one in which the poet wastes a lot of imagination without any use. (1766,Chap. XVIII, p. 90)

In the course of Laokoon, Lessing famously goes on to argue that literature isdeficient in representing simultaneity. Thus, we might somewhat provocativelyargue that representations of urban complexity must therefore centrally be attemptsto prove wrong Lessing’s assumption that literature is deficient in the compellingrepresentation of simultaneity.

The following is an attempt—with no claim to completeness—at a sketchy andidealized inventory of strategies of describing, suggesting, or simulatingsimultaneity.

Arguably the simplest form of representing urban complexity and simultaneityare declarative representations, i.e., passages which state that something is

11 For discussions of Lessing’s Laokoon and its implications for semiotics and intermediality, cf.Wellberry 1984 and Koebner 1989.12 ‘‘weil das Koexistierende des Körpers mit dem Konsekutiven der Rede dabei in Kollisionkömmt.’’


complex without ‘showing’ or performing complexity. These frequently take theform of ‘suggesting’ complexity by means of metaphors or similes such as theoften clichéd urban ‘maze’ or ‘labyrinth’ to express an individual’s sense of beinglost.13 Though surely a way of representing the city as ‘complex,’ this alone ismore a thematic notion than a strategy of representation. If the city is merelydeclared to resemble a maze without representing it as a maze, for our purposesthis is not of great interest and as such has little or nothing to do with simultaneity.In the more interesting cases, however, the text will also assume labyrinthinequalities itself or will have the experiential potential of allowing readers toexperience the disorientation suggested by the notion of the labyrinth.

A further such strategy is what I term the ‘synecdochic representation ofsimultaneity,’ which consists in narrating one strand of action and suggesting thatthere would have been innumerable others that would also deserve to be told. Thistechnique of highlighting the need to ‘select’ from countless simultaneous storiesequally worth telling is apparent in the much-quoted voice-over conclusion toJules Dassin’s 1948 New York film The Naked City: ‘‘There are eight millionstories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.’’ This phrase is alluded toagain with a similar effect in Colson Whitehead’s 2003 The Colossus of New York:‘‘There are eight million naked cities in this naked city—they dispute and disagree.The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be?…Before you know it, you have your own personal skyline’’ (p. 6).

What might be called the ‘performative or experiential representation ofsimultaneity’ is a central strategy that recurs with remarkable consistencythroughout the centuries from eighteenth-century representations of the city all theway to contemporary urban fiction. Complexity and simultaneity are here fre-quently enacted by means of a suggestive sequence of impressions simulating thechaotic and ‘‘rapid crowding of changing images’’ (Simmel 1903, p. 13), allowingreaders to ‘experience’ the sense of being overpowered by the simultaneity ofmultiple impressions. One such ‘experiential’ technique, prevalent in modernistfiction, is the ‘stream of consciousness’ representation of the overpowering senseimpression that frequently occurs in combination with the ‘filmic’ technique ofmontage. The reader is here confronted with the attempt at an unfiltered repre-sentation of sense perceptions, thoughts, feelings, memories of a character con-fronted with an urban scene. A passage from the very first pages of Alfred Döblin’sBerlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which needs to be cited at some length, may serve asa case in point.14 Franz Biberkopf has just been released after four years in prisonand is entering the tram:

13 For a discussion of the city as a maze, labyrinth or jungle, cf. also Brandt 2010, pp. 129–134,2009, pp. 558–564, Faris 1991, Kelley 1997, Smith 1977, 171 passim, Versluys 2003 as well asseveral essays in Gurr and Raussert 2011. Cf. also de Certeau’s reference to the ‘‘mobile andendless labyrinths far below’’ (1994, p. 92) in the passage on the urban voyeur observing the cityfrom above.14 It is interesting to note that even Frank Eckardt begins his reflections on urban complexitywith a discussion of a representative passage from Döblin’s quintessentially urban novel (cf.

142 J. M. Gurr

He shook himself and gulped. He stepped on his own foot. Then, with a run, took a seat inthe car. Right among people. Go ahead. At first it was like being at the dentist’s, when hehas grabbed a root with a pair of forceps, and pulls; the pain grows, your head threatens toburst. He turned his head back towards the red wall, but the car raced on with him alongthe tracks, and only his head was left in the direction of the prison. The car took a bend;trees and houses intervened. Busy streets emerged, Seestrasse, people got on and off.Something inside him screamed in terror: Look out, look out, it’s going to start now. Thetip of his nose turned to ice; something was whirring over his cheek. Zwölf Uhr Mittags-

zeitung, B. Z., Berliner Illustrierte, Die Funkstunde. ‘‘Anybody else got on?’’ The coppershave blue uniforms now.… Crowds, what a swarm of people! How they hustle and bustle!My brain needs oiling, it’s probably dried up. What was all this? Shoe stores, hat stores,incandescent lamps, saloons. People got to have shoes to run around so much; didn’t wehave a cobbler’s shop out there, let’s bear that in mind! Hundreds of polished window-panes, let’em blaze away, are they going to make you afraid or something, why, you cansmash’em up, can’t you, what’s the matter with’em, they’re polished clean, that’s all. Thepavement on Rosenthaler Platz was being torn up; he walked on the wooden planks alongwith the others. Just go ahead and mix in with people, then everything’s going to clear up,and you won’t notice anything, you fool. Wax figures stood in the show-windows, in suits,overcoats, with skirts, with shoes and stockings. Outside everything was moving, but—back of it—there was nothing! It—did not—live! It had happy faces, it laughed, waited intwos and threes on the traffic islands opposite Aschinger’s, smoked cigarettes, turned thepages of newspapers. Thus it stood there like the street-lamps—and—became more andmore rigid. They belonged with the houses, everything white, everything wooden. (1989,pp. 3f.)

In one of the best essays on modernist urban fiction, Bart Keunen discussesManhattan Transfer, which for the present purpose can be regarded as represen-tative of such modernist city novels, and comments on its representation ofcomplexity, once more highlighting the city’s ‘‘organized complexity’’ (Jacobs1961, p. 449):

The novel shows that Manhattan is a complex whole of overlapping plots (lives) andcrossing paths. The different world models converge in a construction that reveals thecomplexity of the world. It is not a chaotic complexity but a complicated network ofindividuals, actions, observations, and situations. (Keunen 2001, p. 435)

A further strategy—or rather group of strategies, as the variations are signifi-cant—is the attempt to break the linearity of print. This may range from invitingreaders to go on reading elsewhere in the book, via recurring phrases in a textwhich connect different passages in a form of hyperlink avant la lettre (cf. mydiscussion of Eliot’s The Waste Land in Gurr 2014, forthcoming), typographicalstrategies of printing a text in several columns, or the segmentation of the bookinto unnumbered booklets to be arranged at will, all the way to fully-fledgedhypertexts—and more recently to attempts to simulate some of the features andeffects of hypertext in print narratives.

(Footnote 14 continued)Eckardt 2009, 7). However, although it is central to Döblin’s endeavor, the notion of simultaneityas a key component of complexity does not play a role at all in Eckardt’s study.


One such form of escaping linearity is inherent in the materiality of the book. Inrecent years, a number of attempts appear to have been inspired by hypertext, butsome of the devices are much older, of course. One such technique is to be found inB.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969): Its form of presentation—27 chaptersranging from less than a page to 12 pages in length, separately bound and delivered ina box in a random order (only the first and the last chapters are identified as such), sothe reader has to choose in what order to read the chapters—appears predominantlydesigned to escape the linearity of print. Though arguably at least asmuch an attemptto render emotional complexities and the intricacies of memory, as a novel essen-tially ‘about’ Nottingham, this is on some level decidedly also an ‘urban’ novel.

Arguably one of the formally most inventive, non-linear,15 and ‘complex’fictions in recent decades is Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a novelcentrally concerned with the perception of space and with the literary rendering ofarchitectural features of the built environment. The text cites innumerable archi-tects and urban theorists (there is an eight-page marginal note listing hundreds ofarchitectural monuments (pp. 120–134, even pages), another one listing hundredsof major architects (upside down and backwards from p. 135 to 121, odd pages), aselective bibliography on architecture (152), interspersed philosophical medita-tions on architecture and the perception of space, numerous references to archi-tecture and urban theory, including, for instance, quotations from Kevin Lynch’sThe Image of the City (p. 176). With its passages printed in mirror writing,countless footnotes, cross-references, parallel columns, typographical games,different colours, musical notations, photographs, sketches, a vast range of inter-textual references, appendices, and an (often misleading) index, the novel is a tourde force of strategies designed to break linearity, to represent complexity, and tostage simultaneity (though the reader is still forced to choose what to read first).

What these and other strategies and texts share is the attempt to representvarious facets of urban complexity from the point of view of literary characters.Yet what may seem aggregable and abstractable (or even negligible entirely) intechnical models is precisely what—in contrast to the non-sensual ‘‘city of soci-ologists’’ (and by implication modelers) Lindner (2008, 92) referred to—makes thecity a sensual place that does have its unique sounds, smells, tastes and rhythms.

6 Conclusion

Despite the fundamentally different status of the ‘model’ in urban complexitymodeling on the one hand and in literary and cultural studies on the other hand,there are a number of important parallels and points of intersection between the

15 Though it is tempting to exploit the notion of ‘non-linearity’ as a characteristic of both literaryand mathematical formulations of urban complexity, I do not currently see how they are relatedbeyond being polysemes.

144 J. M. Gurr

two types of ‘model and in the understanding of complexity: What most technicalnotions of complexity share is that they measure the complexity of a system interms of the length or the complexity of the description or representation of thatsystem. A number of complexity theorists have even argued that ‘‘complexity isnot primarily a characteristic of the object that is being described, but of thedescription’’ (Richter and Rost 2002, p. 112; my translation).16 This notion mightlend itself as a bridge between technical or mathematical and cultural conceptu-alizations of complexity. Ultimately, what is relevant to literary studies, one mightargue, is not so much the complexity of the city itself, but the representation of thiscomplexity, i.e., its description in the ‘model’ of the literary text. Literary studiesare thus concerned with the challenge of ‘modeling’ it, or, in the terminology ofliterary studies, of ‘representing’ it. Thus, where technical and mathematicalcomplexity research is concerned with the mathematical description of complex-ity, literary and cultural studies of urban complexity are concerned with thechallenges of verbal representation.

Gell-Mann’s notion of ‘‘effective complexity’’ provides a further importantconnection between a technical and a literary understanding of complexity:

A measure that corresponds much better to what is usually meant by complexity inordinary conversation, as well as in scientific discourse, refers not to the length of the mostconcise description of an entity (which is roughly what AIC is), but to the length of aconcise description of a set of the entity’s regularities. Thus something almost entirelyrandom, with practically no regularities, would have effective complexity near zero. Sowould something completely regular, such as a bit string consisting entirely of zeroes.Effective complexity can be high only a region intermediate between total order andcomplete disorder. (1995a, p. 16)

This seems precisely to be the case with cities: In the sense of ‘‘effectivecomplexity’’, they are systems in which there are multiple connections, but inwhich by no means everything is directly connected to everyone else and thussystems in which ‘‘a concise description of a set of the entity’s regularities’’ wouldbe extremely long. Thus characterized by an intricate combination of both orderand disorder, cities have long been understood as systems of extremely high‘‘effective complexity’’ (take Jane Jacobs’s classic formulation that cities are‘‘problems in organized complexity’’, 1961, p. 449). Somewhat speculatively, wemight want to argue that literary texts as models of reality per se are combinationsof order and disorder that simulate complexity and multiplicity in frequentlyhighly structured and ordered fashion; they impose order upon disorder and thusstructurally replicate key patterns of urban complexity (for a discussion of criticalpositions on structural analogies between ‘city’ and ‘text’, cf. Gurr 2014,forthcoming).

Moreover, if we regard ‘scenario building’ and the testing of alternativeparameter settings in their impact on a given system as a crucial function of urban

16 ‘‘Komplexität ist nicht in erster Linie eine Eigenschaft des beschriebenen Objekts, sondern derBeschreibung selbst.’’ (Richter and Rost 2002, 112).


systems modeling, then a further parallel emerges: One of the central functions ofliterature, according to one understanding, is that it serves as a form of symbolicaction, as a social experiment free from the constraints of everyday life—literatureas ‘depragmatised behaviour in rehearsal’ [‘entpragmatisiertes Probehandeln’]17

which makes it possible symbolically to try out in fiction different scenarios orpotential solutions for key societal issues.18

Finally, what is also helpful here are the views of Jürgen Link, Winfried Fluckor Hubert Zapf on functions of literature in the system of culture in the sense of a‘history of its functions’ (‘‘Funktionsgeschichte’’, for an overview cf. Gymnich/Nünning 2005; for one influential account, cf. Fluck 1997). Thus, following Zapf’ssuggestive terminology, literature can have the function of a critical culturaldiagnosis (‘‘critical meta-discourse’’), but it is also an ‘‘imaginative counter-dis-course,’’ which potentially develops alternatives. Finally, as a ‘‘reintegrating inter-discourse’’ (Zapf 2001, cf. also Zapf 2002), it re-integrates into the cultural wholewhat is otherwise repressed or marginalized.

What, then, can the study of complex systems learn from literary and culturalstudies? It may be the insight that the irreducible element of individual psycho-logical responses to a given urban environment, that human desires, hopes andfears are very often crucial to understanding that environment. What literary andcultural studies as I conceive them can contribute is an understanding of preciselythose elements of urban complexity that cannot be measured, modeled, classifiedor studied in terms of information theory. From the point of view of practicalplanning, this may mean that what can be planned is very often not that which willmake a place distinctive.

My point is not that these elements of the urban should somehow nonethelessbe quantified in order to be integrated into the models after all. Rather, I argue thatliterary texts as an alternative form of ‘modeling’ urban complexity enable dif-ferent views and may draw attention to blind spots in other models, thus not onlyfunctioning as a type of ‘sanity check’ but as a further, different and comple-mentary type of ‘urban model’.

17 This is the view of formulated, among others, by Kenneth Burke, Dieter Wellershoff,Wolfgang Iser or somewhat more recently in an impressive volume edited by Stefan Horlacherand Stefan Glomb. One classic formulation is Wellershoff’s, who spoke of literature as a ‘‘spaceof simulation for alternative behaviour in rehearsal at reduced risk’’ (Wellershoff 1973, p. 57, mytranslation): ‘‘Simulationsraum für ein alternatives Probehandeln mit herabgesetztem Risiko.’’Cf. also Glomb and Horlacher 2004, passim. Kenneth Burke’s notion of ‘‘Literature as Equipmentfor Living’’ is a related concept, according to which any work of literature has the social functionof being an attempt at naming a situation and coming to terms with it. In this sense, literature canbe seen as an assembly of case studies in naming situations and in solving problems, an arsenal ofstrategies for dealing with situations that is developed in fiction but can lay claim to applicabilityin life (cf. Burke 1974); for a convenient summary of his position cf. the essay ‘‘Literature asEquipment for Living’’ in that volume.18 However, literary texts frequently do not attempt to solve a problem by imposing an answer—and even if they do, they are often less interesting for the answer they propose than for havingasked the question and raised the problem.

146 J. M. Gurr

It is precisely the need to integrate these different perspectives to come to ameaningful understanding of the complex dynamic of ‘urban systems’ that makesthe kind of interdisciplinary dialogue we engage in here so necessary, so chal-lenging and so rewarding.

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Whitehead, C.: The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. Doubleday, New York(2003)

Zapf, H.: Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte anBeispielen des amerikanischen Romans. Niemeyer, Tübingen (2002)

Zapf, H.: Literature as cultural ecology: notes towards a functional theory of imaginative textswith examples from American literature. In: Grabes, H. (ed.) Literary History/CulturalHistory: Force-Fields and Tensions. REAL 17 (Research in English and American Literature),pp. 85–99. Narr, Tübingen (2001)

Film

The Naked City (Dir.) Jules Dassin. U.S.A. (1948)

150 J. M. Gurr

William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 version), from Book VII: “Residence in London”

Rise up, thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain

Of a too busy world! Before me flow, 150

Thou endless stream of men and moving things!

…

Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,

Escaped as from an enemy, we turn

Abruptly into some sequestered nook, 170

Still as a sheltered place when winds blow loud!

… Private courts, 180

Gloomy as coffins, and unsightly lanes

Thrilled by some female vendor's scream, belike

The very shrillest of all London cries,

May then entangle our impatient steps;

Conducted through those labyrinths, unawares,

…

What say you, then,

To times, when half the city shall break out

Full of one passion, vengeance, rage, or fear?

To executions, to a street on fire,

Mobs, riots, or rejoicings? From these sights

Take one,--that ancient festival, the Fair,

Holden where martyrs suffered in past time,

And named of St. Bartholomew; there, see

A work completed to our hands, that lays,

If any spectacle on earth can do, 680

The whole creative powers of man asleep!--

For once, the Muse's help will we implore,

And she shall lodge us, wafted on her wings,

Above the press and danger of the crowd,

Upon some showman's platform. What a shock

For eyes and ears! what anarchy and din,

Barbarian and infernal,--a phantasma,

Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound!

Below, the open space, through every nook

Of the wide area, twinkles, is alive 690

With heads; the midway region, and above,

Is thronged with staring pictures and huge scrolls,

Dumb proclamations of the Prodigies;

With chattering monkeys dangling from their poles,

And children whirling in their roundabouts;

With those that stretch the neck and strain the eyes,

And crack the voice in rivalship, the crowd

Inviting; with buffoons against buffoons

Grimacing, writhing, screaming,--him who grinds

The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves, 700

Rattles the salt-box, thumps the kettle-drum,

And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks,

The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel,

Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys,

Blue-breeched, pink-vested, with high-towering plumes.--

All moveables of wonder, from all parts,

Are here--Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,

The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,

The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,

Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, 710

The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,

The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft

Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,

All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts

Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats

All jumbled up together, to compose

A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths

Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,

Are vomiting, receiving on all sides, 720

Men, Women, three-years' Children, Babes in arms.

Oh, blank confusion! true epitome

Of what the mighty City is herself,

To thousands upon thousands of her sons,

Living amid the same perpetual whirl

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

To one identity, by differences

That have no law, no meaning, and no end--

Oppression, under which even highest minds

Must labour, whence the strongest are not free. 730

aa reader urban_imaginaries_summer_2015

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