© all rights reserved
The modern and postmodern city would appear to be
well-mapped domains in recent cultural studies, cultural geography, and social
theory. For the prospective student of the city of the last one hundred and
fifty years, in both its general and its particular modalities, there is now
available a wealth of scholarly argument about the city's geopolitical significance,
its relation to questions of identity and community, its creation of new forms
of perception, and its productive role in the contemporary spatialisation
of social relations. In this new book, James Donald admits occasionally to
an anxiety over the potential for redundancy, but his writing is overall characterised
by a justified confidence in the originality of his argument. The novel and productive approach Donald offers here stems from his claim
that "the imagination" underlies, indeed produces, the experience
and understanding of the modern city. Donald's particular definition and use
of the imagination is set forth in a few crucial, theoretically dense pages
in his introductory chapter, in which he synthesises the arguments of Georg
Simmel, Henri Lefevbre, and Michel de Certeau on the interplay of the city
and subjectivity, the work of Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek on the "spectral"
nature of our everyday reality, and Cornelius Castoriadis' theorisation of
the social imaginary, as well as phenomenological and psychoanalytic perspectives
on the operations of mental life. In modernity and postmodernity, Donald states,
taking his cue here from some comments by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo,
"there is no possibility of defining clear-cut boundaries between reality
and imagination" (17): our experience of the real – specifically,
the real of the city – is always imagined, or, to use another of Vattimo's
terms, "poetic". In arguing that the modern city is always imagined, Donald means something
more than the familiar claim that the city is always mediated by metaphor
and symbolisation (that the city is a text). Imagination, as Donald uses the
concept, also includes the sense in which inhabitants of the modern metropolis
mentally act to make meaning out of their environment, the ways in
which they do not simply perceive urban space on the basis of some pre-existing
ideological script, but also conceive it: imagination "is always
a creative but constrained interchange between the subjective and the social"
(18). While the imagination is to some extent directed by current ideological
dispensations, then, because it is creative and can project "possibilities
of how things might be" (18), it also contains the seeds of alternative
politics, alternative ethics. As Donald states in his conclusion to this important
section of his argument: "Imagination is not limited to the mimesis of
images sanctioned by the Law. Imagination is inherently ethical insofar as
it always operates in the register of as if: as if I were another,
as if things could be otherwise" (19). Imagination, for Donald, is both interstitial and foundational. It designates
the intersection – indeed, the potentially politically productive "transgression"
– of the psychic and the social (19); and it also precedes any distinction
between illusion and reality, or fiction and truth: "We do not just read
the city, we negotiate the reality of cities by imagining 'the city'. …
It is imagination which produces reality as it exists" (18). The term
is obviously made to do a great deal of conceptual work, and questions might
be raised about whether "the imagination" becomes too elastic or
even diffuse; but the book's subsequent wide-ranging analysis amply justifies
the multifaceted definition of the imagination given in these introductory
pages. The book's organising "poetic" principle also underwrites its own
form. The conception of the imagination as a movement between the subjective
and the social is paralleled in the inclusion of personal anecdote, memory
and opinion in the larger argument. This enfolding of the personal with the
analytical is one of the book's pleasures and one of its strengths. In contrast
to some other personally inflected cultural studies writing, in which the
inclusion of the writer's experience can be superfluous or nugatory, Donald's
judicious relation of his experiences of his home city, London, and elsewhere,
is motivated by the terms of his argument and also enables him to move beyond
the abstractions and idealisms of some city theory. Rather than an attempt
to comprehensively define modern urbanity, Imagining the Modern City
is presented as "a series of improvisations on the possibility that the
category of the city may illuminate some topics entailed by the contentious
notion of modernity" (x). The characterisation of the book's mode as
"improvisational," implying an only loosely connected series of
meditations, perhaps overstates the case, however. For if Imagining the
Modern City is exemplary in its eschewal of theoretical rigidity and totalisation,
it is nonetheless driven by its own internal logic, moving from an account
of some of the important ways in which the city has been imagined in
the recent past of modernity to a discussion of the ways in which it could
be imagined: a discussion, that is, of the possible dimensions of an ethics
of urbanity which was forecast in the opening chapter's definition of the
potential and uses of the imaginative capacity. Donald's presentations of the ways in which the city has been imagined are
uniformly arresting and his command of the range of diverse discursive materials
invoked to support his various theses is impressive. In the course of the
book, incisive analyses are offered of – to name just a few examples
– the writings of Friedrich Engels, Le Corbusier, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
O.Henry, and Alfred Loos, the art of Paul Citröen, and the photographs
of Charles Marville. Compelling readings of novels (Alfred Döblin's Berlin
Alexanderplatz and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway) and films (Henry
Cornelius' Passport to Pimlico and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing)
orient Donald's discussions of the imagination of urban space and urban ethics
respectively. Donald's treatment of film is particularly suggestive. A detailed
consideration of the mutually constitutive "epistemological poetics of
the city and the cinema" (187), exemplified in readings of the early
twentieth-century "city symphonies" of Walter Ruttmann and Dziga
Vertov, forms a kind of argumentative pivot. The perceptual innovations offered
by the cinema figure as privileged exemplification of the imaginative and
creative possibilities of city dwelling. In his Afterword, Donald proposes the cinema and the city as productive alternatives
to the modes of experience associated with television and the suburb –
that favourite topic of theorists of postmodernism. Although he acknowledges
that "sociologically, cinema and the city are now less important than
television and the suburb" (186), Donald insists on the political value
of "thinking the city through the cinema" (187). While television,
on Donald's account, "enacts presence and sameness," cinema constitutes
"the different space, the space of difference" (187); the disorientations
and redirections offered by the experience of cinema open up the space of
possibility, the space of "as if" which is the book's favoured matrix
of the political. Also important for Donald's organising concern with the freedoms and responsibilities
of city life is his account of the urban uncanny which he unfolds across the
first half of the book. The idealised city of urban reformers and planners
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – designated by
Donald "the city of light" or (following de Certeau) "the concept
city" – is juxtaposed with the haunted, labyrinthine city - characterised
by "myth, suspicion, tyranny and … the irrational" (73) - described
by poets and novelists and depicted by artists, not to mention experienced
every day by its less exalted inhabitants. The urban uncanny, set forth most
familiarly for readers of modern city theory by Charles Baudelaire and Walter
Benjamin, is Donald claims, the effect of the "disquieting disjunction
between the city as object of government and the city as frame of mind"
(73). A disjunction, but also a connection: "The uncanny … indicates
not only the split, but also the relationship between Weber's modernity of
rationality, bureaucracy and disenchantment, and Baudelaire's modernité
of le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent"
(72). The urban uncanny, Donald persuasively argues, is an unintended and
unexpected consequence of the making or remaking of modern cities. The modern
subjectivity produced in the new urban environments, which internalises "the
landscape, rhythms and dynamism of the city," ensures "the impossibility
of governmentalist attempts to manage and regulate potentially unruly populations
by reorganising and regulating space": "Whenever modernisers have
sought to impose the rationality of the 'concept city' on urban life, flâneurs,
artists and the rest of us have systematically re-enchanted their creations:
as comic parade, as sexual display, as hellish dream-world, or simply as home"
(51). The imaginative powers of the subject may seem here to be posited simply
as resistance against the rationalising, disciplinary power of the state.
But Donald's view of the interrelations of the city and the subject is in
fact considerably more nuanced. The labyrinthine city which Donald opposes
to the city of light is not, after all, just a space of subversive play or
of community-making or of self-making, but also one of dangers and obscurities,
"suspicion" and "tyranny." In his discussions of the practicalities
of citizenship and city living which form the second half of the book, Donald
insists always on accounting for "the aggression and anxiety" and
the "violence and paranoia" which are integral to the urban experience
(121, 138). Against the fantasies of the "transparent" city which
subtend the discourse of not only zealous reformers of the past but also many
theorists of urbanity today, Donald argues for an urban planning and an urban
ethics which recognises and allows for the opacity and flawedness of the social
and social actors. Donald's final chapter on ethics, "On Noisy Neighbours"
suggests that a pragmatic ethic of respect "can make the violence of
living together manageable" (167). The detail and rigour of his writing
here and previously renders the suggestion compelling. Imagining the Modern City is an illuminating and often exhilirating
contribution to contemporary scholarship on the city. It is also very handsomely
produced. Its format, which is slightly largely than the standard academic
text, makes it a trifle unwieldy, but has the considerable benefit of enhancing
the effect of the many well-chosen images – photographs, artworks and
film stills – which illustrate the argument.
Guy Davidson, English Studies Program, University of Wollongong, New
South Wales, Australia.
James Donald is professor of communications and cultural studies at Curtin
University of Technology in Perth, Australia.Imagining the Modern Citywas
published by the University
of Minnesota Press in November 1999.
In Australian Humanities Review,see also
by Guy Davidson:
James Donald, Imagining the Modern City:a review
Guy Davidson
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/copyright.html for copyright notice.