Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Epistemologically adventurous, insightful and rigorously researched, this highly original, nuanced and always readable study is written with panache and an originality of argument and depth of insight that puts this volume at the head of such studies. — Julian Wolfreys, Loughborough University, UK The author combines methodologies and theoretical models with ease, and the interdisciplinary nature of the book is both necessary and refreshing. — Letizia Modena, Villanova University, USA Laura Colombino’s intelligently researched and concisely written book provides timely and essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary ctions of London. —Nick Hubble, School of Arts, Brunel University, UK

This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on Lon- don since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the con icting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the ction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic- phenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and re ections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning eld of literary urban studies.

Laura Colombino is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Genoa, Italy. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

1 Literature After 9/11 8 Trauma and Romance in Edited by Ann Keniston and Contemporary British Literature Jeanne Follansbee Quinn Edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega 2 Reading Chuck Palahniuk American Monsters and Literary 9 Spatial Politics in Contemporary Mayhem London Literature Edited by Cynthia Kuhn and Writing Architecture and the Body Lance Rubin Laura Colombino

3 Beyond Cyberpunk New Critical Perspectives Edited by Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint

4 Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk Edited by Paul Crosthwaite

5 Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction Lorna Piatti-Farnell

6 Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy Borders and Crossing Edited by Nicholas Monk with a Foreword by Rick Wallach

7 Global Issues in Contemporary Hispanic Women’s Writing Shaping Gender, the Environment, and Politics Edited by Estrella Cibreiro and Francisca López Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature Writing Architecture and the Body

Laura Colombino

NEW YORK LONDON First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Laura Colombino to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Colombino, Laura. Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature : Writing Architecture and the Body / By Laura Colombino. pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature ; 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—History and criticism. 2. Human body in literature. 3. Space (Architecture) in literature. I. Title. PR149.B62C65 2013 820.9'358421—dc23 2012039788 ISBN13: 978-0-415-62480-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-55341-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. For Pino, Franca, Barbara and Michael Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

1 Modular Bodies and Architecture as Skin: J. G. Ballard (1956–1975) 24

2 Human Ruins and Architectural Spectres (the 1980s and Beyond) 62 Part I: Insubstantial Bodies and the City’s Organicism— Peter Ackroyd, Geoff Dyer and Michael Bracewell 68 Part II: Ruins and Memory—Michael Moorcock and Iain Sinclair 86

3 Traumatized Subjects and Chaotic Substances: Iain Sinclair (the 1990s and the Millennium) 99

4 Corporeality within Abstract Space (from the 1970s to the Post-Millennial) 132 Part I: Islands and Rifts—J. G. Ballard and Geoff Ryman 134 Part II: Stages and Intersections—Tom McCarthy and Zadie Smith 150

Coda 178

Bibliography 181 Index 191

Illustrations

I.1 Rachel Whiteread, House. 10 I.2 Richard Rogers, Lloyd’s building, London, 1979–84. 23 1.1 Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter and Alison Smithson (known as Group 6), Patio and Pavilion. 25 1.2 David Greene, Living Pod. 31 1.3 Peter Cook, Plug-In City. 40 2.1 Norman Foster, 30 St. Mary Axe, London, 2001–2003. 65 2.2 Mark Atkins, Tree Angel. 97 3.1 Coop Himmelb(l)au, Project: Town Town—Erdberg Offi ce Tower, Vienna (2000/2010–). 107 Acknowledgements

I owe debts of gratitude to many who have contributed to my eff orts in pre- paring and completing this book, particularly in terms of responses to my academic papers, useful suggestions in informal discussions and reviews of the project, and the recommendation of creative and critical texts. I am especially grateful to Barrie Bullen for helping me ﬁ ne-tune the book pro- posal; A. S. Byatt for our live and email conversations on architecture and chaos theory; Iain Sinclair, who was kind enough to answer my questions after his talk on London Orbital at the 2008 Literary London conference in Uxbridge; Nick Hubble for his invaluable suggestions and comments on the project and extensive parts of the book. I would also like to thank Jeanette Baxter and Andrzej Gasiorek for their appreciation of parts of this work in its early stages, and Guy Mannes-Abbott, Alan Munton, Daniela Dan- iele, Martin Dines, Riccardo Duranti, Valentina Guglielmi, Emiliano Ilardi and Francesco Marroni for their bibliographical suggestions. Furthermore, I’m particularly thankful to Elizabeth Levine, my commissioning editor at Routledge, for recognizing the potential of the project and Eleanor Chan for overseeing the whole process. The illustrations of this book owe their appearance to those people and art galleries that generously allowed me to reproduce their works. Other individuals will recognize their own part, and I remain grateful for their willingness to off er encouragement or various amounts of their time in support of my eff orts. In this context, I must mention Maria Rita Cifarelli, Luis Dapelo, Anna Giaufret, Barbara Sadler, Michael Sadler, Giuseppe Sertoli, Luisa Villa and especially Sara Dickinson. I’m indebted to the following people for the services they rendered me at their institu- tions: Claudio Farello, Franco Reuspi and Nadia Risso, librarians at the Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures in Genoa, and the staff s of the British Library and the University of London Library. I also want to thank my parents and parents-in-law for their extraordinary moral and material assistance. Finally, I’m especially grateful to Ilaria and Andrea, who helped me in more ways than I can enumerate: without them there’d scarcely be any point to it all. Introduction

Central to any discussion of the city is the question of the body, claims Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1991, p. 162). Urban dwellers can be analysed as members of classes, economic units or social monads but fi rst of all they are embodied beings and their knowledge of the city is always pre-eminently a physical one. In contemporary discourse space has taken on the qualities of lived experience, an embodied practice performed at the point where the built environment and the body enter into relation with each other. This book brings out ways in which such an essential interaction produces, in contemporary British literature, a poetics as well as a politics of urban subjectivity, showing how the physical spaces of the city— which mirror and materialize specifi c political and social conditions— shape the concept of the self traversing the metropolis. The nexus of spatial and ideological approaches to the urban body plays—so I argue here—a crucial role in postmodern narratives of the city, and the aim of this study is to pursue major articulations of this connection through a focus on contemporary London writing. According to Lefebvre, bodies generate space with their gestures, movements and spatial relations. Through their perceptions and aff ects they make sense of a tactile and emotive terrain; through their imagination they recre- ate built environments as ‘loci of passion, of action and of lived situations’ (1991, p. 42). In turn bodies are produced by the urban space they inhabit. This prescribes or proscribes gestures, routes and distances to be covered; with its arrangement—which, in the contemporary city, is moulded by the power of capital and capitalism—it infl uences the organization of bodies, from the construction of high-rises to the geographical distribution of labour. Since the post-war years and particularly after the advent of postmodernism, the relationship between the body and the built environment has formed the material for the refl ections of intellectuals and the practices of architects, artists and writers. Increasingly, as architectural critic Anthony Vidler contends, the city’s ‘contours, boundaries, and geographies are called upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity, from the national to the ethnic; its hollows and voids are occupied by bodies that replicate internally the external conditions of political and social struggle, 2 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature and are likewise assumed to stand for, and identify, the sites of such struggle’ (1992, p. 167). The most recent production of neo-Situationist performers and body artists such as Marina Abramović point to the recen- tring of experience around corporeality, often as a strategy to halt, if only temporarily, the rhythms dictated by urban life. Contemporary literature off ers further evidence of this tendency. A recent fi ctional exploration of the theme in American literature, for example, is Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003)—adapted for the screen by David Cronenberg in 2012—where the protagonist’s crossing of New York, whose traffi c is equated metaphorically with the fl ow of fi nancial information, is interrupted by a performance of three hundred naked bodies lying on the street and fi lling a whole intersection (see DeLillo, 2004, pp. 172–76). In this episode DeLillo off ers a neonaturalist description of bodily abjection, which points to the retrieval of a creatural, cosmic dimension in contrast with the increasing abstrac- tion of economy and fi nance. All these cultural instances of a return to the real (see Foster, 1999) lend special urgency to a critical investigation of the forms that this pervasive fascination with the body has taken in postmodern literature on the city. From the mid-1980s, the emphasis on corporeality in architectural and urban studies has been mirrored in sociology and other related disciplines by a veritable explosion of interest in the body, ‘reconstructed and reimagined as a privileged site where a special kind of meaning is created and enacted’ (Schabert, 2001, p. 87). Various explanations of this interdisciplinary phe- nomenon have been advanced. The most widely accepted is the reaction against the pervasiveness of bodiless things—of media, telepresences and digital worlds—which has characterized the turn of the millennium, caus- ing Arthur and Marilouise Kroker to call the last decade of the twentieth century ‘the fl esh-eating 90s’ (1996, passim). Equally signifi cant, though, is the interpretation of the concern with corporeality as a protective move against the attack at the wholeness of the self levelled by deconstruction: ‘if personal identity is reasoned away, one might like to take refuge in the body’ (Schabert, 2001, p. 112). In the context of social studies, Bryan Turner off ers a further insight—which has proven vital and consequential for my analysis—relating this cultural turn to ‘the rise of a “somatic society”, by which he means “a society within which our major political and moral problems are expressed through the conduit of the human body”’; this is ‘imagined as something capable of language, and of translating abstract meanings into material signs and symbols’ (Fraser and Greco, 2005, pp. 2 and 21). Similarly, in Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler shows how signify- ing practices are embodied practices: the state of being in the body, she claims, is a way of acting out discursive meanings, and she calls this ‘per- formativity’ (1993, passim). As we will see, contemporary literature provides potent indications of this propensity for embodied knowledge. Suffi ce it to mention the example off ered by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), an inaugural text of British postmodernism: the pivotal conceit of Introduction 3 the novel, which is set at the time of India’s attainment of autonomy from Britain, is that the protagonist’s corporeality becomes the site where larger political, social and ethical struggles are enacted:

the body of Saleem, its narrator, and one of the children born on the midnight hour of Independence, begin [sic] to somatise the splits and schisms of the new independent state. [ . . . ] The fragile and disinte- grating body is conﬂ ated with the emerging ‘unrepresentable totality’ of the new post-colonial and globalised worlds of the late twentieth century. (Waugh, 2010, p. 117)

But this call for renewed attention to the body cannot be separated—and on such a conjunction this book is premised—from the contemporary spatial turn so widely discussed in the burgeoning fi eld of urban studies. ‘What are [ . . . ] the connections between this concern with the body as an object of analysis and our understanding of the global and the city?’, wonders John Rennie Short (2006, p. 141). As shown in the following in this Intro- duction, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Fredric Jameson and particularly Lefebvre have all provided invaluable insights into these relations. For now, it is suffi cient to stress that their common starting point is the acknowledgement of a weakened sense of historicity in the present epoch and the attendant increasing predominance of the concepts of space, simul- taneity and globalization. As Edward Soja claims in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, ‘we are becoming increasingly aware that we are, and always have been, intrinsically spatial beings, active participants in the social construction of our embracing spa- tialities’ (1996, p. 1). The recognition of this new paradigm has led some intellectuals to carry out an analysis of spatial biopolitics, that is, the exer- tion of individual and social control over bodies through techniques such as the privatization of public space, territorial mapping and surveillance. Others have produced radical critiques where alternative, more liberating forms of spatial politics are propounded. Combining critical debate over the return of the body in architectural and literary production with studies focusing on the individual and social production of space, this book interrogates the relationship—largely neglected by literary critics—between corporeality and urban architecture, in a fi eld, that of contemporary London fi ction and non-fi ction, which has recently drawn increasing attention. In some circles of academia, scholarship on the literature devoted to the British capital city is thriving, as evidenced by myriad journal articles, papers, theses and dissertations. Since 2003, Literary London Annual Conferences have been hosted by a range of Lon- don universities, boasting high attendance numbers and inviting readings of the city also in cognate disciplines, including architecture, urban sociology and painting. In British and American universities, there are masters in contemporary writing and culture which concentrate on British works 4 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature sometimes with a special emphasis on London; architecture masters with an interdisciplinary scope including literature can also be found, such as the MA Architectural History, Theory and Interpretation at the London MET, which devotes sections of its course to diff erent notions of the relation between literature and architecture, explored through the works of Louis Kahn, the Smithsons, Daniel Libeskind and Coop Himmelb(l)au, but also Walter Benjamin, Homi K. Bhabha, S. T. Coleridge, John Ruskin, James Joyce, Iain Sinclair and Patrick Wright. The impressive bulk of creative works on the capital city, both past and present, guarantees an enduring interest in London literature for ages to come. Yet it makes any attempt to engage in wide-ranging discussions all but prohibitive. Even narrowing the scope to the last decades, we are faced with, and bewildered by, an unmanageable variety of texts: the urban theme recurs so frequently in so much of recent British writing that any endeav- our to reach a comprehensive view is bound to failure. Hence my choice to concentrate specifi cally on some signifi cant and illustrative authors and texts where the placement of the geographic or spatial involves more than a descriptive act or a mimetic attempt to transcribe our lives. The aim is bring into focus and investigate primarily the fi ction in which Lon- don provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing the city. A range of authors and texts will be considered, those commonly cited alongside others usually neglected, to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the capital city. The writers analysed include J. G. Ballard, Peter Ackroyd, Geoff Dyer, Michael Bracewell, Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy and Zadie Smith, but their urban visions will stimulate signifi - cant comparisons also with other authors such as Ford Madox Ford, Will Self, Virginia Woolf, Patrick Wright and the fi lm director Patrick Keiller, to name but a few. Each of the main writers brought into focus is given a diff erent emphasis according to his or her importance in the context discussed: the richness, idiosyncratic quality and signifi cance to the fi eld of Ballard and Sinclair account for the chapter-length analyses of their works; the relevance of the other novelists to the defi nition of the wider tendencies of an epoch, or to the investigation of themes transversal to more decades, justifi es their juxtaposition and comparison within single chapters. According to Short, ‘the full exploration of the relationship between bodies and cities has yet to be achieved’ and ‘remains one of the more allur- ing possibilities for future urban theorizing’ (2006, p. 141). Capitalizing on the idea of the return of the body (often abject, traumatized or dismem- bered) in late twentieth-century culture, this book broaches the idea that through the observation of the body–space relation and the interrogation of its ideological underpinnings, a meaningful analysis of contemporary Lon- don literature can be attempted. Previous studies published in the fi eld of Introduction 5 late twentieth-century writing on the capital city diff er substantially in their contents, aims and methodologies. Lawrence Phillips’s London Narratives: Post-War Fiction and the City (2006), for example, has a historical and sociological perspective. Compared with Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature, it is wider in scope, in that starting from the Blitz, but provides no in-depth analysis of works by writers such as Sinclair or Bal- lard (with the exception of High-Rise), because psychogeography and spatial politics in general are not its foremost concerns. Slightly closer in scope, Julian Wolfreys’s Writing London, vol. 2 (2004), has a distinctive textual and Derridean perspective; writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Eliza- beth Bowen, Maureen Duff y, Ackroyd, Sinclair and Moorcock. More com- pact, Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography (2006) off ers a bird’s-eye view of psychogeography’s Anglo-French origins and only a brief survey of its later London developments in Ackroyd, Ballard, Sinclair, Self and Stewart Home. Yet the contemporary London context sketched in the last chapter of Cover- ley’s book is a useful starting point, and my aim is to elaborate and expand upon his premises, widening the fi eld of observation to other authors while off ering close readings of signifi cant novels, short stories and travelogues. Finally, Sebastian Groes’s The Making of London: London in Contempo- rary Literature (2011) traces a major shift from the writers’ shoring up of London’s myths against the ruins of the social fabric in the long Thatcher– Major years to the retrieval of more factual narrations in the urban writing at the turn of the millennium. What diff erentiates my analysis from previous studies is, fi rst and foremost, the methodological approach, which is interdisciplinary in various ways. Firstly, this book interrogates the transformations of London’s urban texture from post-war redevelopments to millennium architecture, to consider their ideological import and defi ne their impact on the contested realms of identity as it unfolds in literary texts. Secondly, the book explores the infl uence of architectural and artistic theories and practices on the writers discussed. Thirdly and fi nally, it is consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and refl ections on spatial politics formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and art critics. In this respect, the intent is to sustain and foster cross-pollination of various disciplines and particularly of literary and architectural studies. Ballard was the initiator of the interest in the relationship between architecture and the body in contemporary British literature. Chapter 1 is, as far as I know, the fi rst sustained consideration of how his representation of post-catastrophic dwellings was infl uenced by the London- based architectural avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s. The aim is to interrogate the impact on his fi ction of Archigram’s fantasies of bio- technological responsive environments and of contemporary theoretical ideas on dwelling and the city (as found in McLuhan, Reyner Banham and others). But the chapter also illustrates the continuities of his spatial poetics with major concerns of existentialist philosophy related 6 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature to dwelling, authenticity and the unhomeliness of the world. A strong emphasis is placed on the key architectural concept of modularity—in- troduced by the Bauhaus and inherited by Brutalist architecture and Pop Art—which is shown to inform transversally Ballard’s representation of corporeality, the mind and the city. Capitalizing on the fi ndings of this analysis, the chapter moves on to consider how such ideas of habitation and the city apply to three early London novels: The Drowned World (1962), where his indebtedness to British Pop Art ‘as found’ poetics is explored; Crash (1973), seen in relation to modularity and Eduardo Paolozzi’s industrial mythologies; and High-Rise (1975), investigated with reference to the posthuman and Archigram’s environments. Finally, the chapter closes by interrogating the continuities between the gram- mar of urban modularity and Ballard’s views on the artist’s re-invention and transcendence of reality. Part I of Chapter 2 focuses on the 1980s. In search of a Zeitgeist in the spatial politics of the London literature of this period, I have chosen to focus on three fi ctional works as diverse as Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (1985), an illustrative example of historiographic metafi ction; Dyer’s novel The Colour of Memory (1989), a celebration of lowlife in Brixton; and Bracewell’s novella on a terrorist architect Missing Margate (1988). After reconstructing the transformations of London’s urban texture in the Thatcherite era, the chapter traces the journey of these writers through the ruins of the city’s changing landscape. In their works the vagrancy caused by high unemployment rates and the pervasive rubble of the daily destruction of council houses become—so I argue here—powerful literary metaphors for the impermanence of the human condition and the voracious metabolism of the city. The sense of estrangement from an increasingly unrecognizable and alienating urban landscape is shown to redouble uncannily in the representation of the subject’s estrangement from its own body. The chapter tackles the riddle of the intensely mas- ochistic or nihilistic drives shared by the three works, trying to make sense of their insistent representation of the body’s incorporation into the formless substance of the capital city as well as their protagonists’ craving for some kind of mystic or surreal transfi guration. The second half of the chapter considers the overcoming of this sense of impotence through the regenerative powers of the writer’s memory and imagination. Illustrative works by Moorcock and Sinclair are analysed, where bodies and minds, strained or even in pain, pursue the aim of embodying the complex but intensely poetic forces of the city. In this connection, the impact of chaos theory on both writers is interrogated. Chapter 3 is devoted to Sinclair’s major fi ctional and non-fi ctional works. It investigates the interaction between two spatial modes: a capitalist and alienating London reminiscent of Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace and a cosmic capital city conceived as organic substance. The two modes imply a redefi nition of the writer’s identity as both the Introduction 7 subject of trauma and the conductor of the chaotic natural dynamics of the city. One of my contentions is that Sinclair transforms politics into a highly individual, psychophysical experience, where corporeal trauma and abjection function as tangible evidence of the hostile forces of the city—fi nancial, political, religious. My investigation aims at disclosing the reasons behind this redefi nition of the subject (and its solitary politics) under the auspices of trauma and the motivations of this knowledge of the landscape through its somatization. Sinclair’s voracious walks, the images of visceral bodies as well as the opposed ones of ghostly insub- stantiality are discussed in relation to the issues of urban surveillance, complexity and informational overload. The fi nal section of the chapter proposes a psychosomatic reading of Sinclair’s love of the arcane, analysing its anthropological and shamanistic aspects with reference to Marc Augé, Mircea Eliade and Marcel Mauss. Chapter 4 brings together an update of developments, circling back to Ballard. The accounts of Ryman and McCarthy reveal how 1970s concerns with the ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1992) of modern cities—which, for the early Bal- lard, were synonymous with post-war functional architecture—morph, at the turn of the millennium, into concerns with the city reimagined through information technologies and reconfi gured by globalization. A path is charted from Ballard’s early representation of London as a ‘machine for living in’, in Le Corbusier’s celebrated defi nition (1924, p. 151), to McCarthy’s post- 9/11 understanding of the capital as part of global dynamics and traumas, a point on a grid. Questions are raised concerning the body’s negotiations with abstract spaces in these writers. Why do Ballard’s Concrete Island (1973) and Ryman’s 253 (1996) need to enact violent chance transgressions of the system through islands of being wedged within it? And what is the signifi cance of McCarthy’s intensely physical and gruesome urban theatres of alienation and ritual embodiment in Remainder (2005)? The chapter devotes its energies to the interrogation of physical pain as an instrument these writers use to attain the rematerialization of bodies and space. The spatial politics enacted in these works are further illuminated through a comparison with analogous practices in art and architecture, from Georges Bataille’s anti-architecture to Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida’s project for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, from Archizoom’s No-Stop City to experiments in performance, body art and constructed situations such as those by Abramović and Tino Sehgal. The end of Chapter 4 brings to a close the exploration of abstract spaces, this time considered in relation to Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000). Her treatment of the postcolonial city is placed in the context of millennium London and its architecture. The main focus is on her deconstruction of the neutral spaces produced by the liberal discourse of multiculturalism, which are revealed to be instrumental in concealing and justifying exclusion. But an equal attention is devoted to her emphasis on the semantic signifi cance of circumscribed spaces and fi xed locations—houses in particular—whose importance takes over from the eff ects of drifting predominant in contemporary London literature. 8 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature Smith’s domestic focus suggests that any treatment of the interaction between the body and the built environment entails questions about the inner and the outer. For this reason, my exploration of contemporary London literature will acknowledge not only new conceptions of corporeality and the urban space, but also the changing relationships between private and public spaces, interiors and exteriors. As we will see, houses and other enclosed spaces are often conceived as sensitive membranes, where exchanges take place between the inside and the city outside; but they can also work as metaphors of the body itself or, alternatively, as microcosmic projections of the larger metropolis.

GASTON BACHELARD AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN

In The System of Objects (1968), Jean Baudrillard claims that post-war interior design determined a fundamental shift in the way home was conceived. Prior understandings of furniture and decoration, he argues, had revolved around the haunting human ‘presence’ they seemed to emanate, the sense of the domestic space as moulded by a certain lived experience and hence replete with unique symbolic overtones:

Such furniture, Baudrillard suggested, was characterized by its perma- nence and monumentality, arranged almost theistically to facilitate the rituals of orthodox daily life. It was a solid refl ection of the patriarchal structures of the family that it served, while at the same time it embodied those relationships as an organic extension of the bodies that dwelled there. Ultimately, argued Baudrillard, the traditional interior was under- stood as a form of material reifi cation, an organic ossifi cation of certain domestic practices that embedded daily life within a complex structure of aff ect and experiential depth. (Hornsey, 2010, p. 212)

Le Corbusier’s modernist project proposed to consign to oblivion these clut- tered interiors, with their moral resonance and overburdening sense of the past: ‘if no cranny was left for the storage of the bric-a-brac once deposited in damp cellars and musty attics, then memory would be released from its unhealthy preoccupations to live in the present’ (Vidler, 1992, p. 64). In Earth and Reveries of Repose, which appeared in French in 1948, Gas- ton Bachelard is adamant in his rejection of Le Corbusier’s modern apart- ments: ‘I do not dream in Paris, in this geometric cube, in this cement cell, in this room with iron shutters so hostile to nocturnal subjects’ (cited in Vidler, 1992, p. 65). In an age of so much homogenized space, Bachelard wants to demonstrate that interior places can and should be poetry, and he does so by writing one of the most appealing and lyrical explorations of home, The Poetics of Space, published in French in 1958. The book shows that our perception of domestic spaces, from cellar to attic, shapes our thoughts, Introduction 9 memories and dreams. For him, we do not live in the uniform and empty space postulated by the existentialists but in one thoroughly tinged with qualities and possibly thoroughly imaginative as well. In a lecture titled ‘Of Other Spaces’, delivered in March 1967 and published in French in 1984, Michel Foucault summarizes Bachelard’s spatial concept as follows:

The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be ﬂ owing like sparkling water, or space that is ﬁ xed, congealed, like stone or crystal. (1986, p. 23)

The house is not just the functional container conceived by Le Corbusier but, more profoundly, a shelter for imagining. As we will see, Bachelard’s intense focus on the poetry of domestic intimacy will be superseded by other infl u- ential conceptions of space, from the almost contemporary psychogeography of Guy Debord, with its interest in the larger aff ective terrain of the city, to the constructed and anonymous spaces of postmodernity later described by Jameson. But although abandoned by spatial theorists altogether, Bachelard’s conception of space continues to exert its infl uence on literary imagination. In particular, his poetics of the elements, especially water, inspires the liquid- ity and dreaminess which guide Sinclair’s transfi gurations of London’s landscape. Even more to the point, at the end of the Thatcherite era, the interest in imaginative domesticity resurfaces in works such as Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988), as a response to the alienating experience of modern high-rise living. Yet, in this new historical context, the image of the house is retrieved in the desiccated form of few survived, highly symbolic objects, ruins of a disappeared past which function as powerful devices of collective memory. Vidler helps us grasp the sense of this transformation:

this housecleaning operation produced its own ghosts, the nostalgic shadows of all the ‘houses’ now condemned to history or the demolition site. Once reduced to its bony skeleton, transformed out of recognition into the cellular fabric of the unité and the Siedlung, the house was itself an object of memory, not now of a particular individual for a once-inhabited dwelling but of a collective population for a never- experienced space: the house had become an instrument, that is, of generalized nostalgia. (1992, p. 64)

In this connection, artist Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture House (Figure I.1) is an excellent case in point. This controversial work (realized in October 1993 and destroyed only three months later) was located in the East End of London to commemorate the previous demolition of local Victorian ter- raced houses and, with them, of a whole community. Erected in the same 10 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature place where the original building stood (193 Grove Road), House was the concrete cast of one of the disappeared houses and materialized the trace of its interior. In Vidler’s view, the sculpture was illustrative of postmodernism’s tendency to replace the past with ‘the signs of its absence, perhaps, in the process, engendering a house more truly haunted than that of modernism, but, for all this, hardly a more comforting or stable entity’ (1999, p. 66).

Figure I.1 Rachel Whiteread, House. © Rachael Whiteread. Photographed by Sue Omerod 1993. Introduction 11 But let us return to Bachelard. His emphasis on domesticity as the condition for the essence of the human being to unfold is questioned by McLuhan. Inspired by Lewis Mumford, who, ‘in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing’ (McLuhan, 2001, p. 51), he makes a strong case that an organic relationship connects people to their living spaces. Mumford believes that, in the physical design of cities, economic functions should be secondary to the relationships with the natural environment; he propounds the idea of the city as a product of the earth and a fact of nature, deriving this notion from the village measure prevalent in Ancient Greek cities. A theorist of com- munication, McLuhan bends this organicist principle to his own purposes, claiming that ‘This biological approach to the man-made environment is sought today once more in the electric age’ (2001, p. 106). Traditionally, he argues, the city has been regarded as ‘a collective shield or plate armor, an extension of the castle of our very skins’ (p. 374). This membrane—be it the house, the city or even clothing—is constantly engaged in negotiating potentially stressful stimuli, from within and without: ‘the city was formed as a kind of protective hide [ . . . ] at the cost of maximized struggle within the walls’ (p. 107). In this connection, he resorts to the biological metaphor of the organism’s attempt to maintain equilibrium in conditions of inner or outer stress or trauma. The inhabited space is a like a biological entity which, he suggests, ‘responds to new pressures and irritations [ . . . ] always in the eff ort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeosta- sis’ (p. 107). He is persuaded that technological tools play a major role in strengthening our power to counteract stressful stimuli: ‘it was amidst such irritations that man produced his greatest inventions as counter-irritants. These inventions were extensions of himself by means of concentrated toil, by which he hoped to neutralize distress’ (p. 107). Technologies (such as radio and television) establish long-distance connections for the potentially immobile individual of the new electric age; a subject conceived pre-eminently as a ‘central nervous system’ (p. 4) connected through communica- tion technologies to the electronic global village (see McLuhan, 1964, p. 517). According to McLuhan, this new condition implies that the human being is now capable of transcending and expanding the conﬁ nes of his or her body in space:

The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emo- tionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society. (2001, p. 56)

As we will see, this sense of the psychophysical relationship with the whole of humankind and the biological approach to the man-made environment exert a powerful inﬂ uence on contemporaries such as Ballard, but a lasting impact can also be detected in later writers such as Sinclair. 12 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

(POST)MODERNIST INTERIORS AND THE CITY Equally consequential, although not ascribable to him alone, is McLuhan’s questioning of the traditional view of the house as a screen used to frame personal memories, a physical barrier between the interior and the exterior. As Lefebvre points out, we have been accustomed to presume that ‘the sphere of private life ought to be enclosed, and have a fi nite, or fi nished, aspect. Public space, by contrast, ought to be an opening outwards’ (1991, p. 147). In the disruption of this spatial truism, though, lie the very founda- tions of the postmodern experience of the built environment. To bring into focus this transformation I will contrast it with the modernist treatment of the relationship between domesticity and the city. An intriguing early twentieth-century exploration of the theme and fi ne example of modernist fl ânerie can be found in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (fi rst published in 1927; a revised version was printed posthumously in 1942). The essay opens with the description of the bourgeois interior of the protagonist and narrating voice, a space redolent of her history and ‘the secrets of [her] soul’ (1993, p. 71). So much so that her own self-defi nition seems to depend upon the familiar objects and indelible traces of the past that surround her—from a burnt ‘brown ring on the carpet’ (p. 71) to the Italian ‘china bowl’ (p. 70) on the man- telpiece—as if the self, too tenuous and fl imsy, were in need of material items (exhaling immaterial memories) in order to confi rm its existence. In stark opposition to this interior, the urban adventure signalled by the title consists in venturing outside the furnished space of the inner world and into the urban environment:

But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! (p. 71)

In the city the soul can ‘become part of the vast republican army of anonymous trampers’ (p. 70), delving—temporarily and fl eetingly—into the abysses of the physical and psychological miseries of other souls or, even more dangerously, encountering past (dead) versions of itself through powerful dislocations in time. Yet the essay circles back reassuringly to the original domestic space with the protagonist’s return to her house—‘it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round’ (p. 81), she suggests—so that the integrity of her self will fi nally be regained. The safe abode of interiority (the comforting and stabilizing furniture of idiosyncratic personality) is always there to return to after the ramble has split the observer prismatically and perilously into multiple selves. Indeed, this conclusion seems to confi rm Jürgen Habermas’s claim in ‘Modernity—An Introduction 13 Incomplete Project’ that in spite of the avant-gardes’ daring experimenta- tions with fragmented visions, a deep nostalgia for the lost coherence and wholeness of vision traverses modernism (see 1985, p. 5). In Woolf’s essay the modernist drifter leaves not just her identity but also her own corporeality behind to turn into an ‘enormous eye’ (1993, p. 71) with its decarnalized perception (the haunting suggested by the title), so that, rather than venture into physical involvement, her adventure may stay within the confi nes of perception while her investigation revolves pre- eminently around epistemological issues (contrariwise, in Brian McHale’s view, ‘the “dominant” of postmodernist fi ction is ontological’ [Elias, 1993, p. 12]). In the essay the entropy and misery of life, and the unattractive human substance incarnated by ‘the humped, the twisted, the deformed’ have been ‘given [ . . . ] the slip’ (Woolf, 1993, pp. 74 and 71) and safely subsumed in the mesmerizing phantasmagoria of the street. After all, the fl âneur is ‘a mirror as vast as the crowd itself’ (Baudelaire, 1995, p. 10), where even the subject is refl ected as part of the spectacle. If we turn now to postmodern spaces, we fi nd that the separation of the inner and the outer found in Woolf is thrown into disarray. Baudril- lard testifi es to this major change in The System of Objects: ‘The rooms and the house themselves now transcend the traditional dividing-line of the wall, which formerly made them into spaces of refuge’ (2005, p. 19). Lefebvre’s remarks are unequivocally in the same vein:

Volumes or masses are deprived of any physical consistency. [ . . . ] all partitions between inside and outside have collapsed. [ . . . ] Thus the sense of circumscribed spaces has gone the same way as the impression of mass. Within and without have melted into transparency, becoming indistinguishable or interchangeable. (1991, pp. 146–47)

It is well known that one of postmodern architecture’s subversive strategies is to place exterior elements into the interior and vice versa. The American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, for example, has created disorienting spaces by turning the inside out and conceiving the walls of domestic space as perme- able and shifting. His maze-like architectures open outward to the natural and urban world and simultaneously inward to the mysterious detritus of the human interior, the scanty remains of the richer and reassuring furniture of interiority which still swathed the modernist individual. Tell- ingly, the essence of the subject, deprived of its protective and constitutive architectural shell, often appears in contemporary art works as evacuated from the domestic theatre. Consider, in this connection, Giuliana Bruno’s remarks on Whiteread’s House:

the stories of the house constantly unfold on the wall/screen. They are sculpted in the corporeality of architexture, exposed in the marks of duration impressed on materials, inscribed on fragments of used brick, 14 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature scratched metal, or consumed wood, and, especially, in the non-spaces. They are written in the negative space of architecture, in that lacuna where the British artist Rachel Whiteread works, casting the architectural void of everyday objects, and the vacuum of the domestic space. (2007b, p. 183)

Domestic architecture is seen as endowed with the power to capture the material trace of the dweller’s physicality and interiority, so that the dis- appearance of the experiential self (the form of subjectivity described by Woolf) is accompanied by its uncanny, ghostly reappearance on the very skin of architecture. Human life has been literally subsumed into space and turned into its attribute; and this transfusion is what triggers postmodern emphases on the biological (McLuhan) and intensely sensorial, haptic qualities of the built environment, both domestic and urban. This acquires that sensorial and even aff ective quality of which the postmodern subject, as Jameson contends, seems to have been deprived. As we will see with Ballard, the corporeal and psychic dimensions (the neural system) tend to be dislocated outside the subject who, consequently, can ‘wear’ a range of diff erent selves by inhabiting diff erent experiential spaces (or ‘skins’). Furthermore, far from envisaging the possibility of a reassuring shelter for the wanderer to return to, the postmodern condition condemns the fl âneur to perpetual homelessness. In so doing, it often commits his or her body to alienating or even traumatic exchanges with the city. In other words, the urban subject’s very essence is put at stake: the postmodern urban self is inescapably implicated in ontological issues, in the prob- lematic relativity of its being, whose autonomy is repeatedly questioned by the constant, unsettling interactions of the body with the physicality of the urban scene. As Daniela Daniele claims about Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the postmodern drifter abandons the mode of the melancholy monologue which characterized the fl âneur to experience a sort of corporeal dissolution into the space of the city, testifying to the loss of the interiority which both Charles Baudelaire and Benjamin still regarded as the observer’s separate stance and defensive space against modern reifi cation (see Daniele, 1994, pp. 29–30). Indeed, we are not wide of the mark if we see the combination of physical involvement and self-estrangement as a main underlying motif in many of the works analysed in this book. The collapse of the barriers between the body and the city can be vari- ously infl ected. Ballard’s promiscuity of forms, for example, postulates a body whose essence can be secured and stabilized only through crystal- lizing collisions with the city’s architectural geometries. For Ackroyd, the reappropriation of the body from which the subject feels dissociated is enacted through its petrifaction, its absorption into stern and brood- ing historic buildings. Finally, Sinclair provides further examples of this Introduction 15 unsettling interaction through both traumatic encounters and forms of surreal osmosis where urban architecture and the body are more than metaphorically conjoined.

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY IN PARIS AND LONDON

In 1654, to accompany her novel Clélie: histoire romaine, Madeleine de Scudérie published a map of her own design, the celebrated Carte du pays de Tendre. This ‘map of the land of tenderness’ is the topographic and allegorical representation of amorous conduct and visualizes, in the form of a landscape, the possible developments of a love aff air. Key geographical features are presented, through pathetic fallacy, as moments of aff ect (e.g., the ‘lac d’indiff érence’ or ‘la mer dangereuse’), inviting the users of the map to chart possible itineraries of emotion and choose their own. Signiﬁ cantly, the map is cited in the anonymous article ‘L’urbanisme unitaire à la ﬁ n des années 50’ (1959), published in the journal Internationale situationniste, as an antecedent to Debord’s 1957 map of Paris entitled The Naked City (see McDonough, 2004, p. 243). The latter was produced by fragmenting the most popular map of the French capital city, the Plan de Paris, and assembling a collage of selected portions; these areas, described as ‘unities of atmosphere’ (McDonough, 2004, p. 243), appear on a blank background as distanced, discrete sections of urban landscape linked by schematic directional arrows. In McDonough’s view:

The act of ‘laying bare’ the social body through the city’s architectural symbols is implicit in the very structure of the map. Freed from the ‘useful connections that ordinarily govern their conduct’, the users could experience ‘the sudden change of atmosphere in a street, the sharp divi- sion of a city into one of distinct psychological climates; the path of least resistance—wholly unrelated to the unevenness of the terrain—to be followed by the casual stroller; the character, attractive or repellent, of certain places. (2004, p. 245)

Situationism mobilizes the concept of space which both Bachelard’s phenomenology and, in a diff erent way, Martin Heidegger’s Existential- ism conceive in relatively static terms. For the latter space is a ghastly chaos in the Greek sense of the term, an inhospitable and inchoate waste- land—somehow imbued with inter- and post-war anxieties—against which the inhabited space stands almost as an act of resistance. But the increasing circulation of commodities generated by economic recovery at the end of the 1950s produces a more dynamic sense of space and triggers transformations also in the concept of inhabiting. As a result, Lefebvre, like Debord, chooses to study ‘the tendencies of the urban 16 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature units, their inertia, their explosion, their reorganization, in a word, the practice of “inhabiting”, rather than the ecology of the habitat’ (cited in McDonough, 2004, pp. 252–53). With its opening up, the dwelling place no longer screens the existentialist body from the external void nor does its space envelop the images and imagination of Bachelardian interiority. Rather, it explodes into dispersed, open and loosely connected areas; each one corresponding to the emotional response it generates while together they compound the varied haptic and emotive terrain traversed by the psychogeographer. Thus inhabiting itself is transformed from a condition spatially fi xed and given into a process generated by and coextensive with the subject’s physical movements through the city. Walking is a way of measuring distances through the conduit of the body—through its energy and fatigue, and the tension or ease of its stride—while eavesdropping conversation pieces or imagining other people’s lives, and all this in a constant solicitation of the senses (see Diasio, 2001, pp. 36–37). The publication of The Naked City was among the last actions of the International Movement for an Imagist Bauhaus, one of the many post- war artistic groups with radical political interests which originated in the wake of surrealism; the movement was soon to join with the French Lettrist International—of which Debord was the most signifi cant lead- er—and the English Psychogeographical Society of London, in order to form the more lasting and infl uential Situationist International (SI). The poetics of this group revolved around the concept of psychogeography, a term coined by Debord to defi ne the movement’s fi eld of investigation: the impact of the urban environment on the behaviours and emotions of the individuals traversing the city. These spatial practices took inspiration from the fl âneur described by Baudelaire and Benjamin—both locate the inception of this fi gure in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Man of the Crowd (1840)—and inter-war surrealist wanderers such as André Breton and Louis Aragon (see Coverley, 2006, pp. 57–65 and 72–79). Debord’s movement aimed at transforming the experience of the city, increasingly predicated in the post-war years upon Corbusian functionalism, by wan- dering off the beaten track and exploring marginal areas usually neglected by inhabitants and tourists alike. The passage through various ambiances and the experience of idiosyncratic trajectories were named dérive, and since the city had grown hostile to pedestrians, this random, ‘purpose- less drifting at odds with the commercial traffi c’ (Coverley, 2006, p. 43) became an act of subversion. From its very inception the psychogeographical project has been committed to debunking the various myths of the continuity of space. By recomposing sections of the most popular map of the French capital in a quasi-illegible way, The Naked City disrupts the panoptic illusion that the city can be presented from a totalizing perspective and off ered to full view. As McDonough contends: Introduction 17 The Paris of the Plan exists in a timeless present; this timelessness is imagined spatially in the map’s (illusory) total revelation of its object. Users of the map see the entire city laid out before their eyes; however such an omnipresent view is seen from nowhere: ‘it is in fact impossible to occupy this space. It is a point of space where no man can see: a no place not outside space but nowhere, utopic’. (2004, p. 246)

From the early 1990s, partly in the wake of Augé’s theory of non-places, the blank spaces left out of the psychogeographical territories (the ‘unities of atmosphere’) have often been sensed and portrayed as rifts in the space-time continuum which is instead vouchsafed by the act of drifting. This is nowhere better expressed than in Sinclair and Chris Petit’s fi lm London Orbital (2002), where the M25 motorway is described as a sort of antimatter, producing trance-like and amnesiac states. A similar view is propounded in Self’s Psychogeography (2007), where the Heathrow– JFK fl ight interrupting the continuity of his walk from central London to Manhattan induces a state of psychophysical disconnection: ‘I was certain I would be the fi rst person to go the whole way, with only the mute, incurious interlude of a club class seat to interfere with the steady, two-mile-an-hour, metronomic rhythm of my legs, parting and marrying, parting and marrying’ (Self, 2007, p. 13). If, during the fl ight, his ‘mind reaches a vanishing point as it negligently orbits the planet’ (p. 13), his walk joining the two sides of the Atlantic seems to respond to an opposite bodily demand ‘to heel with [his] feet’ (p. 18) the vacuous rift in between. The aim, he contends, is ‘to suture up one of the wounds in my own, divided psyche: to sew together my American and my English fl esh’ (pp. 13–14). Till the mid-1980s, the interest in Situationism was a minor aff air in England. Among the few practitioners was Ralph Rumney. An active member at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) meetings, he is best known as the co-founder of the SI, which he joined on behalf of the Lon- don Psychogeographical Committee he had just founded. Barry Miles underscores that:

In 1952 [Rumney] was one of the few voices to oppose Professor’s Buch- anan’s plans for rebuilding London; a scheme which gave precedence to the car and involved cutting roads through residential neighbourhoods and building monolithic high rise blocks. Rumney wanted to apply Situationist ideas to London planning. Instead of destroying communities, he wanted a London made up of pedestrian zones: ‘I would have liked it to become a grouping together of diff erent districts, as it was in the beginning. I thought that the main roads should be built on the periphery of the villages that made up London’. [ . . . ] In the ﬁ fties and sixties ‘developers’ tore down the majority of the beautiful eighteenth- century houses that had survived the Blitz. It was to be expected; this 18 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature is the nation that bulldozed Nash’s Regent Street in pursuit of money. (2010, p. 63)

The revival of psychogeography at the turn of the millennium manifests itself as a literary trend with London at its centre, gaining an unprecedented impetus from the renewed assault on the architectural and social fabric of the city launched by Thatcherism. At the time of the Docklands redevelop- ment, when broad areas of historical London buildings were razed to the ground, the artists’ focus was placed on the East End. The grim industrial wastelands and tower blocks of the area became inhabited by eccentrics and bohemians, turning into a dynamo for cultural ferment. Phil Baker evokes the re-emergence of psychogeography and its subversive strategies at this crucial time:

it ﬂ ared into a higher proﬁ le at the end of the 1980s, with Greil Mar- cus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) and the Situationist retrospective of 1989 at the ICA and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The two streams of psychogeography, Situationist and Earth Mys- tery, fused with the founding of the London Psychogeographical Asso- ciation (LPA) in 1992. [ . . . ] Essentially a far-left post-Situationist group with a penchant for pranksterism and disinformation, the LPA claimed to believe in the wilder reaches of esoteric psychogeography, from ley lines outwards. Slippery and prickley, their stance on these things was a tongue-in- cheek strategy against ‘recuperation’ (compare Debord’s covering his Mémoires in sandpaper) designed to make academia keep its distance. ‘We off er no attempt to “Justify” or “rationalise” the role of magic in the development of our theories; it is suffi cient that it renders them completely unacceptable.’ (2003, p. 327)

A proliﬁ c producer of pamphlets and novels, as well as performer of avant- garde activities, Stewart Home has retrieved the provocative spirit of the Situationists. In a set of letters and texts on Neonism called The House of Nine Squares (1997), he expresses his delight that the deadpan epistles produced by ‘the London Psychogeographical Association have been mistaken as products of “an occult group”: “This type of misunderstanding makes it much easier for us to realise our real aim of turning the bourgeoisie’s weapons back against them”’ (cited in Baker, 2003, p. 338).

THE URBAN BODY FROM LEFEBVRE TO THE DIGITAL TURN

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre identifi es three diff erent but inter- locking conceptions of the built environment: the space of material Introduction 19 production (of goods and objects, and of exchange) which is ‘dictated by blind and immediate necessity’ (1991, pp. 137–38); the conceptualized space of scientists, planners, urbanists and social engineers; and fi nally the lived space (or spaces of representation) of inhabitants and users, but also and especially of artists, because the creative apprehension of the city ‘contains within itself the seeds of the “reign of freedom”’ (p. 137). This third dimension of personal, social and artistic experience—which shares the playfulness of Debord’s dérive—is twice liberating. On the economic level, it allows the body to escape the determination of production. On the experiential level, it eschews the decarnalization of the body produced by a conceptualized space which conceives the subject and the landscape as mental things. Lefebvre’s strategy, therefore, is to oppose the lived to the conceived, the physical to the metaphorical. Anticipating what would become a key issue in contemporary cultural studies, he places the body, with its spatio-temporal rhythms, fi rmly at the centre of his concerns. Lamenting the traditional betrayal and abandon- ment of corporeality in Western philosophy, which he sees as subdued to ‘the reign of King Logos’, he asserts confi dently that a new critical theory has fi nally ‘re-embraced the body along with space, in space, and as the generator (or producer) of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 407). He makes a strong case that:

Architecture produces living bodies, each with its own distinctive traits. The animating principle of such a body, its presence, is neither visible nor legible as such, nor is it the object of any discourse, for it reproduces itself within those who use the space in question, within their lived experience. (p. 137)

His contention is strongly reminiscent of the thesis expounded by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (see 1984, pp. 91–110): drawn by the solicitations of the terrain, the subject escapes imaginary visual total- izations and instead chooses a creative and liberating opacity and illegibil- ity. It is through this experience that recesses of ‘heightened perception’ are engendered, ‘spaces which fi rst and foremost escape mortality: enduring, radiant’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 137); where, it goes without saying, radiance implies the attributes of value, originality and unique event. As Soja contends in his appreciative analysis of Lefebvre’s thought, ‘Clearly an attempt is being made here to retain, if not to emphasize, the spatial unknowability, the mystery and secretiveness, the non-verbal subliminality, of spaces of representation; and to foreground the potential insightfulness of art versus science’ (1996, p. 67). But there again the secret glow of opaque spatial practices is a recurrent topos also in contemporary London writing, and the alternating fortunes of this concept will form a considerable part of my analysis. In the fi ction of the 1980s, for example, we will see how the loss of radiance (of creative, 20 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature liberating energies) is often mourned, in that felt as irrevocably stifl ed by the bleak prospects of a body and space entirely encoded in the inauthentic language of design and fashion (see my discussion of Bracewell in Chapter 2). In the 1990s the subject’s reaction to such alienating cultural circum- stances unfolds as a struggle to re-appropriate corporeality: physical hard- ship and pain restore the dense, opaque presence of the body, yet often confi ning experience (or event) within the limits of invisible patches in the urban environment. Radiance, then, is reinstated, yet conceived in a more subdued fashion compared to the playful one envisaged by Debord and Lefebvre: the inexorable presence of pain or abjection gives it a melancholy touch which was unknown to their homo ludens. According to Lefebvre, ‘Capitalism and neocapitalism have produced abstract space, which includes the “world of commodities”, its “logic” and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state’ (1991, p. 53). One of the most resonant images of this postmodern spatiality is John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which Jameson describes in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Bonaventure’s misleading and disorien- tating structure is deliberately conceived to thwart our spatial expectations. Entrances to the building, for example, are all lateral or backdoor aff airs: through the gardens in the back, the sixth fl oor can be accessed, while the main entrance admits visitors to the shopping mall on the second fl oor, compelling them to take an escalator to get to the registration desk. Jame- son makes a strong case that Portman’s labyrinthine structure is a continu- ation of the baffl ing urban texture outside: ‘I believe that, with a certain number of other characteristic postmodern buildings, such as the Beau- bourg in Paris or the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city’ (2003, p. 40). As a projection of the external environment, the Bonaventure throws traditional architectural distinctions into disarray, enacting a mutual con- tamination of closed and open spaces but also of rational organization and the chaotic sprawl. The building is the avatar of urban ‘hyperspace’, which ‘transcend[s] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself’ (p. 44); the decentralized, dispersed quality of this space which cannot be reduced to a map or made sense of appears to be beyond our sensory and cognitive abilities. This eff ect is confi rmed by the frequent use of refl ective outer surfaces in postmodern buildings. As Jameson contends:

the glass skin repels the city outside, a repulsion for which we have analogies in those reﬂ ector sunglasses which make it impossible for the interlocutor to see your own eyes and therefore achieve a certain aggressivity toward and power over the Other. [ . . . ] it is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it. (p. 42) Introduction 21 The Bonaventure represents the city as the space of anonymous transcendence: to walk through the fabricated worlds and glass surfaces of the contemporary urban reality is to become intensely aware of the disconnection between body, space and time, and the alienation of the self from the places it inhabits. Jameson describes the Bonaventure in terms of spectacle, as a huge machine where ‘like great Japanese lanterns or gondo- las [escalators and elevators] ceaselessly rise and fall’ (p. 42): the visitors which technology moves through this space are part and parcel of the entertainment they enjoy; so their experience is strangely redoubled, as they are both protagonists within and viewers outside. In this connection, they become ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 135) in the biopolitics of the building, because the predetermination of their physical trajectories deprives them of the possibility to generate their own paths and stories. As Jameson contends, the Bonaventure represents the death knell of the ﬂ âneur’s ‘narrative stroll’:

We know in any case that recent architectural theory has begun to borrow from narrative analysis in other fi elds and to attempt to see our physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are asked to fulfi l and to complete with our own bodies and movements. In the Bonaventure, however, we fi nd a dialectical heightening of this process: it seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement [ . . . ]. Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reifi ed and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifi er of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own. (2003, p. 42)

The Bonaventure contemplates only the possibility of being inhabited by virtually immaterial bodies which are both passive objects and active viewers of the architecture-as-spectacle. Towards the end of the 1980s, though, urban projects testify to a ‘return to the bodily analogy by architects as diverse as Coop Himmelblau, Bernard Tschumi, and Daniel Libeskind, all of them concerned to propose a reinscription of the body in their work, as referent and ﬁ gurative inspiration’ (Vidler, 1992, p. 69). Admittedly, since the 1980s architecture has assimilated the results of digital animation into its theories and practices (Peter Eisenman is the most exemplary case), but at the same time:

The body, in its anatomical corporeality, together with all its prosthetic accoutrements, still obstructs total virtuality; architectural space, in its role as a stimulator of mental introjection (memory) and physical and psychical projection (event), still retains its primal power to capture the body. (Vidler, 2007, p. xi) 22 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature We should not fail to notice, though, that bodies are no longer seen as producing space primarily through the rhythms of their everyday or artistic practices, no longer committed to a serene, ludic appropriation of the urban space. Rather, they are ﬁ ghting back on the alienating and disorienting postmodern battleground described by Jameson, the simulacra theo- rized by Baudrillard and the decarnalized virtual spaces of an increasingly digital culture. Symptomatically, corporeality is often presented as in pain or violated, bearing tangible evidence of its traumatic encounter with the powerful energies of the city. If the Situationists conceive the built environment as a landscape of atmospheres and aff ects (that is, mirroring the subject’s psychophysical states rather than its outer appearance), these architects display a diff erent extension of corporeality outside itself, proposing a biomorphic city where the body appears in pieces, fragmented and mutilated. Confronting the architecture of Himmelb(l)au or, less spectacularly, of Tschumi, we feel the integrity of our anatomy is placed under threat and almost eviscerated:

We are contorted, racked, cut, wounded, dissected, intestinally revealed, impaled, immolated; we are suspended in a state of ver- tigo, or thrust into a confusion between belief and perception. It is as if the object actively participated in the subject’s self-dismembering, reﬂ ecting its internal disarray or even precipitating its disaggregation. (Vidler, 1992, pp. 78–79)

As I will argue, Sinclair’s biomorphic urban landscapes of the 1980s and 1990s, whose architectures and natural features often appear as so many body parts, clearly respond to the same Zeitgeist and are symptomatic of the same desire found in Himmelb(l)au to blur the boundaries and merge the body completely with architecture and its context. Such a literal, visceral organicism is akin to similar but less disquieting concepts of the urban and technological landscape found, in the 1960s, in McLuhan’s writings or in the science ﬁ ction utopias of the British avant-garde architectural group Archigram (which believed that modern architecture should be premised upon complete symbiosis with human biology). This tradition is perpetu- ated in Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Beaubourg, where the building is turned inside out, its skeleton made visible with all its guts and nerves exposed to view, displaying a sense of exhibitionism which has never been surpassed, aside from Rogers’s Lloyd’s building (1986; Figure I.2) in Lon- don, perhaps. Truly, the utopianism of these constructions—which are the culmination of Archigram’s city-as-machine—has completely disappeared in Himmelb(l)au’s more uncanny projects. Still, the awareness of this continuity enables us to establish connections between the culture that produces Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which appeared in 1970, and the feel- ings of trauma and abjection which trigger Sinclair’s autopsies of the capital city at the turn of the millennium. Introduction 23

Figure I.2 Richard Rogers, Lloyd’s building, London, 1979–84. Photographed by Andrea Ronconi 2011. Bibliography

Note: Where a ﬁ rst edition is not used, the year of original publication text is indicated in additional parentheses thus: [1999].

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