Review of Beaumont and Dart (eds.), 'Restless Cities' more

Textual Practice 24(6), 2010, 1095 – 1119 Book reviews Matthew Taunton Matthew Beaumont & Gregory Dart (eds.), Restless Cities (London; New York: Verso, 2010), 338 pp., £12.99 (pbk) Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:17 30 November 2010 Recent accounts of metropolitan life – emanating from a number of disciplines – have tended to move away from the emphasis on shock, circulaˆ tion, and flanerie that had long been the established model. The 1980s and 1990s saw a slough of impressive scholarly works that drew heavily on Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Charles Baudelaire. These works followed Benjamin in (sometimes only implicitly) taking Haussmannian Paris as the exemplary instance of the modern city, and the freewheeling ˆ ˆ flaneur (or in a number of important feminist versions, the flaneuse) as its defining inhabitant. One could name T.J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life, Rachel Bowlby’s Feminist Destinations, Marshall Bermann’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Christopher Prendergast’s Paris and the ˆ Nineteenth Century, Keith Tester’s edited collection The Flaneur and Deborah Parsons’s Streetwalking the Metropolis – all great books that taught us much about the city and its literary and artistic forms, but ones that gave a primacy to the experience of walking the city’s streets and squares that has come to seem inordinate. Franco Moretti was strident in his critique of this tendency, arguing that ‘[t]he great novelty of urban life [. . .] does not consist in having thrown people into the street, but in having raked them up and shut them into offices and houses’.1 In a similar vein, work by Sharon Marcus,2 Morag Shiach,3 and myself4 has attempted to shift the focus ˆ away from the flaneur and outdoor phenomena in order to explore the changing realities of indoor inhabitation. Restless Cities collects essays on a variety of themes that testify to the richness and diversity of contemporary thinking about the city, its art and its literature. The title of the collection may seem to tendentiously gesture towards the well-worn view of the metropolis as an endlessly shifting and fluid space populated by itinerant nomads who are buffeted by a Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2010.521676 Textual Practice stream of shocks. Yet many of the essays here try in suggestive ways to move away from this classic account of the city, put forward by Simmel and Benjamin. Chapters are alphabetically arranged and all take a single gerund for their title, from ‘Archiving’ and ‘Bombing’ to ‘Waiting’ and ‘Zigzagging’ – there is more to the city, implicitly, than streetwalking, windowshopping, ˆ and flanerie. The point is made in plain terms by David Trotter in the midst of a compelling essay on the public telephone and its appearances in literature and film. The Romantic view, formulated by Blake, Wordsworth, Baudelaire and others, and still amply evident in urban theory from Benjamin and Simmel to Michel de Certeau, is that urban experience is defined by bewilderment, shock and resistance to shock. They were wrong. (p. 197) Benjamin, Trotter points out, thought that the telephone was shocking ‘because it rang peremptorily and without warning in the depths of the bourgeois home’ (p. 197). He was not interested in the public telephone, which created the possibility of privacy and intimacy in the city’s most public places. Rather than shock, phone booths tend to generate disgust – often at the various bodily residues left by previous users – and tenderness. The Romantic account of the city is wrong because its overwhelming obsession with shock leaves out, in Trotter’s phrase, the possibility of ‘practical affect’. Trotter concludes by suggesting that in the era of the mobile phone, when the porous barrier between public and private is being eroded, the demise of the (albeit urine-soaked) public phone box is to be regretted. Similarly well-researched and thought-provoking is Kasia Boddy’s essay on the phenomenon of the urban pot plant. The choice of object again reveals a polemical intention: ‘pot plants don’t attract much attention from the kind of observer for whom the whole point of city life is to get out of the house and into the pulsating streets as fast as possible’ (p. 213). This kind of observer – one could think of Iain Sinclair, who contributes a florid squib that is one of the weaker points of this collection – might have seemed bottomlessly interesting in 1985: no longer. The history of the geranium, from ‘hothouse exotic’ in 1820 to ‘humble resident of garret windows’ in 1850 (p. 227), is fundamentally one of its domestication, and in Boddy’s hands an excellent lens through which to view the development of the urban home in the Victorian period and up to the present day. The keeping of a window box was held by some in the nineteenth century to have significant benefits for physical and moral health. As Boddy concludes, ‘[t]he Victorian philanthropist’s dream of a Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:17 30 November 2010 1096 Book reviews green-fingered urban feudalism – in which the poor are “like us”, but on a miniature scale – persists into the twenty-first century’ (p. 231). Iain Borden’s essay on ‘Driving’ makes the point that quite apart from pounding the pavements, one of the most important – and modern – ways of experiencing the city is from behind the steering wheel of a car. Wordsworth, no doubt, would have disapproved, but Borden in any case creates an interesting schema for the experience of driving in the city (0 –30 mph), in the countryside (30–55 mph) and on the motorway (55–100 mph). Screened off from the over-theorised habitat of the pedestrian, the urban driver experiences ‘the reduction of city form to a series of signs, billboards and lights’ (p. 103). Mark Turner, then, seems to ˆ reflect the majority view when he writes that the flaneur is ‘a tired figure by now, exhausted surely at having to bear the burden of so many discussions of urban modernity’ (p. 307). ˆ In seeking to displace the flaneur as Benjamin’s ‘heroic figure of modernity’, some of these essays nominate alternative candidates for this role, and Borden’s less Romantic figure of the driver might be thought of as one of these. In Rachel Bowlby’s fascinating essay on ‘Commuting’, she ˆ suggests that ‘[t]he commuter is the city’s antithesis to the flaneur: working not enjoying, conventional not bohemian, a traveller along straight, known lines, not an aimless, curious drifter’ (p. 52). By putting home and work back into the foreground – two things in which the ˆ flaneur was not remotely interested – Bowlby brings her account much closer to the ordinary lives of (sub)urbanites than the essentially Romantic view of the city propounded by Simmel and Benjamin would allow. It may well be that The Diary of a Nobody provides more genuine insight into modern city life than Les Fleurs du mal or Mrs Dalloway, whatever the relative aesthetic merits of these works. Where literary texts are used, as Benjamin used them, as evidence to support certain sociological hypotheses, the choice of texts has considerable scope to skew the results. Matthew Beaumont, meanwhile, makes an unlikely but intriguing case for the ‘convalescent as hero of modernity’ (p. 63). Beaumont’s essay draws on Baudelaire, Poe and de Chirico, demonstrating that the condition of convalescence, poised between sickness and health, holds considerable interest. The convalescent is a particularly perceptive observer of the city, being both ‘painfully sensitive to his environment’ and feeling ‘oddly distanced from it’ (p. 71). The essay may be too ambitious in seeking to place the convalescent at the centre of a new understanding of ˆ urban modernity. By knocking the flaneur off his perch, we have dispensed with one false idol – it would be a pity simply to replace him with another. This goes for commuters, drivers and keepers of geraniums too: this collection is valuable because of the way it reasserts the multiplicity of urban experience, not because it furnishes us with a single unifying theory. Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:17 30 November 2010 1097 Textual Practice Beaumont’s essay raises some interesting questions about the relationships between sickness, health and metropolitan modernity, and one hopes that he will have more to say on the subject. Perhaps inevitably in a collection like this one, there is a certain unevenness in the quality of the contributions. I have outlined the arguments of some of the most interesting essays, and since the faults of the weaker pieces are largely shared in common, they can be dealt with en bloc. Some of the contributions are too predictable in their choice of materials. Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Simmel still loom large and one occasionally feels that familiar examples are trotted out too often. There is also a somewhat narrow and predictable range of cities under discussion, generally drawn from North America and Western Europe, with cities in Asia, Africa, and South America largely left out. At a moment in history when the most profound upheavals of contemporary urban life are more likely to be found in Lagos, Beijing. or Mexico City than in Paris, New York, or London, it would have been interesting to broaden the collection’s geographical coverage. Many of the essays are heavily autobiographical. This sometimes works quite well, as when – in ‘Inhabiting’ – Geoff Dyer analyses his own faintly neurotic desire to create habits and routines in strange cities, usually revolving around coffee and donuts. But the autobiographical essays do sometimes strike a hollow note, when authors’ memories of whichever decrepit and suitably bohemian area they used to inhabit in the 1970s seem merely nostalgic. As Michael Newton complains: ‘The scaffolding went up; the builders moved in; the shambolic and tatty were banished’ (p. 190). So it is the relentless march of gentrification that is to blame. There is, doubtless, truth in that. But in this and other cases the attempt to describe a social historical trend through prism of the author’s adventures on the property ladder is suggestive without producing the hard-biting analysis that the subject seems to demand. This book points to a number of social problems in the contemporary city, problems that are not fully and squarely addressed, partly for disciplinary reasons. Urban studies occupy an ambiguous position between several disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and while some of that diversity is represented here, the focus is predominantly literary. I offer this as an observation rather than a criticism. If there is an obvious methodological problem with quoting a Baudelaire poem as evidence for some general hypothesis about Parisian life in the nineteenth century, ¨ then it would be naıve to assume that the ‘harder’ forms of urban studies, with their statistics and case studies, are not plagued by methodological problems of their own. Nevertheless, it might have been interesting to have more contributions from social scientists friendly to a ‘cultural’ approach. The Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:17 30 November 2010 1098 Book reviews Downloaded By: [Open University Library] At: 09:17 30 November 2010 contemporary architect Rem Koolhaas has undertaken some serious and provocative research that addresses the themes of sprawl and gentrification in a way that seeks not only to diagnose social problems, but also to suggest practical solutions. Similarly, the work of sociologists such as David Harvey, Manuel Castells or Richard Sennett might have been addressed. Marshall Berman is perhaps the only contributor to this volume who could be put in this social science bracket, and his essay is one of the most incisive in its analysis of the causes of urban decay as well as its imagery. Discussing the Bronx, where he grew up, he explores the effects of Robert Moses’s highways on the social and cultural life of the neighbourhoods they cut through. He also praises the housing renewal schemes of mayor Edward Koch in the 1980s and 1990s, which have seen the wasteland that was the Bronx return to something resembling normal life, ‘a perfect example of the liberal Welfare State at its best’ (p. 136). Restless Cities provides an excellent snapshot of contemporary thinking about urban life, and its editors are to be applauded for a diverse and provocative selection. The best of these essays are engagingly written, scholarly but accessible, and they suggest interesting directions for future research. Queen Mary, University of London 2010 # Matthew Taunton Notes 1 Franco Moretti, ‘Homo Palpitans: Balzac’s Novels and Urban Personality’ in Signs Taken for Wonders. (London: Verso, 2005), p. 127. 2 Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 3 Morag Shiach, ‘Modernism, the City and the Domestic Interior’ in Home Cultures 2:3 (2005), pp. 251 – 268. 4 Matthew Taunton, Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). Eli Park Sorensen Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), xiv + 295 pp., $24.95 (pbk) In a roundtable discussion published a few years ago in the journal PMLA, Simon Gikandi argues that it is a ‘universally acknowledged fact that many of the critics who are unhappy with the postcolonial theory point to its failure to account for the foundational literary texts of the colonial 1099