In structuralism a structure is conceived as possessing a centre, a fundamental ground, which supposedly explains everything about that structure, that totality, that phenomenon; the centre might be an arche, a claimed origin that everywhere unfolds, or a telos a presumed destination that the structure, the phenomenon, is heading towards. This centre is usually itself left unexplained as if it is beyond the structure it’s in, so that the centre is both in the structure yet not in it. The centre is not a centre. The centre governs the structure, but is itself beyond the play of meanings of ‘repetitions, substitutions, transformations, and permutations’ involved in a fuller history of meaning. The centre maintains the structure as enclosed totality, as if it contains or exhausts all the meanings we can attribute to that structure.   Docker 132

Diaspar is a fallacy. The concept of having an overriding purpose, goal or aim to a society is a large part of The City and the Stars, given the sizable similarities between Diaspar and a machine, but what is the machine producing?  Diaspar is a complex system interweaving human and machine functions, what is that ultimate prize that Diaspar is heading towards?  Structuralism speaks of bringing out a process, a simulacra in an object that is previously invisible.  In this way, the function precedes the substance. 

“Diaspar and its inhabitants had been designed as part of one master plan” (Ch 5), a central structure to the society, the preservation of the pinnacle of genius and intellect of all of humanity.  The atomized singular units of Diaspar hold no larger ideas of life in Diaspar, but singularly carry out their task of intimately and infinitely exploring the insulated and continuous algorithm of Diaspar.  The people of Diaspar are cogs to a phantasmatic production.

The citizens of Diaspar are ignorant toward the purpose of their existence, but their blind faith in the continual function speaks to the importance of function over substance. Details are inconsequential as long as life remains contained and perpetual, “Diaspar is a frozen culture, which cannot change outside of narrow limits…they store the image of the city itself, holding its every atom rigid against all the changes that time can bring” (Ch 5).  Alvin’s great curiosity and quest is the search for this purpose of survival, the central goal of Diaspar that has supposedly written into the computer’s programming by the creators.

 Alvin crushes the totalizing and central perception of the people of Diaspar by the discovery of Lys, the exploration of old civilizations and of Vanamonde.  The unacknowledged function of their society has no substance.  Their claimed origin of the elite genius of mankind has been devastated along with the trust in a presumed destination.  Diaspar has no explainable purpose or structure. They are not the great intrepid pioneers, the centre and prize of humanity they thought they were, but rather the enfeebled diaspora of a society destroyed by its own hubris. 

             The initial world of Diaspar of infinite exploration of intimate knowledge was fixed and comfortably simple, but once the bubble was burst the universe is seen as “without end, unconfirmed, unreduced, unfinalised, untotalised, not continuous, not linear, where truth in never arrived at, is always involved in a play of differences that keep deferring its arrival, its full presence” (Docker 133), chaotic.

            The comfortable, wrapped with a memory bank stored bow perception of structuralism dissolves, the centre cannot hold, instead a universe without overarching goals and fundamental grounding purposes remains, seen in the last words of the novel:

In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening toward an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again. Ch 25

John Docker. Postmodernism and popular culture: a cultural history. London: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 132-3.

Image from the film Empire by Andy Warhol

It was suggested, that in Clarke’s City and the Stars we were allowed clear insight into the nature of the city only after moving outside that space and looking down on it. This is most certainly true and from that perspective we all (characters and readers) could see the lines and curves, the barriers and openings, the actual and once imagined of the world in which many lived. Diaspora was not what it had once seemed and we were able to explore its nature with new clarity.

Perhaps the perspective that Ballard gives is essentially the opposite (but with just as illuminating results). It seems that in The Atrocity Exhibition what we are given is a view of our world not from the outside in, but from the inside out. It is as though the author has dragged us deep inside the body of humanity and has forced us to push our senses out through the filters of the flesh. This is not a warm and soft place to be. “The inner world of the psyche…images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself” (Ballard 38).

Everything changes when we are held tight inside the body and forced to perceive. This is not a static brace that holds the revelations of discovery, it is a razor wire that drags us terrified and exhilarated from one experience to the next – and then back again. Repeat.

Big Bang Vroom by Kristin Baker

From within the twisting body Ballard makes us witnesses to his unfortunate truths: “the larger ambiguities to which the modern world was so eager to give birth, and its finish line was that death of affect, the lack of feeling, which seemed inseparable from the communications landscape” (Ballard 60).

Looking at our world through the defining filters of psychosis is a powerful and specific technique for examining the tangents of reality and fantasy. This is one very forceful approach demanding that: “the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality” (Ballard 75).

Is it effective? Do the pulses of cruelty and passion allow glimpses into the heart of the world in which we live?

I believe that this push of the novel works to lighten up the shadows in the corners. With it we can move to the darker, hard-to-get-to places of human nature/society and feel our way around the areas of intention, sexuality and place.

Image from the film Elephant

Works Cited:

Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. Flamingo Press: Great Britain, 1993.

Photo Sources:

http://gaynz.com

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk

http://4.bp.blogspot.com

Cities of Memory, Cities of Glass: A Response to Three Fictive Cities

“Cities of Memory, Cities of Glass, I have thought these thoughts and read these works in a sequence of spaces mediated by constructed structures, interpolating their envisioned environments through my own spatially situated self (see contemporary theories of situated cognition). The glass window of the city bus, the sunset’s reflection off West End apartments and office towers.”

Zamyatin’s seminal dystopian novel We is simultaneously the story of a man and a city, and pivotally it is the mediating material between these two which defines their dynamic interrelation. The city is composed almost entirely of glass, glass which exposes all, revealing and uniting spectrally as it divides and delimits. The predilection of progress is that the better we become at holing ourselves in, the more we engineer these structures to reveal or display its interiors and ourselves. Zamyatin’s vision is fixed in the near enough future he so presciently presaged, it is universal and sociological in scope, and it is reminiscent of nothing more than Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon. In an environment where one’s every action may be monitored, enforcement becomes unnecessary as paranoia becomes dominant. This is precisely the world Zamyatin evokes, as his OneState allows only the briefest moments of privacy for controlled sexual relations, as well as two unscheduled hours per day, which D-503, the protagonist, hopes will one day be phased out. Through the contrivances of architecture and materials, the subject becomes the dictator.

“Coast Mountains whose carpet of canopy stretches the eyes enviously to the horizon, and glimpses across the water of leering towers whose dense lights glow in the distance and resonate through my many years’ recollections of this place. On the hills of North Vancouver, where these two views compete and meet, I’ve thought long of what it means to live in a place and transform the earth into inhabited space. “

On the other hand, the dystopia which Clarke presents in City and the Stars is not so much a nightmare of the state or city, but of the human soul when granted infinite capacity. Clarke describes the city with palpable infatuation, marveling at its virtuality, its imaginative mutability, and a projectability of self into electronic avatars which clearly prefigures the Internet of today. The dystopian edge becomes evident not in the city itself, but in its uses. Diaspar is built on terrified falsehood, it is the refuge of a people who have turned their back on outer space and buried themselves in an endless cycle of static, and perhaps stagnant, lives. Though they appear to enjoy a sort of immortality, and it is said that the city cycles its citizens such that the possible permutations of experience are infinite, the inhabitants of Diaspar may also edit their memories before returning to the memory banks of the city, which themselves are held in triplicate, so that while the design and contents of the city may appear limitless and eternal, in fact the structure of the city fosters a permanent ignorance and incuriosity of the broader world. Architecture, the engineering of space, is supposed to be a constructive act, a positive creation working towards a goal of comfort and betterment. But in setting his city one billion years in the future as he does, Clarke highlights the pitfall of civilization, that our technological freedoms might in fact tether our minds, and that total control over memory might prove the greatest means of forgetting.

“And in this place, where my grandfather built his home out of river rock and cedar, I have watched the wave of history peak and break, as the future subsumed the present just as it danced nimbly away, an impossible dream of another time. Peak oil has replaced the jet car, and the Jetsons has faded to childhood folly, as LCD screens and tiny white earbuds quietly supersede tangible constructions in favour of virtual spaces we can’t yet fully imagine. The faces of a thousand strangers whip by mine as I transit this urban environment, billboards and giant televisions heralding the victory march of lust and loneliness and a thousand expensive new tomorrows. There is comfort in the prescience of speculative writers of the past, but their penchant for the dystopic is a warning that progress, if it can be said to occur, is perhaps more a negative process of eliminating undesirable potentialities rather than a fostering of particular outcomes or intentions.”

J. G. Ballard’s later works, beginning with the notable eruption that is Atrocity Exhibition, are an exemplary pinnacle of the urban and architectural themes heretofore encountered in this survey, where the controlling and unifying transparency of materials embodied in glass architecture becomes the total erosion of any delineation between inner and outer space, and the immutable collective memory which Diaspar embodies becomes a horrifying diorama of the indigestible traumas of the past. The novel represents the collapse of all traditional dichotomies and distinctions, it is the unification of Freud’s erotic and thanatotic drives, our twin fascinations with life and death, creation and destruction, fused in an impossible hybrid which effects Baudrillard’s philosophy of the hyperreal. Baudrillard says “we are witnessing the reduction and absorption of this distance [between the real and the imaginary], of this separation which permits a space for ideal or critical projection.” (“Simulacra and Science Fiction“) Ballard’s protagonist, the mutable T, is held captive by this erasure of distance, he is powerless to shield his ravaged emotional core from the grotesque imagery which dominates the landscape and imagination of his world. Denied the space for critical thought, T is held helpless, unemancipated of imaginative agency. Ballard was responding to the emergence of mass media as the ultimate arbiter of reality in the mid 20^th Century, and in the fashion of the well-meaning doomsayer, he accurately extrapolates the technological trends of his day to exaggeratedly explode into a nightmare of the inevitable. Although the limited scope of recycled traumas (JFK, Marilyn Monroe, classic automobiles and Ronald Reagan) might seem quaint today, the Atrocity Exhibition and the hyppereality it entails is the future which is already here, and the only optimism of Ballard’s prophesy is that we can recognize this future which stares us in the face, that we might accept our present in the act of imagining a new future city.

In Ballard’s novel High-Rise, he writes, “She referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling — the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurons of a brain” (1975, 40). 

          Ballard’s imagery dissolves the distinction between the interior/exterior and organic/inorganic. Mental and bodily inner-workings become superimposed upon the (built)landscape and vice-versa. This way of thinking about the contemporary human experience leads one directly to the concept of the cyborg. According to Donna Haraway, the cyborg is a hybrid creature “compounded of special kinds of machines and special kinds of organisms appropriate to the late twentieth century” (Gandy 27). In an age of “dematerialization … driven by the spread of informatics, increased capital mobility and the fracturing of place-bound identities”, the human experience has increasingly extended itself into new spaces of digital/virtual realms (Gandy 35).

       The rapid co-evolution between social and technological systems produces new relationships with the built environment described as “cognitive scaffolding” and “distributed cognition”. Cognitive scaffolding refers to the short-cuts minds use when relying on the external environment to subsidize the processing of information; paper and pencil as external calculators, cellphones as memory, landmarks as distance signifiers, and subway color schemes as orientation devices. The concept of “distributed cognition” builds on these subsidizing mechanisms and represents a more radical environment where the boundaries between sentience and non-sentience is broken down as human agency becomes obscured by the myriad networks of information being processed by teams of organic/inorganic systems. On an individual level, such distributed cognition happens with the increasing prevalence of wearable computers, sensory augmentation, wireless devices, and thought-controlled prosthetics. At the urban scale, distributed cognition is exemplified in an early stage by characteristics of post-industrial global cities, where a traditional utilization of material exchange has become supplanted by the information exchange. The driving processes in cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo is the knowledge sector, composed of highly specialized services such as finance, insurance, real-estate, and law firms. Such cities are command points for the organization of the global economy and their very success depends on their extensive and autonomous integration with global markets in the form of digitized financial information.

Whats interesting to me is the uneven and patchwork nature of the trajectories of the urban/mind/tech hybrids. The wider landscape of material neglect and social polarization which characterize post-industrial urban spaces reveals the intrinsic social forces of unequal power relations, marginal spaces, violence, and social exclusion which shape the way urban and technological progress unfolds. This unevenness is important to note when exploring the suggestive tomorrows painted by techno-futurists, as the undifferentiated “we” of futurist urban literature overlooks the infrastructural crisis of a billion plus people living in slums. The cyborg concept produces useful insights into cities as components in a global-hierarchical information system and urban dwellers as technologically-enhanced urban citizens, and these insights should be seen as grounded in the geographical particularities of places. In this light, the cyborg concept helps illustrate “the hybridized socio-ecological relations that underpin the production of space” (Gandy 37). These hybridized relationships are producing vastly disparate spaces across the world, fostering unique trajectories in the evolution of the human psyche which may fracture across familiar socio-economic divides. The notion of a breakthrough in the body-technology nexus propelling humanity into a post-human realm becomes more of a question for who and where?

Works Cited: 

Ballard, J.G. (1975) High-rise. Cape, London. 

Gandy, Matthew (2005) “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and the Monstrosity in the Contemporary City”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol 29.1 (26-49)