Postmodern Cities and Spaces by Sophie Watson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
At the onset, this collection of essays takes the point of postmodernism for granted, in order to avoid evaluation of the term and jump right into the meat of the matter.
Considering that people often have a difficult time discerning what postmodernism is, it comes as both no surprise that these essays approach the matter from multiple points of view, in as much as it comes as a delightful surprise.
The tactful conclusion this collection reaches is that postmodernism destroys boundaries in as much as it secures them. Sound like a contradiction? The “classical” modernist view, that things are objectively what they are no matter how you look at them, remains a ghost in postmodern studies such that we always refer to what is different in postmodernism… to find the orderless and impose order. Nonetheless, a grand narrative of sorts exist as social boundaries align along a multitude of dimensions, overcoding and re-writing each other.
In the new conceptualization of identity politics the old binary oppositions of class and gender and race are disrupted and dispersed, and new formations and alliances come together in different forms to erupt in new places and new forms. Instead of assuming single subject positions and identities which shift and change all the time.
Ultimately postmodern cities exist because people are postmodern, existing differently depending on who is looking, or what criteria is using used. Of course, this leads us directly into Badiou’s anti-philosophy or Baudrillard’s “lost referential” created by the disclosure of simulacra. In postmodern discourse, we attempt to find the metaphysics of presence, that elusive center that grounds a discourse in reality, so we can safely say, this is official: this is what something means… from this truth we can start to build an objective truth.
Of course, this central position is impossible… metaphysics of presence disappears when we examine one area, as it seems to be slightly off elsewhere… so we chase that bird and end up running in circles. Only in postmodern discourse, going in one direction doesn’t mean you can return to where you came from if you simply reverse vector, as objects of knowledge can only exist through the structured filter of the place you are currently at… other places will be structured differently; under different constraints.
I rather enjoyed the analysis of different cities, different spaces and different gazes… each of which was grounded by the authors historically, only to be partially dissolved when present day is reached. In each “microhistory” we see the effects of politics, economics and culture (among other things, like race, sex, religion and so on) overcoding various areas to question other discourses. The flux of determinable meaning becomes embedded in the everyday reality of a postmodern gaze/space/city. While the overall classical hierarchy appears to vaguely exist (rich people live here, poor people live here, industry is here or there) the overlapping sectors seem to be what determine postmodernism… the fluidity of capital (or the lack of it) within a city seems to be one of the key ways in which a city comes to unknow itself, as it constantly struggles to synthesize standard relations between its different parts. In particular, the essay on Bombay, the essays on heteropologies, discourse, the essay on walls, and the essay on flaneur and gazes seemed to tie the topics coherently for me. This isn’t to say the other essays aren’t interesting either.
All in all, this is an interesting if fragmentary look on postmodern cities. A good place to start. Of course there are plenty of other books on the subject. But if you pick a different author, from a different school, with a different view of social reality, then you will be bound to come to another specific conclusion… and it is this motley of conclusions which is rightly bundled as postmodern.
