Abstract
This paper reveals the theoretical basis of everyday space as a performative dy- namic in which thematic significance is poetically created. Building upon the observa- tions of Marc Augé (1986), Rita Felski (2000), and Ben Highmore (2002) it analyses the everydayness of urban “non-places». Addressing the urban fictions of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and Liu Yichang’s Duidao 對倒 (1972; in English as Intersection 1988;
French as Tête-bêche 1991), the paper focuses upon how thematic agency is released across two separate tendencies, the vertical and the horizontal. Further, the essay en- gages notions from performance theory as a means of comprehending the dynamic aspects of such spaces as performative sites, ongoing spatial constructions which pro- duce affective and thematic contents beyond their textual constraints. As a final move, the essay sets out urban space as an ecology of transfers between individuals and their urban environments.
Résumé
Cet essai révèle la base théorique de l’espace quotidien comme dynamique per- formative qui permet à une nouvelle signification poétique d’émerger. S’appuyant sur les observations de Marc Augé (1986), de Rita Felski (2000), et de Ben Highmore (2002), l’article se penche sur le quotidien du milieu urbain. Se servant de fiction urbaine comme celles de Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis 2003), et de Liu Yichang (Tête-bêche 1991), l’étude se concentre sur comment une nouvelle thématique fait surface à partir de deux tendances séparées: le vertical et l’horizontal. De plus, cet essai emprunte des idées à la théorie de performance afin de faciliter la compréhension des aspects dynamiques de tels espaces comme sites performatifs, lesquels produisent des conte- nus affectif et thématique au-delà de leurs contraintes textuelles. Enfin, l’essai expose l’espace de la ville comme une écologie de transferts entre l’individu et son environ- nement urbain.
Mark D
egganThat Unremarkable Axis
Everyday Space and the Discourse of Verticality
To refer to this article:
Mark Deggan, “Everyday Space and the Discourse of Verticality”, in: Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 13, “Space and Every Day Life. Transformations
Geneviève Fabry (UCL) Anke gilleir (KU Leuven) Agnès guiDerDoni (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin De graeF (Ku leuven) Jan Herman (KU Leuven) Guido latré (UCL) Nadia lie (KU Leuven)
Michel lisse (FNRS – UCL) Anneleen masscHelein (KU Leuven) Christophe meurée (FNRS – UCL) Reine meylaerts (KU Leuven) Stéphanie vanasten (FNRS – UCL) Bart vanDen boscHe (KU Leuven) Marc van vaecK (KU Leuven)
Olivier ammour-mayeur (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -–
Paris III & Université Toulouse II – Le Mirail) Ingo berensmeyer (Universität Giessen)
Lars bernaerts (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Faith bincKes (Worcester College – Oxford)
Philiep bossier (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Franca bruera (Università di Torino)
Àlvaro ceballos viro (Université de Liège) Christian cHelebourg (Université de Lorraine) Edoardo costaDura (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Nicola creigHton (Queen’s University Belfast) William M. DecKer (Oklahoma State University) Ben De bruyn (Maastricht University)
Dirk Delabastita (Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix – Namur)
Michel Delville (Université de Liège)
César Dominguez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella
& King’s College)
Gillis Dorleijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Ute HeiDmann (Université de Lausanne)
Klaus H. KieFer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) Michael KolHauer (Université de Savoie)
Isabelle KrzywKowsKi (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III) Sofiane lagHouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) François lecercle (Université Paris Sorbonne – Paris IV) Ilse logie (Universiteit Gent)
Marc mauFort (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Isabelle meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles) Christina morin (University of Limerick) Miguel norbartubarri (Universiteit Antwerpen) Andréa oberHuber (Université de Montréal)
Jan oosterHolt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) Maïté snauwaert (University of Alberta – Edmonton) Pieter Verstraeten ((Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
ConseilDeréDaCtion – reDaCtieraaD
David martens (KU Leuven & UCL) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur
Matthieu sergier (UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis), Laurence van nuijs (FWO – KU Leuven), Guillaume Willem (KU Leuven) – Secrétaires de rédaction - Redactiesecretarissen
Elke D’HoKer (KU Leuven)
Lieven D’Hulst (KU Leuven – Kortrijk) Hubert rolanD (FNRS – UCL)
Myriam wattHee-Delmotte (FNRS – UCL)
Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KU Leuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331
B 3000 Leuven (Belgium)
ComitésCientifique – WetensChappelijkComité
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hatu
nremarkablea
xisEveryday Space and the Discourse of Verticality
Since Walter Benjamin’s contemplation of the empty street scenes in Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris, everyday urban spaces have been rendered prob- lematic as loci of significance, or to use Benjamin’s word, sites of aura. Famously for Benjamin, the photographer ‘looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift, and thus such pictures work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they pump the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship’. Here the denuded streets of the urban world, are ‘not lonely, merely without mood’, but
‘the city in these pictures looks cleared out’.1 More recently, everyday places such as those captured by Atget have been seen not only as openings for capitalist system- ization, but lacunae in which the ‘cleared out’ aspects of everyday urban existence give way to the speculative presencing of mundane otherness. Concerning this lat- Concerning this lat- ter category, the present paper develops an exploratory ecology of everyday urban space with regard to two famously vertical cities, 1970s Hong Kong and present- day New York. It concentrates upon the ways in which literary artists make use of the horizontal and vertical trajectories of lived experience as framed by the physical environment of urban settings. Further, by asking in what ways everyday city spaces can be made to appear affectively and thematically performative, the paper reveals the process by which significance is created at precisely those points at which repre- sentation and enunciation fail to transcend the everyday realm. The primary modus of this paper is thus aesthetic and literary rather than theoretical, aiming to ground notions of everyday space in the poetic means by which fictional texts explore the meaningfulness of the mundane.
But I have another objective as well, and this is to complicate the idea that everyday urban space might be no more than another “all purpose” structure of theoretically directed significance, a hook upon which scholarly readers can hang a broad array of conceptual tags. In the introduction to her edited collection, “Eve- ryday Life”, Rita Felski acknowledges how the everyday has been “hailed as an escape route from the rarefied realm of abstract ideas and esoteric knowledge, but [may] ensconce us ever more firmly in that same realm”.2 Felski cites Lefebvre’s assertion that “a philosophical inventory and analysis of everyday life [will] expose its ambiguities – its baseness and exuberance, its poverty and fruitfulness – and by these unorthodox means release the creative energies that are an integral part of it”.3 Unlike the more obviously theoretical explorations of several of the essays
1. Walter benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2; 1927-1934, Michael W. jennings (ed.), Cam- bridge, Harvard UP, 1999, 518-519.
2. New Literary History, vol. 33, n° 4, Autumn 2002, 607.
3. See Henri leFebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha RabinovitcH, New Brunswick N.J., 1984, 13, quoted in Rita FelsKi, 607.
in her collection, Felski underlines the “aesthetic encounter” where this “pivots around moments of world-disclosing rupture and shock that are contrasted to the homogeneous and soul-destroying routines of daily life” (608). An aesthetic focus is no less present in Rey Chow’s article from the collection, for whom “it is per- haps less interesting simply to unravel the argumentative pros and cons around the everyday as such than to consider specific uses of the everyday in representa- tional practices”.4 Rather than rehearsing the insights into the spatial conditions of the everyday developed by writers including, though by no means limited to Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, and Marc Augé, the present paper recognizes how through comprehending how tropes of “everyday” space operate in artistic discourse, we position ourselves to comprehend how such spaces are to be ap- proached both as bearers of significance, and an urban ecology unfolding along different orientational axes.
Ecology, here, does not reflect the presence of natural phenomena in the every- day flows and boundaries of the city, though such a thesis could certainly be upheld.
Rather, with Timothy Morton, it responds to urban spaces as no longer structured around “the metaphysical illusion of rigid, narrow boundaries between inside and outside”, city and country.5 Further, the ecological can be read as a poetics in which the human and one’s environment exist not just in symbiosis, but as a synergetic exchange, altering and fomenting discourses of self and place. The spatial aspects of this equation are key. As Morton elsewhere states, ‘‘[w]ithout space, without environment, without world, objects and their sensual effects crowd together like leering figures in a masquerade’’.6 Here I do not intend to draw the literary poetics of the urban everyday into relation with what that author calls the ‘vast nonlocal mesh’ of phenomena, human or otherwise, but to see the extent to which fictional texts make use of the vertical axis of figuration as a means both of defamiliarizing fictional settings, and of suggesting how such settings impinge upon (“crowd”) the centres of consciousness imagined there. 7 In this sense, then, I hope to raise an urban ecology of the everyday with respect to the nonplaces of city fiction. Whilst Augé has defined “non-places” in textual terms, as the “link between individuals and their surroundings [as] established through the mediation of words” (94), I have a different impetus; for where that author sees that the “space of non-places creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude” (103), I see literary depictions of non-places not only as potential sites of defamiliarization, but poiesis. This is not to disavow non-places as spaces “which cannot be defined
4. Rey cHow, “Sentimental Returns: On the Uses of the Everyday in the Recent Films of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai”, in: New Literary History, vol. 33, n° 4, Autumn 2002, 639.
5. See: Timothy morton, The Ecological Thought, Cambridge MS, Harvard University Press, 2010, 39. This work remains a standard text for tracing the connectivities between human discourse and natural phenomena.
6. Timothy morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, Ann Arbor, MPublishing, Univer-MPublishing, Univer- sity of Michigan Library, 2013, 19.
7. Morton’s reflections are part of his work on ‘hyperobjects’, with reference to which, ‘[n]
onlocality means that “Here” and “there” are superficial labels. Thus “myself,” located here and now in spacetime, is a rather abstract generalization, like “weather” as opposed to “climate.” In truth, then, we are “in” something (if “in” has any meaning here) that has no center or edge’ (10- 11). See “Materialism Expanded and Remixed,” presented at the “New Materialisms Conference”, Johns Hopkins University, April 13.04.2010. Hyperobjects are described as “objects that are massively distributed in time and space”, for which “global warming” is a prime example: e.g. http://ecology- withoutnature.blogspot.ca/2010/10/hyperobjects-are-viscous.html. Despite the figurative potential of the nonlocal with respect to everyday space, the terms by which urban ecologies and the nonlocal might be theorized together (versus, say, “the mesh”) are beyond my present scope.
as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (77-78), but to suggest how literary understandings of such spaces are inflected by the orientational axes by which they are described.
As we are about to see, whilst both the horizontal and vertical are woven into the scenarios of my two target texts, it is the vertical that I see being most receptive to the epiphanic experiences of fictional characters. While I note no pre-existing aesthetic or theoretical model for the affective and thematic fallouts of verticality in novels, in it may be stated that another of my goals has been to explore whether such analysis extends into global settings, hence my focusing on Chinese and Eng- lish literary fictions in which representations of consciousness are built around distinct urban contexts, Liu Yichang’s 1972 對倒, or Duidao, and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003).8
One of the clearest features borne out by Nancy Li’s 1988 English translation of Liu’s novella, entitled Intersection, is the convergence of disparate human trajecto- ries across urban Hong Kong. The text’s opening lines quietly underline the direc- tional thrust of the story’s two protagonists. We meet an elderly man, Chunyu Bai, entering the Cross Harbour Tunnel aboard a bus, while a much younger woman, Ah Xing, descends the rotting staircase of a building in Kowloon (84). Chunyu Bai is more adventurous in his peregrinations, and, as a male, more socially enabled, yet his thoughts rarely climb or descend the realm of fantasy as do the young woman’s, but cross the temporal planes of the city, so linking his own past to the changing surfaces of Hong Kong’s urban fabric. Typical of this pattern, the sometimes banal stream of Chunyu Bai’s reflections, allowing Liu to weave his character’s thoughts into the generic details of transit routes, street scenes, and “cross-harbour” convey- ances (85). In distinction to the horizontal plane of Chunyu Bai’s passage through the city, Ah Xing’s reflections tend to be stymied by her level gaze, as where her musing are deflected by shop windows that “suddenly became opaque and turned into a mirror” (86). In fact, it is Ah Xing’s inability to find an acceptable reality in the sphere of the everyday that results in her seeking solace in solipsistic reveries that are not only maps of social ascent beyond the details of her existence, but, as we shall see, vertically inaugurated fantasies in which non-places are transformed in order to sustain the life of the imagination, a process paralleled where Ah Xing’s public excursions increasingly abdicate to the upward trajectory of her reflections.
Often these narrative transitions are theatrically inaugurated, as where eve- ryday domestic or commercial surfaces are converted, as by shifting screens, into virtual worlds of fantasy. These fantasies are most powerfully set in motion where Ah Xing’s imaginings are theatricalized, her eyes once more “glued to the ceiling, where the circular beam of a spotlight suddenly appeared” (93), or where “[t]he scenery on the ceiling changed suddenly, like the sets in a play” (94). Such theatrical- ity is seen as a link between the play of interiority and the urban spaces sustaining and altering them. Following Chunyu Bai’s attention to the “street scene mov[ing]
before his eyes like a revolving stage in a theatre”, we are immediately reminded how “the only place to build is up” (99), as though the locus of the self is being synaesthetically replicated via “tower blocks put up” (100). The recourse to theatre
8. The editions used for this paper are, Liu yicHang, “Intersection”, translated by Nancy LI, in: Renditions 29-30, Spring and Autumn 1988, 84-101; and Don Delillo, Cosmopolis, New York, Scribner, 2003. Liu’s text has appeared as a novel, short story, and in the present version, a novella.
and, increasingly, to film is also used to parody of the reproductive excess of the market.9 Ah Xing might fantasize how “the ceiling was a screen” connected to the
“screens of a hundred cinemas at the same time”, but it is also the means by which
“[s]he saw ten of herself. She saw a hundred of herself ” (94).
Such multiplications of identity are not dissimilar to the production of finan- cial surplus found elsewhere in the text, with the proviso that like the consumer dis- plays in Intersection, or, indeed, the financial screen-indicators in Cosmopolis, Ah Xing’s projections of wealth are figured along a horizontal axis: the self-seeking individual may reach upwards like the urban landscapes of modernity, but in the everyday, such multiplicity tends to tilt sideways into the horizontal and reproductive noth- ingness of endless substitution.10 DeLillo is no less adept at such manoeuvres. Late in the novel DeLillo’s financier protagonist, Eric Packer, stumbles onto a film set where he sees “the elements of the scene in preparation” while the moment being screened remains unknown, “hard to credit in a place of ordinary human transit”
(172): “Of course there was a context. Someone was making a movie. But this was just a frame of reference” (172-173). The context is itself banal, an everyday pro- cess of “frame” construction and meaning in an “ordinary” commercialized space.
By contrast to DeLillo’s more gothic sensibility, Liu’s management of these trajectories is as understated as it is ubiquitous, as where the otherwise undifferenti- ated horizontal slots of commercial development produces its own stream of foca- lization: “Next to the photographer’s studio was a toy shop; next to the toy shop was an optician’s shop; next to the optician’s shop was the gold and jewellery shop”
and so on (87), each space next to another just as some future boyfriend would take Ah Xing walking “this way in the street or in the park or in the countryside” (89).
The places of the everyday might align themselves across the streets and rooms of the city, but jouissance finds a more performative means of ascent. Thus even while the text’s spaces are animated through the shifting lenses of Liu’s free indirect discourse, the vertical onrush of the urban landscape comes to reflect both the young woman’s solipsistic release and a possibly threatening new economic order wherein a new building goes up wherever “East meets West” (100). Against this figuration, Hong Kong’s geographic breadth continues to be cited with regard to the continuity or blockage of more concrete human engagements, stagings enacted via Chunyu Bai’s glances out of bus windows (85), or out of the regularity of Ah Xing’s daily experiences across a known landscape in which, unlike the theatrical or cinematic scenes playing out above her head, “everything which unfolded before her eyes was familiar to her” (85).
So, too, the novella’s vertical scenographies are not just Ah Xing’s prerogative, but extend from the simultaneity of events in Liu’s text as a whole. Blowing “smoke rings towards the ceiling” whilst Ah Xing imagines newspaper cover-photographs of herself upon her own ceiling, we are told how the latter undergoes sensations akin to “the experience of getting drunk” just as “[s]ome trivial events, all deeply
9. Cosmopolis 13, 22, 25, and so on.
10. Similarly, Lefebvre writes of the “[c]onsuming of displays, displays of consuming” against Similarly, Lefebvre writes of the “[c]onsuming of displays, displays of consuming” against the ‘consuming of signs and signs of consuming’ (Everyday Life 108). Unlike the pre-digital “marks”
on the page fetishized by Packer in Cosmopolis, the “signs” and consumer “displays” by which Lefe- bvre charts the circuitry of modern urban existence endlessly offer “another self-destructive twist, at the level of the everyday”. See Mark Poster “Everyday (Virtual) Life”, in: Rita FelsKi (ed.), New Literary History, vol. 33, n° 4, Autumn 2002, 743-760.
buried, would emerge from [Chunyu Bai’s] store of memories and flash across his mind from sparks of fire” (94). At such junctures the fictional text begins to imply, as Felski words it, the point where “the all too prosaic must be made to reveal its hidden subversive poetry” (ibid. 609). Felski might be describing surrealist calls to wrest significance from ordinary experience, but in Liu’s handling, the potential for subversiveness becomes gently ironized through the bootless banality of his cha- racters’ sexual fantasies, “sparks of fire” failing to ignite a corresponding social awa- reness. At the close of the text, for instance, scenes of mental escape extend from each protagonist having fantasized over “a Mandarin movie on television”, from which scenario a generic “side by side” world emerges in which Chunyu Bai “didn’t know what kind of place it was” while Ah Xing’s room appeared suddenly pink and wall-less, a joint non-place occasioning no release from the urban reality (101).
Despite its jauntier style and topical subject matter, Cosmopolis operates along similar lines as Liu’s Hong Kong novella. Ostensibly tracking a billionaire asset manager’s venture across Manhattan by car, DeLillo’s fourteenth novel explores the collusion of consciousness, virtuality, and the opposing lines of urban movement and architectural elevation. Like Intersection, too, the city being traversed is revealed through the banality of its flows and interchanges. The novel’s narrative centre, Packer, is found “crossing the city” like one of its many “bread vans” solely for the routine prospect of getting a haircut (6-7), yet while for much of the novel Packer does no more than consort with the advisors, staff, and women who join him on his apparently ordinary quest, this everyday movement across urban space is not wit- hout its profound aspect: “The noblest thing, a bridge across a river, with the sun beginning to roar behind it” (7). These markings of nature’s strength quickly gives way to Packer’s vertically charged sense of being “contiguous” with the “undistin- guished sheath” of the tower in which he lives: the “one virtue” of the surface of this “commonplace oblong […] was to skim and bend the river light and mime the tides of open sky”, a synaesthetic “aura of texture and reflection” connecting Pac- ker to his larger environment through the constructed sublimity of the urban frame (8-9). The ecological wording of this amalgamation is precisely the point. “He scan- ned its length and felt connected to it, sharing the surface and the environment that came into contact with the surface, from both sides. A surface separates inside from out and belongs no less to one side than the other”(9). Here DeLillo is marking out the nexus of surface and penetration that figures across much of the novel. Like the
“stir of a melancholy” Packer comes to feel, affects traverse the unmarked spaces of urban life, and hence “seemed to cross deep vales of space to reach him here in the midtown grid” (40). In both texts, then, people in the crowd knowingly or unknowingly intersect, but in everyday space – in traffic, a cinema, a street crossing – the self-creating trajectory of contemporary consciousness is forced upwards just as in Liu’s text, “[n]owadays tall buildings tower everywhere” (86).11
A further point needs making with respect to human contact in these urban texts. If in both novels, crowds and vehicles occasionally morph into encounters with known individuals, the fictional spaces each text constructs can only be reco- gnized in their everyday strength when they are not overlaid by more direct psycho-
11. As Augé asserts, the “cinematic long shot, which tends to make us forget the effects of As Augé asserts, the “cinematic long shot, which tends to make us forget the effects of […] rapture” since ‘aerial shots, habituate us to a global view of things”. (See Marc augé, Non-Places:
An Introduction to Supermodernity, transl. John Howe, London, Verso, 2008, XIII).
somatic responses, but perform the unrecognized fabric of a quieter transcendence.
Chunyu Bai is given to feel a like surplus of affect in walking along Kowloon’s shop-lined Nathan Road. The environment he occupies might be less topologically invested than Packer’s view from his tower suite, but the stream of the everyday set out by Liu inaugurates a like propensity for the narration of pure consciousness:
“The registration for buying next years mooncakes […] A thirty-percent discount on all books […] Fresh-water crabs from Yangcheng Lake […] Shrimp dumplings, spring rolls, taro croquettes, steamed rice dumplings, barbeque-pork buns….” (87).
It is worth noting how Liu’s novella ironizes the interactive surface of the mundane in a manner replicated by DeLillo’s parodic treatment of such spaces in Cosmopolis, not least where everyday objects of attention are suddenly vaulted to the status of empty signifiers, the “common sight” of a manhole suddenly made “beautiful […]
carrying the strangeness, the indecipherability of thing seen new […] nearly appa- ritional” (170).
Akin to Felski’s suspicion that it is theory rather than aesthetics that might helplessly “ensconce us” in the rarefied discourse of the everyday, I see the aesthetic modus as the means by which the tensions and trajectories of the urban everyday can be revealed. To this degree, Augé’s citation of “the systems of representation in which the categories of identity and otherness are given shape” can be fulfilled, a task he himself relates to Michel de Certeau’s attention to the “ ‘tricks in the art of doing’ that enable individuals subjected to the global constraints of modern – especially urban – society [to] trace their own personal itineraries” (31).12 Before contemplating the directional basis of everyday space as both a performative trick in “the art of doing” and a marker of fictional interiority in Liu and DeLillo, it is necessary to differentiate between everyday spatial settings and the textual practices by which attention is drawn to them.
s
paCe, t
ext,
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ublimity ofs
elfThe opening page of Cosmopolis offers a textually inflected reading of space in which the insomniac Packer is said to enjoy reading “spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper” (5). Late in the novel, too, the departing woman Packer has just made love to is described as a “lone stroke of motion” traversing an empty intersection (178). Packer’s response to poetry is thus as embodied as it is metatextual. As with his anonymous tryst, he is alert to the rhythmic “nuance of every poem” because “[p]oems made him conscious of brea- thing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice”
(5). By attending to the exceptional as a “lone stroke” across the everyday, Packer’s context-free intersection proves to be the site of affective and thematic significance as where, scanning a text in the bookshop’s poetry section, Packer’s “feelings see- med to float in the white space around the lines. […] The white was vital to the soul of the poem” (66). Like the non-places he is traversing, the ephemera of white
12. Augé is refl ecting upon de Certau’s Augé is reflecting upon de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). There de Certeau writes how ‘[m]any everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc.) are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many
“ways of operating”: victories of the “weak” over the “strong” […], clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things […] polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike’
(XIX).
space is the mark of the everyday, yet one in which, as Augé writes in Non-Places,
“a person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants”
(83). Like poetry, then, DeLillo’s metatextual play is a register of the not quite graspable truths Packer just fails to assimilate in his journey across New York. The urban landscape is itself implicated in this process; for similar to Liu’s protagonists, even Packer’s mastery over the virtual realms of commerce is punctuated less by its built environment than the various screens DeLillo has him observe. His journey, the various women with whom he engages, and even the limousine in which he travels, tend to be described against the movements of the everyday “white space” of the city, and so identified with the “spare poems” in which he seeks the pleasures of embodiment (5). Are we thus to understand the ephemera of ‘white space’ as an indicator of the virtual potential of the everyday, or buildings as vertical strokes of the rhythmic?
As with Intersection, verticality remains both a marker and a symptom of social and personal orientation. Packer not only lives “at the top” of an eighty-nine-storey tower, but like that structure, tries “to sleep standing up one night” (ibid.). Later, too, the level focus of DeLillo’s narration is ruffled by the upward drive of Packer’s
“elation” where, roused by the increasing noise of the surrounding traffic, he “slid open the sunroof and thrust his head into the reeling scene” (36). This act allows Packer (and the reader) to focus upon the seemingly “empty” twin bank towers soaring above him, “the last tall things” – objects “in the future, a time beyond geography and touchable money”.13 Despite their thematic obviousness, the towers are “covert structures for all their size, hard to see, so common and monotonic, tall, sheer, abstract, with standard setbacks, and block-long, and interchangeable, and he had to concentrate to see them”. As everyday structures “[t]hey weren’t here, exactly”, and so it is their unchangeable or “monotonic” invisibility as non-places that we are led to remark via Packer’s upward thrust, and his remarking their banal verticality as “the end of the outside world” (36).
Crucially, the significatory potential of the twin towers is matched by the post-historical nature of Packer’s ambitions, that of reaching past both the lands- cape of the city and his own “body mass” (206). Like so much “quantum dust”, he yearns to achieve the status of the virtual, a being able “to live outside the given li- mits, […] a consciousness saved from the void” (ibidem). This final state has already been rehearsed within the text where (as part of an act of street anarchism targeting the markers of the financial system) Packer witnesses “figures descending a vertical surface”, a surreal moment in which “[i]t took him a moment to understand that they [the figures] were rappelling down the façade of the building” (92). As DeLillo suggests, a perpendicular rhythm of true and false aspirations might be hidden within the quotidian, with only Packer and the rappelling anarchists shown to be in control of both axes at once, the former crossing and ascending various sites across the city as comprehensively as the latter are left “commanding the elevators and hal- lways” of one more faceless financial tower. Yet Packer’s directional versatility does not provide Cosmopolis with the comfort of resolution. Living “outside the given limits” turns out to have less to do with unifying or mastering different trajectories
13. It is noteworthy that It is noteworthy that Cosmopolis (2003) is set in April 2000, before the spatial destructions of 9-ll rendered these towers “the last tall things” in a more direct sense, and before the American financial crash of 2008 brought the banking system they symbolized into disrepute.
than the impossible fusion of capital’s cyber-potential and the old embodied soul.
If the “mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory” is contemplated as a means to “extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth”, the goal founders upon the unconvertible “things that made him [Packer]
who he was” (207), and which he now finds “missing” along with “the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be”
(209). The twin towers may aim to escape the physical limits of everyday social reality and the banal spaces they secretly animate, but their vertical thrust is no more able to escape into the virtual than the human can shed its embodied actuality in order to embrace “infinity as a medium” (207). In DeLillo’s vision, everyday space is the realm we must embrace, yet, like the aesthetics by which our awareness of such spaces is encoded, it remains revelatory. Packer might hope to access new unders- tandings through rising above the virtual aspects of the ordinary encountered in his voyage across the city, but the new is still seen to emerge out of everyday reality in a similar manner to Lefebvre’s adage concerning the “unorthodox means” by which we “release the creative energies that are an integral part” of such spaces.14
There are sociological fallouts to this dynamic. DeLillo’s financier fails to en- gage outside the confines of the self, just as Liu’s high-rise flâneurs remain incapable of operating within Hong Kong’s full dimensionality. Indeed, the latter pair can be constructively aligned with Simmel’s observation of the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibi- tion where individual visitors underwent a process of “levelling and uniformity due to an environment of the same” even as the individual remained simultaneously accentuated through the summation of many impressions”.15 For Simmel, the para- dox of the everyday in a constructed setting such as a world fair causes the individual to be shunted between existence as “an element of the whole” and the individual as a “whole” (ibidem). With Intersection, if the city’s perpendicular topography might suggest a means of social individuation, that everyday landscape is no less the site of cultural enervation. Within this rubric, if upwardness appears as the vessel of the dreams and reflections by which Liu’s protagonists hope to both rescue their selves from the social realm and reintegrate with it at another level, the contents of such reflections – their interior aspects – remain inflected by the banal categories of the everyday as observed by Simmel. Liu is therefore careful to raise the interior rhythms of his characters against the commercialized epoch of which they are a part, so bet- ter to provide counterpoints to the socio-economic strata they so helplessly inhabit.
More specifically, where stream-of-consciousness techniques might suggest the contours of individuality as these depart the realm of the collective uncons- cious, we yet find the older of Liu’s characters reflecting upon past fiscal dealings through a melange of interior reflection and sensory heft:
Chunyu Bai paid particular attention to that old building because twenty years ago, he would go there frequently to speculate in gold. “2.5…2.75…2.5…2.75 3.0…3.25…3.5…3.25…” The voice reporting the market situation came through the microphone and fell upon the hearts of the spectators like a bar- rage of pebbles. (Intersection 85)16
14. Henri Henri leFebvre, Everyday Life, 13.
15. Georg Georg simmel, “The Berlin Trade Exhibition”, in: Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 8, n° 3, 1991, 122.
16. Liu’s stream-of-consciousness technique has been explored in relation to cinematic narra-Liu’s stream-of-consciousness technique has been explored in relation to cinematic narra- tive. See Esther M. K. cHeung, “Do We Hear the City?: Voices of the Stranger in Hong Kong Cin-
A similar play on consumerized thought is presented in DeLillo’s description of a financial theorist reflecting upon her conversation with Packer, a composite fi- gure in which market data, screens, and thinking morph: “She closed her eyes and thought. The screens showed charts and graphs, market updates” (Cosmopolis 104).
Likewise, the commercial life of the city is textually marked by stock tickers attached to building facades with their “words racing north to south” (96). In such scenes, the building programmes and shopping expeditions mapped by Liu and DeLillo work to accentuate the everydayness not just of an urban landscape, but the human consciousnesses operating within them. Elevated to the status of scenic actuality, the collusion of interiority with the built environments of late capitalism begins to operate across several levels at once, not least as epiphanic spaces wherein, as in the final moments of Cosmopolis, Packer faces up to “the pain of his life, all of it, the emotional and the other” (209). With the next section, then, I want to complicate our understanding of the vertical aspects of the scene wherein the unrepresentable
“other” of Packer’s life comes to perform itself.
V
ertiCals
paCesAs central as it may be to urban fabric, the verticality of everyday urban space remains to be properly appraised. One of the leading thinkers of eve- rydayness, Ben Highmore, makes brief reference to it in Cityscapes, observing how “vertical expansion” has become the hallmark of urban development along- side the “centrifugal (horizontal) expansion” of metropolitan centres.17 David Lawrence Pike’s examination of subterranean city space suggests a like tension, focusing upon the “twin modes of perception” by which we are to grasp urban settings, “the view from above, the view from below – and the unstable thres- holds between them”.18 While Pike focuses upon the underground worlds of the city, including above-ground spaces set apart through being windowless or othe- rwise divorced from the surface of the urban environment, he usefully reminds us how, in distinction to the more revolutionary potential of underground sites, traditionally vertical conceptions of the Western imaginary, along with the psy- chosomatic or ideological readings we draw from them, are constructed accor- ding to schemes of ascending values (esp. 20f). A larger concern lies behind such manoeuvres. Melding notions of everyday space to the exploration of non-places, Pike’s thesis centres upon the social and aesthetic praxis of the “threshold” in the same way that, pace the influential work of David Harvey and Edward Soja, spatial theory hopes to dynamize the flows and transfers secreted within the totalizing “spaces” of finance and exchange. In this sense, the poetics of the
ema”, in: Esther cHeung, Gina marcHetti, and Tan See Kam (eds.), Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier, Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2011, 17-32. Liu’s melding of consciousness and its surroundings is not reserved to Intersection, and he has long been included among the inaugurators of the stream of consciousness in modern Chinese letters, foremost with Jiutu 酒徒, or The Drunkard (Hong Kong, Haibin tushu gongsi, 1963; serialized in the literary supple- ment to the evening newspaper Xingdao wanbao, 1962-1963).
17. Ben Ben HigHmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 127.
18. David Lawrence David Lawrence PiKe, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800- 2001, Ithaca, Cornell UP, 2007, XIV.
everyday lend substance to the generative aspect of its spaces, not just Lefebvre’s citation of the “ambiguity” of its potential contents (see note 3 above), but its revelatory capacity.
It is with the idea of poiesis or making that I see everyday verticality coming into play as a theoretical concept, reinvigorating scholarly understandings of what Highmore calls “the landscape closest to us, the world most immediately met”.
In modernity the everyday becomes the setting for a dynamic process: for making the unfamiliar familiar; for getting accustomed to the disruption of custom; for struggling to incorporate the new; for adjusting to dif- ferent ways of living. The everyday marks the success and failure of this process. It witnesses the absorption of the most revolutionary of inven- tions into the landscape of the mundane.19
It is to understand the human cost of incorporating “the new” within the everyday that the poetics of Liu’s and DeLillo’s city fictions reveal themselves – so better to understand how the “landscape of the mundane” might be plotted through its full dimensionality. As we see from the passage just cited, the everyday stands at the heart of two sets of tensions, the “unfamiliar” and that which has already become customary, so capturing within its reach the possible disruptions by which the eve- ryday becomes dramatically charged. Highmore gives a similar reading to Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, observing how this work sees the everyday as “submerged below the level of social and textual authority”, and for this reason largely “invisible and unrepresentable” while yet able to “perform something like a guerrilla war” on authority.20 Despite the potential of the everyday to reveal or even “perform” otherwise uncapturable facets of modernity, a salient feature of everyday space is its tendency to remain unnoted or blank. Prior to mounting a more obviously performative reading of the directionality of everyday spaces, it is helpful to ask in what ways the otherwise “invisible” verticality of the built envi- ronment might be considered dynamic.
As noted by human geographers, everyday urban spaces have long since been considered as sites of flow or rhythm. Acknowledging Bergson’s observa- tion of space’s limits, as well as Henri Lefebvre’s work on the social production of “space”, Mike Crang’s essay, “Rhythms of the City” (2001), finds terms for the rhythmic aspects by which spaces reveal themselves as temporally vital sites.21 Lefebvre expresses a like understanding: “[s]pace is nothing but the inscription of time in the world, spaces are the realizations, inscriptions in the simultaneity of the external word of a series of times, the rhythms of the city, the rhythms of urban population”.22 Making use of these now classic efforts to dynamize space in social theory, Crang conceives the city as “a becoming of velocities, directions,
19. Ben Ben HigHmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction, London, Routledge, 2002, 1-2. 20. Ibid., 31 (original emphasis).
21. Mike Mike crang, “Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion”, in: Jon may and Nigel tHriFt (eds.), TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, London, Routledge, 2001.
22. Henri Lefebvre: Writing on Cities, EXXXX KoFman and EXXX lebas (eds.), Oxford: Black-Oxford: Black- well, 1995, 16. For Lefebvre’s agon with Bergson, see Brendan Fraser, “Toward a philosophy of the urban: Henri Lefebvre’s uncomfortable application of Bergsonism” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 26(2) (2008) 338 – 358. The word “rhythm” is prominent in Lefebvre’s final book, Elements of Rhythmanalysis (1992): Éléments de rythmanalyse, Paris, Syllepse, 1992.
turnings, detours, exits and entries” (“Rhythms of the City” 206).23 Likewise, High- more builds upon Lefebvre’s dynamic model in order to explore the urban through rhythmanalysis, wherein “the body […] is the initial site for recognizing the plural rhythms that we live by”, a recognition reliant upon the insight that, similar to my observation of the horizontal and especially vertical trajectories of city writing, “[i]
t is only when two different rhythms intersect that a rhythm can be recognized at all” (147). Still following Lefebvre, the model with which Highmore closes Citys- capes elaborates two primary “kinds of rhythmicity”, the “linear” (“the regulating rhythms of modern social organization”) and “cyclical” rhythms (those of “nature and biology”) (148). The conflicts Highmore traces, between stasis and chaotic flow, or clock time and biological variance, are seen to sustain “the lived-out contra- dictions of living within a messy, dynamic and plural set of rhythms” (150). It is this “lived-out” plurality that I raise through the poetic axes of figuration found in Liu and DeLillo, and which are so central to geographical writing on the rhythms of places.24 Such, too, is the ecological function I read in the literary construction of everyday urban spaces: by isolating rhythms and axes out of what we saw Crang calling the “becoming of velocities” (ibidem), we uncover a new means of addres- sing the vertical aesthetics of urban representation vis-à-vis Lefebvre’s notion of
“an aspect of movement and a becoming”.25
Despite its proliferation in recent discourse, there is nothing new about the term “vertical city”.26 Indeed, for the Franco-Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, the “ver- tical city” was, at least from the 1930s, a form of the “radiant city”. These locutions are reminiscent of the title story in Fanny Hurst’s 1922 short fiction collection, The Vertical City, in which one finds “no horizon of infinite to rest the eyes”. Prefiguring DeLillo’s phrasings in Cosmopolis, we find that “[a]ll who would see the sky must gaze between these rockets of frenzied architecture”. Such frenzy is not without its basis in the commodified sublime of the captains of modern urban development, hence Hurst lists a “merchant prince” among those who “have run up their dreams and their ambitions into slim skyscrapers that seem to exclaim at the audacity of the
23. Crang makes use of Elizabeth Crang makes use of Elizabeth grosz’s writings on the transgressive spatio-temporality of embodiment and temporal becoming. See, respectively, Grosz’s, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, London, Routledge, 1995; and “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought”, in: Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999. In the latter text, Grosz remarks upon her sense of rhythmic temporalized space: ‘what duration, memory, and consciousness bring to the world is the possibility of unfolding, hesitation, uncertainty. Not everything is presented in simultaneity’ (25). To explore the temporal interest of Intersection and Cos- mopolis via Grosz would require a separate essay.
24. See Tim See Tim Tim eDensor, Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies, Farnham, Ashgate, 2010.
25. Henri Henri leFebvre, Writings on Cities, 1995, 230, my emphasis. This work is cited at Note 20, above.
26. Since January 2011, the National University of Singapore School of Design and Environ-Since January 2011, the National University of Singapore School of Design and Environ- ment has sponsored “The Vertical Cities Asia International Design” around the notion of popula- tion density through architectural responses to the challenges of building height. In 2008, a pro- posed design for the “Dubai Vertical City” was introduced, a 2400 metre tower accessed through a “bullet”-style vertical train. Similarly, the star architect, Renzo Piano, has built London’s “The Shard”, a tower he describes in idealistic communal terms as a “vertical city”. It is instructive to look at the online promotional material for this project, available at: <http://theshard.com/shard/
explore-the-shard/vertical-city>. Also see le corbusier, les Cathédrals étaient blanches: Voyage aux pays des timides, Librairie Plon, Paris, 1937 (in English as When the Cathedrals were White, translated by Francis E. Hyslop, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1964, esp. 34-36). Le Corbusier’s statements are cited in the introduction to David warD’s and Oliver zunz’s collection The Landscape of Modernity: New York City, 1900-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992 [1972]), a work containing a section entitled
“Building the Vertical City”.
mere mortar that sustains them”.27 The virtual might be claimed as a replacement for the sorts of civic and personal virtues DeLillo sees being advertised through architecture, but the latter’s protagonist remains tied to the sublime excess of his high-rise, not just “connected to it” as we have already seen, but awake to “the ten- sion and suspense of a towering space that requires pious silence in order to be seen and experienced properly” (8).
More can be said concerning the vertical reach of ambition and “audacity”
exclaimed by Hurst. DeLillo might cite the sublime through the digital modus of finance capitalism and currency trading, but the skyscraper-enhanced spiritual year- nings are no less prescient for one who chooses to live, as one character tells Packer,
“in a tower that soars to heaven and goes unpunished by God” (Cosmopolis 103). In this mélange of egotism and profundity, the older term “skyscraper” is returned to its historical foundations at the presumably more meaningfully formative stage of urban construction we find mapped in Hurst’s story. Indeed, as DeLillo’s narrator observes, the word itself “belonged to the olden soul of awe, to the arrowed towers that were a narrative long before [Packer] was born” (9). However robust references to textuality and “narrative” are in Cosmopolis (not to mention its powerful undertow of virtual or digital reality) how might we move from the discourses of height and sublimity DeLillo draws from towards the performative ecologies I note of my target novels?28
A caveat might be made here in relation to the role of embodiment in the everyday. As Steve Pile reminds us in his brief comments upon the city in Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, city towers might indicate “a capacity for detachment, for critical reflection, […] for an ability to understand the relationship between means and ends” (246), yet they also “connect worlds, from deep in the earth, to high in the sky” in a manner able to “combine energies” and “elements of nature” with human needs and attributes (247).29 For all his acumen with vir- tual commercial flows, Packer appears in tune with the connectivities and spiritual potential observed by Pile. Despite his having to deal with “a system that’s out of control”, the former is given to acknowledge how “[t]here’s an order at some deep level[, a] pattern that wants to be seen”. More crucially, “[t]here’s a common surface, an affinity between market movements and the natural world”, one inscribing an
“aesthetics of interaction” (Cosmopolis 85-6). While this wording appears congruent to, for instance, Deleuzian conceptions of the virtual as nature’s actuality, I mean something more tangible. As Brian Massumi puts it, while the horizon of the virtual may be “enveloped in potential, outside possibility and predictability”, it is yet “[i]
mmanent to bodily change” (168) in a way that offers promise for everyday space and the sensory aspects of urban living.30
27. Despite Hurst’s relevance to the vertical thrust of urban space and its poetics, her oeuvre Despite Hurst’s relevance to the vertical thrust of urban space and its poetics, her oeuvre Hurst’s relevance to the vertical thrust of urban space and its poetics, her oeuvre has not survived her era. See: Fanny Hurst, The Vertical City, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1922, 109. 28. Concerning DeLillo’s tropes of virtuality and the digital, we read of onscreen “fi gures Concerning DeLillo’s tropes of virtuality and the digital, we read of onscreen “figures running at digital speed” (94), and of the “dynamic aspect of the life force” captured via the “digital imperative’ (24). Likewise, the frenzy of a dance floor is imagined as “replacing your skin and brain with digital tissue” (126), and consciousness seen capturable via a microchip-based virtual reality featuring “the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory” (207).
29. See “Cities” in that volume: Stephan See “Cities” in that volume: Stephan Harrison, Steve Pile, N. J. tHriFt (eds.), London, Reaktion Books, 2004, 246-247.
30. Brian Brian massumi, “Event Horizon”, in: Joke brouwer (ed.), The Art of the Accident, vol. 2, Rotterdam, Dutch Architecture Institute, 1998, 154-168.
Drawing from these theoretical foundations, the embodied ecology I mean is therefore not one of the potential of the virtual or the sublime as sites of pro- fundity anchored, here, via DeLillo’s “arrowed towers” and Liu’s “old buildings […] turned into skyscrapers” (Liu 84). But nor do I mean DeLillo’s central theme of the absurd and false symbiosis of unconscious with the mediated unreality of the contemporary social scene. Instead, I would note the tensions created between the vertical and horizontal trajectories of city spaces as these are reflected within the imaginaries of fictional characters, and then wonder how we can locate that synaesthetic potential in aesthetic or ecological terms. Here I treat the city as the philosopher, Simon James, does nature, not as something “that we perceive” as being separate from the human, but that which is already “at work in our percep- tion”, that is to say, as an embodied dynamic. Moreover, nature (as I indicate of the city) “is not something we can capture in understanding, but something into which we are always already, and for the most part unknowingly, taken up”.31 Such is the realm of the ecological I note of the urban fabrics of Liu’s and DeLillo’s novels, one which, as I will shortly make apparent, is best sustained through reference to the performativity of everyday space in the city, and which, as this paper sets out, becomes particularly acute at the theatricalized and so sensory intersection between directionally defined modes of experience and description.
T
heu
rbant
heatreo
ft
heV
ertiCalIn its most overt sense, theatricality in fiction stems from the foregrounding of the perspectival mechanisms of literary discourse, as where mirrors and screens replicate, for the individual, processes of self-envisioning and objectification. De- Lillo is adept at creating such perspectives, as where Packer comprehends his own actions only after regarding himself “a second or two after he’d seen it on screen”
(20). Similarly, when the social order around Packer breaks down, we read how the “protestors, anarchists, whoever they were, [were] a form of street theatre, or adepts of sheer rampage” (88). As suggestively, the theatrical side of this act “is the free market itself […] a fantasy generated by the market”. Like everyday space itself,
“[t]here is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside” (90). The theatrical thus enters as a space which is both the scene of action and a sometimes carnivalesque player within it, at any rate, as part of a performative imaginary. As Highmore states in Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, where the everyday actuality of the city is concerned, “[i]t will be an urban consciousness as much as an individual’s which will guide trajectories through the city” (157): that is to say, the individual not only plays before the scene of the everyday, but is played by it in the manner seen of Liu’s protagonists in Intersection.
Here I would add that the fictional construction and troping of everyday urban spaces necessitates a performative understanding. While in no way concerned with a theatrical dynamizing of urban spaces, Highmore’s reading of the everyday offers a useful narrowing of terms. Utilizing a similar range of citations to Felski, Highmore shows how “the order of the city” was to undergo a “derive” or “détourn- ment” by which such order might be “negated in favour of a drift that allows the
31. Simon Simon james, The Presence of Nature: A Study in Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy, Houndmills (UK), Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 156.
disordered forces of the city to be revealed”, a process rendering visible “the play of affects and attractions of an urban psychogeography”.32 Raising the example of Walter Benjamin, Highmore observes how “the urban everyday can best be per- ceived as a form of unconsciousness. Drifting around cities is a form of urban ‘free association’ that is designed to reveal the hidden secrets of the urban everyday”
(ibid, 139-140). Unconsciousness appears innocuous in this borrowing, a “form” of aimless association rather than its engine; yet it is precisely the theatricalization of this process of association in and across urban space that I wish to set in motion through recourse to the more robustly symbiotic and performative features of the everyday in aesthetic discourse.
With Cosmopolis, the dynamic aspects of Packer’s voyage across the metro- polis in search of “scenes that normally roused him” does not limit itself to the interior dynamics of Packer’s consciousness, but inhabits such “scenes” via that
“great rapacious flow, where the physical will of the city, the ego fevers, the assertions of industry, commerce and crowds shape every anecdotal moment” (Cosmopolis 41, my emphasis). For DeLillo, the very light of the city is open to “changing radically in the preternatural way that’s completely natural, of course, all the electrical pre- monition that rides the sky being a drama of human devising” (103). Space here may be the measure of extension to the extent that it is “towering” (8), “enclosed”
(25), and so on, but it is no less a medium for the subliminal “flow” or “drama” of the everyday (41).
DeLillo’s spatial imaginary becomes even more self-generating in the latter sections of the novel, indeed, scenographic in the theatrical sense of scenic enact- ments extending beyond the reach of more obviously human poiesis. Such is the scene Packer inhabits at yet another “empty” intersection late in the novel, where he liked to be in his limousine “in bronzy light, alone in the flow of space, the lines and grain, the sweet transitions, this shape or texture modulated to that”.
This flowing space, like that of the “long interior” of the car, has “a thrust, a fluid motion rearward” (179), yet it serves only to deposit him in the nowhere-place that has come to stand for his life as for the city:
He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. […] The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. […] There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all directions were the same? (180)
That this is the end of Packer’s horizontal voyage towards his own demise should not escape us. Despite the events interrupting his trip across the city, his trajectory is not without narrative agency, only the everyday has ceased to remain unnoti- ceable but taken on the status of a finally dangerous foreground, the scene of an ecology wherein the “building itself ” before which he stands has become a suitably blank shooting “target”, a transference that “made every sense to him” (182). The sense Packer intuits concerns the non-place he has come to, a structure that, des- pite the wealth of its given features, remains generic enough to force Packer into the realization of the “sheer cinematic stupidity of [his] gesture” (182) – an act of rebellion against the threatening innocuousness of the space in which he finds
32. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 139. Highmore cites Henri Lefebvre and the French Situ- ationalists of the politicized 1968 era.
himself.33 To recall Highmore’s phasing from the previous section, Packer has at last become agent to “the absorption of the most revolutionary of inventions into the landscape of the mundane”.34 In the everyday economy of the novel, this mundane actuality is the perfective if now literally horizontal realm of mortality, animated here through the banal virtual imaginary provided by the digital camera-screen of his wristwatch.
The irony of Packer’s last act of perspective-making cannot be overstated. It is presaged in Highmore’s reading of one of Benjamin’s observations in “Louis-Phi- lippe or the Interior”. There Highmore notes how in modernity “the private realm became the privileged site of fantasy”, citing part of Benjamin’s assertion that “the private citizen” now “assembled the distant in space and time. His drawing-room was a box in the world-theatre”.35 For other writers, the spatial and the temporal are more obviously graph-like in the sense I have been pursuing above.36 To bring Intersection into the equation, the vertical scale of Hong Kong might be, for Liu, an invitation for fantasy, but as we just saw of Benjamin’s Paris, it is also a site of performativity. The “box in the world-theatre” is not just a slot in which the now private individual might, as in Liu’s novella, indulge in socially liberating imaginings set against, in that case, Hong Kong’s more recent vertical growth, but as DeLillo no less indicates, can provide a perpendicular axis of heightened affect. If the lat- ter author appears finally disinclined to map some putative spiritual ascent across the momentarily liberated verticality of the urban everyday, critics have shown themselves ready to accede to the significance potential of what Joseph Dewey has identified as those “landmark moments when DeLillo’s adults, exposed to the frightening mystery of sublimity, move beyond clear sight to insight”.37 Certainly, the sublime is not absent from Cosmopolis to the extent we see of Liu’s fiction, but is likened less to the excess of experience than its digital analogues. Having come “to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain”, the still embodied consciousness of Eric Packer finds the human drama of his situation “not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end” (Cosmopolis 207-208).
If, finally, the virtual sublime is shunned by DeLillo’s dying protagonist, the spaces in which his last actions play out yet remain animated as theatrically perfor- mative settings. Here we can turn to the definition given such spaces by the theatre theorist, Erika Fischer-Lichte, who writes of the ever-changing space that comes into being through the constant array of modulations acting upon it. In her view, it is the collectivity of these modulations that “bring forth” the performance along
33. Characteristically, Packer is straightaway led to embark, as though in preparation for the Characteristically, Packer is straightaway led to embark, as though in preparation for the virtual features of his imminent death, upon a long detour on cinema’s aesthetic conventions (183- 186).
34. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 2002, 2.
35. Walter Walter benjamin, “Louis-Philippe or the Interior”, in: Reflections, PXXXXX. Demetz (ed.), translated by EXXXXX. jePHcott, New York, Schocken, 1986, 154. See Ben HigHmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 72.
36. For the theatre theorist Silvija Jestrovic, an urban thoroughfare such as Yonge Street in the For the theatre theorist Silvija Jestrovic, an urban thoroughfare such as Yonge Street in the
‘exilic city’ of Toronto “unfolds horizontally through space, rather than vertically through time”. I would complicate this topological reading in order to stress how the urban vertical is no less spatial in its relationality than Benjamin’s assembling of “the distant in space and time”, and no less “eve- ryday”. See: Performance, Space, Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 [2012], 196.
37. Joseph Joseph Dewey, “DeLillo’s Apocalyptic Satires”, in: John Duvall (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2008, 64.
