Essay proposal: Fragmented embodiment of the global city
Ban en Banlieue, p. 71. “19. London Radical modernity requires something of me. / An aesthetics of violence. / to write the larger scene. / In this scene without depth, rust-coloured dust bleaches to a dirty white, like the urea of city birds that then drains off.”
Bhanu Kapil writes the “larger scene” of London (for this element is precisely titled London; here we can say the author is talking about the city) with the gruesome and embodied. The material, which is corporeal, decaying, excremental, is always disappearing. Why? What does that mean about the reality of this materiality? Why this dispersion? Fragmentation has been seen as more adequate way to represent the city. Particles and dispersion could make a utopia: material, but mobile, democratic. Kapil uses it to represent the odious dystopia underlying and surrounding the global city. Why are the bodily traces also mobile, furtive, fugitive?
In the refusal of materiality, the ethereal connectivity of the myth of digital globalisation (myth, for it continues to rely on materiality and space), to uncover the invisible cities, as performance, as denouncement, becomes to uncover the unpleasant, the more or less taboo, the nasty or gross parts of city life. Blood, excrement, smoke, smudges, dirt, all the material unpleasantness that Buuck hunts for in the city.
It’s the hog squeal of the global city.
To represent the placed realities that Sassen misses in globalisation academia, Kapil and Buuck choose images of violence, decay, rejection, belonging to this material reality. They are trying to materialise the global city subversively; so they bring up what is “deemed filthy, fearsome, or uncontrollable: smoke, dust, garbage, rust, exhaust, gas, smog, debris, overgrowth” (Gissen in Artforum, p. 316).
This is the context in which addressing the sensorial and material taboo, an aged transgression dating back at least to 19th century decadence, and which is seen in Mann’s Death in Venice and countless others, becomes “radical modernity”, a form characteristic of the contemporary age from which Sassen and Gissen speak. They are displaying the “subnatural” materiality attached to disembodied globality or to clean modern design—part of the same discourse of the City, a discourse which recreates the material taboo and which marginalises Ban, her class, her part of the city.
But there’s more to the subnatural substances in Bhanu Kapil. These city-substances are the material of Ban’s body. The re-embodiment of the city becomes an inscription of the body in the city. See Embryology for Ban. This is race violence, perhaps the race riot—the girl, resigned, lay on the ground--, and perhaps the rape as the boa runs beneath the street, emerging like an upwards penetration, tilting pavement, rain and blood. Street and body. “Pink lightning fills the borough like a graph”; the entire borough. There is an interchangeability, an immediacy of reality and effect between the body and the city.
The body also enters the scheme of exclusion in the global city; the periphery, the immigrant and the coloured body are caught in the very intense materiality that is underneath the global network: via aggression, prejudice, and by being precisely a quintessentially global mobile element (the immigrant) who nevertheless finds its mobility curtailed in the non-material dimension of society and in the very material dimension of the city where one walks.
So Ban’s very body becomes part of the material that is excluded from discourse in the city. Her events become part of the city, inscribed on the streets and ivy. It’s a subnatural embodiment of the city.
But this material is the particled matter that makes up the “subnatural” city; ironically mobile. Ban’s body is carried on the sole of a shoe—again, the body that is like dirt or ashes and can be removed from one place and taken to the other by the violent act of stepping. A less than ideal walk in the city. Bhanu Kapil rematierialises the city and inscribes the body in the city, but not in a way that localises or places the processes that stand behind the affairs of the global city. Rather, she materialises another mobility, the dystopian hypermobility of dirt and dust, which are easily and inevitably carried from one place to the other, undesired and ignored, with loss of content. By moulding the body (at least Ban’s body, a brown girl in the banlieue) with this matter, Bhanu Kapil compares or equates its movement to the mobility of certain people in the city. By inscribing the body in the city and its subnatural dispersions, Bhanu Kapil makes a statement about the dysfunctional symbiosis of city and body.
*I might be mainly interested in these material forms--smoke, dust, smudges, dirt, etc.--and in their representative, utopian, and dystopian potential. Therefore, a shift of focus of a narrowing down of my paper topic would be in the direction of talking more about these materials...
