Microsoft Word Narrative Exploits docx

American Cities (1961) and Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (1962) two hugely-influential texts that described the social consequences of urban renewal, social critics and urban planners alike have grappled with the powerful forces that are increasingly altering the shape and complexion of our cities. Mumford describes the relationship between individuals and a rapidly changing urban environment that, he argues, deprives city-dwellers of their organic connection to the city. Recognizing the erosion of local communities as a result of urban expansion, Mumford was vocal in his criticism of urban sprawl. Jacobs, who was more closely linked to grassroots programs and social activism, was equally influential in her critique of institutional programs for urban renewal, calling for urban models that rejected freeway development, particularly in New York City.
More recent theorists of urban space working with the American metropolis of the late-twentieth century have been successful in describing the forces of growth and expansion that had yet to fully develop in Mumford’s and Jacobs’ era. Edward Soja, the preeminent spatial theorist of what he has termed the “postmetropolis,” designates “mass suburbanization, the rise of an automobile-based culture of consumerism, metropolitan political fragmentation, the decline of the inner city, increasing segregation and ghettoization, [and] changing labor” as the chief features of the postmodern city, of which Los Angeles serves as the best example (Postmetropolis 98). Insofar as New Orleans’ city space made it possible for its residents to band together to enact regenerative, performative practices, the dispersed city space of the postmetropolis in many
ways precludes the possibility of community-based spatial resistance. Describing the evolution of this new kind of urban space, Soja goes on to write:
well-off Angelenos atomistically constructed far-flung networks of contacts and activities centered around increasingly protected homespaces rather than in well-defined neighborhood communities. The unlisted telephone number and the gated and walled-in residence symbolized this most privatized of urban landscapes. Truly public spaces were few and far between, as what the social theorists call “civil society” seemed to melt into the airwaves and freeways and other circuitries of the sprawling urban scene. (137)
Soja here captures the effects of privatized urban planning on street-level, lived culture; isolated in protected suburban enclaves or, for those less fortunate, stuck in disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods, residents of the postmetropolis rarely interact with those outside their socioeconomic and ethnic communities. This ability to isolate oneself from undesired social interaction is made possible in part by the complex postmetropolitan freeway system and ubiquitous automobile culture,¹ which, when combined, tend to preclude the important street-level social encounters central to the theories of de Certeau, Lefebvre, and their followers.




¹ Genevieve Giulano’s article, “Transporting Los Angeles,” provides a comprehensive overview of Los Angeles’ evolving culture of transportation. Between 1950 and 1990, the period of greatest economic prosperity in the city and in the country, automobile registrations per individual more than doubled. Clearly not just a result of the city’s burgeoning urban population, automobile ownership accelerated dramatically during these years, revealing the movement
The point of these observations is to highlight the social and psychological impact of postmetropolitan space and, more specifically, to confront the ways that the new American metropolis prevents individuals from successfully engaging the central tenets of post-Marxist spatial theory. As freeway networks increasingly remove individuals from street-level spatial practices, and as our cities—most visibly via the automobile—make it possible for individuals to traverse vast swathes of urban space without engaging in any real social interaction, we lose our ability to inscribe ourselves, politically, in the city’s urban spaces. Much of this chapter concerns the individual’s relationship to the freeway system and the ways that this feature of the postmetropolis has both traumatized city-dwellers and precluded the possibility of psychologically and politically productive spatial practices. Describing the institutional discipline exerted by the freeway system in Los Angeles, D.J. Hopkins writes, “The freeways are designed to be comprehensible: these spaces are strictly partitioned, legible from above…Freeways in Los Angeles constitute a new form of closure, by controlling the movement between neighborhoods and even access to the city itself.” Later, addressing the difficulty of “walking the city,” which de Certeau sees as a tactic against the disciplining of urban space, Hopkins writes, “Driving is not an antidisciplinary practice in Los Angeles; it is the practice most closely aligned with the city’s spatial disciplines” (277). Indeed, Hopkins’ observations echo Jean

toward a culture dependent on freeway transit. Giulano is quick to point out that “Although the private vehicle and the highway system provide unparalleled mobility, persons who do not drive or have access to private vehicles are greatly disadvantaged” (237).

Baudrillard’s earlier reflections on his time in Los Angeles. Baudrillard writes, “If you get out of your car in this centrifugal metropolis, you immediately become a delinquent; as soon as you start walking, you are a threat to public order, like a dog wandering in the road” (58). Delinquency, as I demonstrated in the previous chapter, can be politically-subversive, but the problem here, of course, is that walking gets you nowhere in Los Angeles. Whereas the urban space of New Orleans, for instance, is conducive to a pedestrian economy and therefore conducive to street-level spatial practices, the postmetropolis at every turn discourages walkers from establishing themselves in the space of the city.²
Instead, city-dwellers function in a space of movement, isolation, and institutional discipline, all generated and sustained by a complex freeway system that regulates and dictates our experience of the city. In opposition to urban models that force individuals to move through communities and therefore expose them to the encounter with the racial or economic other, freeways move drivers over communities, rendering those communities and their inhabitants invisible.<sup>3




2</sup> In their essay, “Clean and Safe? Property Development, Public Space, and Homelessness in Downtown San Diego,” Don Mitchell and Lynn A. Staeheli argue that private interests are increasingly inscribing themselves in public spaces, creating “pseudo-public space” (153), where, in the interest of keeping the streets “clean and safe” for the middle classes, cities are “promoting private means of controlling homelessness on public property” (161). These programs police and discipline individuals in what should be nonhegemonic, smooth urban spaces.


³ Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 article for the New York Times, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” addresses how racial tensions in the city are in part a product of the freeway system. Rarely journeying into racially-homogeneous neighborhoods like Watts, white Angelenos lack the opportunity to deconstruct harmful racial stereotypes. To build upon Pynchon’s commentary, many postmetropolitan
Consequently, freeways enable privileged drivers—anyone wealthy enough to own an automobile—to reside in a suspended state of political innocence. In blinding city-dwellers to the realities of poverty and urban decay, freeways depoliticize urban space, and the effects of such depoliticization are significant for those residing in under-privileged neighborhoods.⁴ As long as city-dwellers are forced onto freeways and into the program of the city, they remain passive instruments of institutional power rather than political agents inhabiting urban space.
Los Angeles serves as the spatial locus of this chapter. The two texts of interest in the coming pages, Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, each offer commentary on the ways that the urban space of the postmetropolis affects individuals and forces them to deconstruct and confront their traumatic relationship to the city. Much has been written on Los Angeles as the postmodern metropolis par excellance, and social critics from Fredric Jameson to Soja to Baudrillard have described the city as a hyperreal environment in which every trace of the Real has been subsumed by

freeways now utilize “noise barriers,” giant walls that separate the freeway from the community around it. Ostensibly erected to decrease noise pollution generated from the freeway, these barriers also serve as blinders to unsuspecting drivers traveling over blighted inner-city neighborhoods.

⁴ See also Eric Mann’s essay, “Los Angeles Bus Riders Derail the MTA,” which describes the politics of mass transit in the city and the ways in which institutional racism permeates important decisions on transportation. Here, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority was accused of cutting funds from subsidized bus routes that serviced low-income neighborhoods in order to build an expensive rail system that would benefit more affluent communities. Freeway construction similarly tends to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
layers of simulation. What is left, they argue, is a city without history, an urban milieu lacking depth and substance. Hollywood and Disneyland, not surprisingly, figure as important points of reference for their analyses. Much of the critical attention directed at Los Angeles, however, emerged in the 1990s and has waned in recent years, and this decline in critical attention perhaps owes itself to the increasingly prevalent—and somewhat disturbing—admission that Los Angeles is unexceptional as a metropolis. Indeed, Joel Garreau’s prophetic observation in 1992 has become a reality: “Every single American city that is growing, is growing in the fashion of Los Angeles, with multiple urban cores” (3).
Furthermore, one could argue that the most compelling and forward-thinking aspects of these analyses—which center around notions of hyperreality, simulation, and the loss of the center, all touchstones of postmodernism—have been normalized, and are therefore all but invisible, in the cities of the twenty-first century. In his groundbreaking essay, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson argues that the experience of Los Angeles is jarring precisely because it articulates a very specific postmodern vision of the world and of the future of capitalism, a “radical break or coupure” from modernity (Postmodernism 1).
However, here in 2013, the very features that made Los Angeles appear radical to Jameson and other postmodern theorists have been normalized and engrained in everyday life to the extent that achieving critical distance is increasingly difficult.
One of the core features of the postmetropolis is the disappearance of an urban center, or a downtown district that functions as a hub for commerce,
housing, and cultural production for the city, at large. In Los Angeles, for instance, the city’s organizational structure depends on the interconnectivity of cities within the vast county network, not on their relation to a city center, as is the case with Chicago or New York and their European predecessors. Even so, downtown city centers have certainly not ceased to exist, and the recent revitalization of downtown Los Angeles reflects the enduring desire for a center, even if its function is purely symbolic. According to Dieter Lesage, “the suburbanite currently feels a need for ‘the city’…[but his/her] current desire for the city is not answered by the city so much as by the simulacra of urban culture, some of which might still be in the city (pedestrian shopping streets) but most of which no longer are (the amusement park, the shopping center)” (GUST 27).
While they might appear to provide an authentic urban experience, these hyperreal simulations of urban space underscore the latent desires of city- dwellers, who, deprived of an organic urban core, no longer have access to the Real.
In place of this “lost center,” Los Angeles introduces the freeway. Martin Wachs writes, “The freeway is a tangible facility that is also a flexible path through a maze. It is a pathway that encourages purposeful interaction between far-flung but interconnected communities; yet it contributes to the sense of placelessness noted by so many critics of this region” (106). This sense of placelessness—a consequence of decentered urban existence—is intimately involved with the pervasive sense of loss and absence that haunts both
Viramontes’ novel and Altman’s film. This presence, I argue, offers a glimpse of the traumatic Real that underlies the postmetropolis, and the characters’ interactions with their city, and with each other, reveal the profound anxieties that have become symptomatic of urban life in the twenty-first century. This chapter opens with a discussion of Viramontes’ novel, which describes the dramatic transformation of East Los Angeles that occurred during a ten-year period, between 1960 and 1970, when freeway construction carved its way through predominantly Mexican-American neighborhoods, permanently dividing what were once tightly-knit ethnic communities. Viramontes emphasizes the traumatic effects of this construction, both on the individuals in the text and on the communities that make up East Los Angeles. Short Cuts, taking place in the 1990s, offers a very different vision of the city, one which emphasizes the quotidian, everyday experience of life in a decentered, suburban environment: the end result of the metropolitan transformation depicted in Their Dogs. For the characters of Altman’s film, the institutional trauma experienced by Viramontes’ characters has been repressed, and the fragmented urban environment of Los Angeles continually intrudes, traumatically at times, on characters’ personal lives.
First and foremost, the aim of this chapter is to uncover the discourses of power at work in the postmetropolis and to determine what opportunities remain for individuals who wish to claim sites of resistance against institutional power. Exploring the institutional processes that altered the shape and complexion of American cities, I discuss how the loss of and desire for a symbolic center dictates
city dwellers’ traumatic relationship to the decentered urban spaces they inhabit. This chapter also addresses the role that literature plays in representing, simulating, and confronting these new iterations of urban space and trauma.
Consistent with my commentary from previous chapters, narrative production— and the spatial practices involved therein—serves as the vital entry point for discussions on how trauma is experienced and represented in urban space. Both texts under consideration in this chapter simulate postmetropolitan space through complex narrative structures that involve the reader in the negotiation of textual space. Commenting on the postmetropolitan freeway system, which sends city- dwellers along predetermined urban pathways that preclude productive human exchange, Viramontes and Altman utilize fragmented, decentered narratives that both reflect the loss of empathy in the postmodern city and, at times, provide us with the critical distance necessary to understand and confront these new iterations of urban space.