Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworld of Modern Urban Culture: 1800–2001 (review)

David Pike's Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworld of Modern Urban Culture, 1800– 2001 presents a collection of æsthetic and architectural objects organized under the thematic of the underground, one that is particularly useful for anyone working within the nineteenth-century and early modernist periods. Pike concentrates most of his interpretations and attention on the height and ensuing decline of the industrial revolution in France and England, and traces the development of capitalism as a dialectical process hinging on the appropriation of formerly subversive underground spaces. The chapters are arranged to enhance the visibility of that dialectic as Pike moves from popular representations and locations that at one time posed a threat to capitalism but were fated for sublation within that system, quite frequently through an ideology of cleanliness and morality. Pike maintains, however, that the devil has and always will maintain a modicum of threat to capitalism despite the latter's continual attempts to incorporate this symbol.

He begins his book with "The Devil Comes to Town," an examination of the multifarious ways that Satan has been represented and later rendered rhetorical rather than revolutionary through popular theater, "high art" such as that by William Blake, early French films, penny press fiction, and finally capitalist iconography and advertising. The next chapter is devoted to the "Mysteries of the Underground," or the popular urban mysteries and crime novels that were symptomatic of the contradictions produced by capitalism; however, these inevitably also revealed the "structural paradox" between representation and the embodiment of a truly revolutionary zeal. Pike ends with "Through the Looking Glass," an analysis of the Parisian arcades and arches in London as the prime symbols of modern, urban life where criminal life and the underbelly of the city became less visible in favor of a hyper-commodified, consumerist, and policed public space.

The constant of the collection is Pike's emphasis on the underground as an antagonistic repository of truth and reality that always requires a dialectical response by capitalism. Whether it is through the representation of the Devil in ballad broadsides and penny magazines or the depiction of ghastly empty streets in the modernist Parisian film, Pike maintains that representations of underground space reveal or uncover the contradictions inherent to the development of capitalism. He returns after each examination to the point that he makes in the introductory chapter of the book: the conceptualization of the above ground as morally and ontologically superior is always dependent on and produced simultaneously with the threatening, mysterious underground space. Thus, no matter what utopian desires for progress or perfection may be expressed by those taking the above-ground perspective, a perspective that he tends to associate with both reformist groups and the bourgeois, the underground has always been necessary and will always be necessarily subversive.

Such revelations are brought out most dangerously within what Pike labels threshold spaces, those that allow for the intermingling of class identities and a confusion of the traditionally vertically oriented city, and it is precisely these threshold spaces that must be subsumed by the dialectic by which capitalism works. Ultimately, the devil as a symbol enables a reading of representations of the underground that reveals fundamental truths and realities about capitalism as well as potential subversions of it, displayed in contradictions in threshold space. These spaces, however, are always doomed to absorption or destruction at the hands of capital as Pike shows via examples of the arcades in both Paris and London and the punk and rock music scenes of the late 1970s.

One of the most useful and insightful of Pike's overall theses is that representations and cultural productions of space are not subordinate to what could be conceived of as physical or material space. This is clearly an insight that he takes from the work of Henri Lefebvre, but Pike pushes Lefebvre's work further by hooking his conceptual framework directly into a discourse of...