Invisible Cities/Transcultural Images

Invisible Cities/Transcultural Images Johannes Birringer 1. "ZOBEIDE" WHEN I LEFT WEST GERMANY LAST summer to return to Texas, I had just completed the first part of a performance work-in-progress, Invisible Cities, which is based on my experience of having lived in cities whose urban topographies are largely unfamiliar to me. I had begun to ask myself how I perceived and imagined Dallas or Houston, how these urban formations project and reproduce ideologies, myths, cultural values, communal relations, and a social order. Furthermore, how the visible symbolic economy of the contemporary post-industrial city (dis)continues the nar120 rative of the modern city. During my stay in Europe I had seen the concrete effects of discontinuity in the decaying and abandoned harbor in the old industrial section of Genoa, Italy, or in the crumbling and ghostlike ruins of the old monuments in Rome, as I had seen the camouflage of wartime destruction in the rapid reconstruction of West German cities in the 1950s and 1960s. My visual memory of the historical and cultural landscape in which I grew up did not quite prepare me, however, for the unforseen collapse of space which I encountered in Dallas and Houston where the dispersion and decomposition of the urban body (the physical and cultural representation of community) have reached a hallucinatory stage. It is this representational crisis, a crisis of visual space produced by the frantic concealment of the deterioration of the socio-cultural fabric, which I became interested in when I started to work on the performance project. I had just reread Invisible Cities,Italo Calvino's parables of the interminable work of building and rebuilding the city, the construction site of culture and history. I remembered that one of Calvino's key metaphors of cultural process in the tale of the construction of the multinational, corporate city of "Zobeide," presents a reverse image of the urban narratives of capitalist and technological progress which are our modernist legacy. "Zobeide" is a failed dream that has become phantasmatic insofar as it restages precisely and unfailingly the loss and displacement of its imagined center, the memory on which it was built. Men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream . . . This was the city of Zobeide, where they settled waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them . . . ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten. New men arrived from other lands, having had a dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something of the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of the arcades and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would re121 main no avenue of escape. Those who had arrived first could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities As a topography of unconscious desire and symbolic reproduction, the image of the city described here can still be read paradigmatically in terms of the modernist topos of the prison, or in terms of the structural and psychoanalytic metaphors that identify the "scene" of repetition and failure in this theatre. The metaphor of the absent center and of the failure of memory and containment, however, points towards the end of the city as an imaginative or emotional focus even of cultural alienation. In contemporary urban fiction, the city (and the narrative itself) has lost all structural coherence. The people who roam the hieroglyphic urban landscape of Pynchon 's Los Angeles (The Crying of Lot 49) have "no common or geographical...