previous | next

But it was brief; now we seem to be reverting to the free-for-all plurality and confusion that Dickens describes in his essay on buses. These days drivers wear shades and walkmans; bus conductors in trainers converse on their mobiles. There may, perhaps, be a man with a clipboard back at depot who despairs of this; who, like me, hankers after the sunlit Ladybird book certitude of livery and uniform; but that modest and brief expression of Idea has gone.

And perhaps it is right that our empirical, fragmentary, differently labelled transport 'system' should be returning, that we are now tussling with the prospect of a private-public mix for the Underground and for the inevitable disintegration of corporate identity, corporate livery that it will bring. We are right to be empirical, practical, non-corporate in our thinking. We are by temperament simply not given to abstraction, especially about an entity so incontrovertibly tangible as the City. English readers might, for example, well find extracts such as the following a little disconcerting: Jonathan Raban in his classic Soft City writes:

"The city, our great modern foam, is soft, amenable to a dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams, interpretations. But the very plastic qualities that make the city the great liberator of human identity also cause it to be vulnerable to psychosis and totalisation nightmare" (1974).

And Stephen Barber: "The European city is a hallucination made of flesh and concrete, criss-crossed by marks of negation: graffiti, bullet holes, neon. The city is an immense area of eroded and exploded signs, signs that mediate the city to the individual, to the city." (1995)

(How much 'of its time' each passage is! the ludic, protean feel of the first: "foam.. soft…libidinous…plastic": very seventies!. The second much sterner: "criss-crossed.. marks of negation...bullet holes'. Very nineties! very semiological: 'marks, signs'; the style of a hundred titles in the ICA bookshop).

Discourse (sic) about cities thrives on the semiological: as one writer has it: "It would have been easy to go for London as the petit objet a, to think of London as desire's irredemiably unfulfillable character. Rather I have wanted to suggest that London, more often than not, in Eliot or Portheim, Morton or Ealing Comedy, figures the difficulty of an obsessional and neurotic desire to see it as our object rather than to accept how or that we are its subjects. A process of signification congeals round a set of sterotypes…which in their very inadequacy, imperially recruit otherness to give them substance.."

previous | next