Mean Streets: Tracking the Dispositives of Address(es) with China Miéville’s “Reports of Certain Events in London”

Abstract

Abstract Miéville’s short story stands out for its perhaps experimental, perhaps old-fashioned form: the story’s first-person narrator adopts, in nineteenth-century fashion, the persona of an editor and presents both his own view on the ‘events’ in question and a number of mock documents he has allegedly been sent. Readers are encouraged to piece together the story elements – events and characters – from postcards, minutes of a meeting, memos, personal letters, and tables. Typographically distinct and juxtaposed rather than narratively linked, these text fragments suggest internal conflicts in a group of people who track rogue streets – streets that change their location spontaneously and wreak havoc on the geographical and the political order of cities. It is no coincidence that a mix-up of names and addresses is the starting point of the story; the story’s ending hints at the consequences of having or not having a fixed address. My contribution examines Miéville’s use of the short story form in the context of fantastic literature. Following suggestions of Miéville’s “The Conspiracy of Architecture” (1998), the foregrounding of formal and quasi-material aspects of organising and mediating knowledge is read as an engagement with the power/knowledge dispositives made up of discursive ordering principles as well as city planning and city geography.