Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations by Peter Brooker (review)

Abstract

476 Reviews the nature of post-war culture. The 'Enemy' guise signalled his oppositional stance and his recognition that opposition was likely to be ineffectual within an administered society. The stance of the outsider was a bid for the disengaged perspective that permits critique and a self-mocking, semi-parodic 'mask' that acknowledged the impossibility of such disengagement. Lewis was concerned to formulate an aesthetic that would oppose the degradation of avant-garde art to a form of radical chic con? cerned with nothing more than the acquisition of symbolic capital. His advocacy of satire was one response to this dilemma, acknowledging his own embroilment in this cultural problematic. So too, and hardly redolent of paranoia, should be his admission in Men without Art that under present-day capitalist conditions every writer is implicated in this dark comedy?'Is not however "the present writer," as are all other writers, suspect? Certainly he is! Time alone can show which of us, of all these figures engaged in this pell-mell confusion, has preserved the largest store (and at the best it must be modest) of what is rational, and the least affected with rank bogusness' (Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art, ed. by Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), p. 157). University of Birmingham Andrzej Gasiorek Modernity and Metropolis: Writing,Film and Urban Formations. By Peter Brooker. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. ix + 230pp. ?45. ISBN 0-33380168 -7. This book begins from the position that modernity and the city need to be considered in terms of a dynamic interrelationship between space and time. In analysing predom? inantly literaryand cinematic constructions ofthe city,Brooker focuses on urban sites as loci of spatio-temporal difference and process where local and global intersect, and where reworkings ofthe past and imaginings of the future coexist. Brooker refuses a separation between modernity and postmodernity as categories or temporalities. In? stead, he argues that modernity looks back reflexively at the Enlightenment thought which was its precondition, and looks forward at the alternative possible futures that the complex and multiple forms of urban life make possible. This kind of perspective therefore addresses several interrelated questions. Capital ist globalization undermines the securing force of narratives of national, familial, and individual identity,with the result that temporary and speculative biographical narra? tives need to be perpetually reinvented. Urban space is considered in terms ofsimilarly temporary and contingent zones whose boundaries are uncertain and whose meaning is perpetually shifting.Time is imagined as a series ofdifferentpresents necessarily located in their own particular space, reimagining the past and the future, rather than as consensually shared across a region or nation and underwriting a principle of progress and linear development. Having established these critical angles of vision, Brooker is able to pursue their specific realizations. These include the Londons in the works of Pound and Eliot, the Harlem of Langston Hughes, the ethnically inflected suburbia of Zadie Smith, and the lesbian Lower East Side of Sarah Schulman. The majority of the book discusses the urban modernities of Western cities, but there is also a con? cern, following from the attention to issues of boundary and globalized culture, with hybrid spaces in the works of William Gibson and Wong Kar-Wai, for example. It seems to be compulsory in works on the city and modernity to discuss Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982, 1991), but Brooker not only connects the film with cyberpunk fiction and other cinematic dystopias, but also with the architectural theory of Rem Koolhaas and the urban spaces of south-east Asia in the novels of Lawrence Chua. Brooker's analyses are insistently political. The book is implicated in that strand of postmodernist thinking which aims to confuse the boundaries between high and MLR, 99.2, 2004 477 popular culture, between dominant and subordinate, and between agency and re? presentation. The deconstruction of spaces, times, and theoretical categories is, for Brooker, not simply a matter of describing a contemporary urban aesthetic or ex? perience. So, for example, Langston Hughes's Montage of a Dream Deferred offers 'strategies forsurvival and sociality' (p. 69). Writing about the Londons in the written and cinematic works of Sayed Manzarul Islam, Patrick...