Abstracts of Papers
Kim Förster:
Reading New York City and Other Cities in Novel Ways. The Construction of New Meanings of Urban Spaces in and through Paul Auster's New York Trilogy
"What artists and writers teach us
is to look at our transformed cities in fresh and novel ways
and attribute new meaning to them."
[GUST 2002, 9]
For a certain time now different stories are being told about how cities have been transformed in the age of late capitalism, some would even call it the age of transnationalism. Basically these are stories about how urban spaces are getting more and more homogenized and fragmented - in both the material and symbolic sense. At the same time you can read about global cities as well as transnational urbanism, about postmodern urbanism as well as posturban space. Whether single locations do actually show the characteristics of an Ersatzstadt or even a non-place, for most academics the contemporary city nevertheless seems to be still the locus of discipline and control which are regarded as the main organizing principles of individual and social life. Some might even go further and argue that today the organization of urban spaces mirrors the logic of the camp, which is argued to be the spatial paradigm of inclusion and exclusion. Thus, most urban life seems to be situated in zones of indistinction. As the Ghent Urban Studies Team has pointed out it is writers and other artists who try to - and in trying they really do - attribute new meanings to the contemporary city and to urban life. To my mind two interrelated questions have to be posed: What exactly are the urban spaces which are commonly classified and criticized? And can they really be represented? I'm talking about the production as of space, anyway.
In my paper on an alternative reading of The New York Trilogy I argue that concepts of space and text should be combined to understand and appropriate urban spaces - literally as well as literary. Although Paul Auster always argues that - in spite of its title - this novel is, like all his other writings, not necessarily about New York City, he nevertheless writes about other, i.e. lived spaces. Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia is of some help here, allowing not only to read the spaces of representation but also to analyze the representation of space. In order to discuss New York City as a labyrinth, the spaces of walking, the lonely room, the city as a text and an abstract place, I nevertheless need to refer to a more differentiated and dynamic concept of space and place. Making use of Doreen Massey's progressive sense of place, which she bases on Foucault's notion of relational space and her own concept of power-geometries of time-space compression I can challenge the postmodern experience of urban spaces and promote the active construction of identity - of both place and person. Understood as a representation of heterotopias and a heterotopic representation, The New York Trilogy therefore teaches us to look at NYC and other cities in fresh and novel ways. Finally, in and through a discourse on the textualization of spaces and the spatialization or texts conservative constructs of space and text can be transgressed.
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