title: The City of Flow and the City of Borders: The Representation of City in Fiction
Creators: name: Keim, Laurence Virgil
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2007
Subjects: subject: Cities
subject: theory of flow
subject: power and perception
subject: city of flow
subject: city of borders
subject: city in fiction
subject: urban environments
subject: memory
subject: experience
subject: imagination

description: Cities are synonymous with Western Civilization. Likewise their representation is complex and at times elusive. This exegesis establishes a theoretical framework that acknowledges this complexity but at the same time can be operationalized at the street level. Also, while the framework itself is multidisciplinary and extensive, its analysis can activate fiction, particularly the accompanying novel, Psychoclip. The enquiry of the exegesis is initiated by the following key questions: • What are the relations between power and perception? • What constitutes a Theory of Flow? • What evidence is there, in literature, of the representation of a City of Flow? The discussion extends to focus on the following works: Seven Poor Men of Sydney (Christina Stead), Snowdome (Bernard Cohen), The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (Peter Carey), The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe), Cosmopolis (Don DeLillo), Mr Phillips (John Lanchester) and The Arcades Project (Walter Benjamin). Theorists considered in the discussion include: Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Gaston Bachelard, David Sibley and Rebecca Solnit. In paralleling the dissertation, the novel, Psychoclip, explores the relation between power and perception represented as a form of personal agency operating within urban environments. The novel’s fictional exploration could be summarized as: What are the side-effects of the ‘totalizing eye’ and to what degree are memorial and imaginative strategies able to release a City of Borders back into a City of Flow? The fundamental characteristic of a City of Flow is freedom of movement. Writing that represents this principle is mapped at both a perceptual and strategic level. The City of Flow is then reconstituted as a written city where the emphasis is perceptual renewal that creates endless means, and that dissolves the erection of borders that reside within ends. It is a city of movement where multiple new cities are mapped over the old. In contrast, but as a complementary feature to the one structure, a City of Borders is theoretically established and mapped over the City of Flow. This allows a significant reading of urban environments. Beside a critique of Sibley’s urban geography, the thesis provides the conditions for the coding of urban spaces with its constraints and prohibitions and how as a result of such exclusionary practices the less powerful are relegated to the less desirable parts of our cities. The psychological and political dimensions of boundary erection will be critiqued to show how a politically-motivated and self-interested strategy is eventually represented, over time, as natural and inevitable. Further border erection will be examined in the three ontological spaces – memory, experience and imagination. In parallel, the novel Psychoclip (with its central character, Lee Skulks, a criminal whose view of the world has been commandeered by the government) moves in fictional terms through authoritarian space and involves the reader in a number of excursions and imaginative strategies where urban boundaries are pierced, permeated or evaded. As a result the space is reinvigorated and revitalized, causing a new fluidity and rich ambiguity to extend through the lives of the characters.