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Twilight City: Outline for an archaeopsychic
geography of New London
Kodwo Eshun
a
a
Visiting Lecturer in Visual Cultures , Goldsmiths College and the Dutch Art Institute
at University of Twente
Published online: 18 Jul 2008.
To cite this article: Kodwo Eshun (2004) Twilight City: Outline for an archaeopsychic geography of New London,
Wasafiri, 19:43, 7-13, DOI: 10.1080/02690050408589930
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690050408589930
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Twilight City
OUTLINE FOR AN ARCHAEOPSYCHIC
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GEOGRAPHY OF NEW LONDON
In a British film culture dominated by
social realism, video activism,
materialist film and Screen theoryinformed practice, Handsworth Songs
by the Black Audio Film Collective had a profound cultural impact
when it was released in 1986. It created an aesthetic space from
which questions of Afrodiasporic complexity became possible. If
its immediate effect was to displace the amnesia endemic to
debates around social crisis, its longer-term project was to
participate in the reconfiguration of Britishness that
characterised much artistic and intellectual activity during the
1980s.
The Black Audio Film Collective was a London-based artists'
group formed in 1982 by John Akomfrah, Una Gopaul, Reece
Auguiste, Avril Johnson, Edward George, Trevor Mathison and
David Lawson. Before its dissolution in 1998, it was responsible
for eleven films, as well as videos, installations, essays,
statements and cultural interventions. Much of that work
however has been overshadowed by the success of Handsworth
Songs. Yet it constitutes nothing less than a paradigmatic shift in
European culture whereby conditions of cultural memory and
futurity, previously contained by the address of colonial
authority, could now be explored as a series of meta-historical
meditations.
Of particular significance is the group's second feature,
Twilight City (1989), which fifteen years later can be seen more
clearly as one of the first films of the contemporary era to analyse
London as a global city. It maps the archival metropolis in ways
quite distinct from the romanticist cartographies later to become
familiar through texts such as Michael Moorcock's Mother
London (1989), Alan Moore's From Hell (1993), lain Sinclair's
Lights out for the Territory (1997) Peter Ackroyd's iondon: The
Biography (2001) and films such as Patrick Keiller's London
(1993). It also prefigures, yet distinguishes itself from, the
discourse on globalisation developed by sociologists such as
Saskia Sassens, Manuel Castells, and Arjun Appadurai.
Twilight City occupies an appropriately crepuscular zone
between these fields. It does not so much illustrate globalisation
as present a poetics of that condition. In this sense, it does not
simply anticipate social theory; rather, as Sarat Maharaj points
out, it acts by 'stopping short of simply mirroring and miming
their elements. It is a generator of ideas but the kinds of feelthink-know antennae it throws up are quite different from
discursive modalities'.1
Londoners today are living through an era of real estate
speculation and frenzied redevelopment far eclipsing anything
in the 1980s. New builds on the Paddington Basin around Kings'
Cross, and schemes around the former Wembley Stadium and
Stratford are just three of eight substantial developments
underway throughout the city. The polarisation of the city
between over-invested corporate towers and disinvested
residential estates, metonymised of late by the relationship
between Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, looks set to intensify.
In this context, it feels timely to reopen the files on the opaque
work that is Twilight City, a film that explores many of the same
themes analysed by Saskia Sassens. In The Global City: London,
New York, Tokyo and several subsequent texts, she argues that
the 'master images' in dominant discourses on economic
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Twilight City: Outline for an Archaeopsychic Geography of New London
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globalisation tend to emphasise hypermobility, global communications and the
neutralisation of place and distance. She
urges us to recover the concrete, localised
processes through which globalisation
functions in order to specify
a new geography of centres and
margins. Much of what we still narrate
in the language of immigration and
ethnicity, I would argue is actually a set
of processes whereby global elements
are localised, international labour
markets are constituted, and cultures
from all over the world are de- and reterritorialised. This puts them right
there at the centre along with the
intemationalisation of capital as a
fundamental aspect of globalisation.2
It's not so much that Twilight City
articulates the links between
multiculturalism and finance in order to
answer back to mainstream silence; rather,
it seeks to evoke the psychogeographical landscape of living
through the de- and re-terriorialisation of culture. An era in which
global capital emerges into the space of the urban metropolis by
taking on the form of the local. An era in which the future, made
safe for capital, is evoked in order to hide the present in all its
unhappiness.
Consequently, Twilight City melts the conditions of
postcoloniality and postmodernity into a series of questions
framed but not contained by the imperatives of fiction, the
interview and the archive. These questions take the form of a
fabulation that passes from the fiction of nationality to the
unconscious of history via memories of belonging. This way of
narrating the twentieth century consequently opens a continuum
between colonialism, the post-colony and the confusing
transnationalism of the present. In so doing, Twilight City
succeeds in excavating the historical ruins and geological strata
of the global city.
This approach allows us to reconsider the present in terms of
duration rather than novelty. Gilles Deleuze suggests the crisis
that has afflicted European filmmakers in recent decades is not
merely one of representation, but of the ontology of the image:
The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly
increased the situations which we no longer know how to
react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe.
These were 'any spaces whatever', deserted but inhabited,
disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of
demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaces
whatever, a new race of characters was stirring, kind of
mutant: They saw rather than acted, they were seers.3
Deleuze's concept of 'any spaces whatever' is not simply the
81 Wasafiri
I
flattened spaces of postmodernism. It is clear that these spaces
coincide with and announce the moment when the postcolonial
emerges in the metropolitan. Deleuze's new race of mutants
describes the very real conditions of migration, diaspora and
hybridity that characterise the new populations of Europe and
America after the war, an era characterised by the dismantling of
colonial power, and whose ruins live on in the people that
achieved its downfall. Like all BAFC films, Twilight City perceives
migrants as quintessential moderns drifting through the
metropolitan West, seers aware of violent histories to which the
dominant population remains blind. They are figures whose
disappointments demand a new kind of narrativity.
To be concerned with the ontology of the image then is to
refuse to accept representational forms as transparent windows
onto the real. The audiovisual image is here understood as a
means with which to reconfigure the temporal structuring of
modern experience. Understood as such, the work of BAFC
represents a paradigmatic shift whereby European aesthetics are
pressed into the service of Afrodiasporic modernity.
Twilight City opens with Olivia Levelle, a thirty-year-old
researcher on wealth creation, writing a letter to her mother
Eugenia. Eugenia left for Dominica in 1979 and now wants to
return to a London she still calls home. Olivia has to decide
whether to invite her mother given the changes she and the city
have undergone in the intervening decade. Eugenia's desire to
return sends Olivia on a quest to discover what London has
meant to her in the past and the present.
This quest is imagined through modes of epistolary address,
scored by electronic evocations and visualised in night-time
drives through London streets and images of Sinclair's liquid city:
barges ferrying waste downriver to Essex in bright yellow
containers; scenes of the Isle of Dogs, Shadwell, Limehouse,
Docklands; the Portico of the Embankment in the City of London.
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These images are punctuated by interviews with now established
cultural theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy who
recall childhood memories of London neighbourhoods, streets
and houses before evaluating the present conditions of the
global city. The interviews signal BAFC's ambition to use the
moving image to portray an emergent public sphere of diasporic
intellectuals, a project sustained throughout their oeuvre.
In Twilight City, the unstable present and the fragile past are
mediated by a third narrative of colour-saturated archival images
that revisit moments throughout the twentieth century. But the
archive does not merely illustrate recollections and evaluation;
rather, it is reused for distinct kinds of citation, witnessing,
detoumement, and, above all, poeticisation. Such an inventory of
approaches is specific to the post-war tradition of the essay-film.
Andre Bazin defined this in Lettre de Siberie as an 'essay
documented by film ...understood in the same way as in
literature: both an historical and political essay, though written
by a poet'; while Jean-Luc Godard suggested that one 'think of a
sociology essay, an essay on society written in the form of a novel
with only musical notes at my disposal'. Twilight City may be
considered an essay-film of the new London, perhaps the first.
The East End's role as the locus classicus of the new
geography is a familiar one; historically it has constituted itself
through intensive migration and endemic poverty. 1989
nonetheless witnessed inequality of a new magnitude: Canary
Wharf, with its corporate towers sitting cheek by jowl alongside
informal economies, was experienced by many as a shock that
threatened historical memory and breached psychic defences. If
childhood is inscribed into place, then the destruction of locality,
no matter how immiserated, not only endangered memories, but
could trigger a pervasive homelessness. Twilight City,
accordingly, is preoccupied less with unhomely or uncanny
spaces than with the sudden and
permanent condition of homelessness.
phantoms; to the lacunary layers which we juxtaposed
according to variable orientation and connections.4
As Olivia states, 'Each interview begins with a new London
but my line of questioning always leads me back to my childhood
and I don't know why.'The BAFC essay-film can be understood as
an excavation in which a threatened past is unearthed to come to
the aid of the endangered present, and in doing so helps to open
a previously unglimpsed futurity.
In the 1970s, Stuart Hall argued that race was the modality
through which class was lived. Today, we could say that
immigration is the modality through which globalisation is lived.
TwilightCity explores the confusing experience of disjunction
when processes of transnational labour slowly begin to slide
apart from the language of immigration that traditionally names
and contains such processes.
The film is neither a lament for working-class communities,
nor a simplistic critique of new global capitalism. Instead, it
rethinks modernity from the point of view of the Black Atlantic
diaspora in the West. Memory, experience and history are
reconfigured through a series of temporal signatures that, in
their totality, constitute a singular structure of time.
This is clear from the opening scenes in which a car navigates
London at night. The film screens the metropolis, returning
repeatedly to sequences viewed through a windscreen, streets
seen in relation to voiceover. The emphasis is on the screen
vision of an endless travelling shot. The road at night, filmed by a
wide angled lens, becomes an asphalt desert; streets are pushed
far back and splayed; headlights, traffic lights and shop signage
assume a sleazy precedence over people, who appear as
fugitives, congealing and scattering at the frame's edge.
There is, however, something peculiar about these
The lost spaces of childhood and the
dispossessed working classes of East
London are connected by a complex tissue
that is simultaneously psychic,
architectural, historical and spatial. This
psychogeography of the global city owes
little to either the Situationist tradition
invoked by Stewart Home or the nostalgic
vision of sacred geomancy disinterred by
writers like Sinclair, Ackroyd and Moore.
Twilight City is better understood as a
non-linear excavation through
archaeopsychic strata — that is, media
which are simultaneously archaeological
and psychic. In a cinematic philosophy of
this kind, the visual image becomes what
Deleuze calls
archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic.
Not that we are taken back to
prehistory but to the deserted layers of
our time which bury our own
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Twilight City: Outline for an Archaeopsychic Geography of New London
sequences. As there are no reverse shots in the entire film, there
is no sense of the interior or the exterior of the car. No sense of
someone at the wheel. Nor of the car as a mobile intimate realm,
occupied by the self-sufficient subject familiar from American
road movies.
knowing this I stood there staring at an old declaration of
love wondering why the Isle of Dogs can't protect itself from
fire when it has so much water and wondering why someone
so young would think love could banish forgetting.
The human in fact is strangely evacuated. Olivia is there but
somehow not there. What takes her place is a weightless,
disquieting glide through the night-time world, accompanied by
a weak electronic pulse that throbs slowly like a failing heart.
This temporalisation of the image creates an unresolved
expectation that resounds throughout the film.
The image shows a wall inclined at a steep angle where one
can just about see LOVE ME scrawled in capital letters. The city
becomes a surface in which the literal traces of memories of
childhood do not evoke the return of the repressed so much as
the persistence of the lost. At another point in Olivia's sojourns,
the buildings come to her aid, helping her to address her mother
as Eugenia:
These journeys through the centre of the night parallel
Olivia's wandering through a landscape of dreams that
continually folds the historical and the factual inside itself. The
BAFC film is highly personal, even introspective in its mode of
address, yet it proceeds as a kind of collective utterance. Olivia's
recollections move from the city of archive, through geography of
the mind, into the city of lights.
The terrain of interiority through which Olivia wanders is a
zone of the unconscious that has no precedent. Prior to BAFC's
work, it is no exaggeration to say that Afrodiasporic interiority did
not exist in European cinema, only exteriority and cliched actionreactions resulting from what Deleuze terms the 'sensory-motor
schema' of 'the action-image'.
Twilight City is an enigmatic cartography of the political
unconscious mapped through the epistolary mode of address.
Central to this is the drama of linkage. Throughout the film, Olivia
addresses her mother, not the viewer. Her attention is turned
away from us, towards the letter she writes, towards her notes,
her thoughts, her desk with its cigarettes, its photocopies, its
editions of the Evening Standard and Marxism Today. Olivia's
back is not quite turned away from us: seated at an oblique angle
to camera, she is hard to see in full. In fact we never quite get to
see her.5 Her entire being is directed towards maintaining the
space of communication with the absent mother. And this is
achieved through the exteriorisation of writing, through
externalisation of the inaudible speech of reading.
We hear Olivia's internal monologue and her questions to
Eugenia; the interiority of thought, writing, reading; the
pathways of recollection. For all its speech, then, Twilight City is a
kind of silent movie, as indeed are other BAFC movies. Everything
Olivia does is directed at maintaining the link that Eugenia has
reopened. It is the fragility of that link that she addresses and it is
this sense of close distance that sustains the narration from
moment to moment.
That fragility of connections seeps from the unconscious into
voluntary memory and on into archive until the city itself
partakes in it. At one point, Olivia revisits a message left on the
wall of her old flat in the Isle of Dogs. 'Love me and don't forget
me,' she recites, before we realise she is quoting words she
wrote as a child:
Love me and don't forget me. 1979.1 left this message on a
wall for you. Yesterday when I rediscovered it I was lost for
words again. The Blitz of 1943 destroyed an East End Chinese
community dating back to the turn of the century and
101 Wasafiri
Some nights I drive through the city searching for something.
Halfway through the night I forget what I'm looking for, so I
play a game using old and new buildings as a guide home.
Sometimes I practise calling you by your first name. A new
London is being born and I'm still struggling with your first
name.
If Twilight City is in some ways a silent movie, then one learns a
lot from listening to the kinds of silence that mute the film. Olivia
recalls Eugenia's belief that
If you really want to know someone listen to their silences.
Isn't that what you once said? I'm beginning to think that in
order to understand a city you have to do the same thing.
The loudest absence here is the muting of the colonial
voiceover. By emptying the image of British authority, filling it up
with colour filters, typically orange, blue and green and rescoring
it, BAFC partially sever image from context and poeticise the
imperial archive.
Suspended in the void of the soundtrack, the movements of
colonial politicians exist in a peculiar gravity. Old Tory grandees
such as Alec Douglas Hume, Willie Whitelaw and Edward Heath
are not only mute, but deaf to the power of music that surges
around them. It is as if the music is trying to wake up the image,
which, deaf and frail, fails to respond.
The image once dominated by the colonial address is now
occupied by BAFC composer Trevor Mathison's electronic score
which spans the entire film. Despite the priority the Collective
gave to questions of aurality, a preoccupation signalled loudly in
their name and in the titles of three films: Handsworth Songs,
Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) and Three Songs on Pain,
Light and Time (1997), few critics have brought a close hearing to
bear on the group's oeuvre.
Mathison's modus operandi is to exploit the synthesiser's
innate ability to be inhuman. The result is that sound offers no
refuge from deterritorialisation. There is no 'core of affect'whether gospel or reggae or blues or jazz - around which the film
can secure an inviolable core of identity; on the contrary, the
score marshals its affects and identifications from within electromodernity, from inside the synthesiser's inherent alienationeffect.
Mathison's achievement is to redirect this alienation effect,
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familiar from John Carpenter's
soundtracks for The Thing (1982) or from
Tangerine Dream scores for Michael Mann
thrillers such as Heat (1995), to the
aesthetic of the European essay-film.
Twilight City uses the synthesiser to
generate simple yet dense chordal
textures that connote a sense of
'orchestra-ness' while emptying the
screen soundspace of any true orchestral
presence. The result is a mood of grandeur
that gives way to detachment, a gravitas
that yields to passivity through a continual
flattening of peaks and envelopes.
Where Carpenter might exploit this
effect of indifference to bring actionsequences into relief, the Mathison score
moves from indifference to gravitas in the
service of the drama of connection. Each
link between the geography of the interior
and the new landscapes of capitalism is
made in the absence of'horizontal'
melody. One is aware instead of the
'vertical' depth of any one note or musical
fragment, of the loops of synthesiser that simulate wordless
vocal wraiths, of the distant refrains of whales singing.
Mathison's soundtracks also exploit the synthesiser's ability
to function 'as a non-definable, distanced instrument'that is
'devoid of its own identity yet capable of calling up simulated
timbres in a breathy, hazy way.'6 As a result, his electronic score
throughout Twilight City neither underlines the mood of the
image nor sets out to evoke the emotional temperature of a
specific year; it creates a temporal fissure through a process of
nonsynchronosity. This is more than simply joining new music to
an old image; it holds together different audiovisual eras that fail
to resolve into a third new form. The effect is a temporal
signature in which sound blocks access to a familiar way of
seeing and thereby allows us to see this inaccessibility,
experience this distance.
This attentiveness to bad timings, missed chances, quietude
and embarrassment signals a formal language of political
maturity that is allergic to certainties. By replacing the search for
guarantees with the drama of the difficult question, BAFC move
beyond mere historical irony to restore the condition of
contingency to the postcolonial aftermath.
This is never clearer than when Olivia observes that 1958 was
the year of white riots in Notting Hill, the first anniversary of
Ghana's independence, and the point at which her mother joined
the Conservative Party, keeping 'an autographed picture of
Harold Macmillan at her bedside'. The compassion Olivia
bestows on her mother and by extension the Windrush
generation, and their faith in the Macmillan government, is
striking. Her fourth dream extends this quality:
Sometimes when I leave this world I take bits of you with me.
Sometimes I'm lost for decades, even to myself and all that
remains of me is a series of casual statistics: Olivia Leville,
thirty-year-old daughter of Eugenia Leville, the Eugenia who
joined the Conservative Party when Harold Macmillan made
his speech grudgingly accepting colonial independence. The
Conservative Party that disappeared in 1976. In these lost
decades I could be anyone.
The commonplace dismissal of that generation's naivete is
displaced by screenwriters John Akomfrah and Edward George in
order to explore the mixture of deference and hopefulness that
underwrites Eugenia's faith in Toryism. Here, the idea of the
mother country is neither dismissed as naive nor redeemed, but
is repositioned as a failed Utopian moment. A Utopian moment
that is perceived through the obsolete technology of the
newsreel so as to begin to understand why such moments fail to
fulfil themselves. For the filmmaker Stan Douglas, quoted by Hal
Foster in Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (2002), such
obsolete forms of communication can
become an index of an understanding of a world lost to us; to
recover these forms is to address moments when history
could have gone one way or another; we live in the residue of
such moments and for better or worse their potential is not
yet spent.7
Such silences may haunt society as unrealised social
alternatives. Olivia recollects conversing with a statue of Winston
Churchill on the night following the fourth of her six dreams. As
the statue's broad face fills the screen, Olivia recounts its
response. In this apostrophic encounter, animating an inanimate
figure brings it into the present where it yields its secrets.
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If you really want to know someone listen to their silences.
Isn't that what you once said? I'm beginning to think that in
order to understand a city you have to do the same thing.
Whenever I think I'm coming close to this in the new London I
come face to face with the same old things which stand in
silence watching over London like unseen ghosts. Last night
one of them said to me: 'We remain silent because only we
know the secret of the city's power. Ours is the secret of all
cities and it belongs only to those who own the cities future.
We are the guardians of the old city and our secret is the
power of inheritance. That's how we got where we are.'
confining them to streets, estates and slums. Imposing
subsistence level existence reinforced the process of
ghettoisation which halted access to the production of hope,
potential and futurity.
Accordingly, films such as John Boormann's Leo the Last
(1970) Horace Ove's Pressure (1976) Sankofa's Terrritories (1984),
as well as Handsworth Songs, are all preoccupied with
contesting what Judith Butler calls 'the racial disposition of the
visible'.9 They respond to the hostile ambience of white anxiety
provoked by the disposition of the black male body in urban
space.
BAFC's fascination with the malevolent obsolescence of the
imperial statue reaches back to the tape-slide work Signs of
Empire (1983) and to Handsworth Songs. It is not only that the
statue monumentalises historical memory and therefore
solidifies the fiction of national identity. The group are especially
drawn to statues whose commemorative function has been
forgotten. These draped Hellenic figures stand, stranded,
outmoded in the modern era.
Hal Foster explains in Design and Crime that it is precisely
because of this outmodedness or non-synchronous presence,
that such structures may contains 'encrypted mnemonic signals'.
These signals question capitalism's claim to timelessness and
challenge its culture with its own wish symbols. In doing so,
capitalism is forced to 'recall its own forfeited dreams of liberty,
equality and fraternity'.
To ask an outmoded symbol such as a statue to recall its own
'forfeited dreams' is to turn its silence into mute responsiveness.
It is to approach the image as an apostrophe. Barbara Johnson, in
A World of Difference, defined apostrophe as
a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws
voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its
silence into mute responsiveness. The absent, dead, or
inanimate entity.addressed is thereby made present,
animate, anthropomorphic.8
The image as apostrophe is a key signature of the BAFC whose
films contain moments that gaze into the blind eyes of a statue,
as if to enlist them in a metropolitan drama against their wishes.
If we scale up from the neoclassical statuary that overlook
the city to the corporate towers that pierce the skyline, it
becomes possible to explore the spatial as well as temporal
signatures of this drama through the film's approach to modes of
scale, height and depth.
European media, whether cinema, radio, newspaper or
photograph has, historically, sought to contain and confine the
image and sound of Afrodiasporic consciousness. The presence
of Africans, Asians and Caribbeans in London only added insult to
the wounded pride of white Empire and made it imperative that
the moderns be addressed as a threat to be managed or a
problem to be solved.
Crucial to this binary operation was the exercise of
containment at the level of scale. Checking migrant desires for
ascension, aspiration and achievement meant allocating and
121 Wasafiri
In the three years following the release of Handsworth Songs
the conditions of the visible have dramatically altered. Twilight
City steers clear of social realist dramatic cliches: moody streets
prowled by disaffected black youth. Instead it restricts itself to
scenes of Somali ex-servicemen at their Tower Hamlet
community centre and to scenes of church congregation that
counterpoint the enigmatic gay tableaux of photographer Rotimi
Fani Kayode.
The pedestrian scale of black male presence is replaced by
God's-eye perspectives. Several wide angle shots that slowly pan
across London and move up and downriver. It is as if the terms of
visibility have altered so that it becomes imperative to explore
the condition of the urban basin of London at a higher dimension
of abstraction.
The view and the vista have become political questions that
demand attention at an elevated scale. The entire question of the
plan as a means of large-scale investment necessitates the shift
to the perspective of the city as a totality to be surveyed. It is no
longer sufficient to address the street but rather to bring into
appearance the conditions of the urban. In these sequences,
Twilight City therefore assumes the perspective of the property
developer, the master planner, the urbanist, figures that
establish the terms upon which the street comes into existence.
At these points, Olivia seems absent from the film. The
camera impersonally adopts the point of view of the generic
architect standing in the corporate tower, looking down on flows
of traffic and human animals, making plans for entire terrains.
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Twilight City places the viewer within the position of international
business that aims to master the global city. At this height, there
is a deracialisation of the visible. History becomes geography,
becomes space, becomes place.
Director Reece Auguiste extends this perception with several
scenes of the planet viewed from an orbiting spacecraft. From
this extraterrestrial point of view, the global city itself dissolves
into the borderless blue world, an image which by implication
becomes the signal that we are in the presence of the local in the
age of transnationalisation. Seeing the Earth from an
Archimedian perspective such as this provokes multiple
boomerang effects-the intimate immensity of perception
dwarfed by space, the planetary humanism of Gaia considered as
a massively distributed network of networks, the totality of
transnational hypercapital, the planetary surveillance of the
Echelon spy-system. Twilight City conjures these perspectival
revisions so as to return us, again and again, to the questions of
potentiality and the conditions of belonging that form the poetic
trajectory and political unconscious of New London.
Notes
1 Sarat Maharaj, 'Xeno-Epistemics: Makeshift Kit for Sounding
Visual Art as Knowledge Production and the Retinal Regimes',
Documenta11_Catalogue,Hatje Kantz, 2002, p 71
2 Saskia Sassens, The Global City: London, New York, Tokyo,
Princetown University Press, USA, 1991
3 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, University of Minnesota
Press, USA, 1989
4 Ibid
5 We could connect this reticence to a tradition of partial iconicity
familiar from Miles Davis, back turned on his audience, to Fanon
who in Sartre's words, 'speaks of you, often never to you', and to
Lorna Simpson's photographs of women blocking apprehension.
6 Philip Brophy, 100 Modern Soundtracks, BFI, London, 2004, p 150.
7 Stan Douglas quoted in Hal Foster, Design and Crime and Other
Diatribes, Verso Books, UK, 2002
8 Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference, Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987
9 Judith Butler, 'Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and
White Paranoia' in ... 1993
All images are stills from Twilight City, 1989, The Black Audio Film
Collective
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