Edited by Chris Jenks - carlosmoreno.info

AN INTRODUCTION
The city, though traceable as a topic to the works of Weber, Simmel and
the early Chicago School has nevertheless re-emerged as a fecund image
and metaphor within the most contemporary of social theory.
Paradoxically, however, as James Donald argues, although the city is a site
of visibility, it now has to be imagined rather than seen. Urbanist discourse
represents the space and population of the city so as to render it a
governable object. The inhabitants of the city, and not just the flâneurs,
have a different view: they see it through a prism of memory, desire and
fantasy, re-enchanting the rationalist vision of the planners.
In his chapter Donald explores how this modernist ambivalence has been
played out in representations of the city in cinema and, to a lesser extent,
in photography. The ‘city symphony’ films of the 1920s, like Ruttman’s
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera,
all capture the rhythms of the modern metropolis in styles that recall either
Simmel’s sociology or the poetry of Ezra Pound. Yet however seductive
their documentary aesthetic, Donald argues, it is flawed by the same
ambiguities as the modernist urbanism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus.
In contrast to this, he suggests that the vulgar fictions of popular cinema
tell us a different story of the city; the totalitarianism of Metropolis; the
primitivism of King Kong; the postmodern pessimism of Blade Runner, the
comic-book dystopia of Batman or Akira. It is these latter, impossible yet
imaginable cities, buildable only in the film studio, that Donald elects as
the main topic of his analysis.
Having established a bow wave of anticipation for his writings on the
interminable aporia of the postmodern, Dick Hebdige, in his chapter,
reverses that flow and investigates a modernist starting point, or a pre-post-
. His moment, preceding the deformation of the metanarrative of vision
through depiction, is chosen from contemporary visual art. Specifically
Hebdige provides an analysis of the strategies and purposes of Pop art, but
particularly its youthful parentage in the hand-painted Pop art emanating
from America between 1955–62. This category is constituted through a
collection of painters and their work which predated and informed what we
conventionally regard as ‘Pop’ art.
The chapter explores a number of canvases and their critical reception
but it is specifically organised around the unspecifically disorganised
theme of confusion; that which Hebdige regards as a principled and
rigorous necessity of any Pop critic. The confusions proliferate in his
attempting to distinguish between the painterly aesthetic of the work in
hand and the mechanistic and technological manifesto of the mainstream
Pop that claimed the public’s attention through the 1960s. The chapter
further attempts to unravel the confusion woven through the conflation of
Pop with popular and mass symbolism.
At another level Hebdige is opening our eyes to the birth and reception
of genre, which he achieves by locating such artistic practice within its
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