Dean & White republished). I wrote this partly in response to Grosz’s essay,
and also to reading more widely about the city. I have attempted to imagine
many different kinds of bodies or cities in the individual texts, and some-
times their interaction. In the piece, there is no unified city or body. The
emphasis is on parts rather than wholes, glimpses and fragments rather
than totalities, moments rather than sustained stories.
This assemblage is also highly politicised: societal regulation of the body
is fundamental to the piece. The body can be policed in its relationship to
the city, hence the reference to ‘docile bodies/indoctrination’ and the
‘policing’ of the ‘body politic’. The piece draws our attention to this kind
of regulation through governmental repression (the law that prohibits
kissing in public in Kuwait and the use of the vaginal speculum to examine
women’s bodies in the fourteenth century). But it also suggests ways in
which regulation can be transgressed by walking, dreaming, writing and
other creative acts. This tension between regulation and transgression
permeates the piece and is never resolved. The transgression does not nec-
essarily ‘win’, and cannot always be sustained, but the potential to break
through the repression is always there.
In responding to Exercise 6, try to break down the body and the city as
totalities. Include many different cities and bodies; focus on parts rather
than wholes, and a variety of interactions between them.
GLOBALISATION GOVERNS
Exercise 7 asks you to create a text which pivots on time–space com-
pression (that is, shifts rapidly between different times and space).
Postmodern theorists, such as Edmund Soja or David Harvey, see
time–space compression (a consequence of globalisation) as absolutely
fundamental to the postmodern world (Harvey 1990). Time–space
compression means that in our global world distant points tend to
converge on each other. First, many of us are able to make links with
places which seem to be very distant culturally, electronically and
physically through commerce, travel, the media, the Internet and migration.
Second, we are also more able to connect with past time in history
through, for example, the media (so we constantly see replays of World
War II). That time–space compression is a feature of modern life is
widely accepted in postmodern thought. But whether it is productive or
destructive has been hotly debated in cultural theory. On the one hand,
it can be argued, we have an increased awareness of different cultures
and the historical events which have shaped us. On the other hand,
shorthand ways of experiencing times and spaces, such as tourism and
Mapping worlds, moving cities 267