Immoderate territories: trajectories in the postmodern city

Abstract

This thesis argues that modern concepts of the city are under pressure because of changing values in postmodern and capitalist society and culture. It situates analysis of selected fictional and non-fictional texts in relation to the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel de Certeau, and within other enquiries into contemporary conceptions of space and place. Chapter One discusses a conception of the city as immoderate, excessive and "other" to the stable or unitary identity of modern discourse of the kind characterised by Deleuze and Guattari with the term "State philosophy." Chapter Two introduces the concept of the face and investigates the political economy in which a representation of the city as a totalised, definable entity is used as a means to control the flux delineated in Chapter One. This face is seen as both oppressive and necessary for meaning production. The important conceptual difficulty that is underlined through these two chapters is that the city as immoderate or the city as a unitary are not binary opposites but inextricably connected. Chapter Three critiques the models of city provided by both the preceding chapters. Control is argued to be working through the excess of the city of Chapter One, in combination with the recoding to faces of Chapter Two. Chapter Four constitutes a reconsideration of the central aims of each chapter and draws them together to argue for a conception of the postmodern city where faces are subject to being understood in terms of immoderacy and as deliberate constructions.