Seeing Disorientation: China Miéville's The City & the City

Abstract

Orientations revealed as false presumably lead to the need for reorientation. Outside this economy, can there be utopian unorientation or ambiguous post-orientation? The self comes into being in a moment of disorientation, as Althusser's famous scene of being hailed by a policeman on the street makes clear. Althusser represses this moment, but what if we allow for its accompanying self-reflexivity? The fictional cities of China Miéville's The City & the City (2009) are set in a fragmented and multi-layered space characterised by displacement and disorientation. This theoretically informed police procedural emphasises disorientation through the form of the detective story and plays with genre orientations through its fantastic/science fictional elements. Most strikingly, it reifies our everyday practices of ignoring certain things around us, using a science fictional novum: the institutionalised practice of ‘unseeing’. The novel suggests that the seeing that paradoxically lurks behind unseeing creates disorientation, giving momentary glimpses of ambiguous post-orientations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹‘Sich in einer Stadt nicht zurechtfinden heißt nicht viel. In einer Stadt sich aber zu verirren, wie man in einem Walde sich verirrt, braucht Schulung’ (Benjamin 1991: 237).

²Compare Franquesa's Lefebvre-inspired critique of an economy by which the mobility ‘turn’ in the social sciences reinforces the positivism of ‘a social reality where things, ideas, and people flow across a seemingly neutral space’ (Franquesa 2011: 1012–1013).

³‘[C]onversion physique de 180 degrés’ (Althusser 1970: 31).

⁴‘[P]etit théâtre théorique’ (Althusser 1970: 31); ‘dans la réalité les choses se passent sans aucune succession’ (Althusser 1970: 32).

⁵Freedman makes the point that the cities sometimes seem to be placed outside Europe, in an ‘irreducible margin of indeterminacy’ (2013: 21). Indeed, the novel plays on a discourse of ‘nested orientalism’ or ‘nested Balkanism’, in which each country in Central and Eastern Europe sees neighbouring countries to the East of themselves as not quite being part of Europe (Bakić-Hayden 1995; Todorova 1997).

⁶In this essay, I focus mainly on the gaze as an (dis)oriented activity. The ways in which the novel elaborates on language, or, as Freedman (2013) has shown, on uneven development, promise fruitful alternative access points.

⁷Compare the reviews summarized in Frelik (2011: 20).

⁸A description of the neuroanatomy of unseeing in The City & the City has already been attempted (Voytek 2010).

⁹Miéville is a Marxist and has a doctorate in international law, with a critical legal studies slant to the dissertation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johan Schimanski

Johan Schimanski (Dr. art.) is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo and Professor II at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. His research interests include border poetics, national identity in literature, Welsh literature, Arctic discourses and science fiction. At present he co-coordinates a Research Council of Norway project on Arctic Modernities and a work package within the EU seventh frame programme project EUBORDERSCAPES. Book publications include, as co-editor, Border Poetics De-limited (2007), Arctic Discourses (2010) and Reiser og ekspedisjoner i litteraturens Arktis (Travels and Expeditions in the Arctic of Literature, 2011); as co-author Passagiere des Eises: Polarhelden und arktische Diskursen 1874 (Passengers of the Ice: Polar Heroes and Arctic Discourses 1874, 2015).