Seeing Like a City by Ash Amin Nigel Thrift

Author:Ash Amin,Nigel Thrift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2016-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Another way of considering what has been wrought can be found in VanderMeer's (2014a, b, c) Area X trilogy. Often understood as the depiction of a kind of natural extremity, a full speed ahead reversal of the Anthropocene, the opaque Area X might just as well be thought of as a reading of urbanity, of an ‘unending wakefulness’ (2014b, p. 155) in which everything turns into something else, a realm of pure infrastructure without beginning or end. Yes, Area X is a means of clearing the world of anthropogenic poisoning and then starting in on the human too (Tompkins, 2014). Yes, it is a biological machine. But, equally, it can be thought of as a reading of contemporary cities in which the human is in transition to something else.

[The trilogy shows] us characters struggling to understand how their minds and identities might be changed from afar, by systems of influence that they only vaguely understand. Ecology serves as a metaphor for the networked world – a world that's too big to comprehend, too pervasive to evade, and too hypnotic to resist.

(Rothman, 2015)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.