Transcript LONDON CALLING

LONDON CALLING
THE CLASH,
“LONDON CALLING” (1979)
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London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls
London calling, now don't look to us
Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
'Cept for the reign of that truncheon thing
The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running but I have no fear
'Cause London is burning and I live by the river
London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it brother, you can go at it alone
London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out and draw another breath
London calling and I don't wanna shout
But while we were talking I saw you nodding out
London calling, see we ain't got no high
Except for that one with the yellowy eyes
Now get this, London calling, yes, I was there, too
And you know what they said? Well, some of it was true
London calling at the top of the dial
And after all this, won't you give me a smile?
I never felt so much alike
THE MODERN CITY
Late 19th century = fading away of the last remnants of
romanticism (first “normalized” by the bourgeois
culture of realism and then disintegrated by the
radical perspective of naturalism)
Modernism = transnational cultural movement
dominating the first three decades of the century →
“the meaning of the city becomes more dense, until we
see the city through layers of historical meaning, or
until it blurs into the opaque vision” (Richard Lehan)
City = text, full of meanings referring to each other and
to other texts, and to the totality of historical times →
epistemological confusion → loss of the sense of
reality
UNREAL CITY
T.S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so
many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.l
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
MODERNITY AND
CONTEMPORANEITY
Modernity = American and French
Revolutions (1776, 1789)
Contemporaneity = second industrial
revolution (electricity, 1870s), revolution in
communications (material – trains,
automobiles and airplanes – and
immaterial – radio, cinema and sudio
recordings; early 20° century), Russian
Revolution (1917)
Modernism = cultural movement reacting to
the trasformation of the modern into the
contemporary
THREE VISIONS OF
THE “NEW” CITY
1. Denunciation of the “corruption” of the
“harmonious” relationshiop with nature
brought about by urbanization (Oswald
Spengler, Lewis Mumford)
2. Study of how cities “work” → cities =
entities half-way between the organic and
the mechanical (Robert E. Park, Ernest W.
Burgess)
3. Analysis of individual and collective
behaviour patterns – the city as a “state
of mind” → birth of urban sociology (Max
Weber, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel)
MASS SOCIETY
Contradiction between a heavily
individualistic bourgois
ideology (Weber, The
Protestant Ethics and the Spirit
of Capitalism, 1904-05) and a
social and economic system
based on massification and
depersonalization
MASSIFICTION VS.
DIFFERENTIATION
Mass society → tendency towards
“homogenization” vs. expansion of cities
→ spread of heterogeneity (migrations)
Specialized craftsmen substituted by
unspecialized workmen, who on the
other hand resist to the merging into the
undifferentiated melting pot of
“Britishness”, maintaining their own
different cultural identities
ALTERITY AND HOSTILITY
From the village-city to the
metropolis → dissemination of
representatives of “other” cultures,
distinctly different from the dominant
culture → alterity = danger
Migrant = disease, a “contaminating”
body to be expelled from the “sane”
body of the city
THE SPACE OF THE CITY
Jurij M. Lotman – Boris Uspenskij, Typology
of Culture: inner space (IN) vs. outer
space (ES / OUT)
IN-space = space of the already known, of
culture, order, law, maybe constrain
OUT-space = space of the unknown, of
nature, chaos, mystery, maybe freedom
City = IN-space vs. non-city (desert, forest,
ocean) = OUT-space, but also inner subdivision of spaces inside the city → the city
as a jigsaw puzzle of different sub-spaces,
each an IN-space for its inhabitants and an
OUT-space for the others