FoR A NuMBER OF YEARS I have been involved in research on the
body as sociocultural artifact. I have been interested in challenging
traditional notions of the body so that we can abandon the oppositions
by which the body has usually been understood-mind and
body, inside and outside, experience and social context, subject
and object, self and other, and underlying these, the opposition
between male and female. Thus "stripped," corporeality in its
sexual specificity may be seen as the material condition of subjectivity,
that is, the body itself may be regarded as the locus and site
of inscription for specific modes of subjectivity. In a "deconstructive
turn," the subordinated terms of these oppositions take their
rightful place at the very heart of the dominant ones.

Among other things, my recent work has involved a kind of
turning i11side out and outside ilt of the sexed body, questioning how
the subject's exteriority is psychically constructed, and conversely,
how the processes of social inscription of the body's surface
construct for it a psychical interior. In other words, I have
attempted to problematize the opposition between the inside and
the outside by looking at the outside of the body from the point of
view of the inside, and looking at the inside of the body from the
point of view of the outside, thus reexamining and questioning the
distinction between biology and culture, exploring the way in
which culture constructs the biological order in its own image, the
way in which the psychosocial simulates and produces the body as
such. Thus I am interested in exploring the ways in which the
body is psychically, socially, sexually, and discursively or representationally
produced, and the ways, in turn, bodies reinscribe
and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment so
that this environment both produces and reflects the form and
interests of the body. This relation of introjections and projections
involves a complex feedback relation in which neither the body
nor its environment can be assumed to form an organically unified
ecosystem. (The very notion of an ecosystem implies a kind of
higher-order unity or encompassing totality that I will try to
problematize in this paper.) The body and its environment, rather,
produce each other as forms of the hyperreal, as modes of simulation
which have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each
may have had into the image of the other: the city is made and
made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its
turn, is transformed, "citified," urbanized as a distinctively metropolitan
body.
One area that I have neglected for too long-and I am delighted
to have the opportunity here to begin to rectify this-is the constitutive
and mutually defining relation between bodies and cities.
The city is one of the crucial factors in the social production of
(sexed) corporeality: the built environment provides the context
and coordinates for most contemporary Western and, today, Eastern
forms of the body, even for rural bodies insofar as the twentieth
century defines the countryside, "the rural," as the underside
or raw material of urban development. The city has become the
defining term in constructing the image of the land and the landscape,
as well as the point of reference, the centerpiece of a notion of economic/social/political/cultural
exchange and a concept of a"natural ecosystem." The ecosystem notion of exchange and
"natural balance" is itself a counterpart to the notion of a global
economic and informational exchange system (which emerged
with the computerization of the stock exchange in the 1970s).
The city provides the order and organization that automatically
links otherwise unrelated bodies. For example, it links the
affluent lifestyle of the banker or professional to the squalor of the
vagrant, the homeless, or the impoverished without necessarily
positing a conscious or intentional will-to-exploit. It is the condition
and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively
produced. But if the city is a significant context and
frame for the body, the relations between bodies and cities arc
more complex than may have been realized. My aim here will be
to explore the constitutive and mutually defining relations
between corporeality and the metropolis, if only in a rather
sketchy but I hope suggestive fashion. I would also like to project
into the not-too-distant future some of the effects of the technologization
and the technocratization of the city on the forms of the
body, speculating about the enormous and so far undecidable
prosthetic and organic changes this may effect for or in the lived
body. A deeper exploration would of course be required to elaborate
the historico-gcographic specificity of bodies, their production
as determinate.
Before going into any detail, it may be useful to define the two
key terms I will examine today, body and city.
By body I understand a concrete, material, animate organization
of flesh, organs, nerves, muscles, and skeletal structure which
are given a unity, cohesiveness, and organization only through
their psychical and social inscription as the surface and raw materials
of an integrated and cohesive totality. The body is, so to
speak, organically/biologically /naturally "incomplete"; it is indeterminate,
amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities
which require social triggering, ordering, and long-term "administration,"
regulated in each culture and epoch by what Foucault
has called "the micro-technologies of power." 1 The body becomes
a human body, a body which coincides with the "shape" and space
of a psyche, a body whose epidermic surface bounds a psychical
unity, a body which thereby defines the limits of experience and
subjectivity, in psychoanalytic terms, through the intervention of
the (m)other, and, ultimately, the Other or Symbolic order (language
and rule-governed social order). Among the key structuring
principles of this produced body is its inscription and coding
by (familially ordered) sexual desires (the desire of the other),
which produce (and ultimately repress) the infant's bodily zones,
orifices, and organs as libidinal sources; its inscription by a set of
socially coded meanings and significances (both for the subject
and for others), making the body a meaningful, "readable,"
depth-entity; and its production and development through various
regimes of discipline and training, including the coordination
and integration of its bodily functions so that not only can it
undertake the general social tasks required of it, but so that it
becomes an integral part of or position within a social network,
linked to other bodies and objects.
By city, I understand a complex and interactive network which
links together, often in an unintegrated and de facto way, a
number of disparate social activities, processes, and relations,
with a number of imaginary and real, projected or actual architectural,
geographic, civic, and public relations. The city brings
together economic and informational flows, power networks,
forms of displacement, management, and political organization,
interpersonal, familial, and extra-familial social relations, and an
aesthetic/economic organization of space and place to create a
semipermanent but ever-changing built environment or milieu. In
this sense, the city can be seen, as it were, as midway between the
village and the state, sharing the interpersonal interrelations of the
village (on a neighborhood scale) and the administrative concerns
of the state (hence the need for local government, the preeminence
of questions of transportation, and the relativity of location).

II Body Politic and Political Bodies.

I will look at two pervasive models of the interrelation of bodies
and cities, and, in outlining their problems, I hope to suggest
alternatives that may account for future urban developments and
their corporeal consequences.
In the first model, the body and the city have merely a de facto
or external, contingent rather than constitutive relation. The city
is a reflection, projection, or product of bodies. Bodies are conceived
in naturalistic terms, predating the city, the cause and
motivation for their design and construction. This model often
assumes an ethnological and historical character: the city develops
according to human needs and design, developing from nomadism
to sedentary agrarianism to the structure of the localized village,
the form of the polis through industrialization to the technological
modern city and beyond. More recently, we have heard an
inverted form of this presumed relation: cities have become (or
may have always been) alienating environments, environments
which do not allow the body a "natural," "healthy," or "conducive"
context.
Underlying this view of the city as a product or projection of
the body (in all its variations) is a form of humanism: the human
subject is conceived as a sovereign and self-given agent which,
individually or collectively, is responsible for all social and historical
production. Humans make cities. Moreover, in such formulations
the body is usually subordinated to and seen merely as a
"tool" of subjectivity, of self-given consciousness. The city is a
product not simply of the muscles and energy of the body, but the
conceptual and reflective possibilities of consciousness itself: the
capacity to design, to plan ahead, to function as an intentionality
and thereby be transformed in the process. This view is reflected in
the separation or binarism of design, on the one hand, and construction,
on the other, the division of mind from hand (or art
from craft). Both Enlightenment humanism and marxism share
this view, the distinction being whether the relation is conceived as
a one-way relation (from subjectivity to the environment), or a
dialectic (from subjectivity to environment and back again).
Nonetheless, both positions consider the active agent in social
production (whether the production of commodities or in the production
of cities) to be the subject, a rational or potentially rational
consciousness clothed in a body, the "captain of the ship," the
"ghost in the machine."
In my opinion, this view has at least two serious problems.
First, it subordinates the body to the mind while retaining a structure
of binary opposites. Body is merely a tool or bridge linking a
nonspatial (i. c., Cartesian) consciousness to the materiality and
coordinates of the built environment, a kind of mediating term
between mind on the one hand and inorganic matter on the other, a
term that has no agency or productivity of its own. It is presumed
to be a machine, animated by a consciousness. Second, at best,
such a view only posits a one-way relation between the body or the
subject and the city, linking them through a causal relation in
which body or subjectivity is conceived as the cause, and the city
its effect. In more sophisticated versions of this view, the city can
have a negative feedback relation with the bodies that produce it,
thereby alienating them. Implicit in this position is the active
causal power of the subject in the design and construction of cities.
Another equally popular formulation proposes a kind of parallelism
or isomorphism between the body and the city. The two are
understood as analogues, congruent counterparts, in which the
features, organization, and characteristics of one arc reflected in
the other. This notion of the parallelism between the body and
social order (usually identified with the state) finds its clearest formulations
in the seventeenth century, when liberal political philosophers
justified their various allegiances (the divine right of
kings, for Hobbes; parliamentary representation, for Locke; direct
representation, for Rousseau, etc.) through the metaphor of the
body-politic. The state parallels the body; artifice mirrors nature.
The correspondence between the body and the body-politic is
more or less exact and codified: the King usually represented as the
head of the body-politic, 2 the populace as the body. The law has
been compared to the body's nerves, the military to its arms, commerce
to its legs or stomach, and so on. The exact correspondences
vary from text to text, and from one political regime to another.
However, if there is a morphological correspondence or parallelism
between the artificial commonwealth (the "Leviathan") and
the human body in this pervasive metaphor of the body-politic,
the body is rarely attributed a sex. If one presses this metaphor just
a little, we must ask: if the state or the structure of the polis/city
mirrors the body, what takes on the metaphoric function of the
genitals in the body-politic? What kind of genitals arc they? In
other words, docs the body-politic have a sex?
Here once again, I have serious reservations. The first regards
the implicitly phallocentric coding of the body-politic, which,
while claiming it models itself on the hu111a11 body, uses the male to
represent the human. Phallocentrism is, in my understanding, not
so much the dominance of the phallus as the pervasive
unacknowledged use of the male or masculine to represent the
human. The problem, then, is not so much to eliminate as to
reveal the masculinity inherent in the notion of the universal, the
generic human, or the unspecified subject. The second reservation
concerns the political function of this analogy: it serves to provide
a justification for various forms of"ideal" government and social
organization through a process of "naturalization": the human
body is a natural form of organization which functions not only
for the good of each organ but primarily for the good of the
whole. Similarly, the body politic, whatever form it may take,J
justifies and naturalizes itself with reference to some form of hierarchical
organization modeled on the (presumed and projected)
structure of the body. A third problem: this conception of the
body-politic relies on a fundamental opposition between nature
and culture, in which nature dictates the ideal forms of culture.
Culture is a supercession and perfection of nature. The body politic
is an artificial construct which replaces the primacy of the
natural body. Culture is molded according to the dictates of
nature, but transforms nature's limits. In this sense, nature is a passivity
on which culture works as male (cultural) productivity
supercedes and overtakes female (natural) reproduction.
But if the relation between bodies and cities is neither causal
(the first view) nor representational (the second view), then what
kind of relation exists between them? These two models are inadequate
insofar as they give precedence to one term or the other in
the body/city pair. A more appropriate model combines elements
from each. Like the causal view, the body (and not simply a disembodied
consciousness) must be considered active in the production
and transformation of the city. But bodies and cities are not causally
linked. Every cause must be logically distinct from its effect.
The body, however, is not distinct, does not have an existence separate
from the city, for they are mutually defining. Like the representational
model, there may be an isomorphism between the
body and the city. But it is not a mirroring of nature in artifice.
Rather, there is a two-way linkage which could be defined as an
interface, perhaps even a cobuilding. What I am suggesting is a
model of the relations between bodies and cities which sees them,
not as megalithic total entities, distinct identities, but as assemblages
or collections of parts, capable of crossing the thresholds
between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and
often temporary sub- or micro groupings. This model is a practical
one, based on the practical productivity bodies and cities have
in defining and establishing each other. It is not a holistic view, one
that stresses the unity and integration of city and body, their "ecological
balance." Instead, I am suggesting a fundamentally disunified
series of systems and interconnections, a series of disparate
flows, energies, events or entities, and spaces, brought together or
drawn apart in more or less temporary alignments.
The city in its particular geographical, architectural, spatializing,
municipal arrangements is one particular ingredient in the
social constitution of the body. It is by no means the most significant.
The structure and particularity of, say, the family is more
directly and visibly influential, although this in itself is to some
extent a function of the social geography of cities. But nonetheless,
the form, structure, and norms of the city seep into and effect all
the other elements that go into the constitution of corporeality
and/as subjectivity. It effects the way the subject sees others
(domestic architecture and the division of the home into the conjugal
bedroom, separated off from other living and sleeping spaces,
and the specialization of rooms are as significant in this regard as
smaller family size4), as well as the subject's understanding of,
alignment with, and positioning in space. Different forms of lived
spatiality (the verticality of the city, as opposed to the horizontality
of the landscape-at least our own) effect the ways we live
space, and thus our comportment and corporeal orientations and
the subject's forms of corporeal exertion-the kind of terrain it
must negotiate day by day, the effect this has on its muscular structure,
its nutritional context, providing the most elementary forms
of material support and sustenance for the body. Moreover, the
city is, of course, also the site for the body's cultural saturation, its
takeover and transformation by images, representational systems,
the mass media, and the arts-the place where the body is representationally
re-explored, transformed, contested, reinscribed. In
turn, the body (as cultural product) transforms, reinscribes the
urban landscape according to its changing (demographic, economic,
and psychological) needs, extending the limits of the city,
of the sub-urban, ever towards the countryside which borders it.
As a hinge between the population and the individual, the body, its
distribution, habits, alignments, pleasures, norms, and ideals are
the ostensible object of governmental regulation, and the city is a
key tooLs.

III Body Spaces

Some general implications:
First, there is no natural or ideal environment for the body, no
"perfect" city, judged in terms of the body's health and wellbeing.
If bodies are not culturally pregiven, built environments
cannot alienate the very bodies they produce. However, what may
prove unconducive is the rapid transformation of an environment,
such that a body inscribed by one cultural milieu finds itself in
another involuntarily. This is not to say that there are not unconducive
city environments, but rather there is nothing intrinsically
alienating or unnatural about the city. The question is not simply
how to distinguish conducive from unconducive environments,
but to examine how different cities, different sociocultural environments
actively produce the bodies of their inhabitants as particular
and distinctive types of bodies, as bodies with particular
physiologies, affective lives, and concrete behaviors. For example,
the slum is not inherently alienating, although for those used to a
rural or even a suburban environment, it produces extreme feelings
of alienation. However, the same is true for the slum dweller
who moves to the country or the suburbs. It is a question of negotiation
of urban spaces by individuals/ groups more or less densely
packed, who inhabit or traverse them: each environment or context
contains its own powers, perils, dangers, and advantages.
Second, there are a number of general effects induced by cityscapes,
which can only be concretely specified in particular cases.
The city helps to orient sensory and perceptual information, insofar
as it helps to produce specific conceptions of spatiality, the vectorization
and setting for our earliest and most ongoing perceptions.
The city orients and organizes family, sexual, and social
relations insofar as the city divides cultural life into public and private
domains, geographically dividing and defining the particular
social positions and locations occupied by individuals and groups.
Cities establish lateral, contingent, short- or long-term connections
between individuals and social groups, and more or less stable
divisions, such as those constituting domestic and generational
distinctions. These spaces, divisions, and interconnections are the
roles and means by which bodies are individuated to become subjects.
The structure and layout of the city also provide and organize
the circulation of information, and structure social and
regional access to goods and services. Finally, the city's form and
structure provide the context in which social rules and expectations
are internalized or habituated in order to ensure social conformity,
or position social marginality at a safe or insulated and
bounded distance (ghettoization). This means that the city must be
seen as the most immediately concrete locus for the production
and circulation of power.
I have suggested that the city is an active force in constituting
bodies, and always leaves its traces on the subject's corporeality. It
follows that, corresponding to the dramatic transformation of the
city as a result of the information revolution will be a transformation
in the inscription of bodies. In his paper, "The Overexposed
City," Paul Virilio makes clear the tendency toward hyperreality
in cities today: the replacement of geographical space with the
screen interface, the transformation of distance and depth into
pure surface, the reduction of space to time, of the face-to-face
encounter to the terminal screen:

On the terminal's screen, a span of time becomes both the surface
and the support of inscription; time literally ... surfaces. Due to the
cathode-ray tube's imperceptible substance, the dimensions of space
become inseparable from their speed of transmission. Unity of place
without unity of time makes the city disappear into the heterogeneity
of advanced technology's temporal regime. 6

The implosion of space into time, the transmutation of distance
into speed, the instantaneousness of communication, the
collapsing of the workspace into the home computer system, will
clearly have major effects on specifically sexual and racial bodies of
the city's inhabitants as well as on the form and structure of the
city. The increased coordination and integration of microfunctions
in the urban space creates the city not as a body-politic but as a
political machine-no longer a machine modeled on the engine but
now represented by the computer, facsimile machine, and
modem, a machine that reduces distance and speed to immediate,
instantaneous gratification,. The abolition of the distance between
home and work, the diminution of interaction between face-toface
subjects, the continuing mediation of interpersonal relations
by terminals, screens, and keyboards, will increasingly affect/
infect the minutiae of everyday life and corporeal existence.

"With the advent of instantaneous communications (satellite, TV,
fiber optics, telematics) arrival supplants departure: everything
arrives without necessarily having to depart ... Contributing to the
creation of a permanent present whose intense pace knows no tomorrow,
the latter type of time span is destroying the rhythms of a society
which has become more and more debased. And "monument,".
no longer the elaborately constructed portico, the monumental passageway
punctuated by sumptuous edifices, but idleness, the monumental
wait for service in front of machinery: everyone bustling
about while waiting for communication and telecommunication
machines, the lines at highway tollbooths, the pilot's checklist, night
tables as computer consoles. Ultimately, the door is what monitors
vehicles and various vectors whose breaks of continuity compose
less a space than a kind of countdown in which the urgency of work
time plays the part of a time center, while unemployment and vacation
time play the part of the periphery-the suburb of time: a clearing away
of activity whereby everyone is exiled to a life of both privacy and
deprivation". 7

The subject's body will no longer be disjointedly connected to
random others and objects according to the city's spatia-temporal
layout. The city network-now vertical more than horizontal in
layout-will be modeled on and ordered by telecommunications.
The city and body will interface with the computer, forming part
of an information machine in which the body's limbs and organs
will become interchangeable parts with the computer and with
the technologization of production. The computerization of labor
is intimately implicated in material transformations, including
those which pose as merely conceptual. Whether this results in the
"cross-breeding" of the body and machine-that is, whether the
machine will take on the characteristics attributed to the human
body ("artificial intelligence," automatons) or whether the body
will take on the characteristics of the machine (the cyborg,
bionics, computer prosthesis) remains unclear. Yet it is certain that
this will fundamentally transform the ways in which we conceive
both cities and bodies, and their interrelations.