Antipode 25:2, 1993, pp.

159-163
ISSN 0066 4812

Review Essay
REFLECTIONS WHILE READING CITY
OF QUARTZ BY MIKE DAVIS"

Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los

Angeles. New York: Verso, 1990. (ISBN 0-86091-303-1)
462 PP.
City of Quartz by Mike Davis is a quite wonderful, if terrifymg, book.
An inspiration in its style and scope, its prescience and clear headed
analysis of the political-economic and sociospatial dialectics in Los An-
geles compel wide readership. In the wake of the Los Angeles uprisings
in late April 1992, Davis's accomplishment is even more stunning. The
book has been reviewed widely, and it is not my purpose here to add
to these, but to reflect on some of the book's pleasures, dangers and
practical ramifications. In particular I will discuss the pleasures and
dangers of its genre blending; the political perils of its apocalypticism;
and its larger implications as an exploration of what Raymond Williams'
called "the darkly unknowable," witnessed in the time-space of mod-
ernity under postmodern conditions.

Genre Blending

The words I've chosen to outline my concerns - pleasure and danger -

speak not of a Foucauldian inside me, but to the form of City of Quartz
and the way it b(1)ends genres, presenting the real and the hyperreal
of L.A[s social and political economic relations in an unreal and even
surreal form. From the moment I opened the book I felt I had entered
a Pynchonesque world. I knew of course that it was "non-fiction," but
it felt like "the zone" in Gravity's Rainbow. (Of course, Pynchon's fiction
is so fully interpolated with historyhon-fiction that "the zone" feels all
* Comments originally prepared for "Author Meets Critics," Annual Meetings of the
Association of American Geographers, San Diego, 19 April 1992.

0 1993 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Published by Blackwell Publishers, 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA, and
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF UK.
160 CINDIKATZ

too real - a space of political, corporate and psychological conspiracy

as familiar as it is frightening.)
In this ”post-genre” age these strategies are, of course, common -
holes have been shot through all stable notions of ”the real” not to
mention ”the true,” and texts of all kinds routinely call into question
the construction of knowledge and its relation to the subject and the
world. Even in this milieu, City of Quartz goes further in its genre
blending than most texts that attempt to excavate social histories (or
futures). Herein lies its tremendous strength and pleasure, but also
(and not unsurprisingly) its dangers. Its gripping style brings Davis’s
formidable social analysis to the attention of many more readers than
most urban social theory, not only reaching beyond the captive aca-
demic crowd, but piercing through the numbing ennui of urbanists,
social critics, politicos with its visceral prose. City of Quartz forces even
the jaded to take notice of the dimensions and intensity of the calamities
we’ve come to think we know all about. But the dark side of this feat
is that everyone in the book becomes a character, and every thing a
drama, larger, meaner, darker, crazier than life. Most centrally, Los
Angeles itself is a character; the noir occludes the sunshine.
City of Quartz has all the elements of the eternal story of modernity
(and no doubt premodernity as well): power, money, sex, and death,
(although the sex is underplayed, perhaps because women, except for
an occasional Buffy or Missy, have been coded by L.A.’s city fathers,
movers and shakers as invisible in the pageant of the city’s history).
City of Quartz weaves a marvelous story of money, power, sex and
death, but living in the world requires a formulation more like power,
money, sex, death and breakfast - and there’s very little breakfast in
City of Quartz. By making everyone into a character, Davis robs them
of their subjectivity. Perhaps it’s the proximity of Hollywood but a
similar fate befalls the characters peopling the Los Angeles novels sur-
veyed by Davis. Indeed, Davis has done what he “accuses” Thomas
Pynchon of doing in Crying of Lot 49:

”Provided the ultimate freeway map ontology of Southern

California . . . ’in which the city is at once endless text always
promising meaning but ultimately offering hints and signs
of a possible and final reality.”’2

Like Slothrop, Pynchon’s anti-hero in “the zone” of Gravity’s Rainbow,

1 began to feel there was no way out. This is problematic if not dan-
gerous politically, and underscores the books almost relentless apoca-
lypticism, which, the uprisings and millennia1 jitters notwithstanding,
 REFLECTIONS O N CI’I’Yuf-QUAKIL. 101

must be countered if opposition is to have a chance under contemporary

conditions.

Apocalypticism

In City of Quartz Davis has done much more than Pynchon, offering far
more than a freeway map ontology of L.A. If Pynchon is his anti-hero,
Carey McWilliams is his hero, and Davis has managed to expand on
McWilliams’s project, magnificently integrating, in his words, ”histori-
cal narrative with economic and cultural analysis.” It is not a one-
dimensional reality like The Crying of Lot 49 he presents, it is multi-
layered - but what is it? More than freeway map, Davis scrapes at the
scene of apocalypse. He excavates Los Angeles as apocalypse. Layer
upon layer of it.
Apocalypticism is increasingly the order of the day in science, in art,
in everyday life. It seems to me, as Lee Quinby has suggested3, that
apocalypticism is peculiar to male science, or more broadly, to mascu-
linist thinking. Apocalypticism raises dangers analogous to those of
genre blending - there’s no way out of an apocalypse - except if the
angels come. In mapping Los Angeles as apocalypse, Davis flirts with
the menace of Baudrillard - the territory no longer precedes its map-
ping.
The apocalypticism of masculinist thinking is at least partially coun-
tered with what feminist theory calls situated knowledge. By explicitly
positioning the knowing subject, situated knowledge or standpoint the-
ory can puncture the overwhelming subjectlessness of apocalyptic read-
ings of experience, grounding its power grid, enabling entry and the
possibility of unraveling the hybridization of real, unreal, hyperreal and
surreal that characterizes apocalypse. The monstrous destructivism and
relentless and faceless surveillance of all social relations can only be
opposed by conscious social agents taking a stand, and knowing
whence they act.
These monstrous phenomena are still produced by “living historical
subjects,” and while City of Quartz’s map of the apocalypse makes clear
the enormity of confronting these operations on the ground - from
ground zero - that is the task at hand, and apocalyptic formulations
don’t help or inspire all of us. A short personal anecdote may serve as
a cautionary tale. I was in Sudan teaching when Apocalypse Now was
released. When I returned my friend couldn’t wait for me to see it. My
first weekend home we were at the movie. During the climactic ”Val-
kyrie” scene, helicopters flying, Wagner pumping, adrenalin spewing,
he looked over to see how I was loving it. I was asleep.
162 CINUI KAIL

Excavating the ”Darkly Unknowable”

Yet apocalypticism captures ”the structure of feeling” of our times and

places, and Davis has done an extraordinary job of making this palpable.
City of Quartz is one of the best, and most novel, explorations of what
Raymond Williams called ”the darkly unknowable.”
Williams was referring to the times of modernity, the world in the
wake of capitalist industrialization and technological expansion in which
it became clear how much was unknowable, or how partial each way
of knowing was. The partiality of all knowledge, of course, was little
addressed, if even acknowledged, until feminist, post-colonial, post-
modem, and queer theories punched through the seamless wall erected
by western, masculinist, bourgeois, white, heterosexist narratives.
These narratives of modernity obscured as much as they illuminated.
As Raymond Williams pointed out in an interview with New Left Reuiew
on The Long Revolution, the formidable task of exploring the ever ex-
panding frontier of the darkly unknowable, led to strategies that priv-
ileged statistical ways of knowing and denigrated modes of knowing
rooted in “experience.”
The great strength and brilliance of City of Quartz is that it punches
through the terror that lies beneath the surface of all these modernist
constructions of knowledge - and deals with expeiience on an expanded
scale. City of Quartz is an exploration at once much bigger than a
“locality” study, but more intimate and passionate than a macro-level
analysis of a statistical or a political kind. One of the ways this is
accomplished is the books scope which is as diabolical as the structures
of power analyzed, but also highly personal and arcane. I got the sense
that the books chapters might all be replaced with equally insightful
and terrorizing tales. Perhaps perversely, this gave me a glimmer of
hope, because although together the chapters form a matrix of control
and despair, their arcane focus suggests that there are interstices -
cracks from which the structures of power and domination might be
confronted. A grid but not a wall.
More important than this formally anchored glimmer of hope were
the ways intimacy punctured through the noir; when the tender father,
who dedicates this book to his daughter in memory of his mother,
shines through the tough guy pictured on the cover. These conjunctures
are where the possibilities for rupture at least glimmer. But glimmer is
all they do, and this is an insistently optimistic reading of an over-
whelmingly pessimistic book.
I found this intimacy most clearly in the chapter about kids called
”The Hammer and the Rock. ” Perhaps this was because ”The Hammer
and the Rock was the closest to my own work - I too chart the world
of children growing up under conditions in which meaningful work as
a stable form is becoming an impossibility, and in which, therefore,
there has been a wholesale disinvestment in social reproduction along
with a staggering rise in death, destruction, despair revealed in un-
wanted teen pregnancy, drug use, AIDS, and violent crime which bear
witness to the genocidal neglect by capital and the state for the children
of our shared future. The real strength of the chapter was not that it
mirrored my concerns, but that it was a chapter inhabited by people,
not characters. Because of this intimacy and its unspeakable horrors,
"The Hammer and Rock" was the most depressing chapter in this gut-
wrenchingly true book. Even before the L.A. uprisings which brought
the crises to world-wide attention, "The Hammer and Rock" asked and
demanded an answer to what we - all of us - are going to do in the
face of these conditions.
Children are the only angels we've got. In the face of apocalypse,
and the erosive quality of everyday life, it is time to confront in mean-
ingful ways and from different positions, conditions in the cities of
angels. For optimists and angels, time is running out.

Notes
1. Raymond Williams Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. Lon-
don: Verso 1981.
2. City of Quartz, p. 67, citing Arthur Clarke, ed., The Coming of the Space Age.
London, 1967 p. 142.
3. Lee Quinby, "Jeans/Genome Project," talk given at Graduate School and
University Center of the City University of New York, March 1992.

CINDI KATZ
Environmental Psychology Program
City University of New York