The City and The

City

Deciphering the Text

Chin

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the tension between

the political and the fantastic—how the fantastic imagination is

trammeled by politics,

tries and fails to escape

politics, or, most rarely,

reimagines politics—gives the books their

driving force.(Henry Farrell, n+1, March 2006,

http://nplusonemag.com/fantasy-remade-china-

mi-villes-new-crobuzon-

novels)

Weir

d F

icti

on

New Weird is a type of urban,

secondary-world fiction that

subverts the romanticized

ideas about place found in

traditional fantasy, largely by

choosing realistic, complex

real-world models as the

jumping off point for creation

of settings that may combine

elements of both science

fiction and fantasy. New Weird

fictions are acutely aware of

the modern world, even if in

disguise, but not always

overtly political.Jeff Vandermeer, ‘Introduction’, The New Weird (San Francisco:

Tachyon Publications, 2008), p. xvi.

‘Mié

ville

on t

he

New

Weir

d

‘A fiction born out of

possibilities, its freeing-

up mirroring the freeing-up, the radicalisation in the world’ ‘Genres […] a bunch of

fuzzy sets at the best of

times, are all of a sudden fuzzier than ever.’Mieville, ‘Long Live the New Weird’ in The Third

Alternative, 35 (2003), p. 3

Cro

sshatc

hin

g

One way of reading this

complex crosshatching of

material environments is

to see them as analogous

with the instability of

genre boundaries themselves, with how

genres are inherently

overdetermined hybridic

formations that overlap,

intersect, and mesh with

others.Tony Venezia, ‘Weird Fiction: Dandelion meets China

Miéville’, Dandelion 1.1 (2010)

Pla

ying G

enre

D

ete

ctiv

e

Fantasy

Modernist Fiction (Joyce…

Kafka)

Campus Novel Detective Fiction Police ProceduralCritical Theory

?

? ?

? ?

Cri

tica

l Theory

‘The Foucault’s and the Žižiek’s not your

thing?’

‘I respect them of course but –’‘Aren’t there any of those, what should we

say, theory types she could have gone with?

‘Yes, but she told me she needed to get her

hands on the actual objects. I’m an artefact

scholar. My more philosophically oriented

colleagues would … well, I wouldn’t trust

many of them to brush the dirt off an

amphora.’ I laughed.(p. 110)

Cri

tica

l Theory Zizek – the Detective &

the Analyst Foucault – Archaeological Method

Sla

voj Ž

ižek

Slovenian film & cultural

critic known for his somewhat outrageous

claims Lacanian perspective Popular culture/high

culture (has been called

the Borat of philosophy/

Elvis of cultural theory)

Looking awry: an introduction to Jacques

Lacan through popular

culture (1992)

Cla

ssic

al v

s H

ard

-Boile

d

Dete

ctiv

e

‘There is a certain self-reflexive

strain in the detective novel: it is a

story of the detective’s effort to tell

the story [....] and the novel is

finished not when we get the answer

to ‘Whodunit?’ but when the

detective is finally able to tell ‘the

real story’ in the form of a linear

narrative.’ Like the analyst the classical

detective is endowed with an

‘omniscience’, he is the ‘subject who

is supposed to know’

‘The deceitful game of which he has

become a part poses a threat to his

very identity as a subject.’ He is

‘caught in a nightmarish game

whose real stakes escape him’

Slavoj Žižek, Looking awry: an introduction to

Jacques Lacan through popular culture (1992)

What

is a

t st

ake

?

‘Whatever situation or

thing this was, whatever had happened to Mahalia

Geary, we two were its

only investigators…’

(p. 152) ‘the mere fact of it in

my head was a kind of

trauma’ (45)

Arc

haeolo

gic

al

Meth

od

‘I could discern phases of

annotation, though not in any page-

wise chronology – all notes were

layered, a palimpsest of evolving

interpretation. I did archaeology.’

(308) ‘ I sat on the bed and tried to read

Mahalia’s notes a new way, I did not

try to follow the thread of a

particular pen, the tenor of a

particular period in her studies, to

reconstruct a lineage of thought.

Instead I read all the annotation on

each page, years of opinions set

together, I had been trying to be an

archaeologist of her marginalia,

separating the striae. Now I read

each page out of time, no

chronology, arguing with itself.’

(318).

Meta

phys

ical

Dete

ctiv

e

The metaphysical detective

raises questions about

‘narrative, interpretation,

subjectivity, the nature of

reality, and the limits of

knowledge’ ‘Rather than definitely

solving a crime, then, the

sleuth finds himself confronting the insoluble

mysteries of his own

interpretation and his own

identity.’Patricia Merrivale, ed. Detecting Texts: The

Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to

Postmodernism

Bre

ach

It was a statement of both

crime and identity. ‘Breach’, and something

touched me and I went

under into black, out of

waking and all awareness,

to the sound of that word.

(p. 286)

Polic

e P

roce

dura

l

To see the police novel through

an institutional lens focuses

attention on our relation (as

private citizens) to the larger

social network that contains us,

and on any doubts and

anxieties we might have about

the nature of its organization

and operations. Such anxieties

may center on the meaning of,

and relationship between, such

terms as justice, morality,

community, and law…

(Peter Messent, The Crime Fiction Handbook,

p. 45)

‘the e

nd o

f th

e

case

’ My task has changed:

not to uphold the law,

or another law, but to

maintain the skin that

keeps the law in place.

Two laws in two places, in fact. (p. 373)

Law

and S

pace

You’re beyond law now;

this is where decision

lives (p. 295) THE BREACH WAS NOTHING.

It is nothing. […] This trail

that led again and again

to Orciny suggested systematic transgression,

secret para-rules, a parasite city where there

should be nothing but

nothing, nothing but

Breach. (p. 297)

Nom

os

nomos is the immediate

form in which the political

and social order of a people

becomes spatially visible.

[…] Nomos is the measure

by which the land in a

particular order is divided

and situated; it is also the

form of political, social and

religious order determined

by this process. Here,

measure, order, and form

constitute a spatially

concrete unity.Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth (1950)

Also cited in Miéville’s

Between Equal Rights: A

Marxist Theory of International

Law (2005)