Afterword: ‘the only game in town’ or, London to come

Abstract

At first glance, if not in conclusion, it may seem anachronistic, not to say paradoxical or perverse, to insist on writing about the city as writing, to concentrate on the performance of the city through writing, where the constative and performative collapse in upon each other, at a point when the virtual space is celebrated or excoriated in relation to what is too glibly called the real, as though this banal binarism virtual/real had any force, any cogency. In the face of cyberspace and the investigation already underway into the possible ‘conflation of electronic communication technologies and the space of the city’,¹ to insist upon the immanence of the urban space haunting the scene of writing might be misconstrued as a last modernist gasp, a final hurrah of an outdated epistemology. Why write at all, why all this fuss about writing, or what writing can be read as effecting?

With a logic for every contingency, every ability and need, the city is the only game in town.

Donald Preziosi

London is begging to be rewritten

Iain Sinclair

There is also a Narrative which is hidden so that none may see it….

Peter Ackroyd