The Urban Uncanny

A collection of interdisciplinary studies

Lucy Huskinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138929517
• eBook ISBN: 9781317399360
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

The Urban Uncanny explores through ten engaging essays the slippage or mismatch between our expectations of the city—as the organised and familiar environments in which citizens live, work, and go about their lives—and the often surprising and unsettling experiences it evokes. The city is uncanny when it reveals itself in new and unexpected light; when its streets, buildings, and people suddenly appear strange, out of place, and not quite right.

Bringing together a variety of approaches, including psychoanalysis, historical and contemporary case study of cities, urban geography, film and literary critique, the essays explore some of the unsettling mismatches between city and citizen in order to make sense of each, and to gauge the wellbeing of city life more generally. Essays examine a number of cities, including Edmonton, London, Paris, Oxford, Las Vegas, Berlin and New York, and address a range of issues, including those of memory, death, anxiety, alienation, and identity. Delving into the complex repercussions of contemporary mass urban development, The Urban Uncanny opens up the pathological side of cities, both real and imaginary.

This interdisciplinary collection provides unparalleled insights into the urban uncanny that will be of interest to academics and students of urban studies, urban geography, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, social studies and film studies, and to anyone interested in the darker side of city life.

1Introduction

The urban uncanny

Lucy Huskinson

DOI: 10.4324/9781315681177-1

Cities are growing rapidly, often merging with each other in the struggle to meet the demands of increasing populations.¹ Such growth brings inevitable increases in interactivity and communications between urban populations, accentuating at one and the same time a sense of community and feelings of isolation within their citizens. The intense urbanisation of recent times has also brought into focus a range of anxieties, feelings of alienation, and a notable sense of unease; experiences that are often explicitly identified as effects and features of the city itself. The metropolis enables people to mix in their millions, but these people scarcely interact with each other on a personal level, and barely seek to know each other. The anonymity of citizens induces a fear that anyone could do anything at any time and simply disappear unnoticed into the labyrinthine city streets, as if blending into the very fabric of the city itself.

Ever-expanding cities bring ever new possibilities for citizens. Multiculturalism, to highlight just one inevitable consequence of merging populations, blurs social boundaries and identities. The result of which is to elicit for some a prevailing sense of nostalgia – or melancholy even – for a non-existent past, where the city is mistakenly recalled as having once had a fixed and certain identity, and in which everything ‘had its place’ and made sense.

The urban uncanny denotes the slippage or mismatch between our expectations of the city, as the organised and familiar setting for citizens, for their work, habitation, and living, and the often surprising and unsettling experiences it can evoke within them. The city is uncanny when it reveals itself in a new and unexpected light; when, for example, its familiar streets and buildings suddenly appear strange, even hostile.

As the proverbial ‘corridors’ and ‘recesses’ of mind imply, urban city spaces can be likened to the nature and dynamics of the human psyche, with their analogous attempts to negotiate the ordinary everyday tensions of social experiences. The indomitable presence of cities both within the world and within the very mind-sets of their inhabitants – shaping nations and individuals alike – makes the city a tricky beast to define, navigate, and more so to tame.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the iconic pioneer of ‘psychoanalysis’, sought to map the psyche and its influences on a person's subjective experiences and behaviours in somewhat similar fashion to the topographer or urban geographer who surveys the physical and social terrains of the city. Although Freud didn't concern himself with the nonhuman environment or to consequences of urban living for the wellbeing of his patients, his psychological approach can be utilised to elucidate important features of the city and its effects on the unsuspecting citizen, features that are often passed over by or inaccessible to other forms of investigation. A theory of Freud's that is particularly useful in this respect is his understanding of uncanny phenomena, a concept he popularised in an essay of 1919, Das Unheimliche [The Uncanny]. The term ‘uncanny’ was already in common parlance at that time, and was subject to intellectual scrutiny before Freud developed it into the notion that is widely recognised today.

If, as is generally thought, the word canny derives from the root of the Anglo-Saxon word ken, meaning ‘knowledge, understanding, or cognisance’, the word uncanny refers to something outside of one's familiar knowledge or understanding. Before Freud's essay, Ernst Jentsch, in ‘Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen’ [Psychology of the Uncanny] (1906), sought to expand on this definition, describing the uncanny as an experience of ‘intellectual uncertainty’ or lack of ‘intellectual mastery’ coupled with feelings of ‘disorientation’ (Jentsch 1906: 218, 219). If we were to apply this idea to the city, we would experience the city as uncanny when we lose our bearings or find ourselves lost within it. Indeed, as Freud writes in summation of Jentsch's position: ‘The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it’ (1919: 221).

According to Freud, Jentsch's understanding of the uncanny is inadequate. For Freud, the uncanny isn't a feeling of something merely puzzling and disorientating, but something strangely familiar. Freud links his interpretation of the uncanny to an etymological deconstruction of the German adjective for the uncanny, unheimlich, and its root word heimlich, meaning ‘concealed’, ‘hidden’, ‘in secret’. Unheimlich is often mistranslated in psychoanalytic literature as ‘unhomely’ (unheimelig: a word that does not exist in the German language). The correct translation of unheimlich is ‘unconcealed’, ‘unhidden’, or ‘un-secret’. For Freud, the uncanny is not simply an experience of something we cannot comprehend or be certain of, or of something that disorientates and confuses. It is rather, Freud says – and he quotes from the philosopher Schelling in his summation – an experience of that which ‘ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’ (1919: 224; emphasis and ellipses in original). As Freud proceeds to explain, the uncanny is the subject's encounter of unconscious contents (such as experiences, feelings, memories, or ideas) that he or she has attempted to disown and neglect, but which have suddenly reappeared, causing unexpected and often unpleasant surprise. The uncanny is, to cite a dictum of Freud's, the ‘return of the repressed’.

The Freudian uncanny is a curious combination of the familiar made strange, of repulsion and attraction. It presents itself as an intriguing mystery as it expresses that which has been forgotten and subsequently recalled to mind without memory, or that which we thought we had discarded and outgrown, but returns to us as if anew. Within the corridors of the mind, the uncanny denotes the threat experienced by the conscious ego, as it is hampered by material that it had once successfully repressed and relegated to the confines of the unconscious, but now has since returned, seeking conscious expression once again. The return of the repressed thereby threatens to rupture and violate the ego's carefully maintained conscious identity, forcing it to confront its unwanted past. The ego likes to regard itself, Freud says, as ‘master of its own house’ (1917: 143), insofar as it seeks to control and manage the personality as a whole, negotiating the tensions that arise between desires and the perceived pressures and expectations of the external environment. Through processes of rational calculation the ego manages its experiences often by discarding and evacuating (through repression) all it considers inappropriate to its needs. But this neglected material is not completely eradicated; it does not disappear. It lies dormant in the unconscious, and when the conditions are right (and much of Freud's work explores and elaborates what these conditions are), it seeks conscious recognition once again, and thereby destabilises or realigns the orientation of the ego in the process of achieving it. The return of the repressed can be likened to an intruder in the ego's ‘house’, or, in more worrying and pathological cases, it threatens to evict the ego from its house, making it altogether homeless.

A prominent theme of uncanniness, according to both Freud and Jentsch, is that of the ‘double’. This can be understood in many ways, for instance as the doppelgänger² or alter-ego, or those split-off, dissociated experiences once expunged from ego-consciousness and now returning to harass the ego so as to be made conscious again. This double-aspect of the self leads the subject to an uncanny experience of themselves, as something familiar yet other, as out of sorts or out of ‘place’, as fragmented, disturbed, and de-familiarised. The double presents itself as two contrasting perspectives that co-exist in one and the same thing. In our everyday experiences, we inevitably prioritise all that is familiar, ‘normal’, comfortable, and stable, but an uncanny experience provides us with a wake-up call to other possibilities that are latent within, and other perspectives and orientations to life. The Urban Uncanny surveys this uncanny, double-nature in relation to city spaces.

Our homes, our neighbourhoods, and the towns and cities in which we live, work, and conduct our everyday lives, more often than not provide us with the familiarity, structure, and continuity we tend to need to feel contained and stable. The building we call home, for example, is involved with the most intimate aspects of our lives; as one writer puts it, ‘it has witnessed our indignities and embarrassments, as well as the face we want to show to the outside world. The home has seen us at our worst, and still shelters us and protects us’ (Ballantyne 2002: 17). We come to identify and feel attached to the urban spaces of our daily lives; buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, towns and cities, and other familiar places provide our settlements and experiences of containment, and as such can be construed in psychological terms as extensions of ego. Such sites are fertile grounds for the most uncanny of experiences. Indeed, it is perhaps inevitable and unsurprising, given the intimate identifications we have to the house we call home, that the most recognisable of uncanny motifs is the haunted house. The haunted house presents itself as the striking uncanny double of cosy domesticity represented by the home. It is a violation of the most familiar, welcoming, and ‘natural’ of places with an unwelcome intruder of presumed ‘supernatural’ origin. Freud, following in the footsteps of his colleague Josef Breuer (1897), compares the unconscious mind to the cellar rooms of a house. It is a motif depicted time and again in the haunted houses of literature and film, with the basement room revealed to be the favoured location for all sorts of malevolent presences and unsavoury characters that threaten to usurp the normality and comfort of the unsuspecting homeowners.³ These fictional narratives often explore the mysterious nature of the ‘double’, playing with the boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, between real and imaginary, or normal and abnormal. The most uncanny storylines establish ambiguous and undisclosed boundaries, leaving the reader or audience bemused and uncertain as to whether the harassing entity is of otherworldly origins or a projection of a disturbed mind.⁴

In Freud's essay, Das Unheimliche, the streets of an unfamiliar town become the focal point for Freud's uncanny experiences. He notes,

As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt […] I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another détour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery.

(1919: 237)

With this example Freud does not mean to identify the uncanny as an inherent feature of the streets themselves, or to intimate that it's a quality that is especially characteristic of urban environments. Rather, its importance for him is its illustration of the way in which the uncanny involves a ‘repetition of the same thing’; a return to what was once known, or as I mentioned above, the return of the repressed. To that end, Freud furnishes his point with other examples, including the experience of losing oneself in the mists of a mountain forest, and wandering about a ‘dark, strange room, looking for the door or the electric switch’ in which one can't but ‘collide time after time with the same piece of furniture’ (1919: 237).

Perhaps more compelling examples or allusions to the urban environment as a distinctly uncanny phenomenon can be found elsewhere, in works by other influential theorists, such as Georg Simmel, whose Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (1903) [The Metropolis and Mental Life] is regarded as a precursor to urban sociology; and Michel de Certeau, who incorporates Freudian ideas in his celebrated work, L'invention du quotidien (1980) [The Practice of Everyday Life]. Both Simmel and de Certeau define the city as having a double nature that cultivates a mismatch between the citizens’ expectations of what the city ought to be, and their actual experiences of it. The cities of Simmel and de Certeau are most uncanny indeed. On the one hand, the city presents itself to them as an organised, governed system of visible, calculated relations, which lead its citizens to certain, coherent expectations of it; and yet on the other, their cities impart to their citizens a cacophony of bewildering and unpredictable social experiences that can disrupt the citizens’ personal lives.

Simmel's city is a paradigm of ego-functioning, an ‘intensification of consciousness’ where experiences are reduced to rational calculation (Simmel 1903: 326). In response, citizens develop what he refers to as a ‘blasé attitude’, where emotions and feelings and all that cannot be controlled intellectually, are repressed and defended against. By doing so, citizens are able to focus more intently on the task at hand, which is to negotiate the intellectual challenges and ‘intellectual shocks’ that the city continually inflicts on them (Simmel 1903: 329–330).⁵ The city is a conglomerate of rational calculations, and yet its citizens inevitably engage with it as if in an irrational, dream-like state of bewilderment. They are profoundly alienated from themselves, split-off and estranged from their emotional selves. The uncanny city is at one and the same time a suggestion of home and the definitively unhomely. As James Donald, author of Imagining the Modern City (1999), puts it, the uncanny city ‘defines the architecture of our apparently most secret selves: an already social space, if often a decidedly uncivil form of association’ (Donald 1999: 71).

For de Certeau, the urban uncanny is evident in the mismatch between the way modern city spaces are organised according to visible grid plans, where space is systematically compartmentalised into contrasting areas with their own prescribed meanings, and the lived experience of those who negotiate these spaces and either use them or not, according to their own subjective needs. The grid plan is an attempt to control and manage its citizens, directing them efficiently through prescribed pathways to where the city thinks they need to go. But contrary to this rationalised approach to urban living are the subjective movements of the city's residents, who often cultivate their own short-cuts through the city, or move at an unregulated pace, perhaps stopping to chat or to look in a shop window before moving on again. The uncanny here arises in this ‘disquieting distinction’, as Donald refers to it, between the grid plan of transparency or the ‘will to visibility’, and the ‘irredeemable opacity of the social’ experience of its citizens (Donald 1999: 86).

The cities of Simmel and de Certeau cultivate double identities, seeking to supress aspects of human subjectivity whilst at the same time presenting themselves as the proprietors of normalcy. The urban uncanny in this respect reveals the urban subject as one alienated from himself or herself; as a divided, repressed subject who reflects the situation of their environment as a place that promises the security and familiarity of a home, but cannot provide it. The urban uncanny thereby denotes an existential gap or mismatch between city and citizen. It is as if the urban subject searches for a promised city that cannot be found, whilst the city that is accessible to the subject withholds and conceals the home that is expected of it. City and citizen are existentially signified by this mismatch, and it is a mismatch that tantalises the subject, for he or she continues to expect the city will deliver on its promise at any moment. The uncanny as the ‘return of the repressed’ is an uneasy anticipation that something significant is about to be disclosed but what exactly we cannot fully comprehend; its full realisation remains an enticing and daunting secret. The urban uncanny denotes a pervading anxiety and feelings of apprehension in its subject; it is as if the city is playing a game according to undisclosed rules. In his essay, Jentsch associates the uncanny with our human tendency to regard ‘things in the external world’ as ‘animate in the same way’ as us (Jentsch 1906: 225). I wish to suggest that an uncanny city is one that is experienced as if alive and with a personal investment in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the urban uncanny
• 2 Going underground: margins, dreams and dark spaces in Nimród Antal’s Kontroll (2003)
• 3 Shadows over Oxford: memories, murder, mystery, and Morse
• 4 This hated city: ‘Deadmonton’ – Edmonton’s alter-ego
• 5 Cities of the dead: the Catacombs and Père Lachaise Cemetery in post-revolutionary Paris
• 6 Ruptures in the city: retrospective memory in Benjamin’s Paris and Koolhaas’s New York
• 7 Pathologizing the city: archetypal psychology and the built environment
• 8 The wandering architecture of city and psyche
• 9 Geographies of loss and ruptured identities: the divided cities of Berlin and Nicosia
• 10 Nostalgic maps: wandering in a disappearing cityscape in Mies, joka ei osannut sanoa ei [The Man Who Could Not Say No] (1975)
• 11 Reconfiguring the urban body in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003)
• Index