While London is usually the only backdrop for Kureishi’s stories, Susie Thomas merely places her exploration of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid under the title “World City,” among her full-scale study of Kureishi’s creative oeuvre before 2005 (45). As Kureishi’s second film (1987) and screenplay (1988), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid represents London as a nexus intersected by powers from local and global, past and present. Not just orchestrating “whites and Asians, British African-Caribbeans, trendy liberals and the dispossessed” (Thomas 45) for an ethnic symphony in a global city, Kureishi have two political figures—one in Britain and the other from Pakistan—as duets to complicate time-space compression in this work. On the other hand, as long as a world city is also a “Semi-Detached Metropolis” (Ball 226), London has its locality, boundaries and conventions that not every outsider from the world can have a place. Still, uneven distributions of power in public and private space lead to a complexion of spatial articulation and contestation. Doubtlessly the ruler of a national space, like Thatcher in the 1980s Britain, has the most ideological, financial, and political resources in recruiting co-optable social sections and marginalizing those dissidents, while the articulation of relatively powerless in a certain spatial formation excludes and even victimizes people with power in other space.
Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s triad of conceptualized spaces and David Harvey’s analysis of modernity, this chapter explores the contestation of modern
spaces found in this screenplay and film, directed by Stephen Frears. David Harvey’s
The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) reveals to readers the immutable yet
ephemeral nature of modernity (10). Together with Lefebvre’s dissection of space into spatial practices, representations of space and representational spaces in TheProduction of Space (1991), this chapter anatomizes how characters and groups in
this screenplay—be they oppressive governors, the economically and politically powerless, or a defiant middle class—contest spaces in an attempt to demarcate an enduring identity in the face of all that is mutable and uncertain about the post/modern condition. It also renders dubious the dichotomization of officials and citizens as spatial oppressors and oppressed respectively. Using Kureishi’s screenplay, this study puts forth the argument that governmental figures can become “the oppressed” in private spaces they are unfamiliar with, whereas the traditionally oppressed or excluded can become oppressors in their contestation of public or private spaces for their own personal benefit. In this way, a utopian solution for space usage has come to negotiate the shifting and fixing dimension of modernity, as Kureishi has envisioned it through his staging of a group of nomadic subculturalists.Modernity is an ongoing process in which industrialization, capitalism, enlightenment, and colonialism further one another through, among other things, disenchantment, rationalization, and linear progression. It commends “human creativity, scientific discovery, and the pursuit of individual excellence in the name of human progress” (Harvey 13). A maelstrom of change is thus created through proliferation of knowledge, technologies, commodities and representations (and all their ramifications), undermining hopes of stable advancement with a sense of fleetness, transitoriness and fragmentation. A lyric poet in the era of high capitalism, Charles Baudelaire, made an observation still valid for such a paradox: “By modernity, I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is
the eternal and the immutable” (12).
The paradox of modernity is revealed through contestation of spaces within and beyond the domestic realm of Western nations. In the years following Edward Said’s
Orientalism, postcolonial and cultural studies have suggested that the progressive and
sophisticated image of Western modernity cannot forge itself without creating colonized Others. At its height, colonialism went hand in hand with modernity, providing capitalism with mechanizations of production and consumption that ensured steady supplies of capital and materials. Spaces were sites of production, consumption or both, being subjected to changeability and transience bred by capital and technologies as well as colonizers and colonized being transported around the world. In order to reap the fruits of modernity, space must be secured for long-term use and the maximization of profits.Surges of change in the latter half of the twentieth century would suggest to some that the spatial trappings of modernity no longer exist. New technologies in transportation and communication, flexible accumulation as a new mode of production, and an omnipresent aestheticized consumerism impel some critics like Jean-François Lyotard, Jameson and Harvey to characterize the last half of the twentieth century as “postmodern.” The temporal nature of modernity has given way to a diverse commingling of materials, discourses, images and representations. Spaces of modernity and capitalism are transformed by what David Harvey characterizes as
“the time-space compression” of postmodernity. As the leading sign of postcoloniality, increase of different ethnic populations in the ex-imperialist Europe is also one of those postmodern conditions in associative with space. As an important branch of postmodern theory, postcolonialism/postcoloniality resists the colonial aspect of modernity. Its discourses reveal how the Eurocentric modern project is being challenged and rewritten. The outsiders are now inside, and the ethnic Other, like
Sammy in this screenplay, is no longer inferior in the contestation of spaces.
Urban spaces of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have become nodal points in global networks of information, commerce, cultural exchange and other transitory encounters. “World cities,” representative of postmodern urban space,
“are now read as displaying the features of Late Capitalism’s accumulative ways; such as spectacular sites of consumption, architectural pastiche, gentrified neighbourhoods and manufacturing sites reinvented as tourist destinations” (Jacobs 31). Developed over time, postmodern urban spaces have witnessed what Harvey refers to as a
“‘palimpsest’ of past forms superimposed upon each other, and a ‘collage’ of current uses, many of which may be ephemeral” (Harvey 66), something urban planners cannot master.74 Cloaked in the mantles of consumerism, multiculturalism, and aesthetic pastiche, however, spatial asymmetry continues to produce and displace the weak. This is especially manifest in urban racializations—“a taboo vestige of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation,” despite celebration of ethnic richness in the exoticised postmodern city (Keith and Cross 8).
Colonial/modern oppression does not make ethnic groups voiceless Others in need of Orientalist interpretation; but neither are they purely resistant Others in the imaginings of some postmodern/postcolonial discourses.75 Spatial struggles remain, not only between different ethnic groups, genders and classes, but between defiant individuals represented, imagined, or theorized by postmodernist critics. For those emigrating from third world countries into first world metropolises, postmodern cities reflect their desire for modern advancement. On the one hand, they are Other to native
74 However, this recognition does not exclude partial plans for commodifying urban spaces, through which the economic and ethnic inferior, as residents or laborers, are often victimized.
75 While these scholars do not phrase the ethnic, the female, the lower class or the ruled as the Other, they come up with a dualistic structure that pits the dominant against the subordinate, and argue that through some practices the latter resist or reverse the power exercise of the former. Homi Bhabha’s ideas like hybridity and mimicry aims to illuminate the resistant potential of the colonized. In another respect, Michel de Certeau’s spatial tactics of the pedestrian is one of the noted examples of the
citizens, while, on the other hand, they have long been subjects as well as products of modernity, especially under gradual edification of Western colonizers. Following independence, both former colonizers and the formerly colonized (those now living in the West) are in need of each aspect of modernity. Their appropriation of kaleidoscopic postmodern spaces, reflecting a desire for the transient, is premised upon economic stability and a living space where individuality is unfettered.
Competition for space usually unfolds when such a basis collapses.
Such struggles for space, from national boundaries to housing, are illustrated in the setting of Kureishi’s screenplay—London in the 1980s. In this contested arena, politicians of nationalism, ethnic minorities, social deviants and exploited middle/under-class suffer from all the disturbances of modernity. As Michel de Certeau puts it, the city “is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity”
(95). People gather in the city to immerse themselves in the peak experience of modernity, yet the spatial unity of urbanism—characterized by order and modern convenience—includes disunity between classes, sexes and ethnic groups, in which modern subjects are constituted by diverse forces battling one another. Once the center of the British Empire, London is now a microcosm of the world, with, among others, formerly colonized citizens resettling within its own administrative border.
Moreover, it is the origin of industrialization as well as the center of culture, a booming service industry and political power in Britain. London possesses all the features of modernity. As it moves into a highly globalized era, the city now faces forces of synthesis and fragmentalization, progress and decline, as well as the desire for both conformity and diversity. The explosion of urban postmodernism at 1968 occurred almost twenty years before the screenplay, yet it does not solve the anxieties of its characters. If daily life for Londoners in the late 1980s meant suffering from economic recession, then jostling with strangers of diverse ethnicity, class and gender,
and facing increasing disparity between and among socioeconomic groups (which might be termed as the postmodern condition) would leave them with an ever-changing city resembling less and less closely the British culture they learned from official representations.
When considering usage of modern spaces, it is worthwhile to consult Henri Lefebvre’s canonic theories. Evidence of modernity can be found in one or more of Lefebvre’s three moments of space. Space, as a process “continually being produced”
(Liggett 245), is divided into a triad: spatial practice (the perceived space), representations of space (the conceived space) and representational space (the lived space), each of of which exists in the ever-unfolding course of time. Spatial practice is the living space that people experience without conceptualizing it, therefore it is a
perceived space without further need of decoding. Guaranteed by the reproductive
forces of capitalism, spatial practice inscribes habitual activities into “particular locations and spatial sets characteristics” (The Production of Space 33).76 In this way, it embodies “continuity and some degree of cohesion” (PS 33), where a “spatial code”is the restrictive power of modernity (PS 16), “capable of bringing order to the qualitative chaos (the practico-sensory realm) presented by the perception of things”
(PS 17). Under neocapitalism, spatial practice has separated work and leisure as it linked them together in an association between daily and urban reality (PS 38). It is in this perceived separation that postmodern individuals enjoy spaces for a variety of consumptions without bother, and so accumulate energies for production, a certain level of “competence” and “performance” in turn (PS 33). Without spatial practice, any adventure for a modern subject is unlikely to begin.
Even a space structured to ensure its orderliness allows for dissidents, lest their discontent—a byproduct of fragmented values brought about by modernity, becomes
76
a destructive force shattering any sense of discipline and regulation in the society.
Representations of space are “social relations of production” in their spatial expression, and “the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and . . . [are therefore related] to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations” (PS 33). Those with political and intellectual powers are most likely to forge such spaces, and making them “conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers . . . all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived” (PS 38). Representations of space embrace the blueprints of modernity since, on the one hand, they restrict the chaotic nature and rebellious potentiality of the dominated while, on the other hand, their “practical impact” promises changeability that “intervene[s] in and modif[ies] spatial textures”
(PS 42). Physical demarcation or linkage between spaces is not the sole product of this conceived space. Lefebvre further claims “conceptions of space tend . . . towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs” (PS 39).
Discourses of nationalism, and its counterpart, urbanity against nationality claimed by some cosmopolitan in this play,77 exemplify how representations of space are enacted through different present-day localities. The conceived space, as a moment when and where space is created, is never isolated. In order for it to endure, it has to consider other spaces beforehand. It must leave free zones where the governed can not merely stretch their arms, but instead find opportunities of alteration. Therefore, the fluidity and changeability of modernity exists in the seemingly restrictive representations of space from the very beginning.
On the contrary, representational spaces, “essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic” (PS 42), do not avoid oppressive elements once they are introduced.
77 This will later be expounded in Sammy’s renouncement of his Englishness and self-identification with the Londoner.
Representational spaces are lived by those inhabiting it. Subjective impressions and experiences of space are alive in their minds, be they imaginary or not. Thus, representational spaces oppose verbal expressions in representations of space,
“tend[ing] toward more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs”
(PS 39). “[L]inked to the clandestine or underground side of social life,”
representational spaces do not merely illustrate “art” as a “code” of themselves (PS 33). They also ignite riots by deprived citizens in the context of this screenplay.
Rioters and artists are not rational designers in charge of the representations of space, whose dominance their “imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (PS 39).
Without being described with terms like “ideology and knowledge,” which is sometimes the case with representations of space, representational spaces are ideally conceived as non-ideological, resistant and obedient to “no rules of consistency or cohesiveness” (PS 41). However, this does not mean we cannot observe any rules or cause-effect relations in particular representational spaces. One aspect of representational space in the postmodern city is pronounced in the imagination of tourists, who are least likely to resist capitalistic forces shaping their expectations.
What follows the realization of representational spaces is another question at stake.
Desire to change the status quo reflected in representational spaces does not shut out a yearning to fulfill those wishes (another characteristic of modernity), which thereupon conflicts with, and even oppresses, dissidents with differing imaginations and expectations in the same context of space.
Lefebvre also delineates space in terms of its correspondence to different modes of production. The result is a revision of Marxist periodization of feudalism, capitalism and communism. Here I appropriate absolute space, abstract space, and differential space, characterized by Bo Grönlund as “Lefebvre’s second ontological