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Review of Khôra Revisited: a Topography of Battened-Down Power
Erica J. Cartwright-Stephenson, New Calvert University

In Khôra Revisited, we find Zumwalt at his most evocative, approaching a rare poeticism of form, and yet on its own merits the essay falls somehow flat. He takes the standard argument promulgated by Iniesta and Podorefsky – that urban space is a receptacle, a “chora” through which “all passes and nothing remains” and an “artificial construct – at once place and nonplace, extant and intant.” [3] However, he fails to build a cohesive argument atop this pillar of accumulated knowledge. Ultimately, his points, though often deeply relevant, fail to metamorphose into a unified whole. Despite the ambition of Zumwalt’s work, it must be taken as a sort of failed palimpsest – one which has, for all of its scope and ambition, stopped well short of transformative.

I first read Khôra Revisited this summer, in Stamboul, one of the cities that Zumwalt examines in his contrasts in his attempt to contrast certain American and European cities. He defines many major European cities as “axial” [11] – comparing them to the politically weak American cities. To cite three examples, Stamboul, Paris, and Frankfurt, he argues, have had profound political effects on their respective topoi. American cities, which by contrast have been largely prevented from exercising political autonomy, simply do not have the same avenues for asserting independence. This political weakness as prevented liberal and leftist political movements from being protected and nurtured in the womb of the khôra – and thus prevented what Zumwalt describes as the axial impact of many European political capitals.

Stamboul, which for most of its post-war history was under the auspices of the League of Nations until the 1988 Concordat/Memorandum of Understanding, was in Zumwalt’s view uniquely axial, capable of “radical self-definition” [21] to a degree that no American city was capable of achieving. Stamboul was a city of “experimentation and the avant-garde intelligentsia” [21] and contrasted with New York, in the same era, Stamboul was capable of realizing its vision. Zumwalt describes with real passion the beautiful architectural patchwork of the city, the ancient buildings of the Byzantine and Ottoman era adjacent to modernist skyscrapers in the Nude Formalist style and the glass-and-steel skyline of the “New City” and financial district across the straits. Zumwalt correctly recognizes a sort of vitality here, and draws on the work of Corbin and Halleck to tie that vitality to the sort of qualified political independence which made Stamboul a haven for intellectuals in a way that “America may have been in 1848, but certainly was no longer by 1948.” [23]

Zumwalt’s depiction of the American Labor Party as a primarily rural movement is not entirely inaccurate, however his depiction of them as a particularly unexperimental and dogmatic form of socialism is decisively correct. The American populist movement began as a primarily agrarian reform movement, one organized around the desire to create a “Christian Society” and often found common cause with the short-lived Temperance and Morality Leagues. Furthermore, some of the earliest proponents of Unions were those involved in impoverished regions such as western Virginia, where the mining industry often clashed with its workers over matters such as pay and safety conditions.

The heady days of the Manhattan Commune, and in particular the aftermath of its violent suppression, are of intense interest to Zumwalt. The foundation of American government, in Zumwalt’s view, has prevented the rise of urban politics in America, and this trend was reinforced after the bloodbath of the Manhattan Commune shocked elites out of their complacency. Strict limitations placed on urban power have served to alienate American cities from their people, and above all to alienate the urban, immigrant working class from the rural working class. The Manhattan Commune was a failed experiment in communalist sub-state dirigisme, a decentering event which never had an equivalent recentering – a yin without a yang as it were. It was, to quote Selçuk’s Rationality and Despair, a “permanent scar on the American zeitgeist” [16] which has never truly healed. It, like much of what some have begun calling the “Second American Civil War” was an unmemoralized conflict of black-bagged dissidents and khakhi-shirted fascists, born out of pro-Segregationists and the Walkerite movement.

Zumwalt draws, of course, on eclectic sources. It is not enough to compare the broad-reaching, totalizing impact of Stamboul with the brief flourishing of urban rebellion in Manhattan. His exploration of St. Louis, a city wholly rebuilt in the modern era, is also worthy of note. In particular, he utilizes Joseph McNulty’s classic novels The Razor’s Edge and Rose Stone – here he is concerned particularly with how the delineation of sense of khôra leads to a peculiar alienation. In Rose Stone particularly, the African-American population is driven and derided by their rural origins, by their inability to merge with the high society of the immigrant urban population. The African-American groups are implicitly labelled as exurban or suburban – a position which persists to this day.

Zumwalt declares “the topography of the city informs individual crises of identity.” [16] – he contrasts rebuilt cities which were particularly designed with those whose growth has always been to varying degrees organic. A rebuilt city, in Zumwalt’s analysis, is more easily turned towards the process of alienation and promotes identity conflict. Designed cities more easily reflect clear hierarchies because they were built to fulfill the biases of the creators. This portion of his analysis is complicated by the subjectivity of his claims however, and its use of rambling disassociated examples fails in any clear way to be systematic, although it paints a beautifully effective picture of the artificial city as a tool of oppression.

As Iniesta puts it in his seminal 2004 work, Self and the Strange, the “alienation of the self… can be reached to such a degree that the self might experience its own annihilation as an aesthetic pleasure” [67] Ultimately, Khôra Revisited is a work which finds exuberant joy in its contrasts and of course in its depiction of alienation, and yet cannot describe any remedy to the problems it proposes because of the disjointed nature of the essay. The real failing of Zumwalt’s narrative is that, while it argues for the fundamental overhaul of the relations between cities and states in America, it does so without any clear understanding of what that would entail, and often seems to take a sort of vicarious pleasure in depicting the methods of oppression that it cannot remedy.

We live in an era with more than enough masturbatory cynicism as it is. Three and one half stars.

-Erica


[The latest Practical Lobster project. It's weird, but I couldn't think of anywhere else to put it after I created it.

Hope someone enjoys. Would be interested to hear any feedback.]
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