“Detroit, Capital of the Twenty-First Century”:

Motors, Meta-Modernism, and The Work of Art After the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

In his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter

Benjamin takes up the question of the relationship between aesthetic and cultural production and

the (perpetually-changing) technologies structuring economic production, arguing that the

increasing dominance of industrial mass-production in the economic realm went hand-in-hand

with a reorganization of the subjective phenomena of perception and experience along similar

(assembly) lines. But what happens when the assembly line is replaced first by the telephone

lines of the early Internet, and now increasingly by the spatiality-defying “cloud” of distributed

computing? As Jacques Derrida asks in Specters of Marx, what happens when all that was solid

has already melted into air? What happens to materialist aesthethics – and historical ethics, and

especially historical-materialist aesth-ethics – once we reach the end of history and the end of art,

when everything has been digitized, or dematerialized, or deconstructed?

Of course, posing and attempting to answer questions such as these has constituted no

small part of the work of academics and intellectuals (not to mention politicians and

entrepreneurs of both radical and reactionary stripes) for the past several decades, at least. Why,

then, is it so often said that academic discourse is rarefied, retrospective, and removed from the

problems of the world outside the “Ivory Tower” – precisely at a moment when the “digital

revolution” is forcing societies around the world to grapple with a host of ostensibly unthinkable

contradictions and irresolvable conflicts that have, in fact, already been resolved, in strikingly

similar ways, by surprisingly diverse schools of thought? The answer, it seems, can only be that

the branching of humanistic inquiry into the various and increasingly divergent discourses of the

latter half of the twentieth century has obscured their common root and common aspiration: to
make sense of human endeavor; to help us better understand ourselves and our situation, in both

the local and the cosmic senses of the word – in short, to help mankind write and recount its own

story.

In this dissertation, therefore, my intention is to explore Detroit as a site where the

dominant theoretical discourses of the turning twentieth century can be shown to intersect, and

the complex interrelationship between Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, film and media

theory, and “ordinary language” philosophy can be brought into visibility – along with the way

that this complex synthesis integrally informs the essential insights of the emergent theoretical

paradigm known as “Meta-modernism.” Detroit offers itself as an apt site for such a study due to

its historical roles as the one-time richest city in America, the epicenter of American

manufacturing during the American Century; as the metropolis that fell first, and furthest, once

the economic shocks that marked the end of the twentieth century began in earnest; and as the

avant-garde exploring what comes next, after the old ways have collapsed. This historical role,

furthermore, has led to Detroit’s increasing use in artistic works as a figure for the representation

and discussion of broader trends in culture and political economy related to the transition from

the Industrial to the Information Age.

This study, therefore, will consider Detroit as both a concrete, historical city, and as a

virtual trope, a way of organizing an artist’s concerns and an audience’s interpretation of a work

– although each informs the other, and the two cannot be rigorously kept apart. Similarly, it will

consider the 2008 bailout of the automobile industry by the United States government as a

somewhat-arbitrary line that divides the modern history of Detroit into an Industrial Era “before”

and an Information Age “after” – although one could also make the case for drawing this line as

far back as July of 1992, when Moody’s cut Detroit’s credit rating to “junk” status, or as late as
July of 2013, when Detroit declared the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history even

as the automobile industry bailout was ongoing.

The dissertation will be divided into three sections of several chapters each. The first

section is meant to establish an answer to the question: “What was Detroit?”

Chapter One, “(Hi)stories of Old Detroit,” will set the stage for the readings and

discussion that follows by iteratively narrating intersecting accounts of the city’s history prior to

the 2008 collapse. These carefully-tailored summaries of the city’s economic, political, and

social history will introduce the cast of characters and set of common reference points that will

weave through the texts that will be taken up by the rest of the dissertation. This multiplicity of

histories will lead to some theoretical reflection on the philosophy of history, bringing questions

of history’s representational status into the conversation in preparation for the explicit theorizing

of Meta-Modernism in later sections.

Chapter Two: “Old Economies,” will read Joyce Carol Oates’ them and the 1978 TV

miniseries “Wheels,” through Marx’s Capital, Anna Kornbluh’s writing about fictional capital

and metalepsis, and William Cronon’s chapter on “Pricing the Future” in Nature’s Metropolis.

The formal play of both texts will be examined, and treated as paradigmatic of a definite

postmodern tendency even within ostensibly naturalistic fictions of old Detroit. Readings of

them’s performance of uncertainty about its own degree of fictionality, and of the Anna

Karenina-inspired racetrack death scene in Wheels will introduce the concept of intertextual sites

of meaning-making.

Chapter Three, “Detroit’s Drives,” will look at two texts, Loren Estleman’s novel Motor

City Blue and Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides, through the lens of Lacan’s seminar on

“The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,” as well as Alenka Zupancic’s reading of

Lacan’s ontology from “What is Sex?” The discussion of metalepsis will continue, but the

chapter will focus on the circuitous structure of the drives and of the relation to the phantasmatic,

with particular attention paid to Estleman’s afterword, in which he discusses his novel as a

postmodern homage to the Detroit noir genre, and the nature of the relation between his novel

and works of Elmore Leonard, proposing the relation as a model for thinking Lacan’s

understanding of the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other” around which the self takes

shape.

Chapter Four, “The Black and The Blue and The Grey,” takes up John Hersey’s The

Algiers Motel Incident and Paul Verhoeven’s film Robocop to introduce and explore questions

surrounding media, technology, representation, and testimony. The chapter will consider the

issues raised by Wendy Chun’s introduction to the “Race And/and Technology” special issue of

Camera Obscura, before using Robocop to introduce theories of post-digital mediation, and also

show how they intersect with the Marxist and psychoanalytic theoretical claims previously

discussed.

Chapter Five, “Why Only Lovers are Left Alive,” finds us in the company of several

figures supernaturally surviving as the city around them crumbles. We begin in the burning

Detroit of The Crow, read as an allegory of Detroit’s decline, before finding ourselves in the

ruins of old Detroit, where I will read the endlessly circling records and world-weary vampires of

Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive as a figure for the exhaustion of the analog, and a

provocative posing of the question of what happens when one find’s ones temporality no longer

in alignment with that of the rest of the world, possibly through Levinas’s Totality and Infinity.

This chapter will also serve to set up the history of the crash, marking the end of our time in

Detroit, for now.

 Section Two, “Hitting (and Quitting) The Road” is structured as a road trip, a little spin

around (and beyond) the world that will acquaint us with the essentials of the Meta-modernist

theoretical framework.

Chapter Six, “Crossing Boundaries”, finds us at our first stop, just across the Canadian

border in Toronto, setting of David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash.

This chapter will extend the concluding discussion of the previous chapter, reading Crash as an

account of the inter-penetration of the discourses of sex, economics, and technology, and reveals

the homologies between the flow of capital, the circulation of media, and the substance of

jouissance. It will also consider the relation between the film and the novel in order to shed light

on Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s concept of “renarration,” which is integral to Meta-modernist thought.

Chapter Seven, “The Eternal Circuit,” reads Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions,

which passes through Detroit on several occasions, and his House of Leaves, which, though set in

Virginia, is about a house that is is larger than the universe (and therefore must encompass

Detroit, along with everything else) in order to better identify the constitutive negativity that

each of our major discourses attempts to circumscribe, the common not-thing endlessly

circulating through our political, sexual, and representational economies. This discussion will

draw heavily on Samo Tomsic’s The Capitalist Unconscious, as well as Derrida’s Specters of

Marx. This chapter will also begin to bring the concepts of temporality and intersubjectivity

back into the center of the broader discussion.

Chapter Eight, “Ghostly Motors,” will find us proliferating throughout Paris by way of

Leos Carax’s film Holy Motors, which will be read through several essential Meta-modernist

theoretical texts. These readings will further explain how the common not-thing at the heart of

our economic, psychoanalytic, and media-theoretical discourses is in fact made manifest in

digitality, setting up the argument that the Meta-modern condition arises from a literalization and

reification of postmodernism’s metaphors – but that this, in turn, forces one to ask whether, in

fact, the figures at issue were originally figurative at all. In addition to its close focus on

Vermeulen and van der Akker’s “Notes on Metamodernism,” this chapter will draw heavily on

Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect and the writings of Jean Baudrillard – and, by putting the

thoroughly Meta-modernist Holy Motors in conversation with the doggedly Postmodern Crash,

will enable us to draw crucial distinctions between the sometimes-similar-sounding enunciations

characteristic of the two modes of thought.

In Chapter Nine, “(Post-)Industrial Lies: Tech(n)o-nomics,” we will switch on the radio

and, through readings of Cybotron’s “Industrial Lies” (and its accompanying music video) and

“Techno City,” we will attempt to mark the intersection between the theorization of Meta-

modernism thus far and Marie-Jose Mondzain’s conceptualization of “economy,” allowing one to

consider the pre-digital antecedents of Meta-modernist thought, as well as how the advent of

digital technologies specifically inflected its development. I will argue that the incarnational

structure of feeling Mondzain traces back to the crisis over the use of icons is critical to

understanding how meta-modernist art makes its central claims. It will also offer another history

of Detroit – here, the history of Detroit since the late 1980s as the story of the development of

techno music as a genre, which complicates a simple narration of the city’s decline.

Section Three, “Back in Meta-Modernist Detroit,” travels back across the territory

explored in Sections one and two, offering more recent works as Meta-modernist revisions of

texts already explored. Each discussion will be used to flesh out an aspect of the Meta-modernist

critical apparatus (although I am not yet sure which theoretical text is best foregrounded in each

chapter, as my research remains ongoing). Thus, Chapter Ten, “Picking up the Pieces,” will read
Matt Bell’s novel Scrapper as Meta-modernist Detroit’s version of them and “Wheels,” an

account of Detroit’s various economies after the collapse. Bell’s vision will also be contrasted

with that of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a similar text that lacks Scrapper’s Meta-modernist

foundation. Here I shall also consider Lacan’s four discourses from Seminar XVII, using the

novel to illustrate Lacan’s claims about excess and production.

Chapter Eleven, “Death is Not the End,” will Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters against

Motor City Blue and The Virgin Suicides, to similarly consider how its thoroughgoing Meta-

modernism inflects its treatment of questions of law, including the law of mortality, and

epistemology/investigation. The text’s fragmentary viewpoints and experimental treatment of

time will also be used to further explore the intimate relation between digitality and

temporality/mortality/finitude within Meta-modernist thought.

Chapter Twelve, “Detroit?” will consider Katherine Bigelow’s Detroit in relation to both

The Algiers Motel Incident and Robocop, arguing that her earlier film “Strange Days” is a more

interesting and authentic piece of Detroit Meta-modernism, despite its setting in LA and thematic

concern with the Rodney King beating, than Detroit. The latter film, however – particularly

considered through the lens of Richard Brody’s agonized review of the film in The New Yorker –

will also furnish an opportunity to discuss Meta-modernism’s implications for representational

and documentary ethics.

Chapter Thirteen, “Story Time,” will further this discussion by looking at the docu-

mystery film “Searching for Sugar Man” as a Meta-modernist response to the visions of decline

and exhaustion found in Only Lovers Left Alive and The Crow. Furthermore, I will argue that the

formal experimentation of the film models a Meta-modernist response to the earlier films’

interrogations of the experience of manifesting a unique personal relationship to time and

finitude – which is to say, of temporality as a function of narration (an insight which will be put

into conversation with Deleuze’s thinking about the “time-image”).

Chapter Fourteen, “My Car Ride With Eminem,” reads the VR film “Marshall from

Detroit” as both a Meta-modernist reimagining of the fiction film 8 Mile and a new-media

reimagining of My Dinner With André, one of the crucial texts in the established Meta-modernist

canon.

Chapter Fifteen, “(Meta-)Meta-modernism,” considers the game Detroit: Become Human

as a playable re-imagining of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner. After establishing the film as an

allegory for Stanley Cavell’s thinking of the cinema and cinematic modernism (which also

requires a consideration of Wittgenstein), I then show how re-working such a film into an

interactive experience, in the way that the game does, likewise allegorizes interactive Meta-

modernism. The game will also be considered as an alternative mode of communicating the

central theoretical insights of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, itself a paradigmatically Meta-

modern text, and I will argue that Detroit: Become Human reveals the natural affinity between

Meta-modernist thought and the modes of interaction increasingly coming to define our lives, as

it cultivates intersubjectivity and empathy in the player. Finally, the game’s explicit citations of

moments from both Blade Runner and Heavy Rain (an earlier game by the same developers) will

be used to show how citationality and self-reflexivity are integral to the Meta-modernist mode.

An Afterword will use Mark Binelli’s Detroit City is the Place to Be to offer a final

history of Detroit – that of its recovery, and the new political and artistic formations taking shape

on the ground. In addition to a reading of Evil Dead: The Musical, this section will be based

largely on upcoming field work.

 Selected Bibliography

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Bell, Matt. Scrapper. Soho Press, 2015.

Beukes, Lauren. Broken Monsters. Mulholland Books, 2014.

Binelli, Mark. Detroit City is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis. Picador,
2012.

Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott, Warner Bros., 1982.

Brody, Richard. “The Immoral Artistry of Katherine Bigelow’s Detroit.” newyorker.com, 2017.

Black to Techno. Directed by Jenn Nkiru, Frieze, 2019.

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The Crow. Directed by Alex Proyas. Dimension Films, 1994.

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--- Only Revolutions. Pantheon, 2006.

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