The Satellite, the Screen, and the City: On Google Earth and the Life Narrative.

International Journal of Cultural Studies 2016, Vol. 19(6) 659 –672© The Author(s) 2015Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1367877915595886ics.sagepub.com

The satellite, the screen, and the city: On Google Earth and the life narrative

Daniel LaforestUniversity of Alberta, Canada

AbstractThe implications of using satellite imagery like Google Earth to illustrate biographical narratives has scarcely been explored. The Wilderness Downtown, an interactive video by the band Arcade Fire that was launched in 2010, raises questions in this respect. The project uses geolocalization to demonstrate various points of view shown on Google Maps while shaping both the narrative and the generation of personal memory. However, in spite of the aesthetic novelty of this experience, the mental processes being activated are not without precedent, as we can see with the telling example of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. This opens a broader issue. To what epistemology of spatial distribution does such an encounter between satellite imagery and individual storytelling subscribe? We will see that Google Earth’s interface has a lot more in common with the city than we might initially think. Ultimately, we will see that the nature of the city involved is culturally specific and is in some ways confining.

KeywordsArcade Fire, city, Google Earth, interface, literary studies, Musil, nostalgia, storytelling, suburbia, urban space

Among the interdisciplinary works of art involving geolocation technology and satellite and street-level images most readily available today under the names of Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Street View, memory, and especially the feeling of nostalgia, are surprisingly scarce themes. This may partly explain the choice made by Canadian pop-rock band Arcade Fire in 2010. Their commissioning of an online interactive video-interface, called The Wilderness Downtown, to enhance the soundtrack of middle-class childhood

Corresponding author:Daniel Laforest, Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, T6G 2R3, Canada. Email: [email protected]

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reminiscence that was their album The Suburbs released the year before, led to a creative détournement of Google’s geographic interfaces. Such cross-breeding between popular music and visual experimentation is far from unusual since the heyday of video-clips in decades past. Thus, in hindsight, Arcade Fire’s case proves fascinating for reasons other than musical or media-related ones. Their interactive online experiment can help us shed light on a connection between nostalgia and space that has fallen by the wayside in the midst of our otherwise widespread interest in the biographical, life-narrative form of story-telling. That connection is the one provided by visual technologies. Inasmuch as it is true that nostalgia can be a spatially constructed relationship between oneself and a place, it is just as true to say that there are various forms of geographically based and culturally imbued forms of nostalgia. One does not miss one’s Greek homeland in the same ways that one misses the Paris of one’s youth, or the France of one’s summer trip for instance. But how can we sustain such a perspective in a world where Greece, Paris, or any other location on earth has become almost immediately accessible via online satellite images? Can we still feel the nostalgia of space and place in the world of Google Earth?

Such is the question that this article examines. And it must begin with the acknowledg-ment of its relative un-originality. Indeed, the question has been posed before, in a different time and in an immensely more elaborate way, but for surprisingly similar reasons. The fate of nostalgia in a technologically accelerated world belongs to the western literary tradition; it first appeared in 1930 with Austrian writer Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities. This was a novel of impossible ambition that wanted no less than to demonstrate the capacity of literature – and thus of the story – to stand against a rising tide of mechani-cal scientific reason bent on exactitude and increasingly detached from humanity. The per-spective inaugurated by Musil needs to be connected to Arcade Fire’s seemingly innocuous pop experience for us to understand that the latter is at once old and new. The Wilderness Downtown resurrects the concerns of yesteryear for the meaning of one’s personal storyline in the modern world, but it does so in regard to our contemporary context, where online interactivity and the satellite eye have both become part of the mundane reality.

Robert Musil and the visualization of the city

The Man Without Qualities opens with a description that has become famous. A disem-bodied narrator first observes an atmospheric depression. His gaze then swiftly darts towards a big city, which is described as a place where urban life throbs like ‘one great rhythmic beat as well as the chronic discord and mutual displacement of all its contend-ing rhythms’ (Musil, 1995: 4). Within a few paragraphs the focal point descends to street level, zeroing in on an anonymous couple about to witness a car accident. Michel de Certeau (1984: 91–110) would later famously associate a similar all-encompassing per-spective with a ‘pulsion scopique’, a fantasy of dominance unconsciously tied to the authoritarian regulation of civil life. But the almighty plunge of the narrator’s gaze, from clouds to street life, is also a powerful statement on literature: no viewpoint escapes it; no angle proves inaccessible to its reach. The stage is set for what Musil perceived to be the deepest struggle of its time, and for the role of literature therein. A struggle not of weapons, nor of ideas, but of points of view. David Luft has written that:

[The Man Without Qualities] illuminates the tension between the structure of scientific reality – which most people manage to forget in all their really important decisions – and the possibility



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of being poetically produced – a possibility which seemed to have evaporated from life altogether. By forcing the reader from the outset to doubt his own ordinary reality and to suffer the scientific space in which he lives, Musil challenges himself to make the form of the novel victorious within this situation, or in spite of it. He creates obstacles for himself to be poetic … (1980: 218)

The struggle was a real one for the writer. In Musil’s time the Enlightenment project had seemingly exhausted its course; the individual perspective no longer sufficed for embracing the totality of understanding while simultaneously remaining within the realm of truth. The new promise was that the techniques of scientific objectivity alone would henceforth offer the perspectives, the unprecedented measures, and the previously unim-aginable viewpoints needed for an accurate description of the world. Together they would create an apparatus of accuracy, providing concrete meaning of and to the world. Musil’s opening to The Man Without Qualities challenges this scientific objectivity in favour of a new interrelation between novelistic storytelling and the perception of space. The struggle between subjective perception and technical radicalization had brought a challenge not only for modern literary aesthetics, but also for imagination itself. For the latter to prevail, it was precisely the expansion of literature’s capacity to embrace various points of view that was needed. Storytelling had to be expanded and relocated. It had to embrace the mass movements of clouds as much as the minute activity inside particles. There were no sufficient reasons for keeping the scope of the visual field of a story enclosed within the boundaries of a pedestrian, subjective experience. And there was a significant liberation for literary realism, even though it presented an enormous ordeal as well as a considerable effort for the novelist: The Man Without Qualities remains unfin-ished at no less than 2000 pages. Yet this did not stop Musil’s grand novel from setting the tone for a major part of 20th-century intellectual modernity. Musil showed that liter-ary imagination, having undergone a colossal transformation, could potentially encapsu-late the life-stories of characters inside what increasingly is becoming a globalized space from the standpoint of scientific and technological visualizations. I insist on the potenti-ality in this perspective since it is well known that the first victims, so to speak, of Musil’s literary endeavour are his characters themselves, most notably his hero Ulrich who has lost the sense of what it means to possess qualities. Within this new space inau-gurated by Musil, where the literary mind was to confront the scientific one, the most important tragedies result from occurrences generated from the heights and the depths, from beneath or beyond perception, in places where life is governed by incidents devoid of human involvement. Even if the power of poetics is to be ultimately salvaged by the deus ex machina of the writer, there remains a significant loss at the heart of Musil’s novel: the meaning of the character’s individual life. In the words of Jacques Bouveresse, ‘the core difficulty that Musil was confronting […] can be summarized by saying that what happens is always what is probable, which leads to the idea that eventually the same story will always repeat itself’ (1993: 194, trans. by D Laforest). This is expressed clearly in the novel: ‘What one still calls personal destiny today is threatened by collective and ultimately statistically comprehensible problems’ (1995: 172). The Man Without Qualities is imbued with a strong sense of space and with an equally strong belief in lit-erature’s power to create, but because of its project to demonstrate the crisis of moder-nity it does not save a meaningful place for the individual story that in our common imaginary defines a character just as much as it defines our own sense of self.

Such a literary world foreshadows our own time in many ways, and has been so analysed by most Anglophone commentators of Musil (see Payne, 2009 [1988]), be it through the




lens of a crisis of modernity (Freed, 2011) or through its renewed assertion (Jonsson, 2000). However, it is not the historical backdrop of Musil’s work that should interest us here, nor is it the intricate style of his philosophical musings. In the wake of the absence (or the inanity) of the main character’s personal history, there is yet another element in the text that proves at least equally important. The de-humanized space of atmospheric currents in the famous opening lines is placed in direct relation with that of the city. Moreover, it is only from an angle inaccessible to the naked eye, therefore demanding an act of pure imagination, that this conceptual totality – what we call ‘city’ – can be perceived. Musil is explicit in this mat-ter: the slightest change in point of view can transform the initial picture into an assortment of ‘narrow streets’ being crossed by ‘dark clusters of pedestrians form[ing] cloudlike strings’, and where ‘hundreds of noises wove themselves into a wiry texture of sound with barbs protruding here and there’(1995: 3). Musil’s novel performs a crucial cultural change in the shape of the city; or, more accurately, a change in the manner in which the city becomes visible as a system. The linear development of the ‘uniform’, ‘homogeneous’ whole of a city is but one historical process among many that are at play amidst the same elements. Other less visible ones are heterogeneous, non-linear, but they do have inner logic: they can eventually be expressed in a historical form (De Landa, 2000 [1997]: 25–99) . It just won’t be that of the individual citizen – Musil’s literary character – who for his meagre part is simply caught in the turmoil of urban life. Ultimately, The Man Without Qualities registers a subjective loss that is directly linked to a gain in clarity: the literary character falters in a world where the images of the city have become seemingly unlimited.

What does this teach us today? The loss of Musil’s characters leads to the feeling of unhomeliness, which his hero Ulrich experiences constantly. But it also leaves unoccu-pied the place that would normally be filled by another emotion in this case: nostalgia. Individual loss (and the loss of individuality) in The Man Without Qualities is not con-veyed by pathos, but the novel certainly sets the scene for an analysis of personal loss in the world of scientific clarity and certainty. Simply put, nostalgia in Musil’s work is replaced by spatial and narrative disruption. The irony is that such a disruption is ulti-mately produced by the short-sightedness of the modern man. In an otherwise crystal-clear world, there should be no such thing.

The rise of the Google-gaze

There is a second irony at play. This time it speaks directly to us. Between June 2005 and April 2008, virtually everyone – and anyone – has gained access to the literary point of view invented almost a century earlier by Robert Musil in his novel. The period between 2005 and 2008 is the timespan separating the public launch of Google Earth and its com-plete integration with two other spatial visualization tools, namely Google Maps and Google Street View. Visually, these two dates mark a transition from the atmospheric to the street-level point of view. Through this transition, previously non-existent relations can be foreseen between the representation of the physical environment and our deeply ingrained desire to perceive our life in the form of a story, complete with its emphasized episodes and its forgotten chapters. However, when it comes to Google, criticism has thus far focused almost exclusively on questions related to knowledge monopoly, to intellectual property, and to the right to privacy; the underlying assumption being that the market economy and the information economy are Google’s sole purposes (on the US front see Vaidhyanayjan, 2011; see also Cleland and Brodsky, 2011; on the francophone



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front see Cassin, 2007). Thus, there are other possible assessments with regard to the integration of satellite visualization interfaces in the narrative realm of individual life.

The most pressing remark is that the shift from a cloud-level to a street-level view-point no longer necessitates an involvement of the imaginary. Whatever the man without qualities couldn’t clearly see, we can behold today. The satellite images are concrete. Their visual sequence is fluid. There are no gaps. There are no pauses, no need for digres-sion, no linguistic detours, no rhetorical tropes, and thus no moments of stillness allow-ing doubt and reverie to seep in. For the Google Earth user, the opening of the visual field is maximized. Consequentially, a feeling shared through a multitude of stories seems to have faded: that of a concave world where things, events, and even other people do not appear completely, but rather do so as shimmering apparitions, triggering our desire because they conceal as much as they reveal. Google Earth seems to destroy this oppor-tunity for pondering by making everything accessible to the naked eye without empha-sizing anything in particular, starting with the horizon upon which we project and interpret what we see: the geography, the globe in its totality.1

Is this loss any reason to become disenchanted? We should not prematurely declare a fatal impoverishment of imagination just yet. If we consider the criteria for using Google’s inter-face, we notice that the traditionally grounded viewpoint of the world (equivalent to the writ-er’s position) has been replaced by a plane of immanence where the freedom of visual movement has superseded the freedom of literary imagination. Diachronic and synchronic organization – the cardinal components of historical thought – are now tied with the move-ment on the satellite imagery. Scrolling along the map on the interface and imagining the episodes of a story in which our point of view is that of the hero have become more closely related than ever before (for the literary tradition preceding this see Turchi, 2007; see also Conley, 1996). The trigger and first requirement for narrative imagination thus becomes mobility. Prior to becoming another in language, the Google Earth user becomes another in space. Despite manifest similarities, this demands being differentiated from previous subjec-tive conceptions like the notion of ubiquity, or the concept of nomadism in postmodern iden-tities. Rather, the Google Earth interface provides the ability to come and go freely within a completely controlled universe while maintaining the sense of distance as a constant promise, a source of leisure, or even as an unexpected pleasure. Despite the topographical nature of the data, and the realism of the images, we somehow find ourselves detached from the traditional travel narrative. Because in the travel narrative, as Gérard Cogez points out, ‘writing always ends up having the last word’ (2004: 181), implying that the rhythm of writing and reading will always encompass and somehow consume the rhythm of the true travel experience. In fact, we can more accurately draw a comparison between the concrete media experience provided by Google Earth and the imagination’s ability to retrieve memories of spaces as they occur during the dream process. The Google Earth interface allows us to gaze upon the image of a place as many times as we wish, at a speed and at an angle that we freely choose. The photographic authenticity of the satellite images reinforces the feeling that no place on the planet can escape our reach, our desire to explore and to possess it. What we recreate through this exploration coincides with the essence of early childhood narratives, that of fantasies imagined while half-asleep, when streets, oceans, deserts and forests spill into one another without logical transition. Reveries where there are no inhibitions preventing us from sud-denly flying over to stand next to an object of repressed desire, where there is no hesitation to revisit place after place like the many layers of our memories. That said, Google Earth also imbues this process with a visual clarity absent from the psychological projections of




consciousness (dreaming or awake). It thus drags the imagination of the life-story towards a more seamless, latitudinal and ‘functional’ line of meaning.

In summing up yet moving beyond these traditions of the spatialized subject, the Google Earth interface relieves us of our modern obsession for grasping the coherence of the world by counterbalancing the fantasy for omnipresence with the thirst to explore, and by providing a concrete spatial representation that requires no further effort on our part for piecing the photographed world together. Ultimately, an old method of storytell-ing has been revived whereby a founding feature of the narrative imaginary functions in much the same way as metaphor. We find a succession of places that are detached from their immediate context enthralling because it implies a reconciliation of what Paul Ricoeur has called ‘mortal time and monumental time’ (1985: 101). This reconciliation suggests that individual stories are only fragments, or merely attempts at portraying a much larger and impossible setting wherein spaces on the planet, no matter their nature, would all be ultimately juxtaposed to form a unique and absolute storyline. The time of thought and the time of objects, which were not meant to exist in the same realm, seem-ingly do so on the Google Earth visual surface.

And yet, this belief is ultimately disproved by the very interface that revives it. It is Musil’s modern lesson that comes back to haunt us: every scientific ideal has a counterpart. As a matter of fact, Google Earth does not primarily represent an all-encompassing gaze on geography. More fundamentally, it is the result of an encounter between a technology and a discourse. On the one hand, there is the technological representation of the gaze: the satel-lite eye and the imagery it produces in the form of mechanically interpretable and visually translatable data. On the other hand, there is the discursive claim that this gaze is all-encompassing. The technological aspect is not related to storytelling; but the notion of ultimate inclusivity is. Indeed the claim is utopian. Utopia involves the triumph of a ration-ality grounded in language over the chaotic swarm of real spaces, which is why it has been and remains limited to the well-bordered confines of a given epistemological and cultural context. Without going so far as to see in utopia a systematic expression of the economic and political unconscious, as Fredric Jameson (2007, see also 2004) has done,15 one can consider utopia to be the mirror image of the civil society that produces it. As Françoise Choay (1980: 190) explains, utopia offers an idealized snapshot of society, which in turn provides it with a meaningful structure and identity. This is why utopia provides a rhetori-cal organization of space: a monumentalization of certain shapes, an insistence on certain areas or sectors, as well as an aesthetic regulation of what can be said, represented and practised in civilian life. In light of all this, our first reaction would be to consider Google Earth to be a welcome revival of the utopian dream. Google Earth would be the first uto-pian representation resulting not from a civic idea, or from a system of monumentalized ideas, but rather from an active and direct intervention of the population, that is of the undefined and growing number of people using the interface. In this sense, Google Earth would be the first democratized and globalized utopia, one that has no point of reference in a given culture or society, or even in any language. And yet, what we have seen up to now points to the impossibility of such a prospect. The Google-gaze remains limited by its ori-gin, literally by its mode of production. We are about to see that this origin organizes, pri-oritizes and transmits elements of an imaginary that is fundamentally urban.

If we go back to The Man Without Qualities, we can note that the car accident ending the descending movement of the narrative gaze, and also brutally halting the progression of the



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couple on the sidewalk, hints at an important distinction we now need to make. There even-tually comes a point where technology and gaze become divided, the former stays enclosed in its pragmatism while the latter is susceptible to the chaos of daily life. We have to bring that same distinction to the technology behind Google Earth and to the cultural value that characterizes its use. The democratization and commercialization of satellite imagery on portable screens, its imbrication with the habits, the small gestures and the performances of daily life all result from a rhythm of life that cannot be dissociated from the contemporary city. Google Maps and Google Street View are obviously designed according to road maps, their layout offering a mirror image of today’s global urban networks of circulation.2 But even with Google Earth, we notice that the addition of increasingly detailed satellite images, from its inception to today, has progressed in waves of concentric circles starting with the downtown areas of the most important cities, then moving from those of average size to exurban and rural enclaves, before including uninhabited areas. Such an evolution of the interface’s visibility was oriented to satisfy the greater interest of its users, an interest that in turn corresponds to the progression of urban life over the physical territory.

The Wilderness Downtown and North American suburban nostalgia

Google Earth thus presents a utopia that is closely related to the production and move-ments of contemporary urbanization. The Wilderness Downtown (2010) offers a telling example in this respect. It was created as a free interactive website by American video director and photographer Chris Milk in 2010, and was designed in collaboration with the Google Creative Lab, which financed it, and Arcade Fire. It provides a personalized interactive experience of the song ‘We Used to Wait’.

On the homepage, the user is prompted to provide the address of his former childhood residence. A close-up of a kid running down a suburban street appears as the song starts. Moments later, another browser window opens; a digitized flock of birds is shown swirl-ing on the backdrop of a sepia sky. As the music rises in intensity, the birds begin to descend. A series of windows then open in rapid succession on the screen: apart from the one that continues to show the kid running, they all display images from the Google interface, one of which is invaded by the flock of birds that seems to be heading towards a specific spot, while others display houses, buildings, as well as roads and intersections taken from Google Street View’s image bank. The user soon realizes that the images on the screen are illustrating the area around the address he initially typed in. He is revisiting his own childhood neighbourhood through the Google imagery. The lyrics are in sync with this scene: ‘Now our lives are changing fast / hope that something pure can last.’ The running figure eventually stops and begins to look around. The point of origin, the childhood home, has been reached. The interface is designed so that this place fills the screen just as the music reaches the moment of its sharpest pathos in a swirling cre-scendo. The final image takes the user back to the homepage where he is encouraged to ‘write a postcard of advice to the younger […] [version of himself] that lived there’ (The Wilderness Downtown, 2010). The technology involved in this project is well mastered, and the overall effect remains impressive to this day.

There are two objectives underlying The Wilderness Downtown and the designers themselves have made them clear. The first objective is technical as much as commercial:




to emphasize the efficiency of the Google Chrome web browser with HTML5 program-ming which was new at the time. This is augmented by the fact that the video clip was presented without detours as a technical and experimental venture. The second objective is more narrative in nature. The Wilderness Downtown aims to combine the emotional, the visual, the spatial, and the individual within an overarching sense of becoming in line with the common life narrative supporting all biographical perspectives:

Some of us now live far away from the places where we grew up, and I’ve often found something quite evocative and wistful about looking at photos of the streets where I used to live. A few of us decided to capture this feeling of nostalgia in an interactive music experience that we developed for the web. (Street view and The Wilderness Downtown, 2010)

Above are the words of the Google project manager, Aaron Sorkin. We can add those of the director, Chris Milk:

It’s easy to lose the humanity when you start showcasing tech. Google Maps and Street View embody that contradiction though. It’s cold high-tech that can be incredibly emotional when used in the right context. The whole piece is full of contradictions. It’s essentially human nostalgia produced by the most advanced technology available today. (The Wilderness Downtown’s creator talks …, 2010)

The technological contradiction that Milk alludes to subscribes to the most classical symbolism: the juxtaposition of the warmth of flesh with the coldness of metal, the immediacy of the senses against the abstraction of algorithms. Nothing new on this front. But the direct association between satellite imagery and nostalgia is much more surpris-ing. It hints at a cultural and geographic mobility that is pre-existent to the creative mobility implied by the use of Google Earth’s interface.

Figure 1. Opening page of The Wilderness Downtown interactive videoSource: The Wilderness Downtown (2010).



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Those most susceptible to nostalgia over the image of their childhood home and neigh-bourhood belong to the very real growing diaspora of (mostly) middle-class individuals within the current stage of capitalism. People who increasingly have to change location in order to pursue work opportunities or because of the fluctuations of the economy, often

Figure 2. Screenshots from The Wilderness Downtown




several times throughout their active life. By choosing nostalgia as a central theme, The Wilderness Downtown has not only shaped its public, it has also given form to its social space of reference. It is a space of undefined borders where dislocation functions as an a priori for the subjective identity. In such a construct, leaving one’s nest means more than just becoming an adult, a worker and a citizen outside of the family sphere; it means doing so in a space that is potentially detached from the arrangement of recognizable signs and symbols that compose the place of origin in one’s memory. Such is the neoliberal territo-rial perspective, one of global city networks and of a required adaptability to high circula-tion, flux, and transhumance. Therefore, becoming in this world really means relocating oneself in a radius sufficiently remote from the birthplace so that nostalgia ends up not taking shape according to time, but rather according to space, to distances. In order to grasp this space, in order to literally measure the distance from past self to present self, one needs a suitable narrative model, that is a model that won’t allow the bitterness and anxiety of exile to take over. This model must be able to encapsulate the melancholy of a life estranged while still proving itself capable of offering consolation. Google Earth pro-vides the only world of reference allowing for this model. It is a surface world, adequate and complete, because it is achieved beyond the approximate, and beyond the Unheimlich. All the dots are connected right under our noses and at the tip of our fingers in the calm predictability of satellite images, each corresponding to a cultural place and a precise geolocation. Google Earth ingenuously yet calmly works to subdue today’s spatiality.

But we know that this predictability and this peace are unnatural in much the same way Musil’s description of the visual descent over Vienna was. With regard to The Wilderness Downtown, what comes to mind is the critical potential of places that reject adaptation, places that would throw off the process of seamless identification with childhood nostal-gia. We don’t have to look too far. When it comes to places in the countryside, the effects of the visual and emotional crescendo of the video clip fall flat. Roads are rare; they are linear and stretch out forever. This is assuming that Google Streetview provides them in the first place, which is not necessarily the case for a number of remote places. Viewing the downtown of a big city can yield striking results, given the abundance of visual signs. But here we are met with a diminished likelihood of personal memories. There are not many childhood narratives wherein downtown plays the role of ground zero (especially for the predominantly white middle class represented in Arcade Fire’s album). There are few nostalgic archetypes to be found in the throbbing heart of a metropolis. To this we can add a second de-realizing factor: the density of constructions, the verticality of skyscrap-ers, the austerity of public buildings, and the dense circulation captured on Google Streetview all combine to produce a short-circuit in the swooping-bird movement of the camera in the video clip. There are too many obstacles, too many irregularities in the urban landscape to allow the spectator to remain immersed in contemplation. One feels perturbed and distracted by thousands of incongruent details. More importantly, we note a third case of the inadequacy of satellite images in The Wilderness Downtown: different cultural perspectives are likely to affect the depth of the anticipated effect. The majority of European cities, for example, do not have the equivalent of the large residential parks of North American suburbia. In the resulting video, most European towns will appear jag-ged, leaving unclear transitions between places along with the strange coexistence of het-erogeneous urban markers. Like urbanization itself, nostalgia evokes different historical embodiments depending on the cultural context that it stems from.



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The Wilderness Downtown allows for the formation of a nostalgia where the different points of the Google Earth utopia play the role that the mechanisms of memory play in biographical narration. Satellite mapping is no longer a tracking device; it aims to become an image of our memory in action. Yet, as we have just seen, there is a specific memory system at play here, one to which the spectator must subscribe if he wants to experience the emotions involved. And these emotions can be narrowed down to those of a childhood spent in a middle-class North American suburb. This is already suggested by the clothing of the running character in the video clip and by the central theme of the Arcade Fire album that includes this song. But the type of memory that The Wilderness Downtown requires in order to create a coherent life narrative is also subject to the imperative of visual clarity and the iconic recognition of the Google-gaze. This imperative does not tolerate blurry images and seeks to shed a uniform light on every place. It favours surface at the expense of depth, as well as the models of the network and the grid inherited from the original Google Maps interface3,while avoiding obstacles that may interfere with the decoding of the visual field. This is how the structural similarities between the visual utopia of Google Earth and that of the North American suburbs come to the forefront: both favour spaces of delineated clarity where life seems to exist only to prove that it has nothing to hide.

Witold Rybczynski, in his book Makeshift Metropolis (2010: 9–50; see also Gordon, 2010), revisits the three North American pre-war urban utopias: City Beautiful by Charles Mumford Robinson, Garden City by Ebenezer Howard, and Radiant City by Le Corbusier. He ultimately concludes an almost total absence of posterity to these utopias. They were the last projections of urban space to be conceived by one mind. The postwar years, according to Rybczynski, were to be dominated by a debate no longer supporting urban planning per se, but instead the comparative values of densification and sprawl. Obviously sprawl, fragmentation and the subdivision of residential space have prevailed in the dec-ades since. Nowadays, we see that this ‘de-densification’ is no longer reduced to the phys-ical layout of peri-urbanity. It has taken over the imaginary of the North American city itself. The structures and forms of this city are the ones that permeate the Google Earth utopia. Horizontality, a far-reaching gaze, neatly defined traffic routes, places with well-labelled functions, a geography of daily life that is deprived of ambiguity: these traits are not only the ones of neoliberal productivity and urbanization, they are also what the Google Earth user expects. They are the traits that define the efficiency of the interface. The Google satellite utopia extends the paradox also mentioned by Rybczynski: only 5% of the American territory is urbanized (roads, parking spaces, agglomerations), but it is this 5% that dominates the production of cultural images and the politics of affects.4 This has a limiting function, or at least a regulative one in the process of recollection and, con-sequently, in the subjective life-stories that depend on urban nostalgia.

In short, the interpretation and use of the Google Earth interface is compatible with the rise of an urban web that lacks aesthetic or sustainable planning and that is subdi-vided in accordance with real-estate speculation. Life narratives integrating the Google-gaze are influenced by this particular way of perceiving the sprawling North American city. This is precisely the reason why a project like The Wilderness Downtown, if it wishes to produce nostalgia, must rely on a discrete new urban myth. Unlike the pulsat-ing movement of the Baudelairian crowd, or the inhuman chaos of Musil’s city, it depends upon a fiction that thinks of urban images as quietly yet unreasonably extended in time, untouched by the destructions and reconstructions of rapid urbanization and housing




speculation, or by the bipolar shifts in zoning regulations. Those whose childhood homes were demolished in favour of a strip mall (a relatively common occurrence) will experi-ence completely different emotions while watching the video. The experience will not really work. This is why a connection has to remain between the eye of the satellite, the screen of the computer, and the mental screen on which the spectator’s memories unfold. Such permanence is incompatible with the measurement of urban time that has domi-nated modern thought. Modern utopia is defined as a utopia precisely insofar as it indi-cates a general tendency to organize and maintain the shape of a city that in reality, as Charles Baudelaire famously remarked, ‘change plus vite que le cœur d’un mortel [changes faster than the human heart]’(2015: 123). The Google utopia, for its part, sub-ordinates all of its features to the calculus of geolocation and to an unwavering belief in the persistence of the relation between images and reality. The Google Earth user who is able to benefit from the Arcade Fire clip does not believe in the permanence of the urban world because the satellite images are confirming it on the screen. He comes to the com-puter with that belief already in mind. He has always held it. The Google satellite view comprises a utopia of absolutely efficient circulation that originates in urban form and for which visibility is the cardinal value: North American postwar suburbia.5

In conclusion, what can we say of the apparent collective utopia that the millions of Google Earth users embody? This collective utopia also has a connection to the postwar North American city, as it too was mainly defined by the middle class. Robert Fishman stressed this in his seminal book Bourgeois Utopia: ‘unlike the planner’s utopia, [suburbia] was not the work of an individual genius developing his ideas in isolation. Suburbia was, rather, the collective creation of the Anglo-American middle-class’ (1987: Preface). Rybczynski, for better or worse, gives this a populist spin: ‘While planners and architects propose concepts such as the City Beautiful or garden suburbs, the public ultimately decides what it likes and dislikes. Instead of one big idea, the city is formed by many little ideas’ (2010: 91). In the middle-class city, there is no longer a Grand Architect, nor is there a single direction or aesthetic vision. Rather, there are citizen committees, lobbies, and neighbour-hood associations. They keep the chaos of the modern city away in favour of a civil organiza-tion based on statistics and consensus. The global urban forms are maintained in spite of the perpetual movement that gives them life. This ‘writing’ of the city performed more or less collectively and more or less democratically by the North American middle class has a name: zoning. It prescribes and subdivides the territory in a perfectly visible and clear manner.

Closing remarks

Robert Musil, in his time, used the liberties provided by literature to appropriate and supersede the positivist framework of modern science. Before him, it was the sensual frenzy of crowds jammed in the narrow streets of Paris that had sparked Baudelaire’s interest and that were again explored by Walter Benjamin, who, in turn, had been strongly influenced by Georg Simmel’s work (e.g. Simmel, 2007). We have seen that the satellite mapping technology permeating our time seems to have eliminated all the creative ran-domness and uncertainty of poetic endeavours in favour of more concrete patterns. Yet the example of The Wilderness Downtown shows us that exploring the biographical



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dimension is fully possible in this context, and can even bring impressive results. There is aesthetic and technological creativity, but the narrative models conditioning the iden-tification of the spectator and the emotional aspect of the story are limited. We have argued that this is due to the North American suburban rationality that governs the ideals of visibility and the conditions of reception of Google Earth with regard to life narratives involving places of former belonging. Ultimately, narrative – and by extension literary – thinking seems to be impoverished by these limitations. But there remains another pos-sibility. Literary thinking – that which shapes world consciousness by allowing interven-tions of narrative reconstruction and lived experience – may not be left behind after all. Perhaps the precision of Google’s interface diminishes the evocative power of images, yet it increases the power of the narrative imaginary in return, since the subjective posi-tion and the geographical location are reduced to a minimum: a coordinate and an image for every place. From this standpoint, everything can be redone and all the stories are possible again. Against all odds we find ourselves in the exact position of Robert Musil’s fictional apparatus. We have a machine that replicates the entire planet, but that also has the potential to reveal its critical counterpart because it is not satisfied with only repre-senting the world, it also seeks to represent us as we are looking at the world.

Funding

This research is part of a grant received from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.

Notes

1. Let it be noted that the first illustration of this sort of globalizing point of view precedes Google Earth by about 40 years, namely the experimental short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames made in 1968 and broadcast for the general public in 1977 (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0).

2. Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw remind us of the deep ties between urban life and the circulation that has come to define its geographical reality when they ask: ‘How can the con-temporary city be defined and understood in the face of a fluidity and mobility that always link it to places, both literal and conceptual, outside of itself ?’ (2010: 10).

3. It is useful to note how the grid also played a fundamental role in the human transformations of the landscape in 19th-century North America (see Solnit, 2003: 194–5).

4. ‘The number of Americans who actually live downtown is only 0.3 percent of the entire popu-lation’ (Rybczynski, 2010: 178).

5. The Northern California region of Silicon Valley (whose real name is the Santa Clara val-ley) that houses Google headquarters is often cited as a prime example of such a suburban development.

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Author biography

Daniel Laforest is Associate Professor of French at the University of Alberta. His current research, initiated as visiting professor at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, examines the notion of responsibility as regards to literary life narratives and the interaction between daily life and health care in urban/suburban spaces. He is the author of L’Archipel de Caïn: Pierre Perrault et l’écriture du territoire (Montreal: XYZ, 2010).


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The Satellite, the Screen, and the City: On Google Earth and the Life Narrative.

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