ABSTRACT
Metropolises in the US and Germany have frequently been compared to gigantic engines of production and complex servo-mechanisms, melting pots and waste disposal systems, prisons and asylums. From the standpoint of governance, the western city has to be represented as a rational, ordered whole, especially when its superficial appearance is one of chaos and fragmentation. The body analogy furnished a naturalistic image of urban growth and regeneration; it was more used to represent its antithesis – processes of blight and decay caused by parts that become dysfunctional, or parasitic, thereby disrupting the harmony of the whole. Bodies have invisible insides and visible outsides, texts have legible surfaces and depths of meanings hidden 'between the lines'. The hallucination model has the unacknowledged pay-off that it leaves the lives of real East Enders, the real 'inside story' intact, if invisible, in the opacity of its material self-reference outside the text, outside modernity.
