ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between the city and the body. The point of departure is a recurring call for modification of the body when faced with new types of urban space, as seen in the call for new organs by Simmel and Jameson. This call fits in with a long tradition of thinking about the body in terms of remedying shortcomings through technological means such as prosthetics. This chapter traces how such reasoning constructs the urban environment as encroachment upon the individual, requiring the individual to fix or overcome the physical. A close reading of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis explores how this modern framework should be reconceived for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The chapter turns to posthuman theory and particularly the work of Katherine Hayles for situating these questions of the urban body, specifically Hayles’ understanding of virtuality as the interwovenness of the material (bodies, but also machines and space) and the informational (knowledge, discourses, information systems), as well as Hayles’ emphasis on embodiment through incorporating and inscribing practices.
