History

History

AfterCulture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History

By Jerry Herron Wayne State Univ. Press 209 pages, $14.95

Reviewed by Lou Hillman

Staff member at Little Professor Book Center

Jerry Herron's history of Detroit was first published in late 1993. The paperback version available now is every bit as rich - in terms of ideas - as its more expensive sibling.

Herron, an English professor at Wayne State University, writes a different type of history that we are used to. He admits being unable to tell the "whole" story, though by virtue of that, comes as close to a configuration of that whole as anyone can. Herron writes: "...I'd like to think of my project as a book of visits, some of which are to theoretical or technical sties, but the majority of which are visits to the city. I have concluded, finally, that it is not possible to write about 'the city' as if that were a fixed and uniform subject. It's more accurate to think of my subject as a figure comprised of overlapping, often contradictory 'moments.'"

But rather than following the media trend - the total coverage of everything that goes wrong in Detroit - Herron turns his focus on the culture which abandoned this "first postmodern city." What has happened to its promises of upward mobility? What has become of its institutions, museums, theaters and shopping? And finally, what has happened to public space in general in the wake of its "absence?"

In short, they've been "seen through." Herron's problem is "...to understand that the seeing through things and the subsequent covering of what is seen through, are not ends, but openings to knowledge. Unquestionably, the great seeing through has made it possible for people to get inside things: institutions, objects, the computer, their own bodies. And once there, they make new demands based on new levels of information, some of them obviously better than others. The problem is that the further inside we get, the further we get away from each other."

Hence, the future of Herron's Detroit remains open to negotiation, even amidst its "theme-park" historicity and "yuppification." Somewhere, in between the American Dream of "more-equals-better" and the violence of urban blight, lies the theoretical space of a livable city. Who knows? It might be there already.