Wire Anthology

Dear Colleagues,

The editors of the following collection are seeking additional essays about gender in "The Wire." The desired length is 80,000-90,000 words, and the firm submission deadline is September 15, 2010.

If you would like to submit an essay, please contact: Stephen Shapiro [s.shapiro@warwick.ac.uk] or Liam Kennedy [liam.kennedy@ucd.ie].

Please feel free to forward this message to other potential contributors, too.

Urban Procedural: The Wire and the Neoliberal City

Eds. Liam Kennedy (University College Dublin)
and Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick)


Concept

Routinely acclaimed as the best drama television series of the past decade, The Wire (HBO, 2002-08) is an unusual and ambitious urban crime show in the perspectives and layers it brings to characterization and plotting, and in the nuanced portrayal of race conflict, city politics, and the moralities of urban criminality and policing. It references many other urban crime narratives - literary, cinematic and televisual - yet develops its own distinctive sub-genre, the urban procedural, a fabrication of urban spatial relations that intercuts worlds usually unrelated in political and social studies never mind television cop shows. The linking plots, connected in part by the technology of ‘the wire’, are fused chronotopes, mediating the distinctive temporal and spatial coordinates of neoliberal urban governance and its discontents. As they unfold, The Wire also unfolds the ideological and formal contradictions of the crime story as a template for understanding urban America in the twenty-first century.
More consistently than any other crime show of its generation, The Wire challenges viewers’ perceptions of the racialization of urban space and the media conventions which support this. The Wire reminds us of just how remarkably restricted the grammar of race is on American television and related media, and of the normative codings of race—as identity, as landscape—across urban narratives, from documentary to entertainment media. The typical mise-en-scene—of black kids dealing drugs on ghetto corners—is an everyday snapshot of the structural impoverishment and isolation of an underclass whose hypervisibilty in other media frames (including gaming) is either manifestly exoticized and pathologized or only momentarily made visible through instances of spectacular disaster, like Katrina, rather than as a long-standing, structural presence. While The Wire remains unsentimental about drug gang culture, it also respects it as an organizing prism for individuals, ultimately little different from any other (legal, educational) institutional apparatus that contours and administers the lives of urban Americans.

The show attempts to provide new narrative and media techniques to gain a many-windowed perspective (to use long-time Baltimore resident David Harvey’s terms) on the lived systems and institutions that contemporary capitalism creates, redefines, and leaves aside as obsolete. At the same time, The Wire is caught up in the conditions and contradictions of its own powerful social critique, and its appeal may in part be symptomatic of the urban voyeurism it critiques. If The Wire hearkens back to the classic, realist/naturalist narrative cycles, like Zola’s, do its efforts to render the city legible and give a “human body” to social inequality and poverty in the 21st century constitute a radical rethinking of documentary aesthetics and ethnographic ethics? Does the balancing and interweaving of a non-white lifeworld against that of an “ethnic” white one activate or gloss an analytical opportunity to critically apprehend how money and power circulate in a neoliberal city. Similarly, does it successfully balance the tension between a guarded celebration of a vanishing collective dignity involved in craft-like work conditions against entrepreneurial selfishness and the inertia of indifference that contemporary institutions manifest and reward? What kinds of intellectual and affective work does The Wire seem to desire and in actuality accomplish? Do the new modes of content delivery in a post-network age - provided by cable television series, the DVD box set, and internet piracy - indicate a changing demographics of taste and viewer pleasure that this show mirrors in its production qualities? How does the urban imaginary of this show travel?



Audience

Given the international popularity and critical acclaim of The Wire, we expect the collection to have a broad appeal within the academy, particularly within the fields of American studies, African-American studies, Ethnic Studies, Film, Television, and Performance studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as Urban Studies and Social Policy Studies. We also expect attention and readership from the non-academic community interested in cultural affairs. The collection will be written with an idea to broad appeal and seek to avoid language that would limit it to a specialist audience, either specifically within film and television studies or more generally to academic scholars alone.

While no other collection exists, we know of other collections in progress. We feel this collection is unique not only for the quality of contributors, but also for its attempt to be broadly inter-disciplinary and focus on the relation of the market, urban policy, and cultural representations.



Book

Table of Contents/Chapter Summaries

1. Liam Kennedy (University College Dublin) and Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick), “Introduction: Narrative, Capital, and Space: The Wire”


2. Dana Polan, (New York University), ‘Serial Sociology: Story Structure and Urban Analysis in The Wire’

This essay builds on a reflection by the author on the on-line site of the Museum of the Moving Image (http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/invisible-city-20080728) to look at the ways in which the multi-season format contributes to The Wire’s attempts to capture the complex politics of a contemporary urban environment. Where once cinema was imagined within moving image culture as the most promising form of popular culture -- with television as its formulaic, domesticated other -- it is now the television series extending over several seasons that seems to accomplish the most in terms of complexities of narrative perspective and sociological ambition. In the case of The Wire, however, the extension of its premise over multiple seasons is not about developing an overall narrative line in ways that might take on epic dimensions. Resolutely anti-epic, The Wire is bereft of a strong hero whose glorious tale it would chronicle; it uses each new season not so much to advance its story as to move synchronically to yet another dimension of the city that impinges on the lives of its inhabitants; it minimizes ongoing stories by dramatic interruption (key characters who get killed) and by cyclical substitution of new characters for old (so that it seems that the narrative doesn't advance so much as circle back on itself in ways that seem appropriate to the depiction of a city that seems caught in a rut of non-development even as its authority figures keep employing a rhetoric of progress and improvement).


3. Carlo Rotella (Boston University), “Regular-Guy Liberalism 3.0: Street Policing, the Box, and The Wire”

Crime stories are one of our handiest cultural tools for imagining cities and infusing them with meaning. They're particularly well equipped for the task by the procedural formula of investigating and/or planning a crime and the structural habit of tracing the roots of plot-driving surface crimes to discover the systemic wrongs of deep crime. In the past decade, television--or, rather, HBO--hit a high point in the genre's history. If The Sopranos is the American crime story at its operatic best, extending The Godfather's momentum by following the gangster story's deep crime all the way into the moral and psychological costs of suburban life, then The Wire is the American crime story at its analytical best, extending the momentum of realism by following its deep crime all the way into the workings of the American city. This talk considers The Wire's account of postindustrial urbanism by tracing the show's treatment of two of the police procedural's most important figures: street policing, which dominated the 1970s and early 1980s, and the Box (the interrogation room), which dominated the late 1980s and 1990s.

Assimilating and synthesizing these two previous main phases, and adding the figure of the wiretap to introduce a conscious element of structural analysis, The Wire both pieces together the relations of power that shape the city and takes apart the politics of the crime story. The Box is now subsumed by that structural analysis, so that even the cleverest interrogation ruse becomes implicated in what's wrong with the city. (As Bunk says at the beginning of Season 5 after working the old gag in which he pretended that a copier was a lie detector: "The bigger the lie, the more they believe it." The insight is presented as tragedy, not heroism.) And street policing, while it is valorized over the Box as an attempt to strike a civic bargain with the people who are policed, is also revealed to hold its own unpleasant meanings. The heroic-looking business of chasing bad guys down the alley and busting heads is part of the problem, too. The ideological name of that trap is Kojak liberalism, a stance in which liberals seek to "buy" the right to hold latter-day New Deal views by proving themselves "tough on crime." The Wire fingers and dramatizes the basic internal contradiction that is Kojak liberalism's fatal flaw: if being tough on crime means busting heads, mandatory sentencing, and cracking down on low-level streetcorner drug dealers and users, as it so often does, then it only makes worse the very structural problems that post-New Deal liberalism is supposed to address and ameliorate.

Drawing on the show itself, the scholarship of Christopher Wilson and other students of the police story, and interviews with the show's creators and writers (David Simon, Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos), I'll talk about The Wire's attempt to imagine a New Deal liberalism appropriate to the postindustrial city in the 21st century--and its willingness to see such a liberalism as impossible to sustain. I'm not imposing this kind of political intent on the creators of The Wire. They're all left-of-center liberals who self-consciously pursue structural social critique while keeping at arm's length both Marxism and the "tough on crime" mythology. The Wire's rich political sensibility is connected to its rich sense of genre: in telling stories about street policing, the Box, and wiretapping, The Wire works out ideological and formal problems central to the genre.


4. John Kraniauskas (Birkbeck College), “Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire”

In this chapter I will focus on two aspects of The Wire. Firstly, I will set out the
compositional logic of the programme: I will suggest that it combines a realist
strategy of incorporating more and more of the social - via its institutions - so
as to produce an account of the criminal neo-liberalisation of West Baltimore
centred on the drugs business (and its kingpins and corner boys), with a
modernist epistemology that is aware of its own partiality (and partisanship) as
well as its own limitations as a work of detective-crime fiction. Its combination
of television segmentarity and cinematic montage produces what I will refer to
as The Wire's 'looping narrative'. Secondly, I will show how this 'looping' is
presented as a conflict of accumulation 'cycles' between street-level commodity
exchange (m-c-m'), on the one hand, and a process of financialization
associated with neo-liberalism (m-m'), on the other - as well as the violent
competition that sustains them on the streets and in the local polity. I will show
how 'finance capital' constitutes the limit of detection in The Wire; which is why
it returns to the streets to show the hegemonic and subjectivizing power of 'm-
c-m'.


5. Gary Philips, ‘Tracing the Wire’

Ann Petry, Robert Dean Pharr, Clarence Cooper, Jr., Herbert Simmons and Nathan Heard are a line up of what might be termed old school writers most white Americans, and for that matter, not a great deal of black Americans, know about or have read. K’wan, Vickie Stringer, Omar Tyree and Noire, among many others, conversely, are writers known and read by a generation raised on hip hop and video games, and generally despised by the black literati represented by the likes of Terry McMillan and Nick Chiles. From the old school chroniclers of the underside of black life to those nowadays spinning tales under the banner of what has come to be called Ghetto Lit - acknowledging too the Godfathers of this sub-genre, Donald Goines and Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim - The Wire, fittingly, brought to cable TV what these writers had been telling in prose.

The 1970s film Report to the Commissioner (based on the novel of the same name), and TV shows such as Miami Vice, EZ Streets and New York Undercover (even some aspects of the 1960s I Spy in its later incarnations when Culp and Cosby eschewed the suit and tie James Bondish secret agent look for Levis and tennis shoes) serve as pop cultural antecedents to The Wire. This essay will explore the prose and filmic roots of this cold ass episodic about cops and gangstas, and why a show about black and white relations on both sides of the thin blue line resonated so profoundly in an era of, as rapper 50 Cent intoned, “Get Rich, or Die Trying.”


6. Chris Chambers (Georgetown University), “Y’all got Honey Nut?”: Why Barack Obama and Damn Near All of Us Love Omar Little for the Wrong Reason”

Wrong reason: criminal anti-hero. Like “Prince,” Iceberg Slim’s pimp/drug dealer, or even Dublin’s Martin Cahill and any number of rudeboy yardie gangsters in London. Omar Little is the only “unconstrained” character in The Wire’s intricate storyarcs, but not in the facile fashion of: “He’s Obama’s favorite character”. Omar belongs to a new category: the “anti-anti-hero.” This generic category was mined inadvertently by Simon and his writers. They claim they place story above character, but that’s a lie. Without Omar there is no story, and the only character, casting as wide a net as possible, who is remotely close is Walter Mosely’s “Mouse” (masterfully translated from book pages to film through actor Don Cheadle). Omar is grim, banal, as the afrorementioned breakfast cereal, and utterly independent. We say we love him. We say he’s complex. No, he ain’t. We fear free agents. Unfettered. Everyone else in The Wire, from Season One through the end to McNulty surveying Baltimore in the last (and first, of course) scene in the last chapter of Season Five, is in a box. Anti-heroes smash and chew their way out of the box. Omar’s nowhere near a box. And when he does step into one, he dies.


7. Hamilton Carroll (University of Leeds), “Policing the Borders of White Masculinity: Labor, Whiteness, and the Neoliberal City in The Wire”

In the second season of The Wire (USA, 2003), the show turns its attention from the black drug dealers on which the first season focused to an examination of Baltimore’s white ethnic working classes. Constructed around a criminal investigation centered on the city’s moribund port, the show develops a season-long exploration of the corrosive effects of globalization on traditional forms of labor, the regional city, and their representation in U.S. popular culture. The show’s representations of white blue-collar labor—both police and dock-workers alike—highlight its attention to the transformations of the regional city under neoliberalism.

The show contrasts the highly mythologized worlds of masculine blue-collar labor—the police station and the union office—with the spaces of criminality that arise as the inhabitants of those worlds lose their franchise on the putative rewards of possessive individualism. As they attempt to understand their places in the altered landscape of the city, the show’s characters are required, sometimes literally, to construct new cartographies of urban space. In this chapter Carroll will analyze the show’s representations of the white male laboring subject alongside its concomitant representations of the spatial and technological transformations of the failing neoliberal city.


8. Ruth Barton (Trinity College Dublin), “Drinking with McNulty: Irish-American Identity and Space in The Wire”

On foot of The Wire’s evidently liberal attitudes, its famed gritty realism and its critique of American capitalism, it would be too easy to assume that its identity politics were equally enlightened. In this paper, Barton will argue that the depiction of McNulty (Dominic West), has its roots in a long history of representation of the Irish male on screen, from which it deviates little. She will also analyze the space of the Irish pub in the series and how it functions to sanction expressions of male friendship and performative aggression, and to facilitate mourning. This association between Irish ethnic masculinity and a volatile emotionalism is further highlighted by McNulty’s inability to maintain a harmonious domestic life (in this he is only rivalled by the African-American lesbian officer, “Kima” Greggs [Sonja Sohn]). In addition, the deployment of famed Irish drunk and member of the diaspora, Shane MacGowan (and the Pogues) on the soundtrack, emphasizes these connections. Her analysis will draw on histories of Irish-American representation and theories of diasporic space, notably those of Avtar Brah.


9. Michelle Aaron (University of Birmingham), ‘S’no Such Thing as Special Dead, s’just Dead’: The Ethics of The Wire and its (Queer) Political Project”

From the War on Terror to the election of the first African-American president, US-centric Western culture has to some extent undergone a shift in social consciousness about issues of racial identity and individual or national complicity in society’s, especially US society’s, ills. Through a discussion of its representation of death, I will argue that the HBO series The Wire can be seen as a response to this post 9.11 ‘altered global universe’ (B. Ruby Rich). In its break with racialised traditions of representation on television and within culture more broadly, and its exposing and confounding of normative social and familial connections, it offers a radical, and arguably, ethical interpretation of community and citizenship.


10. Paul Anderson (University of Michigan), “The Game is the Game”

This essay reads The Wire as something like a dialogical novel, a novel informed less by a single stable narrative voice (though there is that too) than by many distinct voices. Different characters present different interpretations of the world and the games played in its most relevant institutions. Sometimes, fragments of dialogue are passed along from one character to the next, and from one scenario to the next. Certain phrases, or near echoes of them, and certain practices (especially certain games and game-talk) accumulate new associations and layers of irony upon each new mention in the whorl of life that is The Wire’s five full seasons. The standard mode of allegory offers two distinct levels of signification: the narrative we see is what it is, but is also not what it is, or not what it appears to be. In the typical realm of allegory, we read or see a manifest or surface narrative that is often a repetition of a different latent narrative. David Simon is surely not the only relevant figure concerned with the possibilities and dangers of allegorical interpretation; some of the characters of The Wire are animated by an allegorical imagination as well.


11. Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), “’An Amorphous Series Detailing Society’s Ills’”: Reflexivity and Realism in The Wire.”

This essay explores the contrasting pulls of realist representation and reflexive satire within The Wire. Much of the show’s power and reputation comes from its realist glare into American institutions and environments; however, The Wire has always seasoned its main dish of gritty realism with the garnish of satirical humor. This satire, with a high degree of reflexive “writerly” commentary, plays a starring role in seasons three and five in ways that seem to run counter to The Wire’s commitment to journalistic authenticity and social realism. This essay discusses the ways that realism and reflexivity coexist in The Wire, and how they work to convey the dual goals of entertainment and social commentary. By examining the discourses surrounding the production and consumption of these seasons, as well as the show’s rhetorical strategies, the essay argues that much of the discontent with the show’s final season resulted from misplaced genre expectations and a lack of attention to how the season functioned as a critique of television storytelling itself.


Word Count: 80-90,000 words

Photography and Illustrations: we expect around 15-25 frames from the series



Contributor Biographies

Michelle Aaron. Lecturer, Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham. Aaron is author of the forthcoming, Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I (Edinburgh UP, 2009) and has edited the collections involving lens media and sexuality, The Body’s Perilous Pleasures (Edinburgh, 1999) and New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh, 2004). She also writes frequently on issues of ethnicity in film and television.

Paul Anderson. Associate Professor, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan). Anderson is author of Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Duke UP, 2001) and several articles on popular culture, race, and contemporary American expression.

Ruth Barton. Lecturer, School of Drama, Film, and Music, Trinity College Dublin. She is author of Irish National Cinema (Routledge, 2004) and of Acting Irish in Hollywood (Irish Academic Press, 2006) and co-editor of Keeping It Real: Irish Film and Television (Wallflower Press, 2004).

Hamilton Carroll. Lecturer, School of English, University of Leeds. He is currently at work on two studies of gender and race, Affirmative Reaction: White Masculinities and the Politics of Representation (forthcoming Duke UP) and Domestic Insurrections: Fictions of Citizenship at the Limits of the Nation.

Christopher Chambers. Professor, Program in Journalism, Georgetown University. In Chambers’ early career, he was the first African-American in Baltimore’s Law Review and served with the US Justice Department from 1994-1997. Since 2001, he has turned to crime fiction, having published several novels and collections of short stories. With co-editors Walter Mosley and Gary Phillips, he will publish a graphic/comic book short fiction collection called The Darker Mask.

Liam Kennedy. Professor and Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He is the author of Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (Manchester UP and St Martin’s Press, 1995) and Race and Urban Space in American Culture (Edinburgh UP, 2000), editor of Visual Culture and Urban Regeneration (Routledge 2000) and co-editor of Urban Space and Representation (Pluto, 1999). He is currently researching a monograph on photography and international conflict and preparing an edited book on urban photography.

John Kraniauskas. Senior lecturer, School of Languages, Linguistics & Culture, Birkbeck College, UCL. A founding co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, he has contributed essays to several collections and journals such as Boundary 2, New Formations, and Radical Philosophy. He is currently preparing three books: on transcultural and subaltern studies; crime form and the state in Mexico (in collaboration with Alberto Moreiras); and Eva Perón and the populist state.

Jason Mittell. Associate Professor and Chair of Film & Media Culture Department, Middlebury College. Mittell is author of Television and American Culture (Oxford UP, 2009) and Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004). He has written extensively on television and genre theory.

Gary Philips. Author and editor; born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. He is the author of the Ivan Monk and Martha Chainey private detective series as well as other stand-alone crime fiction and graphic novels that consistenly merge issues of race, urbanity, criminality, and social critique. Philips is the editor of editor of Politics Noir: Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power (Verso, 2008). He also writes frequently on non-fictional matters of politics and the “mystery” of race in contemporary America. His latest works include a short story in Black Noir: Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction by African-American Writers from Pegasus, and Freedom’s Fight, a World War II novel from Parker Publishing.

Dana Polan. Professor, Tisch School of Cinema Studies, NYU. A former president of the Society for Cinema Studies, the professional society for film, and a former editor of its publication, Cinema Journal, Polan is the author of numerous books and articles including, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (UC Press, 2007): Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (Columbia UP, 1986); The Politics of Film and the Avant-Garde (U.M.I. Press, 1984); In a Lonely Place (BFI Film Classics, 1993); Pulp Fiction (BFI Modern Classics, 2000). He is also the author of the forthcoming The Sopranos and The French Chef (Duke UP) and has done several DVD commentaries, most recently, for The Third Man (Criterion Collection).

Carlo Rotello. Professor, Department of English, Boston College. Director of the American Studies Program at Boston College, Rotello has authored several books on American popular culture and writing: Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (University of California Press, 2002); and October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (University of California Press, 1998). He has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships and received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and The American Scholar's prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Younger Writer, and Cut Time was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Stephen Shapiro. Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. Shapiro is author of The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-system (Penn state, 2008), and How to Read Marx’s Capital (Pluto, 2008). Series co-editor of How to Read Theory for Pluto Press, he has also completed co-editing four critical editions of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels for Hackett. He also contributed an essay to NYU’s Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, a 2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.





*******************************************
Meg Sweeney
Associate Professor
Dept. of English Language & Literature and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan
3187 Angell Hall
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
fax: 734 763 3128
e-mail: meganls@umich.edu

Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (UNC Press, 2010)
http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1730
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