Seeing vs. Unseeing Theme Analysis

The City and the City explores people’s sensory perception of the world, mostly focusing on a single sense: sight. Through depicting a world in which people’s perception is strictly policed, the novel shows that perception of the world depends as much on active seeing as it does on selective unseeing. Not only that, but what a person sees and doesn’t see is shown to be shaped by their culture, environment, and politics. Furthermore, in the novel’s setting in the twin city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma, citizens’ perception is itself policed by a mysterious, invisible system of surveillance (Breach). Breach watches what the citizens are watching, and “disappears” them if they breach—that is, see the wrong thing. (The term “breach” refers to the crime, the authority, and the space in which this authority resides.) In this way, the novel shows that perception is a form of power, and reclaiming one’s perception from systems of surveillance can be a significant method of resisting unjust authority.

The City and the City challenges the idea that perception is natural and automatic, instead showing how it is influenced by cultural and political factors. Like everyone, residents of Besźel and Ul Qoma function within their environments by relying on their perception of their surroundings. Yet unlike others, in order to effectively orient themselves these citizens must also deliberately unsee the city in which they are not officially present. This is not a capability that these citizens naturally possess, but rather one that they acquire over time. Children are taught to unsee the city they are not in, and new immigrants and visitors undergo training courses designed to help them get used to seeing one city but not the other. Similarly, when a citizen of Besźel or Ul Qoma officially travels to the other city, they must undergo an acclimatization course in order to reverse the training they have received in their home city. The novel’s protagonists, Tyador Borlú, describes the profound disorientation this process produces, which is due to the fact that it requires “unseeing all their familiar environs, where we lived the rest of our life, and seeing the buildings beside us that we had spent decades making sure not to notice.” Perception can be trained, manipulated, and adapted, although this process of manipulation has bewildering and even traumatic effects. 

Yet while unseeing may be a phenomenon that seems unique to Besźel/Ul Qoma, the novel indicates that it is actually a rather common feature of urban life in general. Being in a city is an overwhelming experience; there are so many sights, sounds, and smells that if a person doesn’t exercise control over their sensory perception, they will not be able to properly orient themselves. Yet what a person chooses to “unsee” is not random or neutral, but rather influenced by social and political factors.

The political nature of seeing and unseeing is made especially obvious by the fact that in Besźel and Ul Qoma, people’s perception is controlled by a system of surveillance—Breach. Citizens of the two cities do not unsee the other city voluntarily, but rather, they do so because they know they are constantly being watched by the mysterious government authority that remains unseen itself. The existence of Breach and the significant influence over people’s sight that it possesses shows that people’s perception is not really under their control. Instead, perception is dictated by the social, cultural, and political norms of one’s environment.

Breach exercises control by dictating what citizens see and don’t see, yet an equally important source of its power is the fact that it remains invisible itself. Citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma know that they are being surveilled constantly, yet the fact that they do not really understand the source or nature of this system of surveillance only increases its power. Borlú describes Breach as the “observing power that must, surely, invisibly have watched.” This description shows that Breach makes itself extremely powerful by watching without being watched in return, an asymmetrical relationship that instills a sense of paranoia in citizens. Indeed, this paranoia emerges in Borlú’s use of the words “must, surely, invisibly,” which shows how Breach intimidates people by remaining somewhat mysterious. If Borlú and others had a clearer understanding of how Breach works, then they would likely feel some control over it and might thereby feel empowered to resist it. But through functioning as a kind one-way mirror, Breach retains near-total control of the perception of citizens while remaining largely untouchable itself.